Override (Glitch)

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