Shutdown (Glitch)

supply bag. Anything to keep his twitching hands moving.
    I was bewildered, and too tired to try to make sense of his behavior. What he’d said last night—that it had never occurred to him not to come back for me, that he didn’t want to live in a world without me. Didn’t that mean he cared for me?
    As the sunlight finally began to dim again, announcing the start of another evening, what had happened the night before seemed like more and more of a dream. Maybe I had been hallucinating again. It had been days since I’d really gotten enough sleep. Maybe I’d entered some half-dream state where I was still awake enough to control my mast cells, but so rested that I’d actually had a dream.
    But then I glanced up at Adrien’s stiff shoulders. No, it had happened. Otherwise, why had he been acting like this all day? I sighed, slumping over to sit with my back against the damp cave wall. I was so tired I felt it down to the marrow in my bones.
    Maybe Adrien had done and said those things just to keep me awake, and for him there’d never been any feeling behind it. Could he be so cold and calculating? I could have sworn I’d felt his desire in response to me when we’d kissed.
    I shook my head. My befuddled mind was too tired to make any sense out of it. My heavy eyelids fluttered, wanting so badly to close. I snapped them open, feeling weary and defeated.
    This was it then. I had no more fight left. “I want to sleep,” I announced. “Let’s use up the last of the oxygen.” Afterwards, we’d both leave the cave and go looking for more. I didn’t care how much he argued with me. I wasn’t going to just sit around waiting anymore.
    He gave a quick nod but didn’t say a word. He stooped to gather up the equipment we’d need.
    But right as I stood up, a sudden noise came from outside. It was just a slight buzz, different from the sounds of the leaves blowing in the trees or the trilling of birds. Adrien froze too.
    “What is it?” he whispered.
    For a second I just looked at him in tired confusion. I had no idea what it was. But then I realized he meant for me to look with my telek sense. I immediately closed my eyes and felt outward past the entrance of the cave.
    “It’s a transport.” We both scrambled to the wall of the cave. “It’s landing.”
    “Is it an attack transport?”
    “I don’t know ,” I whispered back, trying frantically to calm my racing heart so I could focus on the two bodies inside the vehicle.
    “They don’t feel big enough to be Regs,” I said, “but I can’t be sure.”
    Then the side of the transport opened up and a familiar lanky form stepped out. “It’s Henk!” I ran forward to the front of the cave, awash with happiness. Henk was alive! That meant some of the others might be too.
    “Well, where are they?” I heard Xona’s voice ask. She must have been the second person I’d felt in the transport.
    “I don’t bloody know,” Henk said. “Ginni just said they’re at these coordinates. Gotta be a close pace nearby.”
    “Over here,” I called from the mouth of the cave, waving my arms over my head. There was only the barest sliver of moon out, and I could see the outline of the transport thirty feet away, hovering near the lake’s edge.
    “Zoe!” Xona said. “Look, over by those rocks.” She pointed my way and they hurried over.
    She crushed me into a tight embrace, lifting me up off the ground. “We got here as soon as we could. Everything was so crazy.”
    “I thought you were dead!” I said. “I saw the rendezvous site. How’d you get away?”
    Henk had come up behind Xona, more subdued. He cuffed Adrien on the back and then made his way into the cave where we’d set up camp. “This place ain’t half bad.”
    “How did you escape?” I asked. “And what about the others?”
    Xona and Henk exchanged a look, then she took a deep breath. “We loaded as many refugees as we could into the pods, but there was no more room for us. Cole and I took off for the military level right when the blast doors started closing.
    “Henk and most of the rest of our task force were there. A bunch of people had been eating in the Caf and Rand rounded them up and headed down after Henk messaged him. Cole and I just barely slipped under a blast door and met up with them.
    “All the pods were gone by then. But Henk said there was another tunnel that was still under construction and was mostly dug out. We raced down it, then drove the digger the last