Glitch (35 page)

I smiled at Adrien. “You were saying?”

He shook his head, staring wide-eyed at the opened doors. He looked at me and grinned. “I am way crackin’ out of my league being with you!”

I laughed, feeling half-delirious with adrenaline, and raced through the door. “Where to now?” I asked Adrien. “How do we get out of here? Tell me you memorized the blueprints of the holding cells.”

“Of course. Follow me,” he said. He took Max’s other arm to help Juan carry him.

“Why are we dragging him with us again?” Adrian asked.

“He was just like me, Adrien,” I said, looking at him over Molla’s head. She was following mutely, eyes only on Max.

“We were both scared and alone,” I said. “The Chancellor made him promises of things he thought he wanted. I’m sure she told him everything he ever wanted to hear. He couldn’t have known it was all a lie.”

“But he figured it out eventually,” Adrien said, all the lightheartedness gone from his voice. “And he put all of us in danger. He put
you
in danger.”

“So did I. With Daavd,” I said as we came to the end of the hallway.

“But you didn’t know what you were doing!”

Molla stiffened beside me. “Regulators,” she whispered, terror making her body start shaking again. She grabbed Max’s arm, I wasn’t sure if it was to steady herself or shield him.

“Where?” Adrien said, looking around in confusion.

“Twelve of them on the other side of the door up there,” she said. “They’re waiting for us.”

“
Cracking hell
,” Adrien and I said at the same time.

ADRIEN SHOT ME
a grave look.

“Are their guns laser or bullet rounds?” I asked Molla.

“I don’t know.” Molla’s voice was shaking. “How do you tell?”

“Can you see through the guns with your vision?” Max asked Molla, his voice still horse, but he was standing more on his own now. “To see if there are clips filled with bullets?”

Molla leaned in closer to the wall, squinting. “Yes, bullets. I see them.”

I nodded. Adrien glared at Max, then looked back at me. “Zoe, what are you thinking?”

“Is there another way out?” I asked Adrien.

“No,” he whispered.

Max managed to whisper, “I’m too weak to shift and become the Chancellor. Besides, she’d have warned them about me.”

“That decides it, then,” I said. I called up my power and it responded, crackling and eager. It sang to me again, the immense sense of energy pulsing throughout my body. “We’ll have to go through.” I focused all my power on the door. “Stay back, all of you.”

“Wait, Zoe,” Adrien said, “you can’t!”

I let out a feral yell and poured the momentum of my mind forward. The door ripped outward with a roar of crumbling concrete and twisting metal. I sent it crashing forward into the Regulators who waited on the other side.

The door was only big enough to knock half of them down. The others pulled their triggers, pumping bullets toward us. I felt the bullets whizzing through the air, and I dropped to my knees with my hands to my forehead.

The hum in my mind was taking over. It felt like a giant wedge splitting open my skull. My shout became a scream, but before it overwhelmed me, I wrapped webs of air around the hundred and twenty-three bullets in midair. Only then did I see that Adrien had taken the same fraction of a second to throw his body in front of me. He knocked me down and spread his arms over my head, face clenched, ready for the bullets to hit him.

Instead, the bullets fell harmlessly from the air like metal raindrops as they all clattered to the concrete floor. Molla, Max, and Juan huddled in the corner by the wall, looking stunned.

I threw Adrien off of me. “Stay behind me,” I yelled furiously at him, then turned my attention back to the Regulators. If they were surprised, their blank faces didn’t show it. They probably weren’t capable of surprise. They set new clips in place in the silence and raised their reinforced arms to release another volley of bullets.

I dropped the bullets again before they got to us, but I didn’t know how long I could keep this up. It was exhausting to focus hard enough to catch each of the speeding bullets in time. Most of the Regulators knocked down by the wall had managed to free themselves from the rubble. I couldn’t keep an eye on everything else that was happening.

I felt the consuming energy bubbling up in my chest and let it seep out of my pores, my eyes, my fingertips. I focused it on the twenty-four lightweight alloy guns, pushing through the outer casings. I felt out the inner contours of each weapon, almost tasting the metallic oil on my tongue.

And then I ripped them apart from the inside out. The guns exploded in the Regulators’ hands. Flying shrapnel from the weapons wounded a few, but most of them shook it off and stood up, ignoring their bleeding hands and faces.

Without a word, they arranged themselves into a block formation and ran at us, mindless of the pain under the control of their V-chips. My vision flooded with rage at both the violence these men intended and the fact that they themselves weren’t to blame. They were all so young—the same Regs-in-training that were everywhere in the Academy. It wasn’t their fault they’d been chosen for Regulator duty. But I still had to stop them. I had to end this.

Adrien’s shouted warning behind me, Molla’s screams, and the sound of the Regulators’ feet pounding the floor all twisted together into a crazed cacophony. I closed my eyes and sent the energy out one last time, flowing over the block of the twelve Regulators coming at us.

I screamed as the hum became a burning pain in my head—this might finally be too much for me. I felt myself start to fracture, to rip into pieces in the attempt. I pushed onward anyway, through their skin, through the hard metal plating around their skulls, then deep into their brains. I located the sliver-thin outline of the V-chip architecture in one body, then the next and the next, straining with my hands pressing against my own head as if I could somehow keep myself from coming apart.

I felt my body being hauled backward—Adrien must be trying to pull me to safety but I didn’t let myself even spare a backward glance. Almost there …
Almost there
, three more, two, one …

“Zoe!”

All as one, I crushed the twelve tiny fingernail-sized embedded V-chips and all the minuscule alloy webs attached. Adrien pulled me out of the way just as the Regulators, carried forward by their momentum even as their eyes widened suddenly with self-awareness, toppled over one another like dominoes into a pile of muscle and metal right in front of us.

We stood, torn and bleeding, amazed at the rubble before us. I looked down at my own hands in shock.

“What did you do?” Adrien whispered over my head and only now I realized his arms were wrapped around me, again trying to shield me with his body.

I looked up weakly. “I freed them,” I said. “Come on, help me walk. Let’s get out of here.”

“Zoe.” Adrien’s jaw was dropped open. “How did you— What did you—”

“Help me up,” I said again, and he must have heard the pained note in my voice.

He helped me stand, and my legs felt like jelly. It felt so strange to be back in my body after encompassing the whole room. The hum was gone completely, and I felt like it would be a while before I’d be able to call on it again. Adrien started leading us around the mountain of confused Regulators but I stopped him and turned. They were young enough, they should survive the destruction of their internal hardware. I could only hope that with their V-chips completely destroyed they would be stable, not like the young glitching Regulator on the train months ago. I watched them warily, but they were all calm, if a bit dumbfounded.

I was exhausted, but I tried to put as much force as I could in my voice. I looked at them, one with blood dripping down the side of his bionic head implant, another missing at least half his left hand. I thought about apologizing, but I knew the word
sorry
wouldn’t have any meaning to them.

Instead, I said, “You are free from the Community now. Come with us if you want to stay free.” Then I turned back to Adrien, so tired I barely cared if they took my offer or not.

“Get us out of here,” I said. He nodded and led us up through more hallways. Most of the Regulators followed too, offering their wrist chips to gain access to the entire facility. The hulking young men were silent, but when I gave orders, they followed them. I guessed they were used to being ordered around and I was the closest thing to an authority they had now.

As we waited for the elevator tube that Adrien said would lead us out, he suddenly went rigid beside me. I’d been leaning on him for support so heavily, I almost fell down, taking him with me. A young Regulator caught both of us and steadied us.

“What’s wrong with him?” Molla shrieked. I hadn’t looked at her in a while but I guessed she wasn’t taking all the terror and near-death experiences very well.

“He’s having a vision,” I said, slumping against the wall for support. Adrien’s body relaxed after a few moments.

“What is it?” I asked, closing my eyes and hoping it wasn’t something else horrible. The Chancellor had said she’d made my allergies worse. What if he saw me get to the Surface and go into an allergy attack that would kill me? But when I opened my eyes, I saw him grinning.

“It’s my mom. She’s tracked down some of the Rez and they’re coming. But we can’t go up that way.” He nodded at the elevator as the door pinged and slid open. “The Chancellor will have set off the alarm by now. I saw a safe way out, though, and the Rez will meet us there.”

“But how could your mom know where we’ll be?”

He took my arm and helped me stand. “She must have had a vision, too.”

“Good.” I was breathing hard from the exertion of staying upright. “Because I don’t think I’m going to be taking on any more Regulators any time soon.”

He laughed and kissed my temple, then we led our unusual group down several perpendicular tunnels, the Regulators’ wrist access chips still opening up every door in our path. The Chancellor must not have figured out what I’d done. How could she have? I barely believed I’d been able to do it. They opened the last door and there was only darkness beyond.

“It’s the service stairwell,” Adrien said. “We can get one of the Regulators to carry you up the stairs—it’s three stories up. But I want you to stay here until I come back with the biosuit for you so you don’t have an allergy attack.” He saw my confusion. “I saw my mom carrying one in my vision.”

“But the biosuits only have enough oxygen for a few hours. What will happen then?”

Adrien swallowed, his eyes uncertain for a moment. “I don’t know yet. But right now we don’t have any other choice.”

We looked at each other wordlessly, and then I nodded.

“Take Molla and Juan with you,” I said, grabbing his arm as he turned to go. I leaned in and whispered, “They’ll probably be hysterical about going to the Surface like I was the first time. This will give them a few extra minutes to get used to the idea.”

He nodded.

I went over to take Molla’s hands. She seemed almost catatonic, staring blankly off into space.

“Adrien’s going to take you up now, okay, Molla?”

She didn’t respond.

“Max,” I said, turning to him, though I couldn’t quite bear to look him in the eye now that I’d learned the truth of all he’d done. “Can you help?”

“Molla,” Max said, his voice stronger than it had been.

“Molla, find all the extra trackers they embedded in Zoe,” he said. He was looking at the floor

At the sound of Max’s voice, Molla’s eyes seemed to clear a little. She looked at Max and he nodded, so she reluctantly turned to me. Her gaze narrowed as she scanned me head to toe. “Here.” She pointed behind my left ear. “Here and here and here.” She pointed at my right shoulder, right hip, and left ankle.

“Is that all?” Max asked.

She nodded.

“Go with Adrien now,” he said. “Do whatever he says and don’t worry about being on the Surface. I promise you it’s safe.”

“But I want to stay with you, Max.”

“Go,” Max ordered, somewhat harshly, but then his voice softened. “I’ll be right behind you.”

She nodded again, looking slightly less skittish.

Adrien took Molla’s arm and led her through the doorway up into the darkness. Juan followed behind.

After they were out of sight, Max’s gaze shifted to me. We stood, surrounded by five of the tall, silent Regulators. I looked away uncomfortably, my arms crossed. I might not have wanted to leave Max at the mercy of the Chancellor, but that didn’t mean I could forget what he’d done.

“Molla seems to forgive you,” I finally said, my voice sharp.

He shook his head. “She just doesn’t believe it yet. She doesn’t believe I never loved her, or that I was willing to throw her to the Chancellor without a second thought—just for the chance of getting to run away with you.” The pitch of his voice raised. “I’d do it all again.”

“But she’s
pregnant
,” I said, turning to him face-to-face, the pain and anger at his betrayal bubbling up now that I really had the time to think about it. “How could you leave her?”

“I didn’t know she was pregnant,” he said, looking down.

“Would it have changed your mind if you had?”

“No.” He met my gaze steadily. “I still would have left her because all I ever wanted was you. You were the first person I felt anything for after glitching. I loved you before I even knew the name for it. Everyday I’d sit beside you, inhaling your scent, looking at your beautiful face. Every night, dreaming about you. You eclipsed everything else. It was you. Always you.”

“All you wanted was the power the Chancellor promised you,” I said, angry and sad.

“If that were true,” he said with a dark laugh, “I would never have left her, never tried to save us. She promised me the world, all the power, all the pleasures I could ever want, and I was willing to give it all up.”

He took a step closer to me and I flinched. Two Regulators moved silently in front of me, blocking Max.

“But at what price, Max?” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “You were willing to sacrifice Molla and Adrien, to leave them behind to the Chancellor’s monstrous plans. If you thought I could have lived with that, you never really knew me at all.”