“I will!” I said. “I will save you. Come with me. There’s a transport coming.”
He blinked and shook his head like he was clearing away a fog. “Zoe?” he whispered, as if he was seeing me for the first time.
“Oh God, what have they done to you? We have to get out of here.” I reached for his hand, but he pulled me into a hug. He was so skinny, I could feel each rib as he breathed in and out. I held back a sob. He’d known this would happen. No wonder he’d looked so haunted in the months leading up to the raid.
“Let me hold you,” he whispered so softly I could barely hear him through my helmet. “They’ve done horrible things to me. The only thing that got me through was the thought of you.”
I nodded, tears in my eyes. I glanced around me.
The children and the bright white classroom had faded. An errant thought in the back of my mind screamed that this wasn’t normal. Rooms and people didn’t just appear and disappear. But the next moment, I’d forgotten that it was strange at all.
Adrien and I were now in a room that looked like my old housing unit in the Community. It was dark with only the small sphere of the light cell near the head of my bed. Adrien pulled me down on the mattress beside him, just like he used to when he’d visit me in the middle of the night. The ceiling tile was shifted overhead, as if he hadn’t bothered to close it behind him.
“You’ve had a bad dream,” Adrien said. “I heard you cry out, so I came down. But you’re awake now.”
A bad dream. That didn’t seem quite right, but when I held him, suddenly it made more and more sense. I’d had such a very long, very bad dream, and now everything was back as it was supposed to be. Adrien and me, together and hidden away from the world in the dark sanctuary of my room.
He laughed, the sound of it gentle in the quiet room. “Zoe, why are you wearing that suit?”
His laugh made me feel warm all the way down to my bones. I looked down at my gloved hands, then laughed with him. I giggled, confused. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get this off you,” he said, a warm smile still on his face. He put a hand to the edge of my faceplate.
I nodded. All I wanted was his touch. Suddenly I needed it more than I’d ever needed anything in my life, more than food, more than air. I let him undo the clasps and pull my helmet off. He swooped in and kissed me as if he was breathing me in.
For a moment everything was perfect. Adrien was in my arms and his lips tasted sweet, like strawberries. I noticed a slight whirring noise start up around us, like one might notice the buzz of a fly in the background. I kissed him deeper.
But when I pulled back to take a breath, my chest felt tight and I couldn’t get any air. At first I laughed, thinking about how kissing Adrien made me breathless. But the next second, I knew that wasn’t it. My tongue felt wrong. It was a thick stone in my mouth.
I knew what this felt like. This had happened before. My thoughts were sluggish, but I finally remembered.
It was an allergy attack. I was having an allergy attack. I fumbled for the epi infuser I always carried with me. It should be safely tucked in a pocket at my thigh, but when I reached for it, there was nothing there.
“Help me,” I gasped at Adrien. I clutched his arm.
He pulled away. I looked up in confusion. All the features fit—the eyebrows, long aquiline nose, thick lips—but it was like I was looking at a stranger’s face. No emotion flickered. And he was holding the epi infuser in his hand as he backed away.
I put my hands to my throat and tried to get another breath. Only a tiny bit of air trickled through my swollen throat, not nearly enough for a proper breath. Adrien watched me writhing on the bed as if I were no more than a specimen in a lab.
“Help!”
Adrien continued to back away from me. In the next blink, he’d dropped to the ground from the loft bed and pushed the door to my room open. He was leaving me.
No. I had to stop him. I was supposed to save him. He was supposed to save me. My thoughts jumbled all together, but one thought burned clear. I couldn’t let him go. I could stop him, I knew I could, if I could just remember how—
My telek! How had I forgotten about it? I cast it out immediately, reaching for Adrien. But when I did, none of it made sense. The cube projection in my mind didn’t match what I saw. I couldn’t feel the shape of my loft bed or the tiny contours of my room.
Instead, it felt like a hallway.
And Adrien and I weren’t alone. There was someone else standing right beside me. I tried to scream, but only managed a whimpering sputter.
I opened my swollen eyes and tried to get another breath. My throat was swollen almost completely shut now. Panic rose even as I lashed out with my telek.
I threw the other person hard into the wall, headfirst.
The image of my bedroom evaporated instantly. Adrien and I were in a white hallway. I wasn’t on my bed, I was laying on the ground. It was just like the hallway I’d been in right before I’d gotten on the elevator. A thick mist spewed into the room from vents at the top of the wall.
I tried to call out to Adrien, but no sound came out.
My eyes had swollen almost entirely shut, but through the slit I could see a red-haired young man laying unconscious at my feet. He must have been a glitcher, making me hallucinate all those things.
But Adrien hadn’t been a hallucination. He kept backing away from me, my helmet still in his hand. He was real.
I tried to stand, but collapsed to the ground again. My mouth gaped open, trying desperately to fill my lungs with air, but the bit I did manage to gasp through my swollen throat was toxic. The vents must be pumping in allergens.
I reached for Adrien, crawling on my knees, but knew that even if I could manage to get the helmet on again, the allergens were already clogging my lungs. I hadn’t taken a breath for at least two minutes now.
Adrien was at the end of the hallway now.
And then he was gone.
Watching him leave sapped the last ounce of fight I had in my body. I knew he must be under the Chancellor’s compulsion. But I still felt the loss like a sledgehammer to my ribs.
My body shuddered, the muscles expanding and contracting involuntarily. My mouth opened wider, gaping like a dying fish. I tried desperately to get a center, to be able to cast my telek as I had in training so many times, as I could almost do in my sleep now.
But the objects and impressions were all skewed. My back arched and spasmed. Everything in me heaved, needing a breath.
Why didn’t you save me?
I loved Adrien so much. But in the end I couldn’t save him. Or myself.
Anger began to boil inside me even as I felt my body shutting down from lack of oxygen. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. I didn’t care about fate, or what Adrien had or had not seen. All of it was futile if it ended like this. The rage burned red and the buzzing that had been a hum in my ears became a howling scream.
No.
The projection in my mind shined with burning light. I felt the pulsing fury that obliterated every other thought.
I was pure rage.
I didn’t even care where the rage was directed—at the Chancellor, at Max, at me, at death itself for trying to claim me before my time was up—I ignored everything but the fury.
And then suddenly I wasn’t expanding outside my body. I was inside it. I pushed past my skin and tissue and muscles, zooming in closer and closer. I barely knew what I was doing, and I didn’t let myself think about it. I just felt.
Like I’d done with the oxygen molecules in the kitchen fire, I surrounded all the mast cells in my body. I forced the release of histamines to stop, expelling the ones that had already been released through the pores in my skin.