Shutdown (Glitch)

It would serve me right to be left behind here to die.
    I let go of his arm. “I’m so sorry,” I finally managed to whisper, barely able to find my voice. I knew my apology wasn’t enough, would never be near enough. The chasm of all I owed to him, of all he’d gone through, because of me—
    “Don’t be,” he said. He closed his eyes, and his heaving chest stilled. “It was my own fault for being weak enough to fall in love in the first place. I know better now. You shouldn’t let useless guilt weigh you down either.”
    I stared at him, wanting to pull him close and rest my head on his chest, to listen to his heartbeat. Anything to try to reassure myself that the boy I had loved was still inside the person in front of me somewhere. Instead, I stayed rooted where I stood.
    “Why didn’t you say any of this before?”
    He pinched his lips together before speaking. “You never asked.”
    I took a step toward him involuntarily. “I asked you every day how you were feeling.”
    “Exactly,” he shook his head. “How I was feeling. You asked about emotions. You wanted some evidence so you could pretend I was starting to become him again. You didn’t want to know about the things I was interested in. I tried telling you about my coding projects. I showed you the exciting math theorems I was working on. But you didn’t want to hear it. All you wanted to talk about was love and souls and emotions, or worse,” he grimaced, “memories of the past.”
    “Why is talking about memories a bad thing?” My voice broke and I couldn’t help it. “I was only trying to help you remember who you are.”
    “Who I was ,” he corrected. He’d calmed down some, but his eyes were still lit with intensity in the blue light of the lamp. “I’ve been trying to make you see who I am now. ”
    I stepped back, stunned. He talked about the old Adrien as if he was gone for good. As if that’s the way he wanted it.
    I stared at him as he organized and restuffed the packs. It was so obvious he was different. I must have been willingly blinding myself not to see it. The way he ordered things into neat rows, everything in its place, when the old Adrien had been messy. How he read complex math texts for fun when my Adrien would have wanted to go look at the sunset or read a book of poems. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to keep trying to pretend he was someone else.
    No, I tried to tell myself. I looked down at the brown crumpled leaves under my feet. He was still sick. That was all. When he got better …
    I squeezed my hands into fists at my sides. I couldn’t think about any of this right now. Right now it was time to push all this emotion under a shadowed stone somewhere deep in my soul and face the situation in front of us. We needed to get to the safe house. That was all.
    Adrien finished closing up his pack. I took a moment to steady my voice. “We should get moving.”

 
    Chapter 12
    BY LATE AFTERNOON OF THE next day, we still hadn’t hit the border fence between Sectors Five and Six. We’d flown all morning and hadn’t spoken much. All the words that mattered had been slung last night.
    I set us down on the ground. The crunch of our feet on fallen leaves as we walked sounded extraordinarily loud. After a few steps on my weak legs, I barely managed to stay standing. I’d never felt such an allover achy soreness like this before. My shoulder blades felt like they were slicing through my back, and even my eyes felt bruised. It had been over thirty-six hours since I’d last slept.
    The afternoon sun was like a spike in my eyes when I opened them. I immediately backed away into the shadow of a tree and rolled my shoulders to stretch them out. I was beyond exhausted. I’d left exhaustion behind hours ago. I felt like I was about to collapse.
    I slumped to the ground with my back to a tree. We’d both agreed earlier it would be safer to cross the fence at night and figured we should take the opportunity to rest now during the day. Which meant we had a few hours of rest, or at least as much as I could rest without falling asleep.
    Soon it would be over, I reminded myself. We’d get past the border, then into Sector Six. We’d make our way slowly to the rendezvous site. Everyone would be safe and together again. Except for my brother. He was with the Chancellor, under her compulsion. Was she treating him well? If he had a useful enough glitcher Gift, she would, but there was no way to know.
    And then there was