Shutdown (Glitch)

Would he abandon him so easily? Then again, I wasn’t sure he’d ever really loved Molla. Spending time with her and their son could just be part of his cover to get us to trust him again.
    I looked at the clock. It was nine thirty. I didn’t usually sleep this late. Had he switched the pills I’d taken last night to give me an extra-heavy dose of sedative? I wouldn’t put it past him. Early morning sun had been filtering in behind him in the video, so he couldn’t have been gone for more than three hours already.
    But Max was crafty, and there was no telling what he could have already accomplished in three hours. He could have arranged with a doctor in the city to try to get the kill switch chip out of his head. Any tampering was supposed to trigger it, but if he’d found a surgeon who was careful enough …
    My hand tightened around the kill switch trigger. I took a deep breath and lifted my thumb over the red button. But then, just as I was about to push the trigger, I realized something: if I killed Max now, my own cover would be blown. I might be able to make it out of the city—I could call on my power easily these days, and I’d been constantly increasing my stamina and control. Heavy locked doors posed no problem for me. I was confident I could take down a squadron of Regulators too without much trouble. But still, even if I could get myself out of the city, I would have failed to accomplish what I’d come here for. It would be difficult to ever get another chance like this, especially if they realized we’d already infiltrated once.
    My eyes shot back to the clock. It was only twenty-five more minutes to wait. If Max wasn’t back by then, I’d have no choice but to try to escape. I couldn’t pull off the plan without the second pendant key; there was no way I’d be able to get into the central Link coding station without it. Not to mention that walking around with the face of the most notorious fugitive in the country would get me caught within minutes of anyone recognizing me. If there was even the slightest chance that Max was telling the truth—and that’s all it was, slight —then I had to wait for him. I hated him even more for putting me in this position.
    I gritted my teeth and got dressed, then sat down on the bed with the kill switch in my hand. I pulled at the fringe on the edge of the pillowcase and watched the clock. The minutes inched by at an infuriatingly slow pace. I’d have sworn minutes never took this long before. Finally it was nine fifty. Then, what felt like an hour later, nine fifty-five.
    At nine fifty-nine, a moment before the clock clicked to ten, the door to our suite opened. No one appeared to be there, but reaching out with my telek, I could feel the shape of Max’s body. I leapt off the bed as he closed the door behind him and reappeared.
    “Zoe, wait, I can explain—”
    His words were cut off because I’d lifted him off the ground by the throat with my telek. I slammed him against the marble wall so hard his eyes bugged out in their sockets. Then I dropped him to the ground and flipped him onto his chest. I sat on his back, binding his arms to his sides with my telek, and searched the hair at the back of his neck. I couldn’t see any incision points. I reached forward with the kill switch device, put it flush against his neck, and clicked the diagnostic option. After a few seconds it let out a small beep and flashed a message: ALL SYSTEMS CHECK .
    I got off of Max and released him from my telek hold.
    “Shunt, Zoe!” he said, massaging his throat. “I said you could trust me. Can’t you believe that a guy can change?”
    “Never,” I said, my voice full of venom. “And if you disappear like that again without talking it through with me, I won’t hesitate. I’ll trigger the kill switch first and ask questions later. Got it?”
    He stared at me, a heavy frown on his face, but he nodded. “Got it,” he said.
    “Good. So did you retrieve the secondary key?”
    He sat down heavily on the bed. “No, I couldn’t get it. He was surrounded by a crowd of people the entire time. I waited outside his bedroom in the morning, thinking I’d catch him alone that way, but his son met him right as he came out and they walked together. Then once they got to the coffee room, Warnost stayed clustered with the others.”
    He shook his head. “You’d think old men drinking coffee would have to use the facilities once in a while, but while almost all of the