DANIEL
By the time I return to my apartment, my thoughts still swirling around what had—or hadn’t—happened with June, Eden’s still gone to who knows where. I step in through the doorway, expecting to hear the security system’s usual announcement of my name.
But there’s nothing.
I pause in the entryway, glance up at the speaker system, and then frown at the screen embedded against the entry hall. “System’s rebooting again,” I mutter, then flash my hand against the screen and watch as it lights up blue, resetting all of its features.
But something’s off in the apartment. I look around again, warier this time. Everything seems like it’s in its place; Eden’s shoes are still clustered haphazardly near the doorway, and his dirty dishes are in the sink, left in a hurry as usual. Dim light spills across the floor.
But the place doesn’t feel empty like it should. I step into the center of the living room, trying to pinpoint exactly what’s bothering me. There’s a hint of something foreign in the air—a faint cologne, maybe, or the scent of a mint that neither Eden nor I buy.
My eyes go to a shadow stretching behind me. It’s not the shadow of the kitchen counter.
Every hair rises on the back of my neck. Someone’s here. I whirl around, but it’s too late—there’s a woman in a black suit standing in front of my door. For a split second, I think she’s an AIS agent—but she’s not recognizable, and she’s not wearing our uniform. Another presence moves behind me.
I duck, managing to dodge out of one lunge for me—but then another set of arms catches mine, forcing them behind my back. How many people are in here? I bare my teeth, ready to spin around and attack. But a damp cloth is shoved over my mouth. The overwhelming smell of chloroform invades my senses.
I fight wildly to escape it, but whoever’s holding me is easily double my size. Before me stands a figure blurred by my motions. I recognize the neat trim of his beard and the tint of his glasses. He smiles at me.
“Daniel Altan Wing,” he says. “Well. I’m really going to cause a stir in the city this time.”
It’s Dominic Hann.
Eden. Where is he? But my senses are already starting to cloud over. My movements turn more labored. The lingering, relentless stench of chloroform triggers some old memory this time of the Republic’s labs, and I feel a sudden rush of panic—I’m ten years old and back at the Trials again, have failed again, and the soldiers are putting me under, cutting open my knee and injecting poisons into my eye, leaving me for dead. I am going to wake in a pile of corpses. The panic surges through me.
No. I’m not going back to that.
But I can’t fight out of this darkness. The world closes in around me.
In a last, desperate act, I bring up June’s account in my view. Then I message her. I don’t even get a chance to say anything—all I get to send her is an empty few seconds of static.
We aren’t what we used to be, but we know each other enough to sense when something’s gone wrong.
It’s all I have the strength to do. The last thing I see is the silhouette of Dominic Hann standing over me, giving a command to his men.
Then the darkness settles in, and I don’t remember anything more.
EDEN
Daniel’s not answering my call. Not only that, but the call doesn’t go through to his account at all—I just get an automatic message telling me to try again later.
I frown as I head away from the nightclub and back home after parting ways with Pressa. It’s a beautiful space, a walkway between two skyscrapers that’s been transformed into a lush green landscape, full of roses and willow trees and vines that crawl over the side of the walkway’s glass barriers to hang down to the floor below. Now in the middle of the night, it’s quiet, with only the occasional late partyer heading back home.
Maybe Daniel’s still out with June. It would be the only reason why he’s not returning my calls.
The only reason I want to think about, anyway.
The memory of the figures in the club is still fresh in my mind, along with Daniel’s worried eyes and ominous warnings. Here, in the upper echelons of the city, it’s hard to dwell on the fact that I’d just been in the Undercity days earlier, face-to-face with a notorious killer. It’s so serene here. All I can hear is the trickle of water from a central fountain on the walkway.
It’s nothing, I reassure myself. Daniel’s fine. There had been a warning this morning, anyway, about a solar flare that might knock out transmissions for the next few days. Maybe service is just bad right now.
Another automated message comes onto my view right as I reach the elevator station that will take me back up to my floor, telling me again that Daniel’s not available.
I pause, my eyes fixating on the glowing red outline of the hovering text box. It’s true that Daniel’s been on missions before that have required him to keep his system powered completely off … but he’s always given me warnings about that in advance. And after our meeting at AIS yesterday, the timing on this seems off.
A knot tightens in my stomach. I don’t know for sure, because an error
message is hardly a reason to panic about something. But the knot is a familiar one. I remember it from childhood, from the nights when Daniel was still fighting his illness—of how I’d stir awake to see a blurry image of him hunched on the edge of his bed, his face pointed down at the floor and his lips tightened into a wince.
And even though a part of me keeps repeating Solar Flare Interference
and AIS Business to myself, the knot still feels the same.
Something’s wrong. I know it without confirmation, without hearing Daniel saying it to me.
I bring the error message back up. “You better have a good reason for this,” I mutter at the message under my breath. With a sigh, I try to shake off my growing sense of unease.
The elevator station is empty tonight, and for the first time in a while, I’m the only one heading up fifteen stories to my floor. The music playing in the lobby echoes against the empty floor. I swallow, the knot in my stomach twisting into something painful.
It’s going to be okay, I tell myself as the door finally slides open and I step in. My thoughts whirl as the elevator rises silently. Daniel’s going to be at home, and he’s going to be wearing that annoyed expression he always gets as he asks me why his messages weren’t getting through to me.
Then, abruptly, the elevator stops ten floors shy of mine—and a man and a woman in suits step inside.
I stiffen immediately. Both of them are looking at me. “Do you need something?” I ask.
The woman gives me a terse smile. “You’re Eden Bataar Wing, yes?” she asks.
I realize I don’t have my name displayed over my head right now. “How do you know?” I reply.
The man gives me a nod so courteous that it seems mocking. “A pleasure,” he says. “My employer, Mr. Hann, would very much like to extend a cordial invitation to you for a meeting with him tonight.”
Mr. Hann. Dominic.
The name hits me like a hammer, and the wind is knocked out of me so hard that for a moment I can’t respond to him. The knot pulls tighter. Something is wrong something is wrong something is wrong.
“I—” I start, then stutter to a halt from the dryness in my throat. “I can’t make it tonight,” I try again.
The woman smiles at me and puts a hand on my shoulder. It feels ice-cold.
“Mr. Hann would very much like to make it worth your while,” she replies.
I’m trembling now. Through the elevator’s glass windows, the walkway to my university disappears far below me. I shake my head, wishing I could come up with a clever reply. “I’m sorry,” I say instead. “I have some homework to finish up, and I need to work on an engine—”
The man doesn’t wait for me to finish repeating my pitiful lie. He waves a hand subtly in the air, and suddenly a video screen appears between us.
It’s a feed of someone following Daniel as he leaves a hotel room. June’s, most likely. The video trails him down through the Sky Floors as he takes the elevators, his hands casually in his pockets, his silhouette familiar. There’s a small, lingering smile on his face. He has no idea someone is watching him.
Every hair rises on my neck at the sight.
Daniel steps inside our apartment. The alarm system doesn’t greet him in its usual way. The door starts to slide shut behind him, but the video feed follows him in. Whoever it was that was trailing him got into our apartment.
The feed cuts off.
As if on cue, I get an incoming call from June that appears in my view. When I don’t answer, her voice starts playing automatically. “Eden,” she says. “This is June Iparis. I just received a blank transmission from Daniel, and I can’t seem to call him back. Is he with you? Where are you? Eden?”
The knot in my stomach turns to stone. The world around me hazes at the edges. The echo of Something is wrong fills my mind until I can hear nothing but its shrieks. All this time, my brother had been the one worrying about me, and I’d been stupid enough to believe that that meant he was invincible. All this time, I’d never thought about what might happen if things were the other way around.
“Mr. Hann would like to insist on seeing you tonight,” the man says to me now. “You’ll be very pleased to know that your brother will also be in attendance.”
DANIEL
I’m back on the streets of Lake. I don’t know how the hell I got here.
My boots splash in dirty puddles as I hurry down the familiar roads near my old home. The metal of my artificial leg feels so cold that I think it’s encased in ice. All the homes on this path are boarded up, their doors sprayed with red Xs, and the silence roars in my ears. My lips part and I try to call out for someone, anyone—but when I try to utter a sound, nothing comes out. It’s as if the world had been muted.
Daniel!
Except there’s a familiar voice. I whirl instinctively in its direction to see a line of Republic soldiers standing along the end of the street, barricading it. Behind them, struggling to get to me, is my older brother, John.
Overhead, along the horizon, the ominous black silhouette of a Colonies airship approaches, and with it comes a field of distant screams, like a swarm of locusts rushing in my direction. The ground in the distance is obscured with dust. John is trying in vain to break through to me, and I am pushing through thick air as I struggle to run toward him.
He reaches his hand out; I do the same. Just a little farther …
And then the distant screams draw close, and suddenly we are engulfed in a dust storm, shrieks whistling all around us. A bright light overhead grows steadily brighter until it makes me squint. I call out John’s name over and over, but he doesn’t answer. It’s too late to save him—but where’s Eden? I have to—
I jerk awake, trembling, sweat trickling down my forehead.
The light overhead turns into a blinding lamp. I blink away tears in my eyes as the world gradually sharpens, my dream turning blurry around the edges. Already I’m having trouble remembering what I saw, but John’s outstretched hand, his blue eyes mirroring mine, remains clear.
It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed about the Republic like this.
The next thing I realize is the throbbing of a dull headache. My limbs feel sore and bound. My gasps are muffled behind a tight gag, and as I become more aware of my surroundings, I realize that I’m tied firmly to a chair. The chamber around me is luxurious in its sparseness—thick, monochrome rugs and clean-cut sofas, the wallpaper a minimalistic gray and white.
It takes me a moment to pinpoint exactly what’s off about the room.
There are no windows.
“About time,” someone says, and I turn my head slightly, wincing, to see a man in a suit sitting on a couch beside me. There are others stationed near the chamber’s door too.
The man tilts his head at me and speaks again. “He’s awake now.
What do you want us to do?” He’s talking to a superior, I realize.
There’s silence, followed by a few grunts of agreement from him and the nod of a head. Then he settles back against the couch to wait again.
“Mr. Hann thought we might’ve given you too much chloroform,” he says to me. “Good thing you pulled through, saved us all a load of trouble.”
Dominic Hann.
Eden. Have they taken him too? A rush of terror courses through me at the thought, and suddenly the gag feels like too much, and there’s not enough air in the world for me to breathe.
Calm down, I tell myself firmly. They had wanted Eden. It’s probably the entire reason why I’m here. And if they have me as collateral, it means Eden is alive and likely unharmed, if possibly held against his will.
Alive. Unharmed. It’s all I want to know.
I stare at the man for a while before studying the room again. There’s no obvious clue of where exactly we are, and as expected, my system has been powered off, with nothing but a warning blipping in the corner of my view. Wherever this place is, it’s nowhere I can connect online.
One of the others near the door leans back from the wall and strolls over to me. She looks bored. “How long do we have to stay down here?” she mutters as she reaches me and bends over to inspect my face. “I didn’t sign up to be a babysitter.”
“You’ll stay until you’re told otherwise,” the man replies in exasperation.
She smiles slightly at me. I glare back at her. “So this is the world-
famous Day,” she muses. “He’s even younger than I thought.” Then she directs her words at me. “You don’t look like you’ve lived through a war, kid.”
Too bad this goddy gag is in my mouth, or I’d be able to answer her. Instead, I meet her gaze steadily until it seems to unnerve her. She shoves my chin away so roughly that I have to catch myself to keep the chair from tipping over.
“What the hell are you looking at?” she snaps, then straightens and crosses her arms.
Behind her, one of the other women by the door sighs. “Leave him alone,” she says. “We’re not supposed to touch him.”
“Or what? He was staring at me.” The first woman scowls.
“Just wait until the others head down to get us, all right?” the man on the couch says with a sigh. “It’s not like he’s going to do anything or get anywhere like this.”
Head down. We’re probably somewhere in the Undercity. My head pulses with pain again, and I wince, my thoughts scattering. Leaning against the wall at midnight, being wheeled down a hospital corridor in a gurney, collapsing to the fl oor of a train. Bright fragments of memories come back to me now, along with a phantom pain of what I’d once gone through.
I’m suddenly filled with a rush of anger. I did not live through a revolution and take my brother all the way to Antarctica to be strapped down by some stupid mob boss who somehow thinks he’s important. I did not come here to be intimidated by a bunch of trigger-happy trots.
The AIS’s communication system. If I can get close enough to one of the guards, I can try to tether my system to theirs, get a connection going
—if only for a second. Had June received my last message? I have a vague memory of trying to send her a call with nothing but a few seconds of static, but I can’t be sure it ever reached her. Or if she knows that it means I’m in trouble.
I jerk hard against my bonds. The chair clatters forward, scraping against the tiles.
To my satisfaction, all my guards startle at my movement. I smile a little behind my gag. Haven’t lost my touch yet.
“Stay still,” the man on the couch orders me, his frown deepening. He looks reluctant to come to me, though, and his hesitation just makes me more reckless.
Or you’ll do what? They can’t kill me if I’m supposed to be collateral. They need Eden to stay compliant and do what the boss says. So I push harder and bang my chair loudly against the floor. My hands wring behind my back.
“Damn it all,” the man hisses between his teeth as he finally gets up and walks toward me. He smacks me once in the face and then grips my chin hard. “Stay still, unless you want your fingers to go missing one by one.”
Idle threats. I stare fiercely back at him. In his eyes, I can see that what he’d said earlier is true. Hann had instructed them not to touch me, and it bothers this man right now to be forced to discipline me.
Link.
I send out the command on my system with my mind, and it catches his nearby account. A loading circle spins in my view. Attempting to connect, it says.
The man shoves me roughly back away from him. The connection attempt stalls.
I pretend to choke on my gag, coughing uncontrollably. At first the man laughs, smug at the thought of my suffering—but when I keep going, putting on a show of struggling to breathe, his smile wavers a bit. One of the women nods at him.
“Readjust his gag, for chrissakes,” she calls out. “Don’t want him choking to death.”
The man grimaces but does as she says. He comes over, pauses in front of me, and unties the gag from my mouth.
I instantly lash out at him. My teeth close down hard on one of his fingers.
He lets out a yell and shoves me back so hard that I topple over with my chair. My body hits the ground with a painful thud and my head rings from the impact. The coppery taste of blood lingers on my tongue. Above me, the man stalks around in a circle, swearing up a storm, his hand cradling his bleeding finger. In rage, he spins around and kicks me hard in the stomach.
It knocks all the wind out of me. I gasp, my eyes widening at the blow. “Goddamn little AIS shits,” the man shouts down at me, spitting once
on my face as the woman hurries over to force the gag back on over my mouth. Behind her, the man snaps his fingers impatiently, shouting for servants to come clean up the spots of blood on the rug.
I just squeeze my eyes shut and act like I can’t hear anything he’s saying, because at that moment my connection starts up again.
Link successful.
The warning in the bottom of my view disappears, replaced with a glowing green circle. I’m online.
“Tell Hann to hurry the hell up so we can move him,” the man barks as he wraps his finger in gauze. “I have better things to do.”
This link won’t hold for long. I don’t waste another second. As I lie on the floor, I think a command to my system. Location.
My system can’t seem to pinpoint my exact area, but it does give a general read for where it thinks my signal is coming from, and a map appears, displaying a top-down view of the south side of Ross City.
Send to AIS, I think.
The system sends the map. The upload speed down here is slow, and the progress bar inches along.
But before the message can finish sending, the man steps far enough away from me to sever our link. Everything in my display vanishes again, replaced by the blinking red warning.
Damn it.
The first woman yanks my chair back upright and shoves me against the wall. My curled hands hit the wall wrong, and I let out a muffled gasp as the ring finger of my right hand breaks. Searing pain lances up my arm.
She hears the snap of my bone, then smiles at the pain on my face. With a toss of her hair, she leans down and bends so close to me that our faces nearly touch. “Next time, that finger’s coming off,” she murmurs.
I keep my eyes down until she steps away. Behind her, the man I’d bitten is impatiently waving in a couple of servants dragging buckets of soapy water and brushes to wash my blood off the rugs. They look scared.
Then the guard who I’d bitten hits me across the face again, this time hard enough to send my head slamming into the wall.
Everything goes dark.
EDEN
They lead me into a private elevator station. Then they blindfold me.
I tremble in the familiar darkness. Their hands firmly on my arms, their low voices, the faint lurching of the elevator—every bit of it feels like the Republic again, those terrifying moments when I would lie inside a glass cylinder, rocking along with the train car, unsure where they were taking me. I couldn’t see anything. The world looked like nothing but a blur of strange shapes.
I’ve never spoken to my brother about those days when we were first separated. There’s too much to say, and it all bleeds together into one continual nightmare. Screaming at the searing pain of injections. Lying exhausted in a pool of my own vomit. Shaking uncontrollably from fever. Feeling like my body was on fire, like I would die. Shrinking away from horrifying hallucinations. Feeling cold, stiff corpses lying beside me. Being moved over and over again, without being able to see.
In the first years after it all ended, I was a child who could push it away. But the darkness of those moments have clawed back year after year into my dreams. And now I have returned to that same place, reliving the nightmare of being forced into the dark.
My brother. The image of his unconscious face, his closed eyes, and gagged mouth haunts my vision. The thought of where he might be now is almost more than I can bear.
I can’t tell how long we stay in the elevator. Too long. Then their hands are gripping my arms again, and I stumble out with them. They shove me onto a seat, and a moment later we’re moving again, this time forward instead of down.
Finally, after an eternity, we stop. They shove me out roughly and sit me down onto what feels like a couch of some kind. The darkness over my eyes shifts as one of them unties the knot at the back of my blindfold.
They lift it away. I squint in the sudden light.
I’m in a luxurious living room that looks like it’s part of an estate, except that there are no windows. The couch I’m sitting on—all the furniture in the room, actually—is severe in its elegance, all clean, rectangular lines and muted colors. The lights embedded in the ceilings fill the room with a cooling glow.
And standing before me is Dominic Hann himself, dressed in a tailored shirt and trousers. He smiles as my eyes meet his.
“Eden Bataar Wing,” he remarks, scrutinizing me. His voice is as rough and grainy as I remember, as if he suffers from some kind of chest infection. “Your brother has quite the reputation.”
Always known in relation to Daniel, even down here. I narrow my eyes at him and clench my teeth. “What have you done with him?”
“He’s safe. I didn’t bring you here to terrify you, although I’ve been told it’s a bad habit of mine.” Hann steps toward me, and that’s the first moment when I realize that he isn’t physically in the room with me. His figure is slightly translucent, and as he moves, I see his shoes pass through the thick surface of the rugs.
Too afraid to be in the same place as your guards? I want to say archly to him, but the thought of Daniel captured somewhere here keeps my retort at bay. Instead, I say, “And what’s the point of all this?”
He pauses beside me and sits down on the couch, as much as a hologram can sit. I can see the cushions through his body. He coughs forcefully enough that his shoulders hunch from the force. When one of his guards gives him a questioning look, he waves her away with an impatient hand.
“You’re a Sky Floor citizen,” he begins when he’s cleared his throat enough. “There are few in this country who can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle than yours. And yet there you were, in the Undercity, risking your level and your reputation in order to enter a drone race.” He looks sidelong at me. “What brought you down there?”
I can’t help the sarcasm that rises now in my voice. “You went to all this trouble just to ask me why I was down in the Undercity?”
Hann smiles. A couple of his guards smile along with him, and when he laughs, so do they. “There’s a spark in you,” he says, genuine fondness in his voice. “You’re made for our world down here. I don’t attend Undercity events. I haven’t watched a drone race in years. There’s no reason for me to show my face and risk my own safety for an event that my guys are going to bet on for me anyway. So why do you think I showed up after one of them told me about you?”
“My drone,” I answer without hesitation.
He nods, pleased, and some small part of me feels oddly complimented by that. “You told me you built all of that yourself.”
“Where are you going with this?” My anger is starting to triumph over my fear. “Are you going to tell me what you want or not? Where’s my brother?”
Hann leans back in ease and ignores my questions. “I looked up your files. Seems like you’re a star student at Ross University. And yet, here you are, coming down to the Undercity week after week. That’s not the typical behavior of a Sky Floor kid with their entire future ahead of them.”
“You didn’t bring me here to be my therapist.”
At that, Hann laughs. His guards join in. “No, I didn’t. I brought you here because I think you are the kind of talent that I see only once in a generation.”
“Show me my brother,” I demand. “Then we can talk.”
“Rest assured, he is safe, and I will do you the favor of keeping him that way.” He leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, then regards me with a piercing gaze. “But this is not about him. I’m not interested in your brother. This is about you.”
His words are hitting some part of me that yearns to hear it. This is not about him. If Hann is trying to manipulate me, he’s going to be smart about it, I warn myself. He understands exactly what my weak points are.
Where is Daniel? What has Hann done to him?
The man frowns at my expression. “You’re not used to hearing that, are you? That you’re the focus?” He rises from the couch. His hoarse voice is oddly gentle, with that same warmth that had drawn me in when I first met him. “Come with me, please.”
As he steps out of the room, he snaps his fingers once without looking back at me. At first, I think his guards will drag me up and force me forward
—but instead they bow as they approach me, then nod for me to follow Hann out of the room. I hesitate, afraid, but then start walking.
We head out of the room and down a narrow hallway. As we make several turns, the clean walls and elegant corridors vanish, making way for a smooth concrete floor and steel walls and ceilings. Here, they usher me into what looks like a train inside a tunnel.
This must have all been salvaged and renovated from an old, abandoned part of the Undercity.
We ride in silence for a few minutes before the train comes to a gentle halt. Then we step out into a hall that opens up into a vast, cavernous space.
I balk at the sheer size of it. It looks like a factory filled with halls of
identical machines, each of them blinking blue in unison. There must be millions and millions of them, and when they’re all stacked together like this, they look dizzying. Overhead, sheets of cold white lights shine down on the building.
Giant vents run along the ceiling, and tall steel beams tower up in rows. In the center of the room, though, is a large, circular structure that looks like some strange combination of steel and glass and … twisted, fractal mesh. Like something halfway between machinelike and organic. It has a soft blue glow about it. Surrounding it are metal supports, and in the center is a large, circular platform where several workers now stand. The platform’s floor changes to a smooth, dark metal, and my boots clank against the new surface as I step onto it. A couple of the workers look up to see us enter.
“You are getting exclusive access here, Eden,” Hann says to me as he strides toward the structure. “This is a world-class engine I’m building, so I suppose you could say we have similar interests.”
“What does it do?” I find myself asking, momentarily overwhelmed by it and resenting my own curiosity.
“You answer none of my questions, and you expect me to tell you anything?” He smiles at me. “The drone you built for that race, it had a perpetual engine?”
I look at him. “Close, yes,” I reply, surprised that he knows. “It’s powered by a combination of tech and biology.”
“The microorganisms in it feed off the heat that the initial engine blasts generates, and create more energy of their own.” Hann nods. “I recognized the glow that your engine was giving off. Now, I know you are planning to head back to the Republic of America and begin an internship there.” He shakes his head. “But I think it’s a waste of your talent. Stay here, and you’ll find yourself designing much more interesting things than hospitals and museums.”
I bristle at his backhanded compliment. “I don’t consider it a waste of time.”
Hann gives me a crooked smile. “I had to fight my way to where I am today. I knew my worth, that I was destined for more than just staying on the lowest rungs, running errands for someone else. You’re destined for more too. How about you apply that skill of yours to working for me?”
I stare at him incredulously. His machine looms beside us, its light casting a faint glow against my skin but not against his hologram. “You’re offering me a job?”
“I never shaft my talent, Eden. You’ll be paid handsomely. More than anyone in the Republic would offer you, I can guarantee it. Anyone you love and care for will be taken care of.”
“Like how you’re taking care of my brother right now? Like how you had your guys show me a video of someone following him home?”
He shakes his head. “My methods are unconventional. It’s a result of the world I operate in. But I’m not interested in hurting your brother, Eden. What good would that do me, when I’m trying to earn your trust? Cooperate with me, and your brother will be released unharmed, with no knowledge of where he was held, and he and the AIS can go back to hunting me like they always do.”
If you lure Hann out into a space where our agents are ready for him, we can take him down before he can escape.
The AIS director’s words come back to me now, haunting in their premonition. I’d refused to do it, but now the choice has been taken out of my hands. Now I’m down here, and my brother is in real danger, with no promise that AIS will be able to find him in time should I refuse or displease Hann.
I turn my head back to the towering machine, to its soft glow. On a small scale, my engine was able to turn the drone into one of the fastest racers I’ve ever seen. What is this engine for? What is Hann planning to do with it?
At this very moment, Daniel is somewhere down here, wondering whether I’m still alive.
Hann sighs when he sees my hesitation. “When I was younger,” he says, “I lived in the Undercity with my family. My mother once sent me on an errand to buy groceries in a part of the Undercity far from our home. That’s what happens to single-Level folks who don’t qualify for the good stores, you see? We have only a few shops to choose from, and the only one with what we needed was on the other side of the city. I got lost on the way there, and ended up in an alley where I witnessed an attack.
“I hid behind a trash bin and watched several people holding down a man. His attackers all had knives. The man they held down was sobbing, apologizing for stealing a crate of canned food.” Hann glances at me. My heartbeat quickens. “Do you know what they did to him?”
Is he telling me a story from his past, or is he threatening me? All I can see is the blurred edges of my vision, the sharpened focus on this criminal. All I can think about is the way I’d crouched beside my brother on the floor of our kitchen years ago, holding his hand as he fought through the pain in his head.
The way he’d screamed and collapsed. The way I’d shouted for an ambulance. The bright lights of the hospital.
Hann looks grave at my pale expression. “Some of us aren’t born with the luxury of a good childhood. Isn’t that right, Eden? Some of us know what it’s like to carry a burden on our shoulders for the rest of our lives, something that no one can understand except those who have experienced it for themselves.”
And in spite of everything, I find myself drawn to what he’s saying, like he knows me from the inside out. I wonder what had happened to Hann in his past, and why he sounds like he has a chronic condition of the chest or the lungs. He looks so sharp and proper now. It’s impossible to imagine him as a young boy hiding behind a trash bin.
“I’m not trying to hurt your brother,” Hann says quietly to me now. “But I know talent when I see it, and I don’t like wasting it. Your brother is only my way to you. You don’t have to work for me forever. If you don’t like it, I swear that I will let you leave. And your brother will be unharmed.”
In this moment, I am a small boy again, and every word Hann says brings me back to the dark years, and I hear John’s shouts in my mind, I hear the shaking of my mother’s voice, I am strapped down to the gurney and being taken away from my family. I am blind, helpless against the onslaught.
So I hold up my hands, and when I speak, my voice comes out quiet. “Leave him alone,” I hear myself say. “Don’t hurt my brother.” Hann frowns at the tears blurring my vision. “And in return?”
“We can talk about what I can do for you. Just talk, no guarantees. All right?”
He doesn’t answer at first. All he does is give me a steady smile. “A good start,” he says.
DANIEL
I can’t remember how many hours or even days might have passed. The lack of windows down here is disorienting, and a lack of water is making me weaker than I should be. Guards change rotation around me.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m just delirious now, but I find myself continuously thinking about June. This time it’s a recent memory, of the night when Tess first set up a dinner between June and me.
I’d seen June walking toward me at a train station in Los Angeles, right after Eden had finished interviewing for his Batalla Hall internship. Eden and I had been in a good mood that day—he was chatting up a storm beside me, explaining all that he wanted to do, while I’d walked quietly and listened to him, grateful that we were walking down the streets of a peaceful Republic. Then I’d looked up and seen her heading toward us.
It’d been the briefest, most significant meeting of my life. A glance, a flash of a memory. Her dark eyes had locked for a second on mine, and I’d stopped in the middle of the path, overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia. I’d looked back at her, and then decided on a whim to introduce myself to her.
June Iparis. A girl I’d loved for a long time. Someone who, despite the flaws in my memory, I’d managed to hang on to all those years.
That night, we sat down in a restaurant at the top of a newly constructed Republic building. Tess and Eden sat across from us. I sat next to June, trying to figure out what to say to her.
I asked her how Anden was doing. Word was that June had been in a long relationship with the young Elector, that they had even moved in together.
“We’re not together anymore,” she told me. There was a small smile on her lips as she said it, as if she was embarrassed to tell me. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I knew to smile back.
“Ah,” I tried to say. “I just got out of a relationship myself.”
We spent the entire dinner stumbling through our words. Tess found it so entertaining that she kept throwing questions our way, forcing us to bring up specific memories from the past.
Afterward, we walked together in the late, quiet hours of the Ruby sector. The air had the clean chill that comes after a good rainstorm, and we steered carefully around the puddles that dotted the streets. June stayed a small distance away from me, and I did the same. We walked as if we’d just met each other. In a way, I guess we did.
When we finally reached her front door, I faced her with my hands in my pockets, trying to find a good way to say goodbye.
She gave me a small smile and tilted her head. “You’re not staying in the Republic, then,” she said. “You’re heading back to Antarctica soon.”
Everything in me wanted to ask her to come with me, so that I could show her the new city where I lived. But I held back because she held back. “Tomorrow morning,” I answered. “Eden needs to finish his degree before he comes back here for his internship.”
“Are you going to move back here with him?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know yet. My work is in Ross City. But I’ll come here, at least for a little while. I’d rather not leave Eden alone.”
She nodded. “Don’t worry. He’ll have friends in town.”
I smiled at her. “That’s a relief,” I replied, taking a step closer to her. She didn’t pull away. She leaned toward me too, with such an earnest expression that it took everything in me not to kiss her right there and then.
I looked down. “I was wondering…,” I started to say. “Tess told me that when you came to the hospital ten years ago, to see me off to Antarctica, you didn’t mention who you were. I didn’t recognize you, either. It was the worst of my memory loss, that year.”
June hesitated, her eyes far away for a moment, and then nodded. “That’s true,” she replied.
“Why’d you do that?” I shook my head. “Just thank me and walk away without telling me your real name? Why’d you let me go?”
June stayed quiet. Then she turned to me and said, “I once made a promise to myself that if it meant it would help you survive, I would never step back into your life.” She smiled faintly. “And you did survive. So I kept that promise.”
For me. She had done this, made this sacrifice, for her heart as well as
mine. I closed my eyes for a second, overwhelmed by her gesture, and then looked at her again.
“Are you happy here, in the Republic?” I asked her.
She shrugged. A rare uncertainty came into her gaze. “Yes,” she said after a pause. “We’ve had such a time together, haven’t we? I still don’t know what it all means. But you have your life in Ross City now. And I have mine here in the Republic. We’re moving forward and leaving our past behind.”
Up until that moment, I would have broken down at her feet and pulled her in for a kiss. I would have wrapped my arms around her and let myself fall madly back in love with her.
But her words pulled me up short. You have your life in Ross City now.
And I have mine here in the Republic.
It was true. We were completely different people now, living completely separate lives. We had just sat through an entire dinner and barely managed to exchange a handful of sentences with each other. My memories of her were still so fragmented, a million broken shards of a once-intact window.
She had been the one to let me go.
Did she ever love me as fiercely as I loved her? How fiercely had I loved her?
I didn’t know if she read the hesitation in my gaze first, or if she just reacted the same way I did. But she seemed to retreat from me then too. Her smile was guarded, as if she was also afraid of being hurt.
“Perhaps,” she said, “we can find a way back into each other’s lives.
Perhaps we can be friends again.” Friends. It would be a start, at least.
I pulled back my desire to kiss her, the way I wanted to obsess over every detail of her—the darkness of her eyes, the curve of her lips, the thick length of her hair that I remembered running my fingers through. I pulled it all back and let it close, safeguarding those emotions for another time.
“Friends again,” I said, nodding in agreement.
She smiled at me, genuinely smiled, and it brightened her face so much that I wanted to remember it forever. I stretched out a hand to her. She took it. We shook once before pulling each other into a farewell embrace.
“Travel safe tomorrow,” she murmured to me.
I let her go reluctantly. “Tell me if you’re ever in Ross City,” I replied. And I stepped away from her. I let her go this time. I turned my back and forced myself to walk away. It was our first night together after ten years apart. This was as large a step as we could possibly take. Friends
again.
Maybe we could find our way back to that friendship space. Then, and only then, could we have a chance for more.
It would be another month before we saw each other again.
 |
The delirious memory came into focus and then faded away, focused and faded again, ceaseless and repetitive. I don’t know how long it’s been. Days? If they kept withholding water from me, I would die down here. Did June get my message? I don’t know. My head lolls to one side as I dream of water, of rainstorms and summer pools and rivers.
Your past is always a part of you, June had said to me during our last conversation in her apartment. Just as it is a part of me.
I let her words play over and over in my thoughts. I think of how right it’d felt to be beside her. I think of her dark, steady eyes, her beautiful face. It clears my mind, forces me to think.
I’d spent ten years pushing that old part of me away, carefully boxing up every piece of it, every nightmare and horrible memory and moment of grief and hate and rage, had started here in Ross City as if we’d always been here. That I’d only ever been Daniel.
But June, as always, is right. Boxing that past away hasn’t stopped it from creeping into my mind. And if I’m going to get out of here alive, if I’m going to get Eden out of this and pull him through his trauma, if I’m ever going to see June again, I need to remember that I’m still the boy from the streets. The boy who could raise hell.
That I’m Day.
EDEN
“I know you’re hungry.”
I glare at Hann. I’m standing at the door to his Undercity estate’s dining room, with two of his guards behind me. He’s sitting at the opposite end of a round table, observing me with his hands tucked casually into his pockets.
I’d spent most of the afternoon at the construction site, helping them integrate my drone’s engine into their own. The structure they’re working with glowed a pulsing blue the entire time, casting its light against my skin. I can still see the rhythm of its color whenever I close my eyes.
The entire time, Hann had looked impressed with what I’d done.
Now he frowns at me as I stand swaying in the doorway. “Are you refusing to sit down because you’re worried about your brother?”
“I mean, it’s not like I’ve forgotten about him or anything,” I reply, a little too sharply. “I’ve helped you as much as you wanted me to.”
The man pauses to cough his heaving, sickly cough. Then he sighs and glances at the guards behind me. “Leave him here.”
The two guards exchange an uncertain look with each other, but it’s only for the briefest moment. Then they’re bowing their heads in unison to their boss and stepping back. I hear the door close behind me, sealing me in with my kidnapper. The guards are probably standing watch on the other side now. I hadn’t heard any footsteps echoing away from us.
Hann motions for me to take a seat at the table. “You’ll do your brother no good by just standing there. Sit down, please. Eat something. You’re going to need your strength, no matter what you do.”
He acts like this is a completely normal day for him. How large is this underground estate? I try to remember the distance that I’d walked today, then guess at how much more space there might be down here. What if he’s not keeping Daniel here at all, but at some other location?
When I still don’t move, he gestures again toward the seat.
Behind me comes a faint knock on the door. I step aside as it swings open,
this time letting in a cook bearing two silver trays. She hurries past me to the table, places the trays at each of our place settings, and then bows to Hann like all the others. She doesn’t even bother looking at me as she steps out of the room.
Whatever the food is, it smells delicious. My stomach rumbles in spite of itself. I hesitate a while longer. Then I finally walk over to the table and slowly lower myself into the second chair.
Hann lifts the cover off of his own tray. “I’ve been told you’re a vegetarian,” Hann says. “Your dish has been adjusted to your tastes.”
His words send a chill through me. How does he know that?
“Thanks,” I mutter, the word thick with sarcasm.
“I can tell you’re no stranger to tense situations,” he says. “I’m guessing that’s from your days back in the Republic.”
I watch him as he lifts a forkful of steaming fish to his lips. “I had my share of moments,” I finally reply.
He looks up briefly at me from his meal. “I can respect that. News about what was happening in the Republic back then was sparse, but I followed it. It was a worthy cause, what you and your brother fought for.”
I narrow my eyes at him. He’s baiting me, praising my brother while he keeps him locked up in some other room. “What does someone like you know about what we went through?” I say.
“Your family survived based on the whim of your government. Isn’t that true? Your brother was someone like me. An underdog. A rebel. A wanted criminal. I understand, more than you know, what it means to be under the authority’s thumb.”
“Except my brother fought for the people,” I reply. “And as far as I know, you sound like you take advantage of those down here in the Undercity.”
He doesn’t look offended by my words. Instead, he bows his head and smiles grimly. “I am one of those down here in the Undercity,” he replies. “What happens down here has directly affected me all of my life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think I’ve been very fair to you,” he says. “You are, understandably, worried about your brother. And while you’ve told me many things about yourself, you still don’t know much about me. So I’m going to make a deal with you.”
“What kind of deal?” I mutter.
He puts his fork down and laces his fingers together, then gives me a steady look. “I’m going to let your brother go,” he says. “If you finish helping
me install your engine on our machine.”
I wasn’t expecting him to say that. “You’re what?” I blurt out.
“I’m going to let him go,” he repeats. “I told you that none of this was about him, and that my only interest in him was to find a way to get to you.” He holds a hand out at me. “But here you are. You’ve demonstrated your talent already by what you’ve done here.” He leans back in his chair. “So I’m going to do what I promised myself I would. I’m going to release him.”
He must be lying to me. It doesn’t make any sense for him to let Daniel go, not when he could keep using my brother against me. “How can I even trust that you’d do such a thing?” I ask.
He nods. “Because I’ll show you,” he replies. “I’ll send you a live feed of him being released.”
I shake my head, confused and wary. “I don’t understand.”
Hann sighs, then leans against his armrest and regards me carefully. When he speaks again, there’s a strange tinge of sadness in his voice. “You remind me very much of my son.”
“Your son?” I ask.
“Like I said. You’ve offered so much about yourself. It’s only fair that I now tell you a bit about me. It’s the only way we’ll build trust around each other.” He regards my question. “So let me enlighten you about where I came from.”
Everything about him now—his grave expression, the sudden exhaustion in his eyes, the weight on his shoulders—seems serious, and instinctively, I feel myself leaning forward to listen.
“I grew up down here,” he says. “In the Undercity, just like your friend Pressa. My mother and father worked a tiny stall in the markets, selling fried skewers. I remember running in the dirty streets, just like you, weaving through the crowds at the markets, helping my parents until the late hours of the night. Like you and your brother, I grew up learning how to fill the holes in my pockets with things I could steal from others. I had to, you see. We could barely feed ourselves.”
Something strange clicks in my mind. For an instant, I see John circling before me, as tall and rumpled as I remember, his hands burned from his factory shift. He slaps a stolen coin from my hands and kicks the money into the gutter. Don’t ever do that again, he scolds me. The next time, that money will come with street police at our door. It’s never worth it.
I shake the memory away, my stomach churning uneasily. My eyes dart for a second to the corridor behind us, where two guards stand now, and then
go back to him.
“I married into the Undercity too, you know,” he continues. “I loved my wife, and we had a son that mattered more to us than anything else in the world.”
Loved. Had. The mention of his son again.
“Except he got sick.” His eyes flatten at that. The rasp in his voice trembles. “So did I. It was a common side effect in our neighborhood, located so close to the factories on the outskirts of the city. The smoke from the factories turned my son’s lungs black and shriveled. His grades fell in school, and his Level fell because of that. I began to cough blood.” He pats his throat once. “The infection in my lungs cost me my job. That lowered my Level further. They punish you for not working, you know. This government. And the lower my Level fell, the harder it became for me to qualify for work.”
There’s a brief silence from him. “So my wife took out a loan with the illegal businesses that run down here, made a deal with them in order to pay for our son’s illness. She agreed to something we couldn’t possibly pay back.”
“What happened?” I whisper.
“I came home one day to find her body in our ransacked apartment.”
His words make my chest tighten. He says it so calmly and quietly that I can tell it’s something he’s used to saying. Suddenly I see the soldier
—Thomas, his name was Thomas—lifting a rifle to my mother’s head. John lunges in vain against the guards holding him back. June holds out a helpless hand in an attempt to stop him.
“They left a note, demanding payment by threatening our son. So I did the only thing I could. I offered to work for the gang, to pay off the debt.” He’s silent for a moment, the weight of it hanging between us in the air. “It didn’t matter, in the end. My son died a couple of months later.”
He could be lying to you. But I swallow hard, feeling sick at his story.
There is nothing that feels false about these words.
“I don’t blame the Undercity,” Dominic Hann says, snapping me to the present again. “People are businessmen. They step in when no one else will. There’s a need for services like illegal loans down here, for the people forgotten by your government.” He points up at the ceiling. “No, I blame this entire damn system, the Levels and the floors and the hierarchy of this place that made it impossible for us to get out of our predicament. I blame the fact that the President sells the Undercity the dream that, if they only worked hard enough, they too could Level themselves up to the Sky Floors. I blame the fact that the dream is a fantasy.”
It’s as if he’s having the exact same conversation I’d had with Daniel. The Undercity has no choice but to be the way it is. I find myself staring back at Hann with a confused look, trying to understand how a ruthless, notorious killer can make so much sense. Can grieve a family he had lost, just as I’d lost mine.
“Is it still true, though?” I manage to say at last. “The things you’ve done to people here? You killed that councilman the other night. You—” I swallow hard. “You’ve murdered Undercity citizens in the same way that your own family was murdered.”
“You want to play a game?” he says coolly. “Play it down here, where there are no rules at all. Then it’s fair. You do what you have to do to survive. Everyone knows what the game they’re playing is. There are no unfulfilled promises, no special favors. It’s just business here.” His eyes harden. “That, I can work with.”
I look for that taunting edge in his expression—but Dominic Hann looks genuine now, his eyes lit up in earnest as if trying to convince me of his words. And for an instant, I can see him rising up the ranks of this dangerous world, drawing people to him with nothing but his own resolve.
Like Daniel.
The thought is so startling that I shove it away in fright.
“And if someone doesn’t want to work their way up like you?” I say through gritted teeth. Every hair on my skin feels like it’s standing on end.
His cold ease has returned. “Few don’t,” he replies. “Why wouldn’t they, when the system’s decks are stacked against them anyway? Surely you, of all people, can understand that.”
“Stop comparing me with you.”
“Why not?” He leans toward me. “You’re instinctively drawn to this place. This is where you feel at home, down here, where you can keep all those memories swirling in your head at bay.”
I wince. In spite of everything, I find myself struggling to breathe, impressed that this criminal—this murderer—has figured out secrets about me that my own brother hasn’t been able to understand. He knows me better than Daniel does. His words pierce straight through me, as if he could see the dreams that swallow me whole every night.
“You can’t understand why your brother is no longer in the same place you are,” Hann adds. “Hadn’t he been just like me, made his entire reputation off fighting for the people? But he’s left behind that dark place from his past. Now he works for the government, helping to enforce this system that’s
crushing us. Working to dismantle what people like me are trying to do.”
He’s trying to turn me against my brother, convincing me of something I’ve always disliked—his work for the AIS, his siding with this government that is crippling its people. And if he were saying this to someone else, maybe it would even work. I see Daniel’s face, his worried expression. I think of the way he’d argued with the director, how he’d railed against this system. He doesn’t support the Level system, either. But it doesn’t matter. He still works for the AIS.
Hann sips from his glass. “So you see, Eden,” he says as I hesitate, “I’m not trying to force you into anything. But what I am saying is that I think you’re a better fit down here than you think. Even if you left—even if I let you go or you escaped … you’d come back. You belong here.”
You belong here. A part of me wonders if this is what he tells everyone before he kills them. But another part of me … knows he’s right. Because I do keep coming back.
“What is the machine that you’re building, then?” I finally ask him. It’s the question that has been waiting on the tip of my tongue. “What does that have to do with anything you’ve just told me? What exactly am I helping you to do?”
Hann gives me a pointed look. “Finish installing your engine today,” he says, “and we can run a blank sample test. Then you can see for yourself.”
* * *
When we head out after dinner to the construction site, there’s no hint at all on Dominic Hann’s face that he had revealed any weakness to me. Instead, he seems cool, almost cold. There’s none of the weight and the anguish that he’d let me witness when he told me about what happened to his family. I wonder whether he’s genuinely confiding in me.
“How much longer?” Hann asks me now as he walks over to where I’m working.
I look up at the structure. The new engine I’ve installed is mostly in place now, the new pieces expanding on top of the original drone engine I’d built so that it can conduct enough power for the whole machine. The rest of Hann’s workers are already securing the final pieces.
I point at one end of the machine, the portion that’s supposed to send some sort of signal out. It’s all I’ve managed to puzzle out about what the whole thing does. “They’re installing the last piece now,” I say to Hann. “This signal needs to be amplified more than you thought if you plan on making it hit the
entire city. So I needed to make sure it gets that boost.”
Hann studies the engine I’ve made closely. “And this will work,” he says, lifting an eyebrow at me.
I wish it didn’t. But everything else about the machine was already in place. All it needed was enough of a power boost. And my engine has given him that.
My silence is the answer that he needs. He smiles in approval at me, then straightens. “I want to see a demonstration of it, then,” he says. “Send out a blank sample of a signal.”
Of course he wants to test it. I glance to where his guards are watching us, then back to the machine, where one of his workers comes over to start programming in a blank sample to test the signal.
“You look nervous, Eden,” Hann says to me as I watch them work. “It’s as if you don’t believe in the capabilities of your engine.”
“It works,” I reply, but there’s a slight tremble in my voice. Is he really going to free Daniel if this works? I think back to everything Hann had told me about himself. If I fail at this, will Hann kill me? It’s all part of his business, after all.
We wait until the programmer has finished inputting a sample signal. It’s fast, the work of a moment. I watch carefully as he does it, observing the chip he places on the machine and then the info he swipes right onto the system. He steps away from the machine, then nods at us.
“Ready,” he says.
Hann nods. “Good.” We all take a step back from the machine. “Send the signal out.”
The machine’s coil begins to glow. At its bottom, my drone engine, now with its power amplified, glows a bright, brilliant blue.
Maybe everything I’d calculated is incorrect, and my engine will fail the machine. If that happens, what will he do with Daniel?
For a moment, nothing happens. I hold my breath, waiting.
Then a pulse comes from the machine. It ripples out in a wave of vibration that tingles through my body. On the machine’s monitor, the entirety of Ross City lights up with green dots, millions of them.
When I look over at Hann, his eyes are bright and focused. A smile plays on his face.
The signal works. I can see it written all over his expression. And in spite of myself, I feel a wild surge of pride at what my engine is capable of. This is the first real test of something I’ve made, and Dominic Hann—of all people—
is the one who gave me the chance to do it. My delight makes me recoil in horror.
Hann glances at me and nods. “You’re pleased,” he says. “And it goes beyond your desire to protect your brother.”
I’m too afraid to say anything back.
He studies me curiously. “Could it be because, deep down, you believe in everything that I’ve told you before?”
“You promised me that you would release my brother if this worked,” I say through clenched teeth. “How good is your word?”
“Don’t ever question my word.” Hann looks to his side and nods once. Two of his guards don’t even hesitate for a breath. They bow immediately, then leave without a word.
“I want to see it,” I say. “On a live feed, like you told me.” “Done.” Hann turns back to me. “Any other requests?” he asks.
My palms are slick with sweat, and my heart shivers with each beat. There’s the final question I have, the one that Hann hasn’t answered up until now, and that I’m almost too scared to ask.
“What’s the signal for?” I say, my voice coming out like a hoarse whisper. “What does your machine do?”
Hann smiles sidelong at me. I look back up at the machine. My gaze settles on the screen full of green dots.
And suddenly, I know. The Levels that had crushed his family, the system that had forced his mother’s hand. The points, the game that runs this city.
I know what this machine is going to do.
It’s going to take down Ross City’s entire Level system.
