Override (Glitch)

developed as a side effect of the hardware glitches. I’d trusted him, before I even fully understood what that word meant.
    But that was all a long time ago now. That was before I’d learned that someone you think you know can look you in the face and tell you lies.
    I thought about the last time I’d seen Max, right after I found out he’d been working for the Chancellor as a Monitor the whole time. He was an informant, reporting on people who were glitchers like us, getting them captured and “repaired,” or worse, deactivated. And he hadn’t felt remorse for any of it.
    “I was going to protect you from it all,” he’d said. “We were going to live a life beyond your best dreams, you and me together forever. It would have been perfect.” His voice had turned bitter. “You were supposed to be mine.”
    My face burned hot at the memory, and I shook my head. I remembered the disgust on his face when I told him to escape with us.
    “And do what? Join your little band of Resistance fighters? Spend every day watching someone else live the life I always wanted with you? Don’t think so.”
    It was a wound I opened and salted over and over again. It tortured me to remember, and the anger felt fresh and hot every time I repeated his words. But the truth was, I needed the anger and the pain. I dug it deep into my chest like an anchor holding me in place. It reminded me that I was alive even if this alcove sometimes felt like a tomb, that I was free, and that one day soon I’d be able to join the others to fight against the many injustices that had enslaved us.
    I turned my eyes away from Max to the other face that was featured most often in my drawings. Adrien, with that smile he saved for me when no one else was looking. I sighed. His was the only face on my wall that didn’t fill me with regret.
    The last time I’d seen him had been ages ago, while he was passing through on his way to the Foundation. It was going to be a school for glitchers, and, best of all, it would have an air-filtration system equal to the research lab here. I’d be able to join him there without fear of the air I breathed or worrying that any sound I made might get me caught and killed.
    As I reached up to trace Adrien’s face, a tremor ran through my hand. The gentle quaking had been plaguing me all night, first in my thighs, now my hand. A flash of fear washed over me.
    Not again. It shouldn’t be happening again so soon.
    I flexed my hand, then made a fist, and the shaking stopped. I swallowed hard, trying to quiet my rising alarm. I hadn’t gotten my telekinesis to function properly in weeks, and the power raged like a wild beast clawing underneath my skin. Adrien always called our glitcher powers Gifts, but I was beginning to suspect that he was wrong.
    I clicked the light off and settled into my pillow. Our minds may have evolved to develop superhuman abilities, but what if our bodies hadn’t? Maybe we were too fragile to contain that kind of power. Maybe our Gifts were actually a curse.
    *   *   *
    I’d only been asleep for a few minutes when I woke to my knuckles banging repeatedly into my cheek.
    “Shunt,” I murmured, suddenly fully awake. My arm kept at it, but now the shaking had moved up to my shoulder. The normal telltale buzz of my power grew louder in my ears until it was a high-pitched screech.
    “No, no, no,” I whispered, clicking on my light and climbing awkwardly down from the bed. I glanced at the clock on the wall above my head. It was an hour into the workday. Somehow I had to stop myself from going into full eruption mode, or else I’d be caught for sure.
    The first time my power had gotten uncontrollable like this I’d been lucky; it was nighttime, when no one was around. Milton, one of the two people at the research lab who knew I was hiding here, had been slack-jawed when he finally pushed his way into my trashed room the morning after. The metal frame of the bed had been twisted in on itself like a figure eight, and the toilet had come loose and made a dent in the concrete of the opposite wall. All my drawings and clothes had been shredded, and I’d sat huddled in the far corner with my arms over my head, bruised and bleeding.
    But Milton had been kind. He said I reminded him a little of his sister, a drone he had to leave behind in the Community’s control. He told me stories about her while he helped me clean up. He said maybe the outburst had happened because I was boxed in here