Read Shutdown (Glitch) for Free Online

anything else we might pass. As we came to the central foyer that all the suites branched out from, I felt Max pull back up against the wall. I heard the voices coming toward us and imitated him, pressing my back against the wall. We might appear invisible, but we were still solid, and if someone ran into us, they’d know something was anomalous.
    After the group of people passed, we hurried quietly down the ornate marble hallways. In my head, I matched the hallway to the schematics I’d carefully memorized. Just a little farther and we’d be at the stadium.
    The main event would be starting any minute now. I heard a hive of voices buzzing ahead. We soon came to clusters of well-dressed people, faces that had become familiar in the past couple days, all talking and, of course, drinking. Checil stood talking with a woman in the corner whose eyes were also bloodshot. No doubt she was still looking for her next infusion hookup.
    Several whooping boys ran through, bumping me into an older gentleman. I immediately backed up against the wall.
    I held my breath, cursing inwardly. But the man just called after them, “Calm down. There will be enough excitement in the arena!” He must have thought it was them who’d bumped him, not me.
    I stuck tighter to Max after that. He glided with an expert lightness to his feet. I tried to mimic the way he walked, rolling heel to toe, heel to toe.
    A loud horn sounded right as Max and I had edged our way through the front of the crowd toward the narrow stadium entrance. Suddenly everyone on all sides began surging with us. I lost Max’s shape amid all the others. People pressed against my shoulders. This lobby entrance was the only one that led to the premium center stadium seats reserved for the highest tiers of society. There was no time to keep trying to find Max. Soon enough, someone would wonder why it felt like they were bumping up against a person when it looked like empty air.
    Finally the bottleneck of the entryway opened up and people fanned out into the wide aisles that surrounded the huge domed stadium on all sides. I was pushed forward and made it through the doorway just as a second horn blasted.
    The crowd around me roared. I pulled away from the crush of bodies, trying to feel around frantically to find Max. But people were moving so quickly, pouring in and then filling their seats. It was impossible to try to determine which moving body among the hundred didn’t have a visual match. I looked around frantically. Hundreds of rows of seats surrounded the oval pit sunk fifty feet below. Layers of balconies hung over each other for even more seating. Lights from the domed top of the arena blazed so brightly it looked like daylight, and huge screens were mounted along the walls.
    I pulled back out of the crowd and stepped onto a raised ledge running along the bottom of the wall outside the entryway. At least this way I could get out of the flow of foot traffic. No one had noticed me, but only because I’d been lucky. I watched for a moment to squeeze back through the entry. But people kept streaming in, and I worried that if I tried to push back against them moving in the other direction, someone would notice something anomalous this time.
    A third horn sounded, and the crowd responded with deafening noise, jumping to their feet, screaming and yelling and whistling. I’d never heard anything so loud in my life and covered my ears. The screens filled with images of Regulators and detailed stats about their hardware additions and kill records. I shuddered. I hadn’t known it would be Regs fighting. It made a twisted sort of sense, I supposed. They wanted to pit the strongest fighters against each other. Who better than their police force of Regulators with their metal exoskeletons and hardware enhancements? They were still human underneath, but years of training and programming had converted them into killing machines.
    Then I thought about Cole, one of the