Shutdown (Glitch)

you’ve changed, your soul is still the same—”
    “Souls don’t exist!” His eerily translucent eyes flashed up at me. “The entire notion is ridiculous. The body is a machine, that is all.”
    “Then what’s the point of living?” I cried. I took a deep breath to calm myself down before continuing. “I’m explaining it badly. The soul is just a word you always used to describe that part of us that is something more than just our flesh and bones and the electrical synapses in our brains. It’s the part of us that makes us human.”
    “Well, that’s one more thing he was a fool about,” Adrien said, his voice turning bitter. He swiped at his eyes one last time. “If souls were located somewhere other than the flesh, then mine couldn’t have been cut out of me when they hacked into my brain. But it was. I felt nothing, nothing ,” he repeated vehemently, “for months. And when I did begin to feel things again, it was all sadness and pain and the realization that I wasn’t the person everyone wanted me to be. I was better off beforehand.”
    He looked away. “The sun is down. We should get going so we can make it to the fence tonight.”
    “But Adrien—”
    He grabbed his pack and stood with his back to me. “We should get moving.”
    I sighed and rubbed my tired eyes. A headache was blooming across my skull. Like a fool, I’d gotten my hopes up when I saw his tears—thought for a second maybe there was a way he could find his way back to who he had been. Back to me. Instead, like always, I was just seeing what I wanted to see. I looked back at him before quickly averting my eyes again. I was terrified that someday soon, I was going to have to stop pretending to see the light of the Adrien I’d loved in the eyes of the stranger in front of me.

 
    Chapter 13
    I LOOKED OVER AT ADRIEN when we next stopped, right before we got to the border fence. I was so exhausted, my vision was getting blurry. In the light of Adrien’s arm panel, it looked like he had two heads. I blinked several times until the two overlapping images settled back into one. I slumped against a nearby tree, ignoring the bark stabbing at my back as I slid down to the ground. It was the middle of the night now and the fight to stay awake was getting more and more impossible. It felt like every cell in my body was screaming at me to sleep.
    “Get your coolant harness out,” Adrien said. His voice was cold, mechanical almost. He’d been like this all day, the few times he was forced to speak to me. Almost as if, by becoming completely robotic now, he could erase the memory of his earlier emotional outburst. “We’ll be exposed to the Infrared Sat Cams while we’re crossing the fence.”
    My hands felt thick and clumsy as I sorted through my pack. The headache from earlier had only gotten worse. I swallowed another couple of pain pills from the med kit and rubbed my temple.
    “Actually we’ll be fine with just my harness,” Adrien said, frowning as he watched me swallow the medicine. “It’ll cover our heat signatures for a four-foot radius as long as we stay close.” He put his arms through the harness and clasped it around his stomach. Then he clicked the button and the straps of the harness began to inflate. Luminescent nano-infused coolant gel began flowing through the inflated straps like water through pipes.
    Adrien craned his head to look up. “There’s no moon out tonight. That should help us cross without detection.”
    I closed my eyes for a long moment, then jerked them open again right as I felt myself start nodding off. My arms began to prickle from the momentary lapse in concentration controlling my mast cells. I swallowed hard as I focused my telek again. I couldn’t afford to let my attention slip. Not now.
    He checked the map on his arm panel. “Perfect. The fence is right past those trees. We’ll have to fly over it,” Adrien said.
    “I already know that,” I snapped, the exhaustion making me irritable.
    “I meant that we’ll have to fly far up and over it. It’s not just electrified, there are motion sensors on every inch of it, eyes without eyes.”
    “So?” My befuddled mind wasn’t following whatever point he was trying to make.
    “So I’m saying we’ll have to fly far overhead to avoid triggering it. Motion detectors can usually sense anything in a hundred-foot radius.”
    “Oh.” I got his meaning now. It wouldn’t be just a quick hop over the fence. We’d have to fly up