Shutdown (Glitch)

ground.
    Adrien checked his arm panel the moment his feet touched the earth. “Good,” he said. “We’re near a city. I can probably slip inside without any problem.”
    I noticed he said I , not we . He was going to leave me.
    I was too tired to even feel hurt by it. All chance of me getting to an allergen-safe chamber in time was gone now. I was dead weight, just like the broken bodies of everyone who’d been in the safe house.
    So of course Adrien was going to leave and save himself. What had he called it? Survival instincts? I swallowed hard with the realization. When I leaned over, it felt like my ribs were knifing into my lungs. My shoulders ached raw in their sockets.
    At least he’d be safe. At least I’d gotten him this far. I closed my eyes for a long blink, until the itchiness biting its way up my arms woke me abruptly a second later. I immediately got hold of my mast cells again with my telek. But when I finally got the allergy attack under control and opened my eyes, Adrien was gone.
    He’d left without even saying good-bye.

 
    Chapter 15
    I PROPPED MYSELF UP AGAINST a tree. I grabbed a sharp rock and ground it into my thigh in an attempt to keep myself awake. I looked out at the forest. The sounds seemed inordinately loud to my exhausted ears. Above every other noise was the weirdly rhythmic high-pitched screech of cicadas. I put my hands on my ears to try to block out the sound, but it was no use. This was how I was going to die then. All alone with a million insects screaming out my death knell.
    I knew the world was so much larger than this, so much bigger than my personal tragedy. I wasn’t the first to lose a loved one in this war and certainly wasn’t the first to lose my own life. I thought again of the smoking remains of the cabin.
    All year I’d worried about bad things happening to faceless Rez operatives and the nameless families who hadn’t been able to flee the cities in time. But now it was happening to me. I couldn’t hold off sleep much longer, and the allergies would descend the moment I closed my eyes.
    It would be a quick but painful way to die. I was sure I’d wake up every few seconds and use my telek to fight against the allergy attack, then inevitably grow weary with exhaustion and fall back asleep again. I wondered how many times I’d wake up again and push it back before not even my Gift would be able to stop the onslaught of released histamines.
    A sob shook my chest. I looked at the now empty spot where Adrien had stood.
    Had it all really been for nothing then? I’d believed so passionately that the Resistance had a destiny and that, in the end, good would overcome evil. Even if the road was difficult and the sacrifices severe. Maybe they still would go on and manage to win the war, without me.
    Or did this new Adrien have it right? Were hope and love merely lies we told ourselves to try to create meaning where there was none? And if we were brave, we’d just look in the face of it and call hope what it truly was: a delusion to make the cold nothingness of life seem less dark and futile.
    Surely that was the lesson of this moment. I’d failed everyone. My power, which was supposed to save people, had led instead to the destruction of the Rez’s last safe haven. If it hadn’t been for the earthquake I’d caused, the Foundation never would have been discovered. From both my brothers to Adrien, to the people dead at the burned-out cabin, to all the others who hadn’t made it out of the Foundation in the first place—my presence had been nothing but a beacon leading straight to the destruction of the people I cared for most.
    I hugged my arms hard to my stomach. I’d hoped so hard that I’d have a chance to atone for it all. That if I could just manage to free the drones from the power of the Link, or take down the Chancellor once and for all, then it would have all had some twisted kind of meaning .
    But it didn’t. It had all been for nothing.
    Bitterness and sorrow were thick on my tongue like ash. I swallowed hard and stared up at the sky through the tree branches. Thick clouds hid the light of the sun.
    I wanted it to end quickly now. Could I have that last, small mercy? Blocking my mast cells was second nature now, almost instinct. But maybe I could purposefully let the allergy attack take me the first time I fell asleep. Maybe it was possible to stop myself from fighting against it. A quick death.
    I breathed in and out rapidly, trying to psych