Shutdown (Glitch)

his slipped around my waist, pulling me in tight. I wanted this one last moment with him.
    For those few seconds, I let every other care and worry fall away. The touch of his lips lit me up like a spark of electricity tracing up and down my body. It was enough to consume all other thought.
    But then I felt a sharp pain in my back. I gasped and pulled away from Adrien.
    His face wasn’t warm and loving anymore. It was completely blank. I twisted to look at what was wrong with my back, then screamed in pain. But not before I saw that there was a kitchen knife lodged hilt-deep below my kidney.
    I pulled it out, blinking and looking at the small bloody knife in shock.
    What—?
    I turned back around just in time to see City raising her hands toward me. I felt the buildup of her electricity crackle in the air the instant before she released it.
    Nothing made any sense, but I threw my telek outwards against her. If she let out that stream of electricity in the tiny metal-encased space of the transport, we’d all be dead. I tossed her backwards hard. Her head hit the wall with a sickening thwack .
    I didn’t have time to check if I’d overdone it, if I’d hurt her badly or even killed her on accident, because Rand and Cole had both launched themselves at me. Rand held his hand out toward me. I could already feel the heat pouring off him, and I knew he was only just warming up. If he actually touched me, the burn would almost surely kill me.
    I stopped them both midair and wrenched Rand’s arm upwards instead of at me. The metal over our heads quickly turned red hot.
    Everyone attacking me all at the same time could only mean one thing. The Chancellor. But she was still hundreds of miles away, how was she compelling them—
    Suddenly we were all knocked off our feet as the transport dipped down, aiming straight at the ground. I fell hard into Cole, Juan, and Xona. My head banged into the metal of Cole’s chest, but he’d been slammed into the back of the cockpit seat and for a moment was just as disoriented as I was, so he didn’t renew his attack. Then again, he didn’t really need to. In a few more seconds, we’d all be a pile of fiery wreckage, our bodies indistinguishable from the twisted remains of the transport.
    I pushed myself off of Cole.
    My mind spun as I tried to figure out what was going on. The Chancellor’s power didn’t extend more than a few city blocks, maybe a mile at most. How was this happening? How did she even know where we were?
    I tried to grasp the transport with my telek, but we were dropping so fast, I couldn’t seem to get a clear hold before it all spun out of my mind’s grasp again. It didn’t matter how it was happening. All that mattered was that I stopped us in time. But when I tried to move so I could grab the controls, I tumbled past Henk in the driver’s chair and my backside smashed into the glass windshield at the front of the transport.
    The reinforced windshield didn’t crack, but I was woozy from the pain of hitting right where the knife had gone in.
    The transport was spinning now as it fell, throwing me from one side of the dashboard to the other. I kicked Henk in the face accidently, and he let go of the transport controls all together. At the same time, Cole had reached up and ripped off the guide stick at its base. He lunged for me next, but I pushed him back with my telek.
    I could see the ground now, closer every second. I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the screaming pain in my back, the nauseous sensation of spinning out of control, and the thought that this was my worst nightmare coming true—tumbling through the horrible open sky, empty space on all sides except for the unforgiving ground that was rushing up all too quickly to meet us.
    I ground my teeth together. The projection cube blinked to life in my mind, and I hurled my telek outward until I was not only out of the chaotic cockpit, but was outside the transport too. The cube enlarged and I reached blindly for another surface to hold on to so I could orient myself. And there it spread out beneath us—the ground.
    I braced myself against the earth with my telek and then felt out the spinning contours of the tiny transport falling through the huge unending sky. It was like a child’s toy tossed through the air. I caught it and steadied it out until we stopped spinning.
    It was the strangest sensation, because I could feel the momentum slowing in my outer body while simultaneously slowing the