Shutdown (Glitch)

time.”
    Simin let out a furious noise. “Did you not just hear what I said—”
    “Do it!” I ordered. “I know a way to get us off the ground.”
    Simin huffed again, but he typed frantically on his console screen. “I can’t break through the firewall to insert a virus. We need an overload of energy, but I don’t have that kind of equipment here!”
    I knew where we could get some. “City,” I called. “We need you.”
    She came up to the cockpit. “Why aren’t we off the ground yet? They’ll be here any second.”
    “I need you to fry the engine, blow all the circuits. Can you do that?”
    She smiled and placed her hand against the console. The space underneath her hand glowed slightly blue and within a few seconds I heard elements snapping and crackling. The smell of smoke filled the cabin. “It’s done,” she said.
    “Great. Brilliant.” The techer threw his hands up in the air. “We’re now officially dead in the water. Now what’s going to happen to Ginni?”
    “Got all the transports and the jet melted down,” Rand shouted from behind us. “I sure can’t tell which ones were theirs and which was ours.”
    “Good job,” I called over my shoulder. “Help everyone get strapped in as best as you can.”
    Simin got up to go check on Ginni and I sat down in his seat. I gripped the armrests, letting my mind expand. I’d never tried moving something this, well, big . In theory, it shouldn’t be a problem … But in reality?
    I let my telek push through my fingertips and imagined the way I’d seen City’s electricity web weave around the other transport. I did the same, but instead of electricity, I laid a web of energy. The projection cube burst to life in my mind and I could sense the entire transport and all seventeen bodies crammed inside. I memorized the feel of it, the slightly acrid smell of smoke in the air and the smooth texture of the steel armrest underneath my fingers. The back door clanged shut. Everyone was inside now.
    And then I whispered, “ Up .”
    The people behind me let out surprised yelps and gasps, but I ignored them. I was entirely in my mind now, lifting the triangular object off the ground and up into the sky. Like I’d done when it had just been Adrien and me, I kept my mind’s eye focused on the ground.
    But the physics of flying a transport compared to moving two bodies was a very different thing. For one, the wind resistance was different. It caught the wings in ways I didn’t expect and sent us tipping left and right. People screamed and yelped behind me. I bit down on my lip and compensated.
    I tried to get a feel of how the wind worked. Right when I thought I’d gotten a handle on it, it would gust at strange times with another updraft.
    After another few minutes, I’d gotten the basics down, at least enough to keep us mostly steady. “Henk, tell me you’ve got another transport hidden somewhere close.”
    “’Course I do.” He came up behind me and put a hand on the back of my chair, staring out through the window. “Can’t believe it. You just made a dead bird up and fly.”
    “I need you to direct me to the other transport. It won’t take them long to realize what happened. The melted transports might throw them off for a little bit, and maybe if we’re lucky they’ll think we took off on foot. But I’m sure soon enough they’ll go back to the Sat Cam logs and watch this one take off. They might already be tracking us.”
    He nodded beside me. He looked at the projected map the techer had set up on his personal console, depicting our position and altitude. “’Kay, you need to turn left, and head straight that way about a hundred miles.”
    I turned the vehicle slightly and hit another updraft that made the whole transport wobble for several long moments before I compensated.
    “Too far,” Henk said. “You gotta adjust back to the right a smidge.”
    I did, more gracefully this time, and then threw all my concentration into gathering speed. Finally the comments and terrified gasps behind me quieted. I hoped I wasn’t banging Ginni around too roughly. I didn’t dare a glance backwards to check. Sweat beaded on my forehead already. I couldn’t split my focus in any more directions.
    Henk and I kept at it, him giving me directions to nudge me one way or another until finally, only ten minutes later, I felt the landscape that had formerly stretched out flat in all directions begin to jut upward. I opened my eyes to look,