The elevator door pinged again and then opened. But what I saw didn’t match what I’d sensed with my telek at all, and my mind reeled in confusion. Instead of a hallway, I stepped out into a large room that was blindingly white.
Children dressed in white tunics sat at desks, their small heads all turning in unison as I walked into the room. The room was unlike any I’d ever seen, but it was clearly a school. They were so young. Five or six years old.
“You have to get out,” I said, my voice a frantic whisper. “It’s not safe!”
The buzzing exploded in my ears. I closed my eyes and the room fell away. I felt the contours of what seemed like an empty hallway again. Where were the children? None of this made any sense. And then I noticed a lone figure standing just a few paces away from me. He raised a gun. I screeched and crumpled it like I had the weapons in the ceiling.
But when I blinked my eyes open again, I was back in the white room. I twirled around in confusion. My telek faded to a low buzz in my ears and then was gone completely. The children needed me. Suddenly nothing else mattered. I had to get them out of here.
One little girl came toward me, her blond hair in ringlets that framed her face.
Her tiny lip trembled. “Are you here to hurt us?”
“No,” I crouched down so I was her height. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m here to help.”
But all of a sudden, I couldn’t remember why I was here at all. How was I going to help? Something was wrong, there was something I was supposed to be doing—
The girl pulled away from me.
“He’s waiting for you,” she said. She pointed to a boy sitting up front with his back to me. He was bigger than the other children, and the only one who hadn’t turned around when I walked in.
I hurried to the front of the room. I didn’t have much time. Then I frowned, not knowing why the thought had arisen. Other thoughts seemed to be wriggling at the back of my mind too, but when I tried to focus on them, they evaporated.
Of course I had all the time in the world. I carefully rounded the desk and saw the boy’s face.
I knew him.
“Markan!” I leaned over and hugged him hard. My little brother. I looked around at all the other children. They watched me silently. The more I looked at them, the more something seemed wrong with their eyes.
What had felt like a peaceful sanctuary only moments before now felt sinister. There was something wrong with these children. With this whole situation.
“Come on, Markan,” I said, a chill running up my spine. “We should go.”
He didn’t say anything, but he let me pull him to his feet. I grabbed his hand and was about to tug him forward when he cried out and sank to his knees. Blood bloomed on the front of his tunic.
“Markan!” I screamed. I looked around. I didn’t see any Regs. How had he gotten hurt?
I reached to pull his tunic off over his head so I could see the wound and try to stop the bleeding, but he grabbed me with a surprisingly strong grip.
“Why didn’t you save me?” Blood bubbled out of his mouth as his face paled. “Why didn’t you save me?”
The children around us picked up the chant, a choir of accusing voices. “Why didn’t you save me?”
I reached out to pull Markan into my arms, but as I touched him, he disintegrated into thin air.
“Markan!” I screamed, pawing the empty air in a panic. No! I’d had him, he’d been in my arms!
The children continued chanting, but all of them were bleeding now, from their noses, heads, chests. I screamed.
Another figure appeared in the spot where Markan had disappeared. Milton. Half his head was crushed in and blood poured down his face and neck. He reached out his arms to me. “Why didn’t you save me?”
“No!” I screamed, backing away. “You’re not real.” I spun around, clutching my head. “None of you are real!”
I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see them. I had to use my telek, I had to—
“Why didn’t you save me?” Another voice added to the chorus behind me. A voice I knew well.
“Adrien!” I turned around to him, and I remembered why I was here. The thought burned clear like a light piercing the fog. I was supposed to save Adrien. He didn’t look like the others in the room. He wasn’t as clean and he seemed more solid somehow.
He’d always been thin, but now he was positively skeletal. Dark, bruiselike shadows ringed his eyes. His hair was shaved and jagged, barely healed-over scars crisscrossed the left side of his head.
“Why didn’t you save me?” He didn’t reach out for me like Milton. He simply stood still looking like a broken toy. His eyes were vacant, constantly shifting this way and that as if he were seeing but not seeing.
“I will!” I said. “I will save you. Come with me. There’s a transport coming.”
He blinked and shook his head like he was clearing away a fog. “Zoe?” he whispered, as if he was seeing me for the first time.
“Oh God, what have they done to you? We have to get out of here.” I reached for his hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He was so skinny, I could feel each rib as he breathed in and out. I held back a sob. He’d known this would happen. No wonder he’d looked so haunted in the months leading up to the raid.
“Let me hold you,” he whispered so softly I could barely hear him through my helmet. “They’ve done horrible things to me. The only thing that got me through was the thought of you.”
I nodded, tears in my eyes. I glanced around me.
The children and the bright white classroom had faded. An errant thought in the back of my mind screamed that this wasn’t normal. Rooms and people didn’t just appear and disappear. But the next moment, I’d forgotten that it was strange at all.
Adrien and I were now in a room that looked like my old housing unit in the Community. It was dark with only the small sphere of the light cell near the head of my bed. Adrien pulled me down on the mattress beside him, just like he used to when he’d visit me in the middle of the night. The ceiling tile was shifted overhead, as if he hadn’t bothered to close it behind him.
“You’ve had a bad dream,” Adrien said. “I heard you cry out, so I came down. But you’re awake now.”
A bad dream. That didn’t seem quite right, but when I held him, suddenly it made more and more sense. I’d had such a very long, very bad dream, and now everything was back as it was supposed to be. Adrien and me, together and hidden away from the world in the dark sanctuary of my room.
He laughed, the sound of it gentle in the quiet room. “Zoe, why are you wearing that suit?”
His laugh made me feel warm all the way down to my bones. I looked down at my gloved hands, then laughed with him. I giggled, confused. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get this off you,” he said, a warm smile still on his face. He put a hand to the edge of my faceplate.
I nodded. All I wanted was his touch. Suddenly I needed it more than I’d ever needed anything in my life, more than food, more than air. I let him undo the clasps and pull my helmet off. He swooped in and kissed me as if he was breathing me in.
For a moment everything was perfect. Adrien was in my arms and his lips tasted sweet, like strawberries. I noticed a slight whirring noise start up around us, like one might notice the buzz of a fly in the background. I kissed him deeper.
But when I pulled back to take a breath, my chest felt tight and I couldn’t get any air. At first I laughed, thinking about how kissing Adrien made me breathless. But the next second, I knew that wasn’t it. My tongue felt wrong. It was a thick stone in my mouth.
I knew what this felt like. This had happened before. My thoughts were sluggish, but I finally remembered.
It was an allergy attack. I was having an allergy attack. I fumbled for the epi infuser I always carried with me. It should be safely tucked in a pocket at my thigh, but when I reached for it, there was nothing there.
“Help me,” I gasped at Adrien. I clutched his arm.
/>
He pulled away. I looked up in confusion. All the features fit—the eyebrows, long aquiline nose, thick lips—but it was like I was looking at a stranger’s face. No emotion flickered. And he was holding the epi infuser in his hand as he backed away.
I put my hands to my throat and tried to get another breath. Only a tiny bit of air trickled through my swollen throat, not nearly enough for a proper breath. Adrien watched me writhing on the bed as if I were no more than a specimen in a lab.
“Help!”
Adrien continued to back away from me. In the next blink, he’d dropped to the ground from the loft bed and pushed the door to my room open. He was leaving me.
No. I had to stop him. I was supposed to save him. He was supposed to save me. My thoughts jumbled all together, but one thought burned clear. I couldn’t let him go. I could stop him, I knew I could, if I could just remember how—
My telek! How had I forgotten about it? I cast it out immediately, reaching for Adrien. But when I did, none of it made sense. The cube projection in my mind didn’t match what I saw. I couldn’t feel the shape of my loft bed or the tiny contours of my room.
Instead, it felt like a hallway.
And Adrien and I weren’t alone. There was someone else standing right beside me. I tried to scream, but only managed a whimpering sputter.
I opened my swollen eyes and tried to get another breath. My throat was swollen almost completely shut now. Panic rose even as I lashed out with my telek.
I threw the other person hard into the wall, headfirst.
The image of my bedroom evaporated instantly. Adrien and I were in a white hallway. I wasn’t on my bed, I was laying on the ground. It was just like the hallway I’d been in right before I’d gotten on the elevator. A thick mist spewed into the room from vents at the top of the wall.
I tried to call out to Adrien, but no sound came out.
My eyes had swollen almost entirely shut, but through the slit I could see a red-haired young man laying unconscious at my feet. He must have been a glitcher, making me hallucinate all those things.
But Adrien hadn’t been a hallucination. He kept backing away from me, my helmet still in his hand. He was real.
I tried to stand, but collapsed to the ground again. My mouth gaped open, trying desperately to fill my lungs with air, but the bit I did manage to gasp through my swollen throat was toxic. The vents must be pumping in allergens.
I reached for Adrien, crawling on my knees, but knew that even if I could manage to get the helmet on again, the allergens were already clogging my lungs. I hadn’t taken a breath for at least two minutes now.
Adrien was at the end of the hallway now.
And then he was gone.
Watching him leave sapped the last ounce of fight I had in my body. I knew he must be under the Chancellor’s compulsion. But I still felt the loss like a sledgehammer to my ribs.
My body shuddered, the muscles expanding and contracting involuntarily. My mouth opened wider, gaping like a dying fish. I tried desperately to get a center, to be able to cast my telek as I had in training so many times, as I could almost do in my sleep now.
But the objects and impressions were all skewed. My back arched and spasmed. Everything in me heaved, needing a breath.
Why didn’t you save me?
I loved Adrien so much. But in the end I couldn’t save him. Or myself.
Anger began to boil inside me even as I felt my body shutting down from lack of oxygen. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. I didn’t care about fate, or what Adrien had or had not seen. All of it was futile if it ended like this. The rage burned red and the buzzing that had been a hum in my ears became a howling scream.
No.
The projection in my mind shined with burning light. I felt the pulsing fury that obliterated every other thought.
I was pure rage.
I didn’t even care where the rage was directed—at the Chancellor, at Max, at me, at death itself for trying to claim me before my time was up—I ignored everything but the fury.
And then suddenly I wasn’t expanding outside my body. I was inside it. I pushed past my skin and tissue and muscles, zooming in closer and closer. I barely knew what I was doing, and I didn’t let myself think about it. I just felt.
Like I’d done with the oxygen molecules in the kitchen fire, I surrounded all the mast cells in my body. I forced the release of histamines to stop, expelling the ones that had already been released through the pores in my skin.
I couldn’t stop to think about the impossibility of what I was doing. It was millions of cells, billions probably. I’d lose it if I thought about it too much.
The swelling in my throat went down, and the passage opened up. I breathed. Breath after painful gasping breath. My heart was working again and it raced to pump the oxygen back into the rest of my limbs.
The swelling in my eyes calmed until I could see light first, and then objects started to take shape in front of me. My raging telek was still focused inward on my mast cells, and I could sense that if I let go for even a moment the swelling would start again. I tried to figure out what I’d done unconsciously with my telek and how to hold on to it willfully now.
Get up. Get up now, I ordered myself. I stayed still. Too much hurt. How could I move?
“GET UP!” I whispered in a rasping, barely audible voice. I closed my aching eyes for one last moment, then said it again. I tried to think of the strength of Taylor’s voice when she gave commands. There was no other choice but to obey when she spoke. I had to do that now.
“Ginni,” I rasped into my arm com. “Where’s the Chancellor now?”
“Zoe!” Ginni’s voice crackled in my ear. “I’ve been trying to com you for the last ten minutes. I saw Adrien come out of his room and join you, but then he left again and now he’s with the Chancellor! What happened?”
The hallucinations the red-haired glitcher boy had cast on me had been so complete, I hadn’t even heard her com.
“Where is he?” I asked again. I didn’t have the energy to explain right now.
“On an elevator, heading up.”
I rolled onto my knees, then slowly, achingly, grabbed on to the nearby wall and dragged myself to my feet. The movement cost my focus a bit—I could tell by the sudden itching on my left side. I breathed out and gathered it back. The itching calmed, but I felt split in two trying to hold on to all the mast cells internally while also moving my outer body. I took one step forward, then another, and then another. Every few moments I lost it and I’d feel a bit of swelling or itching. I caught it again just in time.
I staggered to the elevator behind me and swiped the card. It pinged open almost immediately. They must have gone up a different elevator.
“They’re on the roof now,” Ginni said over the com.
I pushed the button for roof access and then sagged against the wall while the elevator lifted. It stopped and pinged open. My breath was heaving and unsteady as I stepped out on to the roof. The morning sunlight hurt my eyes, but I could make out figures and two vehicles on the transport landing pad. I recognized Adrien’s tall frame immediately. The Chancellor stood with her back to me, her hair oiled back slick like she always used to wear it. She whipped around and her eyes widened in shock.
I saw her reach for a weapon and gave up a moment’s control over my mast cells. I thrust my telek outward and yanked the gun out of her hands. It clattered to the ground only a few feet away from me.
“It’s not possible,” she managed to choke out. “You’re supposed to die. Adrien said he saw you go into an allergy attack and die!”
The effort of pulling the gun away was too much. I fell to my knees the next second and scrambled to get a hold of the instantly erupting cells.
I reached my hand in her direction. This was it. After all these months, she was finally in my grasp. If I’d been in my biosuit, I could have snapped her neck in an instant. But I wasn’t, and the more I tried to split my telek focus between my mast cell
s and reaching outward toward her, the more it felt like I was caught between two magnets ripping me apart in opposite directions.
“Don’t waste your energy on me, darling Zoe,” the Chancellor called out. The fear that had flickered on her face had disappeared at the sight of my struggle. She smiled instead.
I looked up and saw that Adrien had walked away from her to the edge of the building. The very edge. And on the opposite side of the building, Taylor stood just as precariously perched.
My heart skipped a beat. Why was Taylor even still here? She’d promised she would take off again as soon as she’d dropped me off. We must have underestimated the Chancellor’s reach.
I took a step forward.
“Stop,” the Chancellor commanded. “They’ll throw themselves off if I command it. In your condition, I don’t think you’d be able to pull them back.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked me over. “In fact, I’m not even sure you could save one of them if you tried. But there is another way. All you have to do is pick up that gun,” she gestured at the weapon I’d ripped away from her, “and kill yourself.”
I glanced at the gun, then back up at the Chancellor. Hatred poured off me in waves. If I could just manage to get control …
“Kill yourself and I will let them live.”
“Stop,” I said. “You don’t have to do this!”
She cocked her head sideways at me. “No? You won’t save anyone but yourself? What a disappointing savior you turned out to be.” She waved her hand and both Adrien and Taylor leaned farther out off the roof. Each tottered on the edge, the wind swirling around them as they held on to unstable footholds.
“Wait!” I stooped over to reach for the gun. “I’ll do it.”
The Chancellor sighed. “I can tell you’ll just try to shoot me. You always were so transparent.” She stepped closer to her sleek black transport. “So impulsive and predictable.”
I lunged for the weapon, but out of the corner of my eye saw Adrien and General Taylor throw themselves off the roof.