“Get her!” Taylor yelled, her face a mask of focused intent. She was looking right in my direction.
“What—” I started to ask, but then she strode right past me.
I swung around and my heart dropped when I saw where they were headed.
Saminsa.
Wytt reached out his metal-infused hand toward Saminsa’s shoulder.
“No!” she shouted, a blue orb immediately bursting to life around her. Wytt pulled his hand away. He stumbled backwards, looking back and forth between his hand and the orb in confusion. I followed his gaze and my stomach lurched when I saw four of his fingers lying inside the orb. They’d been sliced right off. Blood dripped from Wytt’s hanging hand.
“Stay back!” Saminsa yelled. Between the shock of everything that was happening, I realized in a moment of absurdity that this was the first time I’d ever heard the girl’s voice.
General Taylor advanced forward. “You’re surrounded! There’s nowhere to go. Did you really think we wouldn’t catch you sneaking into the security hub and trying to send a transmission to the Chancellor about our location? Adrien and the other techer boy detected it and stopped it before it could be sent.” The General glanced at me, then back at Saminsa. “Very clever, though, piggybacking off the signal created when Zoel Links herself at night.”
I felt a wave of guilt and anger. Not being able to control my powers at night was an embarrassing weakness, but I’d never expected anyone to be able to exploit it.
“I knew this day would come,” Saminsa said, her voice calm now, eyes glowing from the blue light of the orb surrounding her. “I knew for all your talk of helping every glitcher that it was never really true. You were never trying to help me.”
“That’s not true!” I said.
Rand nodded at City and widened his stance beside her, preparing to fight.
I glared at both of them. Saminsa was right. We never really tried to make her part of the team or helped her see the good we were doing. But maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference if she’d been set on working for the Chancellor the entire time. If she actually managed to get a message out, all the people closest to me would be in danger. I was torn between sympathy and anger.
Saminsa didn’t look at me, but only held her hand out in warning. The orb’s circumference inched farther outward. She kept her eyes trained on Taylor.
“You will let me pass from this place in peace.”
“So you can go report straight back to the Chancellor?” Taylor said coolly. “I don’t think so.”
“If you don’t let me pass, I’ll take down everyone in the building as I go. Starting with your pet mutant,” she nodded in my direction without taking her eyes off Taylor.
Saminsa held up her other hand and the orb doubled in size. Everyone scooted back, and City barely made it out of the way in time. The pillow she’d been sitting on was disintegrated as the outward curve of the orb passed it.
City let out a growl of anger and unleashed lightning from her fingertips toward the orb. It hit with a crackle of static, but it made no impact.
“Stop it, City, that didn’t work before and it’s not going to now!” I yelled at her, then turned back to Taylor. “Can’t we just let her go? That boy’s power makes it so she won’t be able to tell them where we are, right?”
“Don’t be a fool. If she leaves, she can send a message from the nearest city and the Chancellor would know the vicinity of the Foundation.”
A thunderclap seemed to go off in the room with us. The shock wave of the orb’s release rocked me backward. I hit the ground hard on my back and the air was knocked out of my lungs. I gasped to get another breath and tried dizzily to sit up. Most of the others were on the ground too. Some were bleeding from where they’d been tossed into the walls by the wave.
And Saminsa was gone.
General Taylor got up a moment later. I blinked in confusion as she raised her com and spoke into it. “Jilia, activate!”
“Activate what?” I tried to ask, but it came out as a whisper since I was still gasping for breath. Another shock wave rocked the floor, but it was far enough away from us now that, other than shaking some ceiling tiles loose, we barely felt it. Taylor held on to the wall and dragged herself to her feet.
“Jilia, report!” she said into the com.
There was no response. I managed to pull myself to my feet.
“Jilia, REPORT!”
Another moment of silence. Then finally, Jilia’s voice sounded over Taylor’s com. “I activated the system and it’s done. She’s down. Access corridor north.”
I got to my feet and turned to head out the door to the north corridor, but Taylor grabbed my arm to hold me back.
“No glitchers. Just Xona and Cole. Come with me.”
“But Wytt,” Cole protested, pointing to the injured ex-Reg cradling his bleeding hand. “I have to help him.”
“Rand and City can get him to the Med Center.” She looked at me, then pointed up at the cracked ceiling tiles above us. “Zoel, you need to go get into your biosuit in case of leaks in the air-filtration system. Come with me, Cole; that’s an order.”
Cole nodded and snapped to attention, following Taylor and Xona out the door. I stared after them for a quick second, disquieted by Taylor’s tone and the way Cole immediately obeyed. And what had they done to Saminsa? Jilia had said Saminsa was “down.” Did that mean dead? I shuddered at the thought, then went to my room to put on my biosuit.
Xona and Ginni came in not long after I had finished putting on the helmet and sealing the suit shut. “That was fast,” I looked up at Xona. “What happened to Saminsa? Is she…” I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask.
Xona sat backward on one of the chairs at the desk. “When we got to the north corridor, Saminsa was already on the ground unconscious. There was some kind of gas that had been released from the vents.”
“Did Taylor get you masks?” I asked in confusion.
“Nah, most of it had been suctioned up by the time we got there. And Taylor said whatever was left in the air was harmless to non-glitchers. That it just might make us feel tired for a couple hours.”
I felt my mouth go dry. Taylor had developed something that could take down a glitcher but was harmless to others? I’d known General Taylor didn’t trust glitchers … but this? She’d set up security measures against us in our own home.
“So Saminsa’s still alive?” I finally managed to ask.
Xona nodded. “Cole picked her up and carried her to the Med Center. Doc said she’d keep her sedated for the time being.”
“And then what? They can’t just keep her knocked out forever.”
Xona shrugged.
All the next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility that Taylor had developed some kind of chemical weapon against glitchers. As disturbing as it was that she’d set it up here in the Foundation to use against us whenever she saw fit, I couldn’t ignore the fact that it meant we might finally have a chance against the Chancellor. I didn’t understand why we hadn’t already set up a mission. I could get close enough to administer it, then the rest of my team could follow me in as backup without fear of her compulsion.
Instead of going to lunch with everybody else, I headed toward Taylor’s office to talk to her about it. I was still in the suit while they repaired a cracked pipe in the air-filtration system and didn’t feel like eating through a straw anyway.
When I knocked on Taylor’s door, though, there was no answer. I stood outside her office for a minute feeling frustrated, then went to the Med Center. Jilia was the one who had activated the gas that had taken Saminsa down—surely she knew something about it.
But I slowed to a stop outside the open Med Center door when I heard voices inside.
“Henk, you know what she’s doing is wrong, but you’re building it for her anyway.” It was Jilia talking. I leaned in closer, though I was careful to stay clear of the entryway.
