Shutdown (Glitch)

pace beside me. We topped the rise and looked down at the valley below.
    And then my legs dropped out from under me. Because the cabin was gone. It wasn’t just more fog ahead I’d seen, and the funny smell suddenly made sense too.
    It was smoke.
    All that was left of the place where all my friends and everyone else at the Foundation were supposed to be waiting for us was the smoking remains of a building that had been blasted to bits.

 
    Chapter 14
    ADRIEN IMMEDIATELY PULLED ME BACKWARD . “We’ve got to get out of here,” he whispered, dragging me back farther into the forest, away from the ridge.
    But I could only stare ahead, unseeing. No, it couldn’t be. I tried to fight off Adrien’s hold for a moment so I could go look again. I had to have seen wrong. There was no way the rendezvous site could have been cracked. No one knew the coordinates other than those who had been in the pods … a wave of nausea hit and I grabbed my stomach. They must have tracked one of the pods itself somehow, in spite of Henk’s cloaking tech.
    All those people. I thought of everyone who’d made it in the first pod that launched. Tyryn. All the refugees. Molla and the baby.
    “No, they can’t be dead,” I whispered, stumbling back from Adrien’s grip. “It can’t be.”
    “We don’t know anything,” Adrien said, coming up to me again. “Except that we need to get out of here. They probably know it’s a rendezvous site, so they’ll be watching to see if anyone else shows.”
    My eyes strayed back to the ridge as a sob choked its way out of me. I’d urged everyone to get in the pods thinking it would save them, when really I’d been sending them straight to their deaths. Over a hundred people. Dead because of me.
    “It can’t be, I just need to look again.” I tried to lurch back toward the top of the hill, but Adrien grabbed my arms again.
    “We saw it wrong.” I wrestled to get out of his grasp. “We saw it wrong!”
    “Stop it, Zoe.” Adrien took my face in both hands and forced me to look at him. His eyes searched back and forth between mine. “You need to focus and fly us out of here. Right now. I know you’re tired. But you have to do this. They’ll kill us if they find us. Do you understand? You’ll die.”
    I shook my head. No. I didn’t understand anything. None of this made sense. I ground my palms into my eyes.
    “Fine, if you don’t care about saving yourself, then think about me.” Adrien’s voice was sharp like a slap. “If you don’t get me out of here, they’ll find us and kill me. Is that what you want, to get me killed?”
    My head snapped up. Of course. I was his only escape route. It stung, but he was right. I couldn’t let him get hurt anymore because of me.
    I breathed out. Empty mind, empty mind , I intoned to myself. Just like back in meditation practice. I couldn’t think about what might have happened to everyone. I was the reason Adrien was a shell of his former self. I owed it to him to get him safely away from here. The thought sharpened my mind to a single focus. There was nothing else in the world except this moment right now: objects filling space and the feel of the wind against our faces as I lifted us off the ground. Somehow I managed to pull from wells of energy reserves I didn’t know I had.
    We flew up, up, up until we were right below the tops of the trees. And then I propelled us forward. For once, I succeeded at clearing my mind of any thoughts. I was truly emptied out. But it didn’t feel a thing like being at peace.
    *   *   *
    We flew until I simply couldn’t anymore. We continued heading north, trying to put as much distance between ourselves and the safe house as possible. Adrien checked his arm panel every so often to tell me which way to turn and by how many degrees so that we’d stay in the mountains. I had no idea where we were, or where we were going. I didn’t let my thoughts stray from the task at hand. The trees remained thick, that was all that mattered. We wouldn’t be seen. Adrien would be safe.
    But I’d been awake going on two and a half days now, and suddenly I just couldn’t do it any longer. All the other thoughts I’d been keeping at bay suddenly rushed back in. The smoking cabin. Wondering if all that was left of my friends were charred bones. The trees started swirling around me again, and the air seemed like liquid, like the edges of everything seeped into one another. I slowed down and dropped us to the