Glitch (31 page)

In spite of all the worries about Juan and Molla, I had to work hard not to break into a giant grin every time my thoughts wandered back to Adrien.
My
Adrien. I wished I could let out shouts of happiness that echoed down all the monotone tunnels. I wanted to dance on the gray subway platform and grin until my face cracked in half. I caught myself before I actually broke into a smile and, instead, sat down at the table to eat my protein patty.

I noticed my father watching me, his gaze uncomfortably observant. I took a big bite of bread even though it felt thick in my throat. Just a little while longer, I thought. Just a little while longer and I’d be free from the stalking eye of the Community. Adrien said he’d arrange our escape and that it might even happen today. Then I could be myself. I could openly say, do, and feel as I pleased.

Finally, what might be my last breakfast in the Community was done and I slipped through the front door. I walked the hallway of the housing unit, trying hard not to look like I was hurrying. There were a few people in the tunnel with me and I slowed my pace to match my impatient footsteps to their calm ones.

One woman with short-cropped red hair broke out of the usual formation to walk very close beside me. I glanced over, but her face was neutral. We kept walking. She remained blank, but she stayed close to me. My mind raced. Was she a Monitor, or maybe a Rez agent? Was I caught, or was I rescued? I started cautiously scanning the tunnel in my peripheral vision, looking for an opening to turn down in case I needed to escape.

The woman leaned over and whispered, “Turn in to the next service door.”

My eyes widened but I kept my pace steady. Trying to look as non-anomalous as possible, I pulled open the next service door on my left as if it was something I did every day. The woman followed right behind me. The doors in the tunnels were the old manual kind, so at least I didn’t have to swipe my arm panel to open it. I looked around warily at the old equipment and pipes in the room until the woman shut the door quickly behind us.

The woman’s image shimmered and then it was Max standing in front of me. I breathed out, unaware I’d been holding my breath in terror.

“Zoe, you aren’t safe. We’ve got to escape, just you and me. Right now.”

“Did Adrien send you?” I asked excitedly. “Is the plan ready.”

“Zoe, listen to me!” he said, grabbing my arms. “I know you won’t want to believe it, but Adrien isn’t who you thought he was. He’s a Monitor. He’s been working for the Chancellor the whole time! He even reported Juan.”

“Stop it!” I pulled away with a flash of anger. “I have had
enough
of your ridiculous suspicions. Now your feelings about him are actually becoming dangerous and right when he’s about to get us all safely out of here.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” He shook his head, looking suddenly weary. “Maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it from his own mouth.” He dropped down and started setting up a tablet projection on the floor.

“We don’t have time for this! We should be finding the Rez agents and getting Juan, Molla, and Markan out of here.”

“That’s what I was doing when I found this,” he said, sounding furious. “I hid after school and impersonated a Regulator. I went to find out about the boy but they just looked at me strangely and said the boy had already been transported.”

“Oh, no.” I sank down to sit beside him. We’d failed Juan. My stomach cramped up painfully at the thought. We missed our chance.

“So then I snuck into the Chancellor’s office, thinking maybe she’d have a record of where he was being sent.”

I looked up at Max in surprise. He noticed and laughed darkly. “Is it so surprising that I would try to help him, Zoe? Is that what you think of me?”

“I’m sorry.” I put a hand on his arm. He’d taken so many risks.

“When I was in her office, looking through her files, I found this. It’s dated two days ago.” His voice had turned grim.

He clicked a fingernail-size drive into the tablet and the video began. It was a stable image of the Chancellor’s room. She was sitting at her desk and looked up. Another figure entered the room. My heart seemed to stop in my chest. Adrien.

“Sit down,” the Chancellor said, and he sat in the chair directly across from the desk. “Have you had any visions recently?”

“Yes,” Adrien said.

“Tell me about them.”

“There’s another boy who is glitching. Subject Juan T-73.”

“It’s a fake,” I whispered my eyes glued to the image. “It’s not real. They could have altered this easily, after they’d caught Juan.”

“Just keep watching,” Max said.

On the video, the Chancellor paused and clicked open a 3-D directory. She tapped on a name and the face appeared in the cube of light. “Is this him?”

Adrien leaned in. “Yes.”

The Chancellor smiled, patting his hand. “Very good, Adrien. That is very helpful. Now, tell me more about the girl. Zoe.”

Adrien shifted in his seat and didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Tell me, Adrien.”

“I have seen visions of her as the leader of the Resistance.” Adrien’s voice sounded oddly stilted.

“You are helping her learn to control her powers?”

“Yes.”

“Does she suspect that you have been talking to me?”

“No.”

“She trusts you, then?”

“Yes. She tells me things she tells no one else.”

“Such as?”

“She’s afraid for her brother, Markan. She fears he will be captured just like her other brother and that it will be her fault again.”

The Chancellor nodded. “Good. If the visions of her are true … We will bide our time. It will be difficult, so stay near her. Keep her trust by whatever means necessary.”

“Yes, Chancellor.”

“And you administered the switched tube I gave you for her last allergy injection, correct?”

“Yes, Chancellor.”

“Excellent.” The Chancellor’s thin lips twisted into a smile. “Thank you. You are dismissed.”

The video feed stopped and the screen went blank.

My legs felt frozen.

“It’s not true,” I whispered. “It’s not real. They just digitized Adrien’s image and voice and then manipulated it. It would be so easy for them to do.”

“What about the things he was telling her?” Max said. “Did you know he was giving you injections, or did he disable you to do it?”

I looked at Max in disbelief at what I’d just seen. “Yes, I knew about them,” I said. “They were for my allergy. So that I could survive on the Surface when we escaped. But this is all wrong. Fake. Adrien wouldn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Don’t you get it?” Max said angrily. “He’s the Chancellor’s tool. She’s using his visions to learn all about us. He’s a Monitor. Maybe they caught him out at his last Academy and made a bargain with him. Maybe he joined her voluntarily. Either way, we’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

“No!” I said. “If you knew Adrien, you’d know this couldn’t be real.”

“What about the other things he told her?” Max asked, looking angry but also pained, as if he knew he was hurting me but had to do it anyway. “The things you’ve told only him? About your allergies, your dreams, and about your brother? No one else knew that, Zoe. Not even me.”

I shook my head, violently. “Then they must have cameras or audio devices in my room.”

He pulled away from me angrily. “Why are you refusing to see what’s right in front of your face! He tricked you. He used you. He played on the fact that you’re naïve, that you’ve never felt those kinds of emotions before. That you’re so damned trusting!

“It’s all a lie, he just told you what you wanted to hear. And if we don’t make a break for it right now before they know we’ve figured them out, they’ll deactivate us or turn us back into drones. They’ve already got Molla, and I only barely managed to escape to come find you. Come with me, Zoe. Let’s get the hell out of here before it’s too late!”

“No…” My voice broke and tears brimmed over. No, no,
no.
I paused, torn. I trusted Adrien without question, absolutely. I
loved
him.

But what if I couldn’t trust my feelings? What if Max was right and Adrien
had
been manipulating me? There was still so much I didn’t know about him, so much I didn’t know about this world, let alone the world that might or might not exist outside it. What could I trust?

“What about when I went missing?” I asked, still trying to work things out. “He helped me escape.”

“You can’t even remember that time clearly, Zoe,” Max said. “They probably took you away to run some tests and experiments on you. They could’ve implanted false memories so you’d trust him. You know they can do that.”

His eyes opened wide as if he just thought of something. “Zoe, he must have had a vision of me trying to get you and Molla out. That’s why all this is happening now.”

My resolve began to crack. Liquid hot fire rose inside of me, a tide of hurt and pain and confusion. I didn’t know what to believe, but I knew everything was wrong. My power buzzed in my chest, but I held it still. This was a pain I had to keep inside.

Max tossed the projection pyramid in his tablet case and swung it over his shoulder. He stood up, dragging me with him. I followed mutely, letting him direct me. I felt disconnected from the situation, disconnected from my own body even. A freight train of thoughts and memories and feeling were tumbling one over another in my mind. I couldn’t sift through them quickly enough. I couldn’t make sense of anything. None of this made sense.

“We can get on the subway and go to this place I found in the Central City. I can hide us, impersonate officials as we go so we can travel and get as far away from here as we can. We’ll go to the other side of the sector, or even go to other sectors if we have to. We can reintegrate and stay under their radar, switch out our wrist chips and become other people. If Adrien has visions of us and they come for us, we’ll run away again. Whatever it takes, so long as you’re safe.”

Max transformed back into the redheaded woman and opened the door. He stuck his head out, looking carefully each way before pulling me out with him.

My mind was a storm again. It seemed there was no other explanation. What if Max was right, and Adrien was helping the officials. One thing was sure, we were all in danger now.

I wasn’t sure we could help the others, but Max was right here in front of me. For once in my life, I might be able to help someone I cared about.

But at the same time, my whole chest ached.
Adrien.

Max pulled me sharply sideways so that we were moving along the wall of the busy tunnel, whispering at me to keep my head down so the cameras wouldn’t catch our faces. When the tunnel opened up to the subway platform, he maneuvered us into the flood of people. The redheaded woman’s thin hand grabbed my wrist in a pinching grasp and pulled me to a corner along the side of the tunnel.

“Regulators,” Max whispered in the woman’s soft voice, nodding to the platform.

A group of Regulators stood where the tunnel narrowed before opening onto the subway platform. There were twice as many of them as usual, scanning faces and checking wrist IDs at random. I tried to quiet the fear that had gripped my chest. Our only way out was through that narrow passage. There was no way we’d make it through without getting caught.

“What do we do?”

“They’re probably looking for us. Adrien must have had a vision.
Damn.
Cover me while I change.”

He dropped down, ostensibly to retie his shoe. I leaned over him, terrified and trying not to look anomalous while I blocked him from sight. When he stood up again, he looked exactly like Chancellor Bright. He grabbed my arm roughly and pulled me out onto the platform. He strode right up to the Regulators.

“I’ve got the girl,” he said in the clipped tones of the Chancellor’s voice. “But the boy eluded me. Spread out and keep looking. I’ll take her directly to the holding facility.”

The two Regulators nodded once and motioned to the others across the room. They left, fanning out and grabbing people roughly every so often, turning them around to check their faces, then shoving them back in line to continue their placid progression down the tunnel. I breathed out when I heard the low rumble of the train approaching. I didn’t know what we’d do next, or how I could work out a way to keep Max safe and still find Adrien. But I knew we had to get off this platform.

The train slowed to a stop. Max, still disguised as the Chancellor, pulled me authoritatively to the front. Everyone parted to make way until we were at the front of the line.

My chest was tight with tension but I felt better when I saw that all the Regulators were at the opposite side of the platform. In a few seconds, we’d be on the train and hurtling away from them.

But then the train doors slid open with a hiss, and the real Chancellor stepped out with Adrien, a half-dozen Regulators, and a wicked grin on her face.

“Adrien!” I heard myself cry out in disbelief before I could even think. The sight of him with the Chancellor sliced like a jagged knife into my stomach. It took everything I had not to fall to my knees with the shock and pain of it.

Max shifted again, shoving me to the side and shouting, “Run, Zoe!”

The real Chancellor snapped her fingers. Regulators surged forward off the train as Max turned to run, dragging me along behind him. I looked over my shoulder. Adrien was watching everything calmly, not even looking at me. I felt sick. Max tripped as one of the Regulators caught up and grabbed his coat.

Max.

I instinctively spun around and thrust my hand out. Time seemed to slow, then stop. The high-pitched buzzing in my head consumed all other thought. The Regulator who held Max was thrown backward into a column, his head cracking against the concrete with a sickening thump.

Max transformed again, this time into a short man. He ran to me and pulled my hand, but I didn’t move. Instead, I lifted my arm, and all the other Regulators who’d come running after us were yanked backward as if an invisible explosion had sent them flying.

The drone subjects on the platform stood silently, watching with indifference, typing their anomaly reports on their arm panels.