Override (Glitch)

taking me farther away. I flailed and beat at his armored chest with my fists, and he finally paused when we reached the entry to the hallway. He looked down at me with no expression on his face.
    Then suddenly an explosion rocked the building. Half of the domed room we’d just left collapsed and the walls blew outward. Eli and I were thrown hard into the hallway wall from the blast, but somehow he managed to stay on his feet.
    Sound rushed in again, a cacophonic mix of screaming and the squeal of steel beams cracking overhead. Debris and dust filled the air.
    For a moment I blinked in a daze. I had no idea what was happening. Nothing made any sense. There was a painful ringing in my ears. One of the girls who’d escaped the cells lay on the ground right beside me, bloody and unmoving.
    “I saw Max!” I shouted. “We have to go back for him!”
    I looked over Eli’s shoulder. Clouds of dust made it impossible to see, but it was clear that many of the cell rooms had been destroyed in the blast. The glitcher responsible for the silence must have been in one of them.
    But Max, where was Max? I wiped at the grime on my face mask and caught only the barest glimpse of him, still lying inside his cell before Adrien shouted, “Get her out.”
    Eli picked me up and started running again. In the opposite direction from Max. “No!” I shouted into his ear.
    “Don’t put her down,” Adrien yelled over his shoulder. “The General’s orders are to protect her. Get her to the transport, now.” Eli kept running, his arms around my waist like a vice grip. A few of the escaped glitchers ran just behind us.
    “Stop listening to him and put me down! We have to go back!”
    I tried to gather my telek so that I could make Eli stop. But just then, the wall on one side of the hallway began to groan and buckle. Part of the building that had already collapsed was pulling down the rest. The groans became screeches.
    The ceiling cracked and a pile of concrete and rubble collapsed straight on top of us. I screamed and threw my hands in the air. A huge slab of concrete stopped a mere foot above our heads, caught in my telek web.
    Debris sifted down around us. All down the exit tunnel the walls were buckling, creaking under the strain. The rest of the ceiling would come down soon. I threw my telek at it to keep it from collapsing long enough so we could escape. I tried to hold the slab overhead while also reaching back into the circular room to help Max. But the second I tried to split my focus, the ceiling dropped closer.
    No, this couldn’t happen again. The scene was too familiar, an ex-Reg carrying me away while Max was left behind. I had to save him this time. He’d obviously seen the error of his ways. He wasn’t working with the Chancellor anymore. She’d tied him up and left him here.
    I strained to turn around.
    But right then, the ceiling finally dropped behind us. I couldn’t hold it anymore. A glitcher boy who had lagged behind was crushed in front of my eyes.
    I screamed in rage and grief, clinging to the last bits of my power to keep the hallway ahead of us clear. I poured every ounce of strength left in my body into the telek, and then when that was gone I pushed harder still. I remembered the image I’d seen in my dream of all the blue lights spilling out of me as I cracked like a smashed glass. It was going to break me, but I didn’t care. I had to hold on a moment longer. Just a moment.
    The next instant we were out in the night air and my power dropped out completely. I dropped my head in exhaustion against Eli’s shoulder as the building behind us shook with a terrifying tremble before it crumbled in on itself. The sound was deafening and dust billowed outward in a thick cloud.
    So much had gone wrong. In my exhaustion, I turned to Adrien. He looked distraught, but his eyes lacked the bewilderment and shock showing plainly on the faces of the rest of our disheveled and injured crew. And with a rush of pain and grief, I realized why.
    “Did you foresee this?” I asked. He looked away. “DID YOU SEE THIS?”
    But then even my voice was gone and the world swirled around me. All I could manage before I passed out was to whisper a name no one could hear: Max.

Chapter 17
    I SPENT A WEEK in bed. Jilia had easily healed my fractured ankle, but pushing so hard with my telek had taken its toll on my body. I was absolutely depleted, without enough energy to lift my own head. Ginni helped me to the bathroom a