Shutdown (Glitch)

managed was punctuated by another flicker of terror. I was drowning, I couldn’t breathe! I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to ignore my panic.
    I held my breath and searched the wall with my telek. My instincts had been right. More guns dropped from where they’d been hidden encased in the wall, taking aim at me. I ripped them off only seconds before they could fire at my prone body.
    Still, when I tried to move again, I was as immobile as if I’d been wrapped head to toe in steel bands. I choked out the water in my mouth and managed another quick breath before my throat filled back up again. I didn’t know if the water was real or just a hallucination, but if I didn’t get more than half a breath soon, I’d pass out.
    Worse, in addition to the jarring noises still blasting in my ears, I suddenly felt the prickle of a thousand crawling insects all over my body. I shuddered internally and counted to ten to calm down, in spite of my desperate need for air. I could hold my breath for a minute more, and my mind at least was still unbound.
    I reached back into the building with teeth-grinding determination. I was done letting the Chancellor use these innocent people as weapons against me. Not to mention I was so battered, I didn’t know how much longer I could keep this up. I let out a growl of anger as I sent the energy outward from my body. It passed easily through the wall and then into the thirty waiting bodies, knocking them backward.
    It must have been enough to startle the mind-workers from their focus, because suddenly I could both move and breathe again. I took in a gulp of air and then jumped back off the ground, biting back a scream from the pain that lit up my body. I flew as fast as I could toward the main entrance. I could sense some of the bodies starting to move, so I reached in again, more surgically this time, pinching the blood vessels leading to their brains until they all passed out.
    Then I moved on to the Regs lined up behind them, poised to attack in case the glitchers failed. Their standing in such orderly ranks was actually a help to me as I reached through each body, counted down their vertebrae, and all at once, snapped their spines where I knew they could survive until spinal reattachment surgery was done. They immediately toppled to the ground in a single wave. I flew through the doorway and over all the slumped bodies.
    I wanted to stop so badly to see if Markan was among them. But I was exhausted and battered. Blood from my broken nose dripped into my mouth, the wound in my back had bled through the bandages, my right arm was broken, and the burns on my leg and torso screamed in pain with every move I made. Still, I had to keep going and find the Chancellor. I’d come this far and there was no going back. I cast my telek outward, hoping I could sense the shape of her body. Maybe now that I’d taken out most of the glitchers and Regs, she’d be easy to find. I dropped down to my feet and searched both the floors above and below with my telek.
    And then my heart lurched in my chest.
    There were hundreds upon hundreds of Regulators all around me. They filled the two elevators and all four stairwells, all heading to the ground floor with their heavy hydraulic-reinforced legs pounding out a terrifying rhythm.
    In the seconds before they burst out the doors at the end of the long wide hallway, I felt the shape of the building in my mind. It went down six floors, so deep that my telek became too fuzzy along the edges to tell if the Chancellor was down there. Even if I sensed the shape of a body, what if she’d already escaped and simply left a body double behind?
    I hadn’t seen or heard any transports taking off, though, and she had to know she’d be a vulnerable target if she tried to escape like that. I could easily bring a transport crashing to the ground before she ever made it out of my telek range. No, she would have stayed here and burrowed deep into the ground like the snake that she was. She’d trust in her army to protect her. It was how she operated—compelling others to do the dangerous work in her stead so she never had to get her hands dirty.
    Either way, there was no way I’d know for sure until I stood over her dead body, just as Adrien’s vision foretold. I tried not to think about the other fork he’d seen, the one where she stood over me.
    I snapped the cables on the elevators right before the doors opened and sent them tumbling down six stories. A