Override (Glitch)

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