DANIEL
Maybe it’s still the same night as when I was having my illusions of memories about June. I can’t tell.
My lips crack from thirst. My eyes can focus only on a gray line of sparse embroidery along the edge of the floor’s rug. The guards near the door shuffle their boots against the floor.
They sound like they’re about to switch out. The two women are still here. There are other guards now too, just arrived, and in the exchange between them, I listen for clues.
“The boy’s been working on the site,” one of them says in a low voice. “He’s good, from what I hear.”
“Yeah?”
“It sounds like Hann has really taken to him.”
Another sighs. “Great. But what about us? How long are we going to sit around with this one?”
The woman shrugs. “As long as it takes.”
As long as it takes. Through my thirst-induced weakness, I attempt to concentrate. Are they trying to break Eden? Has he not already offered his help?
I close my eyes, trying to stave off the nausea that bites at my insides. My hands twist quietly behind my back. I’ve been tightening and loosening my hands against the ropes for hours now. My wrists are scraped down to the flesh, and I can feel the blood trickling wet down my hands, probably soaking crimson into the rope fibers. But it’s not for nothing; the rope has loosened slightly since I first started working on it. Another couple of hours, and I might be able to slip a hand through one of them.
After that, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do. But I’m used to taking crises one step at a time.
Near the door, the women switch out with two male guards. I see them
turn their heads in my direction, but my figure stays limp against the chair. After several long minutes, they lean idly away and against the doorframe. My last round of guards make their way down the hall outside that I’ve never seen, their boots echoing against marble.
I listen closely to them until they fade away. It takes a long time. How big is this place? The hall they walked down seems to continue forever, and only after long seconds have dragged by am I no longer able to hear their echo at all.
My wrists keep twisting. The pain of it makes me clench my jaw, but I fight to keep the grimace off of my lips. The metal of my artificial leg cuts cold through my pant leg as I keep my ankles crossed.
The new guards don’t pay me any attention. They must have been warned about the way I bit the first man, but they haven’t seen it, and as far as they’re concerned, I look pretty harmless.
My wrists keep twisting. Fresh blood flows down my hands. I can feel it dripping silently down my fingers to the rug behind me. The slickness of it makes my hand slightly more mobile within its bond. I tug slowly, careful not to show my arms at work.
The bonds loosen a fraction more. Just enough.
I stop twisting and pull one of my hands gently against the frayed bond. My thumb and pinkie finger are squeezed together as I tug as hard as I can. At first, the bond doesn’t give, and the ropes cut hard against my already-damaged skin. I let out a quiet, shaky breath. Then I pull harder.
Finally, the rope gives a little. The tight bond edges closer to the rim of my knuckles. I keep working it. By the door, one of the guards casts me a casual glance.
I stop moving for a moment and keep still, my eyes still focused on the ground.
He nudges his friend and says something about me in a low voice.
They laugh. Then they do what I’d hoped, going back to their positions.
I give my hand one determined tug, ignoring the pain.
This time, my knuckles finally squeeze past the rope, and my hand comes free.
I don’t dare react. My arms stay firmly locked in place behind my back. But my freed hand searches for the knots tying my other hand down, and quietly I start to work on that.
My second hand loosens, then starts to come free.
By the door, one of the guards looks in my direction. This time, instead of glancing away again, his gaze lingers. I stop moving for a moment and shift uncomfortably in my chair, letting myself look like I’m settling back into a restless sleep. But through the slit of my half-opened eyes, I can tell that he’s not looking away.
Then he pushes back from the door and starts heading toward me.
For some reason, this triggers a flicker of a memory. June, standing at the door of an underground bunker, approaching me and motioning for me to get up. Her hands brush my waist, my chest, my chin. She positions me for a fight, then teaches me how to view my opponent. She throws a purposeful punch and shows me how to dodge and counter.
I try to hang on to this wisp of a memory even as it starts to fade. Over the years, I’ve learned to hold my own in a fight, have fought back the urge to run and replaced it with the bracing of an attack. And now, as the guard steps toward me, I can feel my muscles tensing, my hands instinctively tightening into fists.
The guard stops in front of me with a frown. Then he starts moving to look behind the chair.
My second hand slips free. I move.
He shifts toward me in surprise—but I’m already in motion. I snap to my feet in an instant, then swing the chair up. The guard has only a moment to bring his arms up in defense before the chair catches him in the side hard enough to send him sprawling onto the floor.
I don’t wait. Instead, my eyes fall on the gun at his belt. I lunge for it.
He kicks out at me.
The other guard runs toward me now. I manage to get my hands on the gun, but the first man’s leg kicks up at me. Better to let the gun go instead of falling. The thought flashes through my head and I snap backward, giving up on grabbing the weapon. I race toward the entrance.
But I’m weaker than normal right now, and my swinging of the chair has sapped more of my energy than I thought. I stumble in my steps.
One of the guards catches up to me and points a gun at me. Gritting my teeth, I thrust the chair at him. The chair leg hits him in the face— just enough time for me to whirl and dart out the door. I’m temporarily in the open.
Running—now that I can do. The hall before me is long and narrow, cutting through several rooms, and I race down it. At the end of the hall
stand a couple of guards who don’t yet realize I’m coming. I won’t be able to go around the bend, but there’s a window against this wall. The first window I’ve seen.
The guards at the end of the hall turn toward me for the first time.
Behind me, the others let out shouts. A bullet pings near my leg.
My breath runs shallow. The lack of water holds me back. Spots appear in my vision as I go, but I force myself to push back against it all.
As I reach the second set of guards now trained on me, I slide against the marble and turn my feet at the last instant. I lunge for the window, my bloody hands nearly slipping against the windowsill, but they catch, and I’m swinging myself through the window and out of the hall.
One glance out this window tells me that this building is entirely underground. High ceilings rise multiple floors over me. The complex is sprawling. And far ahead, I see what looks like a construction site and part of a large, circular machine.
Eden. My heart lurches. The guards had said he was working on some
site. Was that where it was?
It’s all I have time to see. Then I’m twisting my body up, my boots pushing off against the windowsill and propelling me up toward the roof. My hands catch the edge of the roof and pull me up. I land in a firm crouch. Below me, I can hear shouts coming from inside. A spotlight starts to sweep across the estate.
This must be just one of Hann’s many hideouts. How many other places does he have? I duck behind a chimney as the spotlight sweeps close. My eyes narrow. As if bred out of years of muscle memory, my body knows exactly how to avoid the light, thinks it’s in Batalla Hall again and trying to find a way out. Thinks it’s on the Colonies’ airfield again and searching for a way to get close to their parked fighter jets.
I dart across the roofs. The construction site nears.
Then a bullet scrapes the roof nearest me. It misses me—but it chips the roof tiles hard enough to shatter them into fragments. My boot catches in just the wrong way against the breaking tiles.
I slip.
My hands scramble to grab the edge of the roof, but they’re too slippery with blood. I tumble off and to the ground.
Immediately, I try to scramble up again, but now a guard has reached me.
A Republic soldier, seizing me as a bullet shatters my knee. My scream,
hoarse with rage and grief.
The memory is like a flint in me, lighting up the dark. A vicious growl rumbles in my throat, and I whirl on the guard, catching him hard in the jaw. I hit him once, twice—
—and then my strength gives way again, and I fall, dizzy from the exertion.
The guard stands over me. Several others rush to join him. I look back down to the ground and realize that I’m not sweating at all. There’s no water left in me.
That’s when I hear one of them say something above me that I swear I must have hallucinated.
“No,” one of the guards says to the others. “Let him go.”
“Hann’s order just came in. We’re to take him back up to the surface.”
I look up, thinking that maybe my weakness has left me too delirious to think straight. They’re letting me go.
I must be dreaming.
But then they’re taking me by the arms and dragging me up and throwing something dark across my eyes. I struggle with all the strength I have left. I’m misunderstanding what they’re saying, I tell myself. That’s the only way this makes sense. They’re not going to let me go. Hann has ordered them to kill me instead.
But I wait for the bullet through my head and it doesn’t happen. My feet drag against the floor. My consciousness is flickering in and out now. I can’t even tell when I’m awake and when I’m gone because, in this suffocating darkness, it’s all the same.
Eden. I have to find where they’re keeping him. My mind struggles to remember the path we’re taking.
I don’t know when they drag me into what seems to feel like an elevator. All I can do is try to remember how long we’re in it. Five seconds. Fifteen. Thirty.
My mind starts to fade. The guards’ voices above me are still talking, barking sharp orders at one another, but I can’t tell what they’re saying anymore.
I have to find my brother.
And then, suddenly they’re gone. The hands holding my arms vanish, and I crumple to the floor. It feels like asphalt, cement. The darkness lifts from over my eyes, and I suddenly see myself lying on the street
somewhere in the Undercity, the smoke from nearby food stalls hazing the air.
AIS agents are here. They’re everywhere. The red dots of their guns are shining on me, and their shouts are deafening.
Hands in the air! Hands in the air! For an instant, I feel like a criminal again.
Then someone is shouting. “Stand down!” It’s the AIS director, Min. Her voice echoes against the concrete walls, forcing the guns to lower in a tidal wave. “Stand down! It’s Daniel. Stand down!”
Pushing through their ranks, too, is June. Her eyes lock on me and never steer away. I must be dreaming now. I lie where I am, the edges of my vision slowly fading into black, while she bends down beside me, her hands touching both sides of my face. Agents swarm around us.
“We’re here,” she’s saying. Then she raises her voice to those crowding around us, the authority in it returning. “Get back. Give him room. He’s injured!”
They listen to her instinctively, parting around us like a school of fish. I close my eyes, savoring her presence beside me. “They’ve got him,” I whisper through my parched lips. “Eden.”
June says something else. I think she’s ordering me to relax, that paramedics are going to take me to a hospital. I strain to understand what she’s saying, but her voice sounds muffled now. It’s still the loveliest voice I’ve ever heard. I want to stay awake to hear it.
And then everything is a blur of ambulance sirens and a chaos of other voices. June is nearby, holding my hand. Through it all, I keep looking back at where I’d come from. My thoughts blur together as I try to make sense of everything.
Hann ordered them to release me. They’d let me go. Why would he do that?
What does he want with Eden? Where has he taken my brother?
EDEN
Dominic Hann keeps his promise to release Daniel.
That night, I watch numbly through a live feed. My brother’s unmistakable figure appears, bound to a chair somewhere else on the estate, struggling against his restraints. As I watch, he manages to scuffle with the guards and, incredibly, breaks free. Shouts fill the air as he slips out a window with others in pursuit.
It’s easy to forget how adept my brother once was at evading the Republic’s soldiers. I’m dizzy watching the speed with which he moves. How he knows the route back to the surface is beyond me, but it doesn’t matter. He keeps going, despite the occasional stumble. I watch, my throat so dry I nearly gag.
He nearly escapes on his own, even without Hann’s help. But then he trips. At that moment, as the guards close in, I fear I’m about to witness them kill Daniel right there.
It would be a repeat of what happened to John. But instead, I hear one guard say, “Let him go.”
He shakes his head and orders the others to pull Daniel to his feet. To my shock, they cover my brother’s head with a bag and lead him away. They take him up an elevator and leave him in the streets of the Undercity. The last thing I see on the feed is the AIS finding him and swarming around him. Among them, I think I spot June Iparis.
I don’t know what to make of the entire scene. I don’t know why Hann would agree to do such a thing.
Daniel’s free now. He’s going to come back for me, that I know with a dead certainty and a wild hope. He’s going to find where they’ve taken me and pull me back to the surface.
But if Hann succeeds in what he wants to do, I don’t know if any of that matters. I’ve now witnessed what his machine can do when powered with my
engine. It’s one of the most spectacular and terrifying inventions I’ve ever seen.
Ross City is about to crumble.
DANIEL
I must have blacked out between the time June and the AIS found me and when I arrive at a hospital, because I don’t remember getting out of the ambulance. I don’t recall going up in an elevator or traveling down a hospital’s corridors.
All I know is that when I wake up next, I’m in my own bed, my window overlooking a blanket of clouds shrouding the glittering city. It’s nighttime now. The dizzy weakness I’d felt before is now gone, and I feel awake and alert, rehydrated, and as good as new.
When I look to my side, I see a girl asleep against the side of my bed, her head buried in her arms. Her dark hair spills behind her in a shining blanket.
It’s June.
She suddenly stirs, sensing that I’m awake. Her eyes dart first around the room, doing a quick sweep, probably sizing everything up in the way she always does to make sure we’re okay. Then her gaze settles on my face.
She lets out a long breath. “Hey,” she whispers, getting to her feet. I give her a small smile. “Hey,” I reply.
She puts a cool hand against my forehead. “I don’t know how much longer we would have taken to get to you if you hadn’t sent that message. You looked pretty bad when we first found you.”
“They still have Eden,” I say. “Did you and AIS find anything about him?”
She shakes her head, her lips pressed tight. It’s the expression she gets when her mind is spinning, and I find myself remembering snippets of other memories, of when we were escaping the Republic. “No,” she says. “But AIS is trying to track him based on the general area where you were.”
“They were underground,” I reply.
“Is that where Hann was stationed in a hideout?” June asks.
“A hideout is an understatement. It looked like an estate buried under the city. I don’t know how many other spaces he might have like that. But he has a construction site there. A machine.”
“Do you remember anything about the route they took you through?” I shake my head. “They had me blindfolded the entire time. The area beneath the Undercity is a maze of old tunnels and abandoned elevator shafts. It’ll take weeks to get down there and do a proper sweep. We need
to find a different way.”
Had Eden heard that I’d gotten out? Does he know that Hann had intentionally let me go? Did he have anything to do with that—had he made a bargain with the man?
Immediately, I start trying to get out of bed. That’s when all the soreness of my captivity hits me. I wince, looking down at my bandaged wrists.
June gets up in the darkness and pushes me down. “You’re not going anywhere,” she says sternly. “Strict orders from the doctor. Everything you need to do, you can do from the comfort of your bed, okay? Your director said she’d contact you in the morning, and we can go from there.”
“What about you?” I ask. “The Elector? He—”
“—is well aware of the situation,” she says. “Anden sends his regards and concerns.” June leans closer to me. In the night, her eyes shine like dark marbles. “This is big news in your inner circles, apparently. The President wants to be kept updated on what happens with Hann.”
I slump back on my pillows and clench my teeth in frustration. I made a promise to myself to keep Eden from harm, but I’ve failed to do it again. Nightmares from the Republic come rushing back now to haunt me—Eden, being taken away for experimentation; Eden, blinded and weak; Eden, left to die during the war with the Colonies.
Now he is in Hann’s grasp, and I have no goddy clue what the man wants with him.
June puts a hand on my shoulder. Her warmth is the only thing that breaks through my whirlwind of thoughts. “We’re going to find him,” she tells me. “He’s a smart boy, and he’s going to take care of himself. Your job is to be sure you’re strong enough by morning to tackle all this. There’s nothing you can do before that. Understand?”
I look back at her. “How long have I been out?”
“A day,” she admits.
“And you stayed here?” I ask softly. “The entire time I was out?”
A flash of fear glints in her eyes, then fades. She looks away and out my window. “I was afraid,” she murmurs, “to lose you.”
And again, I find myself thinking about what she’d said during her first night here, when we shared a kiss. When I realized how much her life had moved forward and settled into place.
She looks back at me. “What’s on your mind?” she asks me. “I can always tell by the weight in your eyes.”
“I’m thinking about how I’m the catalyst for chaos in your life,” I answer. “And how sorry I am for it.”
“Don’t be,” she replies. June sighs and looks down. “We’ve always been each other’s catalysts, haven’t we?” she says. “I don’t think we would have met if we weren’t. And sometimes I find myself pulling away because I want to end that cycle for you, as if that might somehow solve it all.”
I think of the way June pulls herself away from our intimate moments. It’s the exact same thing I do. I lean closer to her, letting my hand brush hers. For an instant, I think that she might pull away … but her hand lingers in place, and she stays where she is.
I know that fear she mentioned. That terror of not knowing what might happen to us next, of what could go wrong if we opened our hearts completely to each other. I’d bled the last time I allowed myself to love her, and she had bled the same.
But still, I find myself tightening my grip around her hand, then pulling her closer. She turns to face me in the night.
The fear still grips me, and the words I want to say still stutter to a halt in my throat. But this time, all I can think about is what it was like to live without her for a decade.
When I open my mouth this time, the words finally spill out.
“I don’t deserve having you in my life,” I tell her quietly. “There may always be pain and grief that follows me, even here, in all this Ross City luxury. Maybe that’s the way it goes in life. You don’t deserve to share that pain.” I take a deep breath, trying to quell my fear, the rising tide of all the darkness that still haunts me from the Republic. “But I think you do deserve to know the truth of how I feel. Because even if we can’t be together in the end, I would like you to know.”
June’s eyes are glossy against the blue-gray light filtering in from the
windows. “And what is that?” she whispers.
“That I love you,” I whisper. “That I’ve been in love with you for years, even when we were separated. Especially then. I’ve lived with you in my life, and I’ve lived without you. No matter what kind of fear I feel in the possibility of us being together, the fear of being away from you is something I don’t think I can bear.” I look down, shy to meet her gaze now. “I have nightmares of losing you again. All the time.”
There. My heart is ripped open and exposed before her. All the uncertainty that had plagued me before now roars in my mind as I wait for her response.
Maybe this was all a mistake. I shouldn’t have told her this. It’s too soon.
Then June draws nearer. “I never had a chance to tell you, before you and Eden left for Antarctica, that I love you too. So fiercely that it frightens me.” Her voice trembles.
I love you. I love you. I have never heard these words from June before, and now they fill my heart to bursting, making me whole in a way I never knew I could be.
She smiles a little, and now I see that her eyes are moist. “Even if we don’t know where we’ll go in the future, perhaps our lives were always meant to collide again and again. Perhaps we are forever meant to be each other’s catalysts.”
Forever. It’s a word I’ve never dared to use with June. Maybe there is a chance for a forever in our lives.
“I’ve looked over my shoulder for a decade,” I whisper, “wondering what it was that was missing in my life. Turns out, all this time, it was you.”
Then I lean close, and this time, I kiss her.
She nearly collapses into my embrace. Her lips are so soft and familiar against mine, everything that I’ve missed in the years we’ve been apart. Our conversations together may be awkward and polite, and our presence around each other stilted and distant … but this, this feels right in every possible way.
She belongs here, in my arms, and I belong here, giving my whole heart to her.
A deep hunger rises in me. This time, I don’t waste a second. I wrap my arms tightly around her and push her back against the bed. My skin prickles in pleasure wherever she runs her fingers. She runs her hands
through my hair and sighs contentedly against me. Her waist, her slender neck, the curve of her hips … I shiver at the warmth of her. Everything about her is like a fever dream. I want to preserve this in time for us. I want a million more of these moments.
She unbuttons my shirt. I pull hers over her head. My fingers run across new scars on her, here and there, a healed scratch, an old raised bruise. She is older, as am I, and we are different now than we were. I love her more for it, wish I had been able to share in all of it with her over the last few years. She kisses my cheeks as I fall into her. Her hands slide down my back. I shudder at her every touch.
The rest of the apartment is silent. Outside, I hear the passing of airplanes. Somewhere in the distance, music is playing. Millions of lights twinkle beyond the windows and against the night, each one a different life, a different moment from ours.
But tonight, we let ourselves stay entwined together, as if everything will remain as perfect as this moment. As if this could be our future.
EDEN
I don’t know when Hann plans to unleash the real signal. All I know is that Hann finally comes to see me again in the makeshift chamber that he’s offered me at the estate.
I jump a little as he enters the room with two of his guards.
“I don’t mean to startle you,” he says to me now, holding up both of his hands. Then he nods at the guards. “You’re no longer needed,” he adds. “I’d like a word alone with Mr. Wing.”
The guards do as he says. They step out, and the room is suddenly just me and him.
Hann sits down in a chair across from me and leans his chin on his hand. “Word is that your brother is now safely back with the AIS,” he says.
“Thank you for keeping your word,” I reply.
“Do you know why I’m here right now?” he asks me. I just stare warily at him. “Why?”
He reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket, then pulls out what looks like a heavy purse. With a careless gesture, he tosses it in my direction.
I fumble with it as it lands against my chest with a chunky clink of metal. “What’s this?” I say.
“Your payment, of course,” Hann replies. He nods at me. “I only pay in real gold corras. Soon, this place’s virtual currency will be useless after the Level system is disabled. I figure you’ll want real money instead.”
I glare at him, then peek once inside the purse.
There are hundreds—thousands—of gold coins in here. Each is worth a thousand corras. This entire purse must contain at least a million.
I look sharply back up at him. He’d promised a handsome pay for what I did, but this level of money is an amount that I hadn’t guessed at.
Hann smiles at me. “Surprised?” he says. “I’ve made enough of a fortune doing what I do. It’s a worthy investment for me to spend that money on talent like you.”
This kind of money is beyond what even most of the Sky Floor citizens can earn. It’s money that could pull Pressa and her father completely out of the Undercity. It’s money that could buy you the kind of Level that would make you safe forever.
It’s also the kind of money that’s dipped in the blood of people who have paid dearly for crossing someone like Hann.
I close the purse back up and toss it to the floor between us. “How long are you going to keep me down here?” I ask quietly. “Until my brother comes to find me? Until the AIS descend on you? Just because you disable the Level system doesn’t mean they don’t have a way to hunt you down.”
Hann smiles, unconcerned about the way I’ve rejected his money. “I’m not going to keep you anywhere,” he replies, nodding toward the door. “You’re free to go, whenever you wish. My guards are ready and waiting to escort you back to the surface of the Undercity whenever you want.”
Now I know he’s messing with me. I laugh, shaking my head at him. “What kind of game do you want me to play?” I say.
“I don’t play games with people I respect,” Hann replies. “Or have you just lived in a gamified society for so long that you don’t even know how to react to people outside of its system?”
“Why would you let me go?” I demand. “I’ve been a proven asset to you. I know where this place is. I’ve seen you, and I could go straight to the AIS the instant you release me.”
He shrugs. “I know.”
I spread my hands wide. “So—that’s it? You’re setting me free?” As if to test him, I stand up from my chair and walk toward the door. Everything in me tells me that this is a trap, that the instant I try to step out into the hall, they’ll clap me in chains or shoot me dead.
But Hann just watches me. “Go.”
When I still don’t budge, he leans forward in the chair and regards me with a focused expression. “Do you want to know why I’m letting you go? Do you want to know why I’m willing to give you millions?” He smiles. “Because you’ll be back.”
“What?”
“You’ll return to find me again. I can see the fire in your eyes, the way you try to hide the satisfaction of seeing that machine work with your engine attached to it. I know that you believe in the same things I believe in.” He narrows his eyes. “It’s haunted you the entire time you’ve lived in Antarctica, hasn’t it? The way this place runs its Undercity? The way the government
handles the poor? The Level system that is as corrupt as it is innovative? You hate it all, just like I do.”
I shake my head. “Once I step out of here, I’m never coming back.”
Hann leans back in his chair and heaves a sigh. “Yes, you are,” he replies. “You will, because when you see the chaos that will reign in this city after the Level system is disabled, when you see the change it can bring about in the upper-class people you loathe … you’ll realize that what I do here is the noble cause. You want to be a part of something significant, don’t you? All people with your talent desire to make a difference. And I can help you get there. You can go from obscurity in your brother’s shadow to becoming one of the most prominent disrupters of change that the world has ever seen.” He nods at the purse on the floor. “And think of your friend Pressa. You can change her life forever with that. With a new job at my side.”
I start to shake. “You’re offering me a job,” I repeat incredulously.
He nods. “Yes. I’m offering you the chance to come work for me, permanently. Think of the things you could do, Eden, without restrictions placed on you. Think of not having to cater to anyone else when it comes to your schedule and your life.” Hann laces his fingers together. “You’re free to come and go as you wish. Should you need to contact me again, you can use this.”
A series of six numbers appears in front of my view. I stare at it for a second, memorizing it, before it vanishes.
Hann smiles briefly at me. “I never intended for you to be my prisoner, Eden, and now I want to prove that to you in the most obvious way.”
I don’t trust him. I don’t believe him.
And yet, I think he’s telling me the truth. Somehow, this killer—the most- wanted criminal in all of Ross City, someone whom Daniel fears and hates, a person who has ruled the Undercity with an iron fist—is the only person I’ve ever known who seems to see me straight to my core.
Now he’s offering me a chance to work with him.
“I can’t do this,” I tell him. “We aren’t the same person. We don’t have the same beliefs.”
Hann stays even-tempered. “You can tell yourself whatever you want,” he replies. “I understand that it would be difficult to do this, because you would be separating yourself completely from your brother. But I know this is what’s in your heart. You want to change things, just like I do. And you’re tired of other people getting in your way. Tired of being unable to help the ones you care about the most. Tired of being unseen.”
I stay where I am, my mind whirling with confusion. On a surface level, he’s someone I’d need to avoid at all costs. But this …
“What if I choose not to work for you?” I say. “Will you still let me go?”
Hann nods. “If you choose not to, then what’s the point of keeping you here? Life is too exhausting to hold someone hostage every time I need something to get done.” He waves at the door. “Go. Confide in your friends. Find your brother. Never see me again. I won’t hunt you down at races; I won’t have my guards stalk what you do. All I can tell you is that you’re about to see what Ross City should actually be like, once it rises from its ashes. It’s time for someone else to run this place.” He leans forward on his knees. “Then you’ll soon ask yourself … who are you helping, exactly, by refusing my offer?”
I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know how to prove him wrong. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Ross City.
All I do is step toward the door. I go through the entrance and into the hall. Just like he’d said, his guards are waiting to take me wherever I want to go. And Hann is still behind me, sitting in my chamber.
I turn my back on the estate. Hann’s words ring in my mind, lingering, haunting.
Who are you helping, exactly, by refusing my offer?
And right as I consider those words, a high-pitched sound crackles around
us.
I press my hands to my ears. The chip implanted near my temple seems to
grow warm. My heart jumps into my throat.
Then everything goes silent.
It’s over as quickly as it happened, like an electric shock that blitzed right through the walls and floors and us. The guards, too, felt it—they hunch for a second, flinching, then look at one another in bewilderment before everything settles back down.
But something is missing. I open my eyes and see nothing virtual hovering in my view. No numbers, no account, not even the persistent warning that I’m unable to connect down here. There’s a weight to the silence, like the kind of quiet that you hear when you’re truly severed from civilization. The buzz and hum of technology. It’s all just gone.
He’s done it. It worked.
Dominic Hann has ordered the real signal to trigger. And he has just eliminated Ross City’s entire system.
DANIEL
It happens the next morning, right as June and I reach the AIS headquarters.
I’m awake by dawn, pulling my shirt and trousers on and tugging smooth my suit. Beside me, June’s already ready, as impeccably neat as any soldier trained in the Republic.
I don’t know what to say about what happened between us last night. Neither does she, I think. All we can do is glance occasionally at each other as we get ready. When I do speak, it’s about Eden.
“AIS messaged,” I tell her as we step out of the apartment and into the hall. “No luck hunting down Eden’s location. But my description of the underground has narrowed it down to a rough patch of the city.”
“What part?” June asks.
I bring up a map between us as we enter an elevator station, then point to a section of the grid. “This area was once in development to expand the Undercity to floors beneath the surface,” I explain. “They were going to house Undercity folks down there, in cramped spaces underground. It turned out to be a disaster, though—not enough escape routes up to the surface in case of fire or flood, not enough emergency ventilation. There was a huge fire that ripped through the space. After that, no one bothered with the maze of tunnels.”
“And it sounds like what you saw when you were down there?”
I nod. “The kind of building I saw, the construction site … it had the kind of infrastructure that reminded me of that story.”
June looks down at the city through the elevator’s glass windows. “We’re going down there, then, aren’t we?” She glances skeptically at me. “Are you sure you can do this?”
“I have to,” I reply. “I’m not going to keep lying around up here, waiting for AIS to find something.” In desperation, I bring up Eden’s account again and try one more time to track his location.
That’s when I feel it.
There’s a spark of something electric, as if every particle in the air were suddenly charged—followed by a sharp crack in my ears. It’s so loud that I flinch. June does the same in unison.
“What was that?” she exclaims.
But as soon as she says it, every single one of our Levels flickers out. June’s name and Level vanishes from over her head. The faint glow on the handles of her glasses disappears. The numbers and bars in my view fade into nothing. The elevator shudders to a stop on one of the middle floors of the building. When I glance up at the ceiling, I notice that the power’s out. None of the elevator’s panels are lit.
What happened? A short circuit in the system?
My first reaction is to turn on my grid lines—but there are none.
Nothing about my system works at all. It’s as if it turned off.
June glances at me with a frown. “It looks like it’s not limited to our building,” she says, nodding out at the city.
Sure enough, she’s right—every building close to us also looks blacked out, with no hovering virtual info on any part of them.
June glances at me. “AIS? Can you contact them?”
I shake my head. “No. Everything about my system is disabled. Come on.” I step off the elevator, then motion for us to head down to the walkways. We start sprinting along the halls. Here and there, we run into a few other people also coming out of the elevators, looking bewildered.
One of them shouts at us as we pass. “Your systems working?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No,” I call back. So it’s not limited to our accounts, either. A heavy feeling starts creeping into my chest. Something has gone severely wrong—and a part of me knows it must be somehow tied to what Hann was doing.
What he had stolen my brother for.
As we sprint down the stairs, I almost run right into Jessan and the director, right as they exit into the stairwells from the headquarters.
“Wing!” Director Min exclaims. “You’re not supposed to be up—”
I ignore her comment and keep going. “Your systems?” I ask. “Anything working?”
She looks pale as she shakes her head back. “Our Levels—everything
—our data—all the info that the government displays and tracks and keeps. All of it’s gone—not just reset, or flattened, but gone. Wiped.”
A cold fist tightens around my chest. It’s impossible, I want to say— because everything I know about the infrastructure of the system, how spread out across the city and how decentralized everything is. But I’ve seen too many goddy impossible things come true to believe those words.
“It’s citywide?” June asks.
Jessan nods grimly. “As far as we can tell. We can’t reach anyone. No calls going in or coming out.”
If the entire city’s system is down … the pandemonium on the streets in the Undercity must be unimaginable. My heart seizes at the idea of Eden still being trapped somewhere underground there.
“I’ve seen what happens when you have a complete blackout in a city as divided as this one,” June says as we run. Her face turns grimmer. “When people who have been held down for decades suddenly realize that their chains have been removed, things unravel quickly. It can take less than an hour for a society to destabilize.”
Jessan looks sharply at June. “What do you mean?” she asks.
“I mean, you’d better make sure your military is down in the Undercity right now, before things get out of hand,” June replies.
I think of the constant outages we had in Lake, the unrest that would take over the streets. June’s right. There had been one particular outage that once affected the entirety of Los Angeles—and within the hour, fires had broken out all over the city as the poor sectors clashed with the Gem ones. I remember seeing the tanks rolling down the streets to bring order back. My mother had forced us to stay inside for two weeks as police swarmed through the neighborhoods.
“Ross City is not the Republic,” the director says stiffly to June.
“No,” June replies, just as severely. “It’s worse. This is a far more concentrated place, and the effect will be swifter. As far as I can tell, without your system in place, the Undercity will crumble, and it will happen soon if you can’t get your system back up.”
Damn, I’ve missed hearing her talk when she’s breaking down a situation. Min scowls at the bluntness in June’s voice, but she doesn’t argue back this time. Instead, she returns to trying to place a call out to the President.
“Emergency power’s still not up,” she swears under her breath after a moment.
“Head northeast as soon as we reach the ground,” I say to June. “We’ll go in the general direction where we’ve been hunting for Eden.”
She nods without hesitation. I have no idea what we’ll do after that, or how we’ll find our way down, but it’s the best bet for finding my brother.
We finally reach the bottom floor. The stairs lead out to a tall set of heavy, barred metal doors, and when we slide them open, they reveal the streets of the Undercity.
We step out into a scene of chaos.
All around us, the names and data hovering over each street stall, each shop, each person, are gone. When I look up, I notice that virtual overlays have vanished from over the elevator stations too. There’s nothing we look at that isn’t already real.
My eyes go to June, but she’s looking down the street. Some are taking advantage of the moment already, and the space in front of a station is starting to flood with people. My first, fleeting thought is that all the stations have also powered down instantaneously—if everyone’s Levels have been flattened, then everyone is trapped wherever they happen to be.
But that’s replaced almost instantly by my second thought: Our Levels haven’t just been flattened, they’ve been deleted. In one fell swoop, Ross City’s Level system—the class system I’ve always argued about with AIS, the same system that Eden rebelled against by constantly coming down here—has been cleared.
People are now able to enter the stations and stairwells, no matter their Level. Local police patrolling the streets struggle in vain to control the flood of people. Small, isolated scuffles have already started to break out between the authorities and the citizens.
Behind us come several other AIS agents. The director hurries over. “Coordinate the police in this district!” she shouts at me, pointing down the street. “Tell them we’re calling for reinforcements. Emergency martial law, immediately. Understand, Wing? We have no time to lose.”
I nod at her. “Yes, ma’am,” I reply. Then she’s off like a bullet, running with her other agents toward the nearest police headquarters to try to get the emergency lines up and running.
Shattered glass already litters the concrete, and not far from us, people are pushing into a store and eagerly starting to haul things out. Carts full of food they would never have been able to buy with their Levels, armfuls of clothing, appliances, and furniture. Around them, others are starting to get the hint too. I can hear the shouts rising up and down the street.
“Quick!” someone yells. “Before they get the system back up!”
I keep running in the direction that my brother might be in. How the hell am I ever going to find him in this mess? I reach a busy intersection and halt in the middle of it, looking in despair down both streets to see masses of people crowding out into the road. Beside me, June takes my hand and squeezes it once. I look at her, hating the feeling of helplessness that washes over me.
Suddenly, I feel like I’m back in the heat of the war with the Colonies, searching frantically for my brother in enemy territory.
And then, I see something familiar.
There. In the middle of the street. A flash of familiar, wavy blond hair and the glint of his metal glasses. A miracle in the midst of absolute chaos.
At first, I think I’m hallucinating. There’s no way Eden is here.
But I blink, and he doesn’t disappear. There’s his hair again. June also tightens her grip on my hand and points in his direction. “Is that him?” she calls out.
I don’t know how he got away from Hann. I don’t know how he found his way back here to the surface of the Undercity. I don’t know anything except that maybe he was heading back in the direction of our home too, so that our paths crossed.
But I raise my voice, and in it, I can hear my own terror. “Eden!” I shout. “Eden!”
His head snaps over to us. His gaze falls on me. From his distance, I see the recognition click on his face. “Daniel!” he calls back, and it’s as if I were seeing him as a child again.
Everything in me floods with adrenaline. I suddenly start pushing my way over to him. Beside me, June follows. I have to get to my brother before something happens to him. The fear in my heart reaches a bursting point.
Eden shoves his way toward us. It seems to take an eternity for him to fight his way through the throngs. For an instant, I think we’ll never reach each other. This is it, I think. I’m lost in one of my nightmares. I’m running and running toward my brother and I will never reach him.
But then he’s suddenly standing before me. And I’m not dreaming.
And I’m sweeping him into a fierce hug. He embraces me tightly back.
It’s Eden, and he’s out of Hann’s clutches.
EDEN
I’ve never seen Ross City without its layers of augmented-reality before. I don’t think it was ever meant to be seen this way.
There are no signs or street names, no hovering messages, no grid lines. Most of all, there are no Levels over anyone’s head. It is as if everything that holds a city together—streetlights, traffic laws, police enforcement—has vanished in the blink of an eye.
Riots are triggered so quickly that—from the AIS headquarters in the Sky Floors—we can see the chaos happening in real time on their screens. At first, people stand around out on sidewalks, puzzled, muttering to one another as they ask others if their Levels had suddenly vanished. Auto-cars and trucks stop in the middle of the roads. The traffic starts to pile up.
Slowly, I see the realization start to hit the Undercity. It ripples through the streets in a wave. Murmurs turn into exclamations, and then into shouts.
The system is down. The Levels are gone!
And just like that, the ripple becomes a tidal wave. The system is down, the Levels are gone, the system is down, the Levels are gone.
After the scene in the Undercity, the Sky Floors seem eerily quiet. It’s midnight now, and even though we’re at least a hundred floors high, I can see the orange glow of fire coming from the Undercity far below. Smoke rises in plumes as the city brings in the military to try to contain the chaos.
Even the AIS headquarters itself is struggling to stay operational, running on limited backup power. Here in the main lobby, a large screen plays live footage from the Undercity as a newscaster talks rapidly over the scene. It’s weird to see video like this without our Level systems in place.
“Why would Hann just let you go?” Daniel asks me as I pace restlessly by the windows. “Did he hurt you?”
“No,” I reply, distracted. I’m trying to place a call manually on a phone to Pressa, but nothing’s getting through. On my dozenth try, I swear under my
breath and turn to my brother. “He didn’t do anything to me,” I reply. “He told me that he would release you if I helped him install my drone’s engine into his machine.”
“And then?”
“And then…” I hesitate, wondering whether I should tell Daniel about Hann’s history. My eyes go to my brother’s bandaged finger. Hann had promised he wouldn’t hurt Daniel at all—but his promise had only been partly true. Daniel was apparently hospitalized for dehydration. The guards broke one of his fingers.
Because of me, he’d hurt my brother. The thought makes me so sick to my stomach that I have to pause for a moment to fight down the nausea.
“After I finished installing the engine,” I say, “Hann told me that he would let me go, as a gesture of goodwill. But he said that I’d be back.” He knew, fundamentally, that Daniel and I would find ourselves at a crossroads again. That I’m not like my brother.
Daniel frowns at me. “It makes no sense,” he mutters.
“Hann said he has no interest in forcing me to work for him. Besides, he’s already got what he wanted.” I turn back to the windows, where we can see plumes of smoke rising from the streets below.
Daniel narrows his eyes at me. “He’s playing a game with you,” he finally says. “It’s what he’s known for. I’ve seen several cases of him winning over loan victims by giving them the illusion of safety with him.”
Something about the way Daniel just assumes that Hann’s playing a game with me makes me feel wary. It’s true that he’s a dangerous man—he kidnapped us both, after all, and held us hostage. Just the fact that he let us go on a whim … well, it’s something only a confident criminal would do.
But I can’t help thinking about what he’d said to me. What had happened to his son and wife. The genuine grief that had been etched onto his face. The way he seemed to know exactly what was going on in my mind, better even than what Daniel knew.
The call I’m trying to place fails again. I grit my teeth in frustration and toss the phone onto a nearby couch. Then I turn to look at the elevators leading out of the AIS headquarters.
“You’re not going down there,” Daniel says automatically as he watches me.
“I have to,” I reply. “I can’t call through to Pressa at all. If the AIS headquarters is this stripped down in terms of tech, the Undercity is probably completely cut off.”
Daniel’s lips tighten. “No.” He nods at the screen, where they’re showing the streets down below. Barricades have been put up in some parts of the Undercity, but they’re doing little to stop people from hopping over them and organizing into furious crowds. Some are marching down the streets, shouting. Others are breaking windows and flooding into shops.
“See that?” he says, glancing sternly at me. “The President himself is flying out tomorrow for his safety, and he’s taking his security detail with him.”
“Anden has offered to host him in the Republic,” June finishes. “He has invited us to evacuate with him too.”
Even the President’s leaving this behind. The thought of us all flying out sends fear rippling through me. What about Pressa and her father? I can’t just leave them here and run like a coward. And even then, tomorrow is far away. Daniel’s heading down to the Undercity in a few hours with the rest of AIS to get things under control.
I turn determined eyes on my brother. “Isn’t your shift next, down in the Undercity?”
“It’s my job to contain this mess,” he replies.
“Your job. Always your job.” I throw up my hands. “You think I don’t worry about what’ll happen to you every time you head out into that? You put yourself in danger’s way every day. But you won’t let me in. You won’t let me join you.”
“I do it so that you don’t have to,” he snaps.
“I have to!” I suddenly burst out. The anger burns in my throat. “When you head out there and don’t come home until late, when you’re captured by a dangerous criminal, I have to deal with it. I have to bear the idea of losing you. You can’t let me just leave Pressa to fend for herself down there. That’s not what you would do.” I take a deep breath and glare at him. “If June were down there, you would tear every street of the Undercity apart to find her. You would keep going until you were dead, and you wouldn’t care what the hell I said.”
June clears her throat uncomfortably at my words. Across from me, Daniel’s quiet. His face has turned pale, as if he’s remembering something from his past.
“It’s going to get worse down there,” June says after a while. I can’t tell if she’s siding with me or not. “People who have suffered for that long, who don’t have the ability to attack higher powers, turn on one another instead. They’ll destroy every shop and stall and home down there, and they’ll do it
quickly. So if we’re going to get anyone out of the Undercity, we have to do it now. It’s about to become impassible.”
Daniel’s gaze goes from me back to the dark windows. When he finally speaks, his voice is pulled tight. “Fine. But you’re not going alone. I’m coming with you.”
“Same,” June says.
Even with this compromise, I can feel the chasm widening between us. No matter what Daniel says, he makes me feel small, like a little brother asking for permission to do anything and everything. I turn away, disgusted with myself, and start heading toward the elevators.
* * *
Even though it’s past midnight, the streets of the Undercity are fully lit tonight—with lights from the backup electric system; with handheld lamps, glowsticks, torches, and portable screens held up by protestors; and with floodlights set up along the streets’ barricades, monitored by police and soldiers alike.
Now I run through the streets with Daniel and June at my side. Shouts come at us in all directions. The streets, always narrow, are crammed full of people in every form of celebration and confusion. Some are uncertain, standing outside the front of their stalls or shops and wringing their hands, looking meekly at the police that rush by. Others hang out the open windows of the floors above, squinting at the buildings in disbelief at the lack of any augmented layering. Others take photos with old-school cameras, now that their systems are disabled.
Still others are furious, delighted to unleash their anger by attacking their neighbors with the kind of violence that’d normally get your Levels flattened. There are some taking advantage of the system’s disappearance to break into shops and stock up on all the things they’ve never been able to buy. We pass several young people who are simply wrecking the street for no reason, crushing scooters and boards and auto-buses and spraying them with buckets of paint. In the night, their figures cast long shadows against the wall.
“Things are deteriorating quickly,” June calls to us as we run. “Eden, we won’t have long before this situation makes it unreasonable for us to stay down here. Can we get to your friend before that?”
Pressa. Her name rings through me over and over. Her father’s apothecary is deep in the heart of the Undercity, right in the thick of everything. “We’ll reach her,” I call back as we hit an intersection and make a sharp turn. “We
have to.”
A flipped auto-car in the street stops us dead in our tracks. People have already crowded around it so tightly that there’s no easy way around it. Nearby, flames burn gold against the night.
I spit out a curse. “We can’t get through,” I say.
Daniel looks overhead and nods for me to follow. “There’s a way,” he replies. He reaches the end of the street and then darts into a narrow alley between two blocks. His movements are steady and sure, like he’s been down these roads a dozen times before.
We hit a dead end stopped by a locked gate. But Daniel doesn’t stop moving. He kicks off against the wall and shimmies up to the second floor in a matter of seconds, then leaps off the ledge to climb onto the top of the gate. He drops out of sight. June runs up to the gate right as Daniel emerges from the other side of it, opening the gate from the inside.
“Hurry,” he gasps as he ushers us through. We dart down a private walkway before emerging back out into the streets.
Two blocks down, I see it. The apothecary.
There’s a mob of people that have surrounded the shop, and the front window is already smashed. Standing in the entrance is Pressa’s father, his frail body gamely pressed in the doorway as he pleads with the people to keep order. Beside him, Pressa and her father’s assistant, Marren, are shoving back anyone who gets too aggressive.
“Get away!” she shouts. “Get back in the street! You can’t come in here!”
There are others trying to help them, too. I recognize a few of the store’s frequent customers. Several of the larger men have formed a human barricade on one side of the shop, while two others are boarding up the broken window on the other side.
My heart lifts a little at the sight, even though the situation looks like it’s about to tip over into something dangerous.
“Pressa!” I shout at the top of my lungs as we approach. My hands wave high in the air.
Her head whips around in my direction, and her dark eyes search the crowd for me. They finally settle on where we are.
“Eden?” she says incredulously. Her entire demeanor brightens at the sight of me.
I don’t hesitate. I just start pushing through the crowd to reach where she’s standing with her dad. She grabs my arm in a viselike grip. Her eyes are wide and frantic.
“Everything’s falling apart,” she tells me in a rush. “People are trying to steal our medicine.”
Behind me, Daniel and June have pushed their way up to the top of the steps too. When one man trying to get into the shop suddenly shoves Pressa’s dad, June whips out an elbow so fast that she breaks the man’s nose before he can even react. He cries out in pain and shrinks back.
June narrows her eyes at him and raises her voice at the crowd. “Police!” she shouts. “Get back, now!”
The authority in her voice is so militaristic that, at least for the moment, everyone listens. Beside her, Daniel shoves two people away from the entrance.
I turn back to Pressa. “You and your dad have to get out of here,” I say. “Leave the shop. Dominic Hann destroyed the Level system—it’s not coming back up anytime soon. This situation’s going to boil over.”
Pressa looks desperately to where her father is standing guard at the entrance. “There’s no way in hell we’re leaving,” she replies. “I can’t just let him stay behind, and he’s not going to give up on his entire life’s work.”
I grit my teeth and start pulling her with me. “Do you get how dangerous this is?” I urge her. “I’m talking about your lives here!”
She yanks herself out of my grip. Her eyes flash with anger and fear. “You think I’m stupid?” she snaps. “This is everything we have, Eden! Everything!”
“It’s a shop, Pressa—not your lives!”
“This shop is something that Dad has built all his life. It’s all that keeps us from being homeless. He’s not going to run, so I’m not going to leave his side.” She gives me a bitter glare. “Not that I expect a skyboy like you to understand.”
I release her arm, and she goes hurrying back to her father. Mr. Yu’s now pleading with the people who are trying to shove their way past him.
“Please!” he calls out. “I’ve known many of you for years!”
But the hunger and chaos is building to a breaking point. I see two men suddenly crash through one of the side windows. They stumble into the shop, then start dumping any and every herb and canister they can find into a bag. Others start stepping in.
I curse at the sight. Daniel’s struggling to keep the tide of people from entering through the broken side window, while June stands determined at the front entrance. I shove back a woman clawing her way through another open window.
Pressa shields her father, and together with Marren, they pull him back. Her father’s sobbing now—rivulets run down his face as he tries in vain to tell people to stop taking his medicines. “Please!” he calls over and over again, grabbing a passing sleeve and arm and pant leg whenever he can. “Stop! Please!”
This is going to go wrong. The thought amplifies until it becomes a scream in my head. My heartbeat speeds up until I think it’s going to explode. It’s the feeling of being tied down in a gurney in the seconds right before a soldier shoots my mother.
This is going to go very, very wrong.
I see it happen in slow motion.
A young, bone-thin man with hollow cheeks makes a beeline toward the shop’s entrance, trying to pass underneath Mr. Yu’s outstretched arms. He stumbles in his rush, falls, and hits his face hard against the edge of the doorframe. It cuts a deep gash across his cheeks.
Mr. Yu turns to him. I see a flash of worry cross his eyes—and instead of shoving the young man back out of the store, he bends down to help him.
“Steady,” Mr. Yu says to the young man on the ground as he clutches his face and moans. “That’s a nasty gash. I’ll help you bandage it—”
But the young man whirls on Mr. Yu in a blind fury. Pressa sees the glint in the air at the same time I do. She screams and grabs her father to yank him away, even as he holds the bandages in his hand. I open my mouth and lunge in their direction.
Neither of us reaches him in time. The young man’s knife plunges deep into her father’s stomach. Once. Twice.
Then I slam hard into the man and knock the knife from his hand. The weapon goes spinning to the floor as he and I both fall. Above me, Pressa grabs her father as he clutches his stomach, his watery eyes wide with shock.
The young man struggles with me. He’s surprisingly strong for his size, as if he were fighting for his life. Finally, I kick him off me hard enough to send him skidding against the wall. He hits his head and shakes it, dazed for a moment.
Daniel sees the commotion and rushes over, but it’s already too late. Pressa’s father drops to his knees in the middle of his floor as people stream all around him, running to grab everything from his shelves. Mr. Yu’s face has gone paper white, and he’s shaking uncontrollably. Between his fingers clutching his stomach seeps dark blood.
“Dad!” Pressa’s shouting at him as she helps him lean against the wall of
his shop. She presses her hand against his leaking wounds too. Blood runs across her skin. “Dad!” She looks helplessly up at me. “Call an ambulance! Now!”
But without the Level system, there’s no way to make a proper call to anyone. I dash out into the street in an attempt to grab the nearest police officer I can see—but there are so many people in the streets, some shoving their way into other shops, others trying in vain to stop them. I run back in, bend down beside Mr. Yu, and strip off my thin jacket.
Mr. Yu’s eyes flutter weakly at me before they go to Pressa. His breaths come in irregular beats. He whispers something to her that sounds like he’s telling her to get out of here. She ignores him and keeps trying to stop the flow of blood.
I take Mr. Yu’s hand and hold it tight. Before either of us can do any more, his eyes fade, the light in them dimming to nothing. His trembling stops. One of his hands clutches the bandages that he’d been ready to use to help his killer. They’re stained red now.
Pressa’s hands are still pressed against her father’s wounds. Around us, people stumble forward to the shelves to grab handfuls of herbs and powders, stepping over his body as if he were nothing more than an obstacle.
I realize I’m tugging on Pressa’s arm, telling her we have to leave. She tries to shake me off and go back to what she’s doing. Only when June and Daniel join me do we finally manage to snap Pressa out of her reverie and start pulling her away from the store. Marren flees into the street and turns to watch helplessly as people overrun the store. Only then does Pressa break down in tears against me.
I force my eyes away from the scene around us. No matter how strong the country, no matter how invincible one might seem … there is always a tipping point. Always something that can pull the entire house down.
DANIEL
I know what it feels like to be forced to leave your home behind. I know what it’s like to lose your parent. To feel helpless as the world around you burns.
The girl named Pressa is quiet as we leave the hospital the following morning, where they’ve already covered her father’s body. She doesn’t look at me. She barely speaks to Eden, who has his arm around her in a protective grip.
I feel sorry for her. In her eyes, I can see a mirror of my own grief from the past. I can hear the echo of my screams and the blood on the ground.
“The Elector’s plane takes off in half an hour,” June says in a low voice to me as we walk toward the elevators. “We need to hurry. Your President is heading out soon too.”
I nod at June, then look back again at my brother and his friend. In this moment, it’s as if we’re back on the streets of the Republic, evacuating as the Colonies closed in. But this is no battle from an outside force. This is the consequence of a flawed system, something that had been rotting underneath a glistening exterior.
From the screens in the AIS lobby, we can see the police pushing the Undercity crowds back, clubs out, guns sparking. People falling.
I tear my gaze away from the sight and keep going. My job is to keep Eden safe. And right now, the only path to safety is to get out of this country.
We enter the elevator, now functioning only on emergency backup power.
As we rise toward the top floor, the Elector’s private jet comes into view. I stare at it, the red and black paint streaking the sides of the plane, the angled nose, the lights dotting the platform around it. The entire scene feels surreal.
I fall into step behind June, my brother and Pressa silent at my side. What thoughts must be running through his head? What were his last moments with Dominic Hann like? But I don’t have time to dwell on him before we are inside the jet and seated across from Anden.
As the engines start and the jet lifts into the air, I look out my window and down at the city below us. Smoke rises from the lowest streets, hazing the still-glittering lights on the higher floors. Without the colorful overlays on the city, the place looks more vulnerable than I ever imagined
—the buildings stark white, empty of substance. Tiny dots of people run back and forth on the pathways that connect each of the buildings like a web.
It looks like war. It looks like something I’ve seen all too much of in my life. As we rise higher and the scene below fades behind the clouds, I find myself wondering if there is ever a time in history of peace, if we can ever find a way to escape the cycle of destruction we bring upon ourselves.
If there is, I sure as hell haven’t seen it.
LOS ANGELES
REPUBLIC OF AMERICA
EDEN
I spend the entire twelve hours on the plane sketching one schematic after another.
It’s the same habit that emerges every time I’m trying to distract myself from my anxieties. My drawings are of what I remember from working on Dominic Hann’s device, but they’re not enough—I hadn’t gotten access to everything, and as a result all I end up with is an unfinished idea of how he managed to take down the entire Antarctican system in Ross City in one fell swoop.
“Eden.”
It takes me a while to realize that Pressa is saying my name. I startle out of my sketching to see her staring pointedly at me, a cup of steaming tea in her hands. She puts it on the table before me.
“Thanks,” I mutter, forcing myself to sit back in my seat and wrap my hands around the cup. The heat of it scalds my skin, but the sudden shock feels nice too.
Pressa turns her dark eyes toward the window. She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Thanks for taking me with you,” she says in a low voice.
She’s been quiet for most of the trip, her eyes hollow and red with grief. Now she glances uncomfortably around the Elector’s jet. It’s a luxurious space, its rounded ceiling high and its sides lined with smooth couches and chairs. Behind us, two full-length beds with thick curtains draped over them bookend the back of the plane, along with a bathroom that rivals the one in our apartment.
Her gaze settles again and again on the Elector, who sits at the other end near the front of the plane and talks in low voices with June. Daniel lounges beside her, his face trained idly on the scene outside the windows. Despite his attempts to look like he’s not paying attention to what they’re saying, I can tell he’s taking in every bit of it. Just like how he’s noticing where I am right now and what I’m doing, even though he’d never show it.
Pressa’s eyes dart briefly to my schematics, then up to me. “You’re gonna need to rest if you want to make any more progress, you know,” she finally murmurs. “You’ve been at it nonstop for the entire flight.”
“I know.” I rub my bleary eyes. “I just … The Level system was destroyed because of me. My own engine powered that machine, and I just let it happen. I have to figure this out.”
Her eyes soften at me. “This wasn’t your fault.” “Wasn’t it, though?” I put my cup down in disgust. “I never should have taken you to the drone race.”
“What choice did you have?” I say gently. “You were trying to help your father. And instead, I gave Hann the last piece of the puzzle that he needed.”
And now Mr. Yu was gone. I see fresh pain cross Pressa’s face and bury my head in my hands. Numbers and blueprints crowd my exhausted mind.
Finally, Pressa shakes her head. “Hann would’ve gotten it somehow, with or without you. He couldn’t have moved as fast as he did otherwise.” She leans her elbows against the table between us. “How long must it have taken him to set that up? Months? Years?”
I flip incessantly through my useless sketches. “Long enough that no one noticed him building up that kind of infrastructure.” The only consolation I have is that at least he did use a part of something I’d created. It gives me some starting point to try to figure out the rest of his puzzle, at least. But there isn’t much time for that.
As I think about Hann, I feel a strange tug in my chest of something uncertain. The memory of the man’s grave eyes comes back to me, along with the story he’d told me about what had happened to his family.
You remind me of my son.
Those words of his shouldn’t stick with me. For all I know, they could be a lie. But the grief in his eyes as he’d said them …
He’d let my brother go. He’d let me go.
He’d taken down the very system that Daniel had argued against to his superiors, that I’d hated and defied every chance I could get.
It’s his fault that Pressa’s father is dead, I try to remind myself. But was it Hann who had killed him, or Ross City’s system?
The plane dips slightly, and an announcement from our captain comes on the speakers. I pause to glance out the window and see a familiar outline of land emerging beneath the clouds. The curve of California’s coast.
Suddenly, thoughts of Hann dull as I realize that we are now officially over the waters of the Republic.
On the other side of the plane, Daniel stiffens at the sight and straightens in his seat. For a brief moment, his eyes flicker to mine. I remember the last time we’d visited, how uncomfortable he’d been to return to our homeland.
Now we’re back.
And the Republic is strangely our savior.
* * *
Half an hour later, we’ve emerged from the plane and are headed down the ramparts. I follow quietly behind June and the Elector. Beside me, Pressa clings tightly to my arm as she studies the entrance into Los Angeles’s airport. Everything looks so different here, as if we’d gone back in time to a different era. Towering, brutal columns draped with bold banners of red and black heralding the Elector’s return to his country. Tall, harsh rectangular windows. No augmented overlays or hovering digital images.
Daniel is also unusually silent, his head lowered and his hands shoved into his pockets. Republic soldiers in familiar, formal red-and-black uniforms snap to attention as we pass by. I can see my brother flinch slightly when they move. Even when we’d been here weeks ago for my interview, he was quieter than usual. Every instinct in him must be telling him that these guards are here to kill us, to arrest him, to take away his family.
Suddenly, I feel a rush of guilt at his days spent constantly wandering the Undercity. It’s one thing to hear him tell me how much he wants to leave our past behind. It’s another to see the past haunting every line of his body.
As we’re ushered into the airport, a throng of waiting reporters flock to the railings holding them back. A barrage of cameras clicks into overdrive, and we’re engulfed in a sea of blinding lights and roaring voices.
“Mr. Wing! Mr. Wing! Daniel!” “Commander Iparis!”
“Elector! Elector, over here!”
I blink, taken aback by the onslaught. Ahead of me, Daniel stiffens even more beside June, keeping his head down as the news crews push forward toward us. I put an arm instinctively around Pressa, who has gone wide-eyed at the mess of a scene.
June looks the calmest of all of us. She lifts her head and snaps her fingers at the other guards walking alongside the Elector, and they tighten their formation protectively. Then she presses herself beside Daniel enough for their shoulders to come together. When an overly eager reporter sticks his camera too close to Daniel’s face, June shoves him unceremoniously back.
“Make way! Keep this area clear!” Her voice is unwavering and efficient.
The reporters part obediently, but then keep trailing us in a constant tide. “Daniel! Eden! Over here!”
I turn at the familiar voice.
There, in the midst of the crowds gathered to see the Elector’s—and Daniel’s—arrival, is Tess, her face as bright as ever and her arm waving high over others’ heads.
She doesn’t try going up to June, who’s technically still in formation and guarding the Elector, but I do see the two exchange a grin and wink. Then Tess darts away from the Elector’s entourage and makes a beeline for us.
I’d first seen her again a month ago, when we’d returned to the Republic for my interview. I hadn’t recognized much in her then of the little girl I remembered—small, uncertain, with hunched shoulders and wide eyes, always wringing her hands. She’d grown tall and straight-backed, her hair cut into a short brown bob, her movements confident and precise to match her surgeon demeanor. But the glint in her eyes, the bright echo in her voice … that stayed. And it’s still here now.
She waits until we’ve emerged and the guards allow her through, then steps toward us and throws her arms around Daniel’s neck.
My brother doesn’t hesitate. He wraps his arms around her and hugs her so tightly that he lifts her slightly off the ground. Cameras around us click wildly. As he puts her back down, he tweaks her nose the same way he used to do to me as a child. She protests, shoving him in the shoulder. Like his second sibling. He just laughs.
It makes me realize how long it’s been since I’ve heard such a lighthearted sound come from him.
“Welcome back,” she exclaims, beaming at him, then looking over to Pressa and me. Her hand comes up to pat my cheek. “You haven’t been sleeping well since the last time I saw you.”
“I’m fine now,” I say, trying not to let my embarrassment show. Nearby, Pressa watches with an uncertain look on her face.
Tess smiles shyly at her before she holds out her hand. Pressa takes it, and Tess shakes it once.
“This is Pressa,” I tell her. “A friend of mine.”
What I want to say is my best friend, my confidante, the girl who makes me bolder than I think I can be. But a friend of mine just comes out. It sounds careless, even cold.
“Nice to meet you,” Tess says to her, and she manages a smile back.
“Likewise,” Pressa answers. But I can see a slight tension in the way she steps away from me.
Several cars are waiting for us at the airport’s loading zone. Pressa and I follow Daniel into a second car. June and Tess climb into the seats in front of us. The doors shut, and the din from outside fades to a hum of noise. Here, Daniel’s shoulders relax and he leans back against the leather headrests. The Republic may not have the high tech of Antarctica—there aren’t auto-cars or rails running everywhere here—but it’s kind of comforting. Our driver, a Republic soldier, gives us all a terse nod before he follows the Elector’s train of cars as they pull onto the road ahead.
“News about Antarctica has been all over the news here,” Tess says as she swivels around in her seat to look back at us. “Is it true, what happened to their Level system? I thought that was supposed to be completely secure.”
“Nothing’s completely secure,” Daniel says in the silence afterward. “We didn’t know how fast it could go down, though. Everything works until it doesn’t.”
“Now what?” June looks from Daniel to me, her eyes quicksilver as bars of sunlight and shadow slide through the car’s interior. “What is this man’s plan?”
Daniel shakes his head. “You crumble a place’s foundation, crack its walls, and anything can get in. There are fires in the streets—everything’s chaos. And chaos is exactly what someone like Dominic Hann likes best.”
There’s real anger in his voice. With this blow, Hann is going to take advantage of this mask of liberation to seize power for himself. In chaos, monsters rise quickly.
Whether or not Hann actually is a monster … I’m still not sure.
Tess frowns at us, then shakes her head. “We all know what chaos can do,” she says impatiently, waving a hand at us. “But I think what June’s asking is what he wants to do with that chaos. Specifically.”
At that, Pressa straightens beside me, shaken out of her daze at the overwhelming introduction to the Republic. She tilts her head at Tess. “I hadn’t thought about that,” she says. “Hann’s taken down the entire system. What if he knows enough about it to bring it back up? Put it back in place and change it to suit him?”
Tess nods back at her. “It’s what a dictator would do,” she replies. “Pure anarchy is never what they’re going for.”
A thought snaps into place. Sometimes I forget that Tess is a girl who had scraped by on the streets and barely survived the same revolution we had.
She’s no stranger to understanding how a society falls apart.
It seems like an obvious next step. Why would Hann go as far as taking down a system of control just to throw it away?
And suddenly, I find myself thinking about my schematic doodles in a different light. I dig into my pocket and bring all the papers out in a crinkly mess. Then I straighten them in my lap. Pressa looks over my shoulder as I do.
No wonder there were so many parts of the machine that felt to me like they didn’t need to exist. Maybe it’s because the machine was never meant to just take down the Level system. Maybe Hann’s invention is also designed to bring it back up.
When I glance up, I see Daniel’s eyes locked on mine. This, at least, is something he recognizes in me—when he sees the flash of an idea on my face.
“What are you thinking, Eden?” he asks.
It’s time for someone else to run this place. Hann’s last words to me flash through my thoughts, searing and clear.
“What if Hann is going to rebuild it?” I say automatically. “The Level system, I mean?” I point to several parts of the machine that I hadn’t figured out. “What if he’s going to implement a new system, one that has him at the helm?”
The pause that follows is thick and ominous.
June finally nods at me. “How much do you know about his device?” she asks.
“Not enough,” I reply.
“Any is better than none.” She raises an eyebrow at me. “I hate to say it, but your meddling might be just the thing that takes Hann down.”
DANIEL
Everything about the Republic feels familiar and strange.
I’m quiet as I walk with June during sunset through the streets of inner Los Angeles, where we’d met so long ago. When I’d first come back here with Eden, I hadn’t had the time or guts to wander through my old haunts. Now that I do, I remember why I’d hesitated.
June walks with me, content to let me take it all in. Antarctica’s slick high-rises and chaotic, jumbled floors are a distant world compared with this place. The red-gold haze hovering over the lake in downtown Los Angeles, iron waterwheels churning in the water. The smell of fried dough and boiled goose eggs and pygmy-pig hot dogs filling the streets. The divide between the rich and poor, the Gem districts and the other districts, still stark. These images are clear between the holes in my memory, and with them, I think I can piece together the rest of what my childhood had been on these streets.
But there are things I don’t recognize. No more Xs spray-painted against doors. No more plague patrols haunting the streets of my own neighborhood. There are vegetable gardens now, patches of green striping the ground here and there, the result of people being allowed to create and sell products. And most of all …
Scaffolding. Everywhere. Buildings—crumbling towers, subpar housing—are being torn down and built back up again, and the bones of steel construction sites line the horizon. Plans for parks, private shops, safer neighborhoods.
“It’s been a decade,” June says as she notices my gaze lingering on the horizon’s cranes. As always, she is breaking down my thoughts. “But change is still slow to come. Anden has been trying to bridge this gap with some new work projects. We can’t afford any of this, but Anden’s confident he can get international investments to keep our pace going. I hope he’s right.”
My thoughts waver from the Republic to the feeling of June’s smooth hand sliding into mine. She edges closer to me as we near the water. The awkwardness between us is still there, lingering, but at least it’s been dulled. I savor her touch. The memory of her in my arms several nights earlier comes back to me now in a wave of warmth. Somehow, beside her, this whirlwind of lost memories and dark places stills in me, and I can remember things better.
I pause at an intersection marked with the edge of the lake on one side and a pair of towers rising up on the other. One of the towers is old, just as I remember it—ramshackle layers of concrete long streaked by water and grime, the lowest floor a barely lit entrance to a bar and the upper floors made colorful with lines of drying clothes and plants draping haphazardly down rusted balcony ledges.
The other tower is new, a structure of straight lines and polished stone, its sides draped with crimson-and-black Republic banners. Over the steps leading up to the entrance are words I’ve never seen engraved on a building here: REPUBLIC HISTORY MUSEUM.
I look at June, and she gives me a terse nod. “Come on.” She tugs slightly on my hand and starts making her way up the stairs. “They just finished it this year.”
I nod wordlessly and follow her. It’s better than standing in the middle of the street, lost in memories I don’t want. Trying to keep the fear of my past at bay.
Inside, curators in red and black stand at the entrances of the museum’s many rooms. They bow their heads in recognition at the sight of us. Our boots echo against the stone floors.
We stare at the exhibits in silence. This is a memorial to the horrors of the past. The child-size outfit of a Trial taker, plain and white, now framed and hanging. A plague patrol uniform encased within glass, its gas mask rusted and faceless. Portraits of the late Elector and those who came before him, all lining the back wall. Anden had banned his portrait being hung everywhere not long after the end of the war with the Colonies. I guess one of them ended up in here.
We step between the rooms without speaking. There are old videos from the JumboTrons, the pledge that we used to recite every morning, giant maps hanging by steel cables from the ceiling, indicating how and where the borders of America had changed over the years. There are even rooms dedicated to America before the Republic, when we were
unified with the Colonies. I stare, overwhelmed, at placards describing the events that led up to the war that divided us. They’ve named it Coranda’s War, after the young general who first staged a coup and became the first Elector Primo of the Republic.
They don’t call it the Civil War. There had already been one that split the nation before, hundreds of years ago, during a time when the enslavement of human beings was legal based on nothing but the color of one’s skin. There is an entire room dedicated to that, to the unified, sinister America before we existed.
We linger in this room so long that the curators have to ask us to leave as they close for the night. I don’t say a word. Maybe the United States was only ever united for some. Maybe this place has always been a dystopia.
The sun is dipping below the clouds as we step out of the museum’s entrance again, and the light against the haze on the lake casts the sky and water in gold. I stand there with June for a moment, taking in the intersection.
“There used to be a row of pawn shops and food stalls where this museum now is,” I finally say, then point to the bar across the street. “I first met Kaede there.” The memories are scattered and broken—a faded image of a dim interior, an Asian girl with a vine tattoo on her neck leaning over the bar counter to give me a clue. Then, a narrow alley, a crowd gathered in dirty, dingy rings, their voices hoarse from yelling. Me, watching a young Tess cut her way through the throngs to place a bet for us.
“This is where I first saw you,” I say in a low voice, my eyes lingering on the narrow street between the two towers. The space is empty now, the shouts of those Skiz duel gamblers nothing more than an echo from the past.
June’s face is serious. She doesn’t turn in the direction of the alley, and I realize with a jolt that it’s because it reminds her of the darkest time in her life, because I recognize the same grim look in her eyes as I’d seen back then. The memory sparks in me, clear and in focus, another piece of her puzzle coming back to me.
“I don’t like coming here,” she finally says in a quiet voice. “It reminds me too much of his death. Of everything that happened after.”
She doesn’t need to say her brother’s name. Metias. I try to remember the first time I’d seen him, and I can’t. To me, he’s nothing but a blur of a
Republic uniform in the night. Instead, I see an image of John, his jacket thrown over his shoulder as he heads home wearily from a long shift at the factory. I recall him reading by candlelight, one word, slowly and steadily, after another.
June has adjusted better than any of us. But even so, she’s afraid of the past. Just like I am. We may not be the same people we used to be. Maybe we’ll never find our way back to that place. But we bear the same scars from the same old wounds.
I reach out and touch her hand. “You’re here,” I reply, pulling her close. “Living in the future, changing the world around you. He’ll always be a part of your story.”
She leans into me, and I close my eyes as she rests her chin against my shoulders, her straight, confident body suddenly tired. She doesn’t answer. She knows I understand what it’s like to love a brother, to hurt for one’s absence, and to worry for the one who’s still here.
“You need to talk to him,” she says, pulling away too soon. Her eyes turn up to me. “Eden. He is you now, in the position you were once in.”
I put my hands in my pockets again and look out at the shining water. “He’s the only one of us who has any understanding at all of Dominic Hann’s work. It’s not the first time a nation has suddenly come to rest on his shoulders. He needs to know that you get him, Daniel. That you can see the past like he does, not like we do. That you’ll be there for him now.
He can’t move forward and figure this out without you.”
See the past like he does.
I look in the direction of where our current residence is, a sleek condo far off in a Gem district. I think of Eden’s faraway look, his haunted expression when the house is quiet and he thinks no one is around. I think of the defiant anger in his gaze whenever we argue. He had learned that from both his older brothers, from John and from me. And maybe, in my singular drive to protect him, I’ve never acknowledged that he can use his defiance in the same way John and I once had. To change things.
Some pasts can’t be left behind. They must be fought.
* * *
When the sun finally goes down, Los Angeles transforms back into the evening view I know so well—the dark, grungy streets, pockets of the city grid dark as some sectors have scheduled blackouts in order to conserve electricity.
I’m perched on a ledge overlooking our place when Eden heads into the entrance. He expects me, because he automatically turns his head up without me even moving a muscle.
“Spying again?” he calls up at me with a raised brow.
I shrug, turning my eyes up to the sprinkle of city lights leading toward the horizon. “Just idling until you came home. Not like there isn’t a precedent for you being in trouble when you go missing.”
I hop down from the ledge and lean against the apartment entrance. He’s pale, and I can tell that behind his hesitant exterior is a deep undercurrent of guilt over everything that had happened. Deep, dark circles rim the bottom of his eyes.
A flicker of pain washes over me. Hann had done this to him. But so had I.
“Hey,” I say quietly, nodding toward the Lake sector’s skyline. Just studying the familiar cityscape sends another current of fear and dread through me. But this time, I force it away. I have to do this for him. “I’m going out for a run. Come join me?”
Eden’s eyes widen slightly in surprise. He knows I’ve never really trusted his physical capabilities, and the invitation catches him off guard. It only twists the knife deeper in my chest. Had I tried protecting him every chance I could, only to turn into yet another person who has hurt him?
Then, to my relief, Eden nods. A faint smile hovers on his lips. “Sure.
But you’re gonna have to lead the way.”
EDEN
Daniel’s definition of a run, of course, is different from everyone else’s. In all the years he’s spent darting across roofs and shimmying slick as oil between balconies and railings, he has never asked me to come with him or taught me how he does it or even mentioned where he goes. The one time when I was fourteen and tried to follow him up the side of a wall, I fell on my back and hit my tailbone hard enough to limp for several days.
“Where are we going?” I ask him now as we head out of our complex. We’re dressed in comfortable clothes—loose pants scrunched at the ankles, soft hooded jackets, shoes with good traction. Nervous energy buzzes in my head.
Daniel doesn’t seem bothered. He walks in front of me with the absolute assurance of someone who knows where he’s going. His mess of blond hair bounces with each step he takes. I try to keep pace with his strides.
“How well do you think you know the Lake District?” he says to me over his shoulder.
I shrug. It’s hard to think about our old neighborhood when we’re staying in the middle of this Gem district. “I remember our street,” I reply. “John’s factory. Mom’s workplace. The alleys where we used to play street hockey. Why?”
In the night, shadows cut across Daniel’s face and hide his expression from view. He casts me a sidelong glance as he turns us in the direction of the humbler districts. It’s easy to see them from this hilltop view, the areas of the city where lights turn sparse.
“Just follow me,” he says, turning into a narrow street that leads to a set of tracks. “I figure it’s time I show you what my memory of our past looks like.” It’s an old subway stop, the concrete thick with layers of graffiti. My brother nods down the track to where the first glimmers of a train’s light
flicker in the darkness.
“Keep close to me,” he says. “We’re going to take it easy today, but over
time, I’ll show you how I make my way through tougher areas of the city.”
Over time. “You mean, you’re going to take me with you on some of your outings in Ross City?”
He gives me a brief smile as the subway pulls up to a stop. “I’ll think about it,” he replies. “If there’s a Ross City to return to.” Then he ushers us into the train, and the glass doors close behind us.
Half an hour later, we emerge onto the cracked, humble streets of Lake.
I have a vague recollection of this intersection—it’s where I used to walk through on my way to school, at least before everything happened. I look curiously on as Daniel walks up to the building wall of an alley and tests his boot against the crumbling brick. Then he steps back and points up to show me.
“See this?” he says, touching the cracks in the brick. “If you step up on something at this height, you should be able to grab on to the second floor’s ledge.” Before I can respond, he backs up a bit, then darts at the wall and kicks off against the brick. He reaches up and swings himself onto the ledge, then shimmies over to the closest balcony he sees. I look on, stunned, as he swings his legs over the balcony railings and then hops up to perch against them.
“Okay,” I say slowly, eyeing the brick. “Just give me a sec.”
On my first try, my boot slips against the brick and I fall on my back. It takes me four more tries before I finally grip on well enough to grab the second-floor ledge. Then I pull myself up laboriously, inching carefully along the wall until I reach the balcony. Daniel grabs my arm and helps me climb over it.
I eye him, waiting for him to scold me for being careless, for that worried light to appear in his eyes. But he just shrugs. “The more you practice, the easier it’ll get,” he replies. “If you end up in trouble in the Undercity again, you’ll know how to make a quick escape.”
I look at him in surprise. “You’d actually be okay with me going down to the Undercity by myself?”
He gives me a withering look. “After everything we’ve already been through with Hann? You wandering the Undercity sounds like day care.” He nods to the side of the building, where a thick pair of cables crisscrosses between the alley’s two buildings. “Come on. I’ll show you where I used to stay.”
I follow him gingerly onto the cables. He steps rapidly along them, as sure-footed as if he were walking on the street. Where he used to stay. “John
always said you never strayed far from the house,” I call to him as I try to keep my balance.
“I never told John about all the places I went,” he replies. “It was safer that way.”
Daniel waits patiently as I take an extra few minutes to cross the wires. Then we make our way onto a flat rooftop, and from there, take a metal ladder up another floor. With each step, we go deeper into the heart of Lake, until I can see the vast, dark shoreline, the water lapping idly below us. I’m drenched in sweat by now, and my breath comes shallow as I try to keep pace with Daniel.
Finally, he stops us on a street crowded with crooked sheds and shuttered stalls, all closed for the night. I’ve never been this way before. Trash piles in heaps on the sides of the streets, and tattered clothes line the sides of each stall. It looks like some kind of marketplace.
Daniel nods up at the second story of stalls stacked on top of the first. He points to an empty one, then the shadows behind it. I follow him up the side of the first-floor stalls until our boots clang against the tin metal sheets of the roofs. The second level of stalls is low enough that we have to duck our heads. Daniel leads us into the shadows where the stalls are stacked against the wall.
Here, the wall itself is crumbling away, so that there are tiny concave pockets of loose brick hidden behind the second-story stalls’ cloth drapes. It’s just enough space for a person to curl up without being seen.
Daniel crouches here for a moment, his eyes distant. His entire body is tense, and his hands fiddle restlessly. He swallows hard. It looks like it’s taking everything in him to be back here.
“When I first started roaming the streets,” he says, “I’d end up looking for these crumbling pockets in the markets. They were high and dry, for the most part, and the street police wouldn’t bother you if they did a sweep through the neighborhood. You could get a decent night’s sleep and no one would ever know you were in there.”
I stare in disbelief at the tiny pocket of space. It’s filthy and dark, littered with brick and dirt. “You’d sleep here?” I whisper.
He nods. “For years. It wasn’t so bad. I liked that it was right in the markets. Made it easier to steal food.”
His lips have tightened now. I look at him, wondering what kind of effort it takes for him to dredge these memories up. He has never talked about the details of his street life with me before. I knew nothing about how he
survived, what he had to do, where he had to live. Now I try to picture my brother—the legend of the Republic, the star of Ross City—curled into a tight ball in this pitiful place, scrounging for a meal.
And I’d never understood. I’d never bothered to understand his abhorrence of this kind of surrounding.
He shakes his head at me, then starts climbing back down the side of the stalls. I follow him.
He leads me to the back alleys behind the markets, pointing out the trash bins. They are overflowing, with heaps of garbage piled around them. “This hasn’t changed much since I lived here,” he tells me as we walk. “Another place you could get food, albeit during more desperate nights. Sometimes Tess and I would camp in alleys like this one. The street police only did their sweeps through here every other night, you know. Lack of funding and manpower.”
He pauses at the end of the alley, then points out to the water. “See that?” he says.
I look closely. Rising out of the water some fifty yards from the shoreline is an old, abandoned skyscraper, hollowed out and long gutted for parts, its skeleton towering dark and foreboding against the night. These structures litter the entire lake.
Daniel hops onto the end of a dilapidated, abandoned pier leading out into the water. He nods for me to follow. I do. Together, we make our way along the pier’s rotting floorboards, hopping over parts where it’s all caved into the lake. As we reach the end of it, Daniel jumps onto the lowest floor of the skyscraper rising out of the water.
I take a running start, then collapse to my knees beside him. He gives me a grim smile as we settle against the edge of the building.
“John always told us to stay away from the lake when we were kids,” I finally say through my gasps of breath. “He said these skyscrapers were full of dangerous folk.”
Daniel nods. “He wasn’t wrong. You had to be careful which towers you chose to stay in, which floors you ventured on. Gangs would rotate in and out on these structures. I had to make sure I stayed out of their way and remembered what the schedules were. But it’s the nicest place that me and Tess were able to find. Whenever we had a chance to stay on these towers on the lake, we considered that a lucky day.”
A stone sinks to the bottom of my chest. I’ve always known, to some extent, why he’s never told me his stories—why he doesn’t seem like he
wants to remember our home, or seems so eager to stay in the Sky Floors of Ross City. I knew, and yet I didn’t know at all. I’ve never walked these streets like he has, never understood what he faced out here every day, a child with a family he could never contact.
I was always drawn to the humble streets of Lake, always despised the luxurious ignorance of our current home.
But I never had to fend for myself in Lake, either.
The screaming, the blur of soldiers in our home. The sound of a shot to our mother’s head. The past crowds into my head, loud and relentless.
Daniel watches me quietly. What he sees in my expression, he doesn’t say, but after a while, he looks away and leans back on one arm. “How much do you remember of John?” he asks.
An old, rusty memory appears of Daniel and me waiting around our dining table, impatient for John to come home from his work shift so that we could eat. My oldest brother’s weary smile, his cheeks still red from heat and exhaustion, his arms outstretched as I’d dash from the table to greet him.
Enough nights pass now when I forget that we had another brother. The realization makes me flush with shame. “Not as much as I wish I did,” I reply.
Daniel smiles. “John was the one who taught me how to change your diapers, you know.”
Now it’s my turn to smile. “That’s not where I thought this conversation would go.”
“Who do you think was in charge of you as a baby when Mom had to work late shifts?” Daniel raises an eyebrow at me. “John would drag me over to the table where he’d change you, and the two of us would hover over you, arguing about the best way to pin a fresh cloth diaper on you while you screamed your head off. It was the worst goddy chore in the world. He taught me how to put you to sleep and how to tell if you were sick. I almost burned down our house once when I was trying to boil you some mashed carrots. John almost killed me for that one.”
I try to picture two young boys bickering with each other while an infant version of me looked on. I try to imagine Daniel frantically putting out a kitchen fire while John watched in horror. The thought is so ridiculous that I can’t help a laugh from escaping my throat.
Daniel laughs once, too, and shakes his head. “I used to fight with him even more than I do with you. Everything was a battle. He hated how impulsive I was, how sometimes I’d stand in the street and complain about the police loud enough for everyone to hear. How many questions I’d ask
about why Republic soldiers had roughed up our father or where he’d gone. I lost count of the number of times he had to drag me home after I’d gotten in some argument about Republic history with the kids at school. He was convinced I’d get myself killed someday with my carelessness, or that you’d pick up my bad habits.” He sighs. “I guess he wasn’t wrong.”
A breeze sweeps past us, bringing with it the scent of a Lake night—fried street food, smoke, briny water. I cross my legs and try to ignore the sudden lump that rises in my throat. “I should have listened to you,” I finally say, my voice so quiet that I can barely hear myself.
“I couldn’t protect you any more than John could protect me. You’ve seen the wrong in this world, powerful forces that no brother could ever hope to hide from you. And no matter what John did—or what I do—those things stay with us forever.”
I start shaking my head. “John shouldn’t have had that burden. You
shouldn’t have.”
“Keeping you from the truth of the world only made it worse for you.” Daniel gives me a sad smile. “This place was your home too. Every single one of these rotting streets, these back alleys. This is where we were all raised, yeah? But I’m so afraid of this place, Eden. I’m afraid, even now. I wanted to hide it from you, like somehow that would keep you from being drawn back to it, so that you’d never have to know what it was like.” He shakes his head and stares out at the water. “Like somehow, us leaving this all behind meant that it didn’t exist anymore.”
I look out into the darkness, the voices crowding in my head. As always, I can feel myself pulling away, trying to shield the jumbled mess in my mind from Daniel, to turn it inward and let it churn there until it all fades again into the background. But it doesn’t fade.
Daniel’s looking at me now, and I realize it’s because there are tears streaming down my cheeks. I hadn’t even noticed when I started crying. Embarrassed, I wipe them angrily away and try to force myself back into a state of calm. But the tears keep coming. I can’t stop them.
Daniel reaches out and seizes both of my wrists in his hands. “Look at me,” he says, his eyes locking on to mine. They are fierce in the night, and in them I see the same brother who had once stood up to an entire nation. “It is not weakness to open your heart. It does not make you less of a man to ask for help. To turn to someone when you’re vulnerable. To need a shoulder to cry on. You don’t have to bear the weight of anything by yourself. Do you understand me? I know what it’s like to be forced to go it alone. I never want
you to feel that way.”
I find myself nodding through my tears, wishing I could have turned to him sooner, wishing I could be more like him in every way. “I see them every night,” I say to him, my words breaking. “They’re there every time I close my eyes. I jump at every sound. I see a soldier in every person standing at a corner. I thought—I thought if I could just drown it all out in the Undercity, if I could replace it with something else so loud and overwhelming, that it might go away—I thought if I could just see the Republic again, return home and understand my past…”
The pain in Daniel’s eyes is raw and real. The fear of this was what had kept me silent for so long. He nods once, his hands firmly on my shoulders. “I see them too,” he says quietly. “I should have talked to you about my nightmares. I can’t expect you to open up to me if I don’t do the same.”
I nod again. “I’m sorry. I—”
“Don’t be.” His eyes soften, and he pulls me into a hug. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
It is his embrace that finally breaks my last barrier. I cry and cry and cry. I cry because I’d never let myself truly understand my own brother, because I’d never understood myself. I cry for all the lives that our pasts have set on different paths—for June’s loss of her family, for Tess’s loss of her childhood, for Daniel becoming a parent when he was himself just a boy. I cry because I’m grateful that we still, in spite of everything, have all found each other.
Because sometimes, broken pieces find a way to make a new whole.
DANIEL
When we finally return to our apartment in the dark hours of the morning, Eden showers and collapses into a deep sleep. He doesn’t stir again until the sun has already risen high in the sky. At least he doesn’t seem to be dreaming.
I spend most of the time awake, leaning against our balcony railing, watching the headlines and videos rotate on the city’s JumboTrons. News about what’s happening in Antarctica comes out in a steady stream. I watch the screens and see tanks roll through the Undercity, making their way down streets full of bonfires and angry people. There are police struggling to contain the chaos.
ROSS CITY IN FLAMES AS TROOPS, BROKEN VIRTUAL SYSTEM STRUGGLE
The President has called for an emergency meeting today in Batalla. But while all the politicians try to hash out a plan, time is ticking by. My lips tighten in frustration. The advantage that Hann has always had is the ability to ignore laws entirely. It was my advantage on the streets too. When you aren’t accountable to anything, you can move pretty goddy fast.
I look away, sick, as police surround a protester and swing their batons down at her body. The rest of the crowds raise their fists, cheering for Hann. He had wanted to make his point about the city’s corrupt system. He’s just willing to sacrifice all the people he claims to be fighting for in the process.
By the time my brother gets up, the sun has started to paint the sky gold.
I glance at him with a wry smile. “You look awful,” I say.
Eden lets out a single laugh as he limps over to join me. He’s holding his drone in one hand, its engine glowing with a faint blue light. “I don’t
know how you climb all over the city like that without being completely useless the next day. My legs are killing me.”
I offer him a sip of my coffee. He takes it, cupping the hot mug between his hands, and we’re silent for a moment while the light turns steadily stronger. Eden tosses the drone in the air, and we watch as it hovers in place, steady and straight. Eden seems lost in thought, but I don’t push him. There’s a new ease in the quiet between us.
Finally, he straightens and nods out at the horizon, in the direction of Antarctica.
“I saw the news,” he says. “The Antarctican military has imposed martial law on Ross City.”
I shake my head. “No call signals are getting out of the city right now. It’s like no one knows how to function without the Level system in place.” For us, who came from the humble streets of Lake, functioning on days when the power grid died was something we were used to dealing
with. But a place like Ross City suddenly stripped of its technology?
Eden moves his fingers idly in the air, and his drone shifts to match his gesture, swerving right and then left. He frowns thoughtfully. “Hann said that his device would wipe the entire Level system clean,” he says. “But something about what Pressa said yesterday stuck with me. She mentioned that Hann might have taken down the entire system so that he could bring it back up again. Replace it with something to suit him.”
I nod. “But?”
He shakes his head. His fingers move again, and the drone obeys, flipping once in the air. “It’s stupid to dismantle the entire system only to rebuild it all over again. I don’t think he wiped it all clean. I think it’s just suppressed somehow, that he did something to disrupt the implementation of the system, but that it’s all still there somewhere. Intact. It’s much easier for him to work with something like that.” He shrugs. “I wouldn’t dismantle my drone completely if I wanted to change it. I’d just revise it.”
I look on, marveling at the invention of his drone as it turns this way and that, its power source strong and stable. “Are you saying you might know how he did that?”
There’s a long pause, but when Eden finally nods, I note the light in his eyes. “I’m saying I can find a way to reverse it. He’s using the engine that I built to power it. If I can get back into his circle, I can find a way to shut the whole thing down and get the Level system back up.”
To prove his point, he waves his drone back into the balcony and lets it hover between us. Then he reaches for it, sliding his finger underneath the glowing engine. The engine gives a sudden, strange noise, and then it shuts abruptly down, clattering to the balcony floor.
I look back at my brother. The old fear rises in my chest, and images flash through my mind of him captured in the Undercity, his face pale and frightened. “But you’d need to be back in his good graces to do it,” I say, echoing his words. “You have to find him, yeah?”
He nods. “The machine needs a physical chip installed on it. I have to do it physically.”
The terror of not knowing where the Republic had taken him; the uncertainty of what was being done to him; the paranoia of ever letting him go again. It all rises back up in my chest. Eden can see it on my face, because he leans toward me and fixes his steady gaze on mine.
“You told me last night that I don’t ever have to go it alone,” he says. “Well, that goes for you too. I can do this, if you let me. But I’m going to need your help. June’s too.”
Everything in me wants to pull him back, tell him to stay here, stay safe. But I know he’s right. His silhouette is long and lanky now, no longer the small boy I once carried through a war-torn street. There are no guarantees that he’ll come out of this safely—that any of us will. But I also know, without a doubt, that he’s the only one who can do this.
At last, I nod. “What do you need from us?”
“A diversion. I need to convince Hann that I’ve decided to go rogue from what you and the others are planning to do, that I want in on his plans. Come back to Ross City with me. Find ways to slow him down. If you and June then go after his device with what little we do know, if you’re acting from the outside, then maybe I can convince Hann that I’m helping him keep it safe from you.”
It’s ridiculous. Too dangerous to play this kind of game with a mobster who has survived his entire life on tricks and double crosses. Hann is going to figure this out, and then my brother will be completely at his mercy.
But I still find myself nodding at him. “I’m in,” I say.
He blinks, and I realize that he’d been expecting me to push back. “Do we go to the President with this plan today? Do you think they’ll agree to this?”
I shrug. “There’s no way in hell any of them will—not in a meeting,
anyway. But that doesn’t change anything we’re planning to do. We don’t have time to wait around watching them debate issues.”
He looks at me in confusion. “You mean you’re going to go behind the AIS’s back on this? On the government?”
His words bring a smile to my face. My brother—the rulebreaker who has made me panic more times than I can count—has never actually rebelled on the world stage. The old part of me, the wildling from the streets, the boy who’d spent his life running the city and dodging the Republic, stirs.
I shake my head. “I’m such a bad influence on you.”
At that, a grin creeps onto his lips too. “You mean, we’re just going to go?”
“As soon as we can sneak out of this country. By the time we discuss it with them, they’ll have no choice but to agree.”
“They’re going to kill you for this.”
I give him a sidelong grin. “They can try.”
We laugh a little at that, then fall back into silence. “What if we’re doing the wrong thing, Daniel?” Eden asks me. His voice is grave again. “What if restoring the entire system is exactly what shouldn’t happen?”
I look at my brother and take a deep breath. “Then maybe we don’t restore it to exactly what it was,” I finally reply.
I study his face, taking in how serious he is. “What are you planning?” I say.
“I can add a chip to the machine that tweaks how it handles the Level system.” He digs papers out of his pocket and waves me over to the desk. There, we bend over it as he points out where his engine is installed. “The machine pulses a signal through the city’s entire Level system,” he explains as he scribbles. “So we pulse a new signal through it that tells the Level system what to do.” He glances up at me. “Maybe we add some things to that signal that changes how the Level system judges people hooked up to it.”
I frown at him. “And you can do this before we leave?” he asks.
“It’s the machine that’s complicated to put together. Not the signal. Once you understand how it works, you can run another signal through easily. I watched them test one, and it took a matter of minutes.”
I think of the late nights I’d seen him up before, as a small boy and as a young man. The light of creation is bright in his eyes now, and as I consider his words, my emotions gradually alternate from uncertainty to
wary hope. “A rebellion within a rebellion,” I murmur.
Eden smiles a little. “Never let it be said that we take the easy way out.”
 |
June seems even less enthusiastic about the plan than I am. But she still shows up at our apartment late in the afternoon, her outfit simple and black, her voice hushed. Beside her, Pressa has a backpack that makes her look even more petite than she is, but she stands tall and confident, the grief in her gaze now replaced with resolution.
“If they come after our plane and we’re forced to stop, let me handle it,” June says. “I swear, somehow these things only ever happen when I’m with you two.”
I lean against the doorway and smile down at her. “You’re the one who agreed to help us.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t come.” She shrugs. “Anden will forgive me. It has to be done.”
I reach for her hand and brush her fingers with mine. “Thank you,” I murmur. My eyes skip to Pressa, who has unzipped her backpack and is handing something over to Eden. It looks like a small package of glass vials.
“This is a serum for Hann’s lung infection,” she says. “The way Eden describes his hoarse voice reminds me of the later stages of my dad’s illness. So I used to make this serum for him out of some of the herbs we carried. It’s not a cure, so don’t tell him that it is. He won’t believe you. But it should improve how he feels if he takes it every day.” She replaces the vials and gives the backpack to Eden.
“And it’s swallowed?” Eden asks.
“Swallowed.” Pressa nods. “But I did make one change. Hann’s serum contains a powerful sleeping drug. It’ll knock him out pretty hard and give him a slight fever that will throw off his judgment and strength. Give him a heavy enough dose of the serum, and it’ll stop his heart entirely.”
Trying to poison Hann will be a risky move. I bet he’s survived dozens of such attempts. Still, Eden gives Pressa a grim nod. My brother’s feelings for her are on full display here. I can see it in the way he pulls her in for a hug and how tightly he holds her, the faint blush on his cheeks as she smiles and hugs him back. In them, I see the early signs of how,
despite our backgrounds, June and I had first come together.
Finally, we’re ready to head out. “Your signal?” I say to Eden.
He nods. His face is paler than it should be, and his hands are trembling slightly. But he seems calm enough as he holds up a tiny chip, so small that it could sit on the tip of his smallest finger. “Got it,” he replies.
As the President prepares to host his political meeting with the Elector, we take an unmarked military car to the airfield and into a plane that June has somehow gotten for us. The soldier who salutes us as we board is sweating up a storm. He doesn’t meet our eyes. June stops, though, to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll vouch for you,” she says. “Thank you for your help. The Elector himself will pardon you—I give you my word.”
He shuffles his feet. “Of course, Commander,” he replies to June.
We take off in silence. The plane has been airborne for only a half hour before a call comes in, right as we clear the waters of the Republic. The pilot’s voice flickers on overhead, and we all tilt our heads up as her apologetic words fill the air.
“Commander Iparis,” she says regretfully. “The Elector Primo has ordered me to patch him through. He would like a word with you.”
June doesn’t even blink. “Of course, ma’am,” she replies. I find myself marveling, yet again, at how cool and calm she can be even in the most stressful circumstances.
There’s a pause, followed by Anden’s deep, familiar voice. He sounds more weary than furious. “Hello, Commander,” he says, addressing June. “I assume, as usual, that you have a good reason for leaving the country without notifying me?”
June looks a little guilty at his tone. “As always,” she agrees. “It has everything to do with the emergency that you are currently discussing with President Ikari. We thought it best to discuss it with you while the plan is in action. There’s no time to waste.”
“Is Daniel Wing with you, then?” Another voice comes on—and this time, it’s Director Min’s. She sounds less formal than Anden, and much more livid.
“I’m here,” I say, glancing at my brother. “With Eden.”
“And do you have an explanation for this? Or should I have you all court-martialed the instant you land in Ross City?” She sighs. “I’ll have you know that the President is sitting with us as we speak. He would like
to know why I can’t seem to wrangle one of my agents into line.”
“You know it has nothing to do with you, Director,” I reply evenly. “President Ikari, sir, the director has been nothing but gracious to me. But there are policies in place in Ross City that have her hands tied, and in turn, they tie my hands. With deepest respect, sir, the best way we have right now of confronting this crisis is for us to act against those policies you have in place.” I smile a little, even though I know they can’t see us. “Of course, we can discuss it now. If you like.”
There’s a pause, then the sigh of a man that I’ve never communicated directly with before. “Enlighten us, then, Mr. Wing,” he says. It’s a voice I’ve only ever heard in broadcasts or on screens. Now he’s addressing me by name. Suddenly, I feel the audacity of what we’re doing—of going against the leader of Antarctica.
Doesn’t mean he knows what the hell he’s doing, I remind myself. So I take a deep breath and straighten in my chair. “My brother, Eden, has had personal contact with Dominic Hann before,” I say. “So have I. We’ve seen a glimpse of how Hann’s operation works. Eden thinks that, contrary to what we think happened, Hann did not completely erase the Level system. It’s only been temporarily disabled. Unless we act quickly, Hann may have plans to revise it to work in his favor. I don’t know what the hell that might do. I only know that we have to find a way to stop him before he does it and disrupts the capital of our entire country.”
I look meaningfully at my brother then, and Eden nods. “I think I can find a way in,” he says. “If I can get close to Hann again.”
There’s an incredulous laugh from the President. “Is that the boy talking?” he says. “Eden? You’re going to take on Hann alone?”
“Not alone,” he replies. His voice is so confident and calm that I can’t help but feel a surge of pride.
The director stays silent. When she speaks again, her voice sounds thoughtful. “What do you plan to do when you arrive?” she asks.
Eden hesitates, exchanging a quick glance with Pressa. “I’ll find a way to make contact with Hann,” he says. “He’s using the engine design that I’d made—it’s not a stretch to think that he might still want to recruit me onto his team. He’d told me himself that he expected me to come back under his fold. And Pressa knows enough about the layout of the Undercity to take us somewhere where we can get his attention.”
“And Daniel? June?”
“We’ll be staging a diversion,” June says. “We’ll be trying to break
Hann’s system from the outside, staging an obvious attack to draw his attention. When Eden warns him about what we’re doing, we’re hoping it’ll persuade Hann to let Eden into his circle again.”
“Of course,” I add, “it’d be helpful to have the AIS and the military at our back during all this. Getting arrested by our own the instant we land won’t be much help. So our fate’s ultimately in your hands.”
I pause, abruptly nervous that maybe they won’t go along with this after all. That we’ve all just signed our own prison sentences. The irony of it, after everything we’ve been though, almost makes me laugh. Across from me, June’s eyes are fixed on mine, dark and logical. I feel a tingle of nostalgia, the feeling of fighting at her side, of once again working together toward something.
There’s a silence, followed by a few murmurs that none of us can make out.
Min speaks first. “You are, by far, the worst agent I’ve ever recruited,” she says. “After this is all done, you will stand trial, as well as your brother and those working around you.”
“It won’t be the first time I’ve been on trial,” I say stiffly.
“After this is all done. The President will issue a temporary pardon for you. When you land, the military will be there to greet you and assist, as is practical, with what you need. You will have AIS resources.” She sighs. “And I hope, for your sake, that your plan works. I’m not holding my breath, though. Don’t make me pay for your funerals out of the AIS budget, Wing. I don’t have the balance for it.”
“You won’t have to,” I reply. “You might want to set aside a fund for our parade, though.”
“I hate you, Wing.”
“And I love you, Director.”
Anden’s voice comes on again. “Commander,” he says. “I expect you to be careful. I don’t want to appoint someone new. Understood?”
June bows her head. “Of course, Elector.”
And that’s it. The call ends, and far below our plane, the clouds close
in.
EDEN
My thoughts are a jumbled mess when we land. Through the airplane window, I can see the skyscrapers of Ross City piercing the view below us as we hover over the landing pad on the top floor of one complex.
Looking at the cityscape sends chills along my spine. Plumes of smoke billow from the Undercity all the way up to the sky, cutting the air into light and dark streaks. The enormous virtual markers that usually hover over the city, names of buildings and cumulative scores of its residents, the lights that would wash the buildings in bright colors … that’s all turned off. What’s replaced it are troops lined up in battalions on several of the higher floors, monitoring the elevators.
I remember scenes like this from the Republic, from the days when we couldn’t be sure if the nation would still be standing at the end of its war. But to see Ross City—Antarctica—without its blanket of technology, is to see a superpower suddenly vulnerable and exposed.
I lean back in my seat and close my eyes for a second as we start to land.
Hann’s face swims in the darkness, grave and deadly. “Hey.”
I open my eyes to see Pressa beside at me. Her hand is warm against my upper arm.
“You’re not going to be alone down there,” she reminds me.
Alone, this would be overwhelming. With Pressa here, though, maybe, maybe, we can do this. Still, as I watch her dig in my backpack to double- check the supplies she’s brought with her, I feel a pang of fear. This is no longer a game I’m playing with my own life.
Daniel leans closer to us both, but when he fixes his eyes on me, he doesn’t mention how pale I look. Instead, he holds out a small, flat phone and a tiny, insectlike drone. “The phone’s for you to contact Hann,” he says in a low voice that only he and I can hear. “He’ll probably confiscate it from you as soon as you’re in, so there’s nothing else on it.” He nods at the drone. “And
once you’re in, we’re not going to be communicating via any type of signal.” I study the drone he hands me. On it is a nail-size chip. It’s the patch that
I’m going to install on the Level system when I try to bring it back online. A patch that will alter the system to something different from what it originally was. A revolution within a revolution.
“So hold out your wrist,” Daniel tells me now.
I do. He takes a wet cloth, swabs my wrist with it, and then wipes it on the drone. It instantly lights up with a faint green mark, then fades back into its black color.
“This will track you down and deliver any message we need to send to you. Use it to send a message back. It’ll only deliver one round before it self- destructs. Anyone who isn’t you or me and tries to tamper with it will get a nasty surprise when it simulates a bug bite and then erase its drive. Got it?”
Already, my attention has shifted to how the insect drone functions. It’s solar-powered—I can tell from the sheen of its shell—and its metal body looks so much like a real cockroach body that I want to recoil from the way it flicks its antennae.
“Got it,” I repeat. “I won’t be able to transmit back to you, not until I figure out what our options are if we get to Hann.”
“When you do,” Daniel corrects me firmly. Uncertainty flashes in his eyes, but he just looks away and leans back.
AIS agents are waiting for us when we step off the plane. Their uniform black suits blend into one as they line up at the base of the steps, giving respectful nods to June. They greet Daniel too, albeit warily. There are several soldiers here too, in their gray and green uniforms.
I fall into step behind them as we make our way down the elevator. Through the glass windows, we get a better view of the chaos that has engulfed the city.
“Things have calmed a bit,” one of the agents tells us as we go. “Martial law is firmly in place. Curfews are set for nine at night.”
“And the Undercity?” Daniel asks.
His skeptical tone makes the agent turn slightly red. “It’s under control,” he says, as if to defend himself. “We’ve rounded up and jailed a lot of the protesters.”
I frown, mirroring my brother’s expression. “That’s not going to keep people in check,” he says. “The last we saw, the entire Undercity was in open rebellion. You’re telling me you locked up everyone?”
The man reddens again. “We’re containing it,” he insists again. It’s all I
need to hear to know that things down there aren’t really in control. Even a city like this place is going to have trouble quelling a lifetime of abuse against an entire population.
“The President has given explicit orders about you all,” he goes on, impatient to shift the subject. He eyes me. “You’re the brother?”
“I’m the brother,” I reply, used to the question, but beside me, Daniel narrows his eyes.
“His name’s Eden. I’m the brother.”
I glance at Daniel, surprised, but he’s not looking at me. Instead, his attention has shifted to the floors appearing one by one below us as our elevator gradually slows. The closer we get to the Undercity, the more of the chaos we can see. There are heavy barricades set up at intersections everywhere, and many of the lower floors are barred from entry, guards present in front of every elevator entrance.
Finally, we reach the floor where our escorts will get off to join the rest of the Antarctican troops. This is where Daniel and June will leave too. Where Pressa and I will go on alone.
June and I exchange a steady look, one borne from a lifetime of surviving together. Then she turns to squeeze my shoulder. “See you soon,” she says. “We’ll be right here, listening for you.”
I nod, trying to mimic her calmness. When she was young, when she was going through the worst of the Republic’s war, did she ever feel terrified? It seems impossible, looking into her level eyes.
While June gives Pressa an encouraging nod, Daniel and I hesitate before each other. As a kid, I used to throw myself into his arms without thinking twice. I’d grab for his hand whenever I had the chance. I’d wrap my arms around his neck and babble affections until he’d shove me off.
But now, we don’t quite know how to say goodbye. We stand there for a moment, feet shuffling, expressions awkward. In the end, we don’t. He just pats my arm once before giving me his crooked smile. “Don’t be late,” he tells me.
I nod, searching for something to say, but Daniel has already turned back around and is walking out of the elevator. At first, I think it’s because he didn’t want to linger any longer. Then I realize that it’s because he can’t bear to see me go.
Too soon, Pressa and I are alone in the elevator. We head down to the Undercity. Through the glass, I can hear the sirens coming from below, the shouts of an officer through a megaphone.
It’s too much like the Republic. The sounds surround me like a blanket, and I suddenly wonder if I’m in one of my nightmares, that maybe all of this has been my subconscious, trapping me. My palms break out in a sweat. I look to my side. Pressa is pale, too, her shoulders trembling slightly.
Her presence gives me the strength I need. I reach out to touch her arm, then give her a small smile. “I’m glad you’re here,” I say.
It startles her out of whatever thoughts she had. She turns to me with a smile of her own, relieved, and presses herself closer to me as we reach the last floor and step out into the chaos of the Undercity.
The path toward Pressa’s shop is completely shut off. We wander past police barricades and troops lining the streets, of wary Undercity civilians eyeing the soldiers or grouped behind barriers, shouting angrily.
Pressa tightens her grip on my wrist. “This way,” she whispers, nodding us down a narrow alley away from the main streets.
We make our way along until we’ve gone past where most of the soldiers have set up. Here, the streets are more shaded by skyscraper shadows, the roads more cracked and broken.
I finally stop near where Pressa and I used to make our way down to the Undercity. The streets are quieter here, eerily so. We’re in uncertain territory now. I stop in the middle of the path, then place a call on my phone to Hann with the number he’d given me.
For a moment, I think no one will answer. Maybe he changed it by now, or never meant for me to use it at all.
Then a voice comes on. It’s not Hann, of course, but one of his associates.
Her words fill my ears.
“Step out of the shadows, so we can have a better look at you,” she says. “The boss would like to know why you’re back in his neighborhood.”
Every hair on my neck stands on end. They’re already watching us. I look at Pressa, then motion for us to step into the light.
“Who’s the girl beside you?”
“A friend,” I answer. As if in response, Pressa reaches into her pack and holds up a box of vials. “Hann will remember her from the drone races. She’s here to give him something for his condition.”
I guess the associate wasn’t prepared to hear that. She pauses for a long time. When she finally does speak again, she’s still addressing me. “And what do you want?”
“I’m here to help him,” I reply. “If he’ll still have me. Tell him he was right about everything.” I hope he can’t hear the lie in my words. “And I’m
here to warn him. The AIS is planning an attack on his system soon.”
The phone goes silent. I wait a few seconds longer. “Hello?” I ask, but she’s gone already.
Pressa stares sidelong at me. “Do you think she’ll relay this to Hann?” she whispers.
My lips tighten. “We’ll know soon enough.”
We stay where we are for what feels like an eternity. My eyes turn up. The skyscrapers overhead disappear into the air, and if I look for too long, the sheer endlessness makes me dizzy. What if Hann has people watching and waiting everywhere up there, their eyes turned toward us in case this deal goes wrong. I glance around us. We are as vulnerable as we can be now. If he wanted to, he could shoot us down right here. And for a moment, I think that’s exactly what he’ll do.
A new call comes on. I answer it. My hand trembles against my ear.
Even before he speaks, I know it’s him. His presence hangs in the air. “Your brother is already calling for me to meet with him,” he says. “Does he know you’re down here?”
So Daniel and June have already made their move. I tilt my head up, listening for their voices being broadcast. It’s faint, coming from the heart of the city where the advertisements jumble the closest on the skyscrapers.
“No,” I reply.
I can’t tell if he believes me or not. “And why is that? A change of heart?” he asks, a touch of amusement in his voice.
I will never be able to fool him. This will all go terribly wrong. But I still take a deep breath and answer. “I just want to meet again,” I say.
He’s silent for a moment. My eyes lock on a silhouette that appears at the entrance of the shuttered bar ahead of us. It’s one of his men; I recognize him as one of the people who had held me hostage in the Undercity. Beside me, Pressa stiffens.
He approaches us. His eyes are expressionless. “Come with me,” he says.
DANIEL
The main difference between the Antarctican military and the Republic one is that, back in the Republic, we knew exactly who we were fighting. The Colonies were pushing on our border, and their airships filled our skies.
Here, though, they hide in the shadows. Our enemies are ourselves.
And it makes it that much harder to fight back.
I frown as we survey an area where we are to try to make an announcement to catch Hann’s attention. Ross City used to be filled with virtual billboards that stretch all the way across the entire sides of skyscrapers. Their 3-D advertisements wandered around on each floor, all the way to the ground. Now though, with the Level system shut down, only a few screens still work, ones that were physically installed and operated before the Level system was implemented. Old-fashioned tech.
June holds out a device to me. “Here,” she says, tapping its screen once so that it lights up with a blue glow.
I study it with a thoughtful frown. “What’s this?”
“When we send our message out to Hann, let’s send out different versions on different frequencies.” She nods down at the device. “With all of Ross City’s systems down, Hann will be using more primitive communication tech, just like we are. This will tell us whether or not he’s listening in on one of our frequencies.”
I look at her. “So we run a different message on each frequency,” I reply, puzzling out what she’s saying, “and based on how he responds, we get an idea of roughly where he might be in the city.”
She blushes a little at me. “It’s how I first tracked you down in Lake.” A dark figure standing in the middle of a midnight street, holding up vials of plague cure. Me, crouched in the shadows of a second-story ledge, talking into a crackling speaker. The memory wavers in my thoughts. “So
that was how you did it,” I murmur.
She looks away toward the city, as if sorry to bring it up. I wait a moment before I reach out to touch her hand. Her skin is cool to the touch.
Our beat of silence ends as an officer comes up to us to set the frequencies on the device. She nods toward the platform where we will be playing my statements. “We’re ready to start, whenever you are,” she says.
I nod back, then get up and head with June over to the platform. There, we run through several of the alternate statements we’ll be releasing. Finally, I clear my throat, and as they start recording my voice, I begin the first statement.
“We have a deal we’re ready to cut with you,” I say, forcing myself to stay calm and my chin to stay up. “I know there’s something you want from this city that we can offer you. But we want a meeting with you, face-to-face.”
My voice reverberates into the mike. It’s jarring to hear the silence around me as I record. Has Eden already found his way back to Hann? Has the man even responded to him?
“We are prepared to give you a good offer,” I go on. “But the city can’t go on like this. Both you and I know that. So let’s find a way to negotiate, unless you want to continue this stalemate. We will meet you in two hours in the Undercity, at the intersection that divides the four quadrants of Ross City. If you choose not to come, we’ll have to force you out. Let’s do what we can to avoid a bloody end to this.”
I finish. The message starts to play from the beginning again, looping endlessly until the meeting time. I listen to it several times. When we’re all sure that it sounds right, we move on to the next statement.
A half hour passes before I record every single variation. There are differences in the locations where we’re asking Hann to meet us, with the kind of deal we’re offering him. I feel a sense of hollowness as we go about it. He could easily not be listening at all—or he might have figured out what we’re doing in the first place. But it doesn’t matter if this works or not.
All we’re doing is buying Eden time.
June gives me a nod when we’re done and begins broadcasting out the different messages on each frequency.
“Place a call to Eden,” she says quietly. In order to give a realistic illusion that Eden and I are at odds, I need to try to contact him.
I call Eden. As expected, he doesn’t answer. Even though I know he isn’t supposed to, a part of my chest still tightens in fear.
I call several more times, then stop. It’s a good sign that Eden isn’t picking up, I tell myself. It most likely means that he and Pressa are in, and that he’s no longer on the grid.
June is already checking the harnesses on her waist and legs. She’s going to lead a small team into one of the intersections we requested Hann to show up in, to watch for where he might appear. I’m wearing a similar getup—hooks, harnesses, and an assortment of knives and weapons. My team will head to the opposite side of hers. Still other teams are on their way to the other locations.
I watch as she works. She may not be with her Republic teams, but even here, with a patrol of foreign soldiers at her beck and call, she exudes a natural leadership that makes them wait respectfully for her command.
A sudden sliver of a memory returns to me at that. I remember the swing of her dark ponytail as she stood in an alley, her hand on her hip and her chin tilted up, the light in her eyes invincible, calling out a challenge for a Skiz fight. The first time I saw her. The first moment she caught my eye. How could I not have known then, immediately, who she was?
June notices me looking at her. A curious smile touches the edge of her lips, and she tilts her head at me. “What?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head, embarrassed to be caught. “I was just making sure you looked like you have everything, yeah?” I point out the gun at her hip and the climbing hooks hanging from her belt. “If, for some reason, Hann does show his face—”
“—then our teams are ready on the ground, hiding in our zones on every side of the intersection.” June nods down at the street. It’s desolate right now, the usual rows of cluttered shops and neon signs shuttered and fenced off. “And if he doesn’t show—”
“Then we hope that it’s because he listened to Eden’s warning and has taken him into his circle.” I take a deep breath, run through the elements of the plan in my head, and look down at my watch. “We should hear from him in several hours.”
June walks up to me. She reaches out to touch my wrist with her hand, gently coaxing me to lower my arm. “We’ll hear from them before then,” she promises. “I’ve seen Eden in worse situations.”
“I know.” I run a hand through my hair, trying to keep my eyes on the horizon instead of on her so that she can’t see my worry. “I’m just thinking everything through.”
June hesitates, then edges close to me. Her lips brush mine in a light kiss. For an instant, it’s as if she has created a small, sheltered space for us—even here, on a tower overlooking a standoff. I close my eyes and let myself lean into her, savoring this small moment of peace.
Finally, we pull away.
“You’d better make sure you’re careful,” June says. I smile back. “You know I always am.”
Then she pulls away, and the moment’s over. We straighten, step back from each other, and go to our teams. I do stop, though, to glance one more time at her over my shoulder. You rarely regret the things you do, but always the things you don’t. A last glimpse of June walking away. Then she’s with her cluster of soldiers, and I keep walking.
Lara and Jessan are here, along with two other AIS agents. Then there are a handful of Antarctican soldiers. They give me wary looks as I join them. Guess they must’ve heard enough about my reputation to be nervous. Good.
“There are a number of supplies missing from one of the factories on the city outskirts,” Jessan says to me.
“Weapons?”
She nods grimly. “I don’t think this is just an operation to destabilize the city. Hann is ready to start a war with us.”
That’s where Eden and Pressa are right now. I grit my teeth, pushing the thought back, and nod down toward the intersection. “I know wars,” I reply. “He should be careful what he wants.”
Moving stealthily with all these gadgets strapped to me is always a strange feeling. I’m used to finding my footing on my own—running and hiding with the help of nothing but a sturdy pair of boots. If I’d had all this equipment with me on the streets of Lake, the Republic might never have caught me at all.
It’s the work of a moment for me to scale the top of a shuttered shop and slide my way inside its second story, then weave in and out between the windows until I’m perched at the vantage point I need. From here, I get the perfect view of the street. Down below, the others are slowly getting into position—crouched in the shadows of alleys that branch off down the street, hiding behind parked buses and stations.
June should be in position now too. I look at my watch. It’s almost time. My heart thuds. My head feels light. I keep imagining Hann’s cold, lean figure walking up the street, using Eden again as his hostage. What if we’d overestimated his desire for Eden’s work on his project? What if he’s already guessed what we’re doing?
The seconds drag by. The time comes for Hann to show up. No one appears.
I hold my breath. He shouldn’t appear. If all goes well, he should stay put. Maybe he’ll send out a broadcast to us, just as we did to him. My hands are sweating, and I press them idly against the wall. We should receive an insect drone from Eden later, telling us that they’re in. Telling us what he’s doing.
The silence continues. Over the city, my repeated message continues to play. I start to let myself believe that Eden has made his way in.
But I’m not ready for what happens next. Because just as the thought occurs to me—I hear a loud pop come from the opposite side of the street. My head jerks to where June and her team should be waiting.
It’s all I have time to do before an explosion engulfs their building.
EDEN
The first thing they do is blindfold us. I stay quiet, trying to remember every stair and turn we take. My shoes clank against metal floor, then clip against wood. All I hear beside me is the flutter of Pressa’s breath, soft and rapid. She doesn’t say anything.
I have no idea how long we walk, but finally we come to an abrupt halt. I stay still, listening intently as our guards murmur to each other in low voices. Their words are too hard to make out.
Then rough hands are undoing my blindfold, and I squint in the sudden, artificial light.
This isn’t where I’d been held the first time. Instead of the estatelike property where Hann had first taken me, we’re now standing on a balcony overlooking what seems like a series of walled compounds. I realize that this is right near the border of Ross City, where the biodome ends. When I look out beyond it, I can see the expanse of frozen tundra that still makes up the vast majority of Antarctica’s terrain.
“You’re back. Just as I thought.”
His calm, smooth voice is like a knife scraping against my skin. I whirl around and find myself face-to-face with Hann.
He looks paler than when I last saw him. His skin appears almost entirely drained of color, nearly milky white, and new circles of exhaustion seem to drag underneath his eyes. But his gaze is as sharp and cold as ever, and his smile is the same: confident, secretive, and intimidating.
Pressa stiffens. I reach out instinctively to touch her hand, and she startles at my gesture.
At my hesitation, Hann takes a step closer to us and tucks his hands behind his back. “You took longer than I would have guessed, though,” he continues. “You have a high tolerance for watching chaos unfold. I should have known that, given your past.”
Remember why you’re here. The words clank through me, and I force
myself to swallow and open my mouth. When I speak, my voice comes out hoarse. “Where are we?” I ask. “And what are you doing out here?”
He shrugs, glancing out at the frozen wasteland. “The chaos in the city won’t last forever. But while it does, this is the best place for us to be. Now is that something you’re transmitting to the military, or are you genuinely here for a reason that matters to me?”
I hold my hands up. Already, my heartbeat has jolted up to a feverish rhythm. “No one else knows I’m here. Or, at least, they don’t know where I’ve gone.”
Hann doesn’t look like he believes me. He nods at two of the guards behind him, and they head over to pat us down. I hold my arms up. Pressa does the same.
“I know you left the city with your brother,” he says as we’re inspected. “What did you spend the last few days talking with him about?”
“We didn’t talk so much as fight.” I hope the bitterness in my voice is convincing enough. Beside me, Pressa snaps at the woman searching her—the woman shoves her roughly against the glass wall. I take a step toward them. “Hey, how about telling your folks to cool it?”
Hann’s smile turns amused. “What’s this? You’ve brought your friend with you? Maybe you’re serious after all, if you’re willing to risk her life.” He tilts his head at me. “What are you doing back here, Eden?”
The two guards finally step away from us. Pressa straightens her shirt, still mumbling under her breath, and comes to join me again. If she’s putting on an act of bewildered innocence, she’s doing a good job of it.
“I came to find you without my brother knowing. Right now, he’s probably sending out search parties for me.” I take a deep breath. “When I last saw you, you told me that you wanted my help on your plans for restructuring the way Ross City’s system works. I’m back here because I’m wondering if you still need me.”
At that, Hann narrows his eyes. “Why the change of heart?”
I hesitate. We may be here because we’re trying to fool Hann, but suddenly I feel like I’m here of my own free will. Hann studies me with the same concern and interest he had on the first night of the drone races. And even now, knowing what kind of person he is, I feel the urge to impress him.
“I did what you said,” I end up muttering, forcing myself to go on with my lie. “I had an audience with my brother and the AIS. They’re studying the chaos happening in the city right now.”
“And what did they say?”
“Their solution to fixing it all is to just—sacrifice the people in the Undercity.” I pause here and look at the floor. “I told Daniel he couldn’t let that happen. I thought that he would understand, of all people.”
When I trail off, Dominic Hann studies my face carefully. “But he sided with the AIS, didn’t he?”
I look up to meet his eyes. They’re still studying me, and I wonder if I remind him of his son right now. “They’re trying to lure you out with a deal,” I say. “They might even have broadcasted it by now—that they’re willing to meet you somewhere and negotiate a truce, in exchange for you disabling your system.”
I’m not sure whether Daniel and June have already made their move, but when a glimmer of recognition appears in Hann’s gaze, I get my confirmation.
“They’re setting up a trap for you,” I go on, my words speeding up in my urgency. “So I came here to tell you that, as a gesture of goodwill. I can give you the details of what they’re planning as far as their operations go.”
“A gesture of goodwill.” Hann is still watching me with that lethal stare, and a shiver runs through me. He doesn’t look convinced.
I glance at Pressa, and on cue, she pulls out the glass vials that she’d carefully packed for us. “My name is Pressa,” she says, slightly bashful. “I was the one who had the counterfeit money at the drone race.”
Hann nods once at her. “I remember you,” he replies.
Pressa’s voice is small but clear, more secure than mine, and I find myself admiring her calmness. “Eden told me about your condition, so I got these from the apothecary where my father used to work.”
“Used to?” Hann raises an eyebrow at her.
Pressa trembles for a moment. Hann sees it, and to my surprise, sympathy flickers in his eyes at her. “I’m sorry,” Hann says to her, gently now.
In spite of everything, I can feel Pressa want to take his pity. Is that what I look like when I feel drawn in by Hann’s charisma too? My anger flares suddenly. Mr. Yu had suffered under the Level system, but he’d died because Hann had caused this chaos in the Undercity.
Hann may be a father figure, a man with a painful past. But he’s also a master manipulator.
Pressa doesn’t answer Hann’s words. She tightens her lips instead and holds up the vials. “This is a serum that’s supposed to ease the symptoms of your lung infection. I used to make it for my father, when he was suffering from his condition. It’s not a cure. But it’s the next best thing.”
Hann doesn’t seem to expect this. His eyes widen slightly, and he blinks once. He glances at me before returning his focus on Pressa. “And why would you offer that?” he says.
His piercing stare doesn’t faze her. Pressa lifts her chin. “I spent a lot of years helping my dad run our apothecary. His failing health was the reason I started gambling in the drone races in the first place. I know what it’s like to struggle like you did. And while I don’t agree with your plans, I do believe in your cause. So here we are, helping you out. The question is, will you return the favor?”
Whatever hesitation Pressa might have had earlier, I see none of it in her response. She’s cool and calm. It’s as if this reminder of the death of her father has given her new strength.
Hann doesn’t move, but I can tell that Pressa’s boldness has brushed past some vulnerability hidden in him, however small. His eyes linger on the vials. I might be promising him my skill set—but Pressa is promising him his life back.
Hann frowns at me. “You think this is enough to bring you both into my fold,” he says. “You dare to dangle my own life in front of me?”
Maybe we’ve stepped too far; maybe we’ve overreached. The fear coursing through me starts to make way for anger. “Fine,” I snap. “You want to know the real reason why we’re here—why we’re offering all this? It’s because I’m sick to death of watching both you and the Antarctican government play your games with the Undercity, while the people there are the ones who suffer from your antics. I’ve had it. You’ve seen the riots, haven’t you? I watched Pressa’s apothecary get destroyed and her father … There’s nothing left of it. She had to flee. Is that what you’re fighting for? Is that you championing the rights of the lower classes—turning their home into a battleground? We’re here right now, offering all we got, because I can’t stand watching you do this for another second. Stop hurting the people you claim to be helping. Stop all this—and I swear I’ll serve you however you need. I’ll help you build a system that upends everything Antarctica had. Whatever you want. Just put an end to all this.”
When I finally stop, I realize that I’m shaking. My words must have come out convincing. Even though everything spilled out in a mess, and all I remember is a blur, I can still hear the anger in my voice ringing in the air.
Hann is quiet. His face is serious now, his eyes thoughtful.
Pressa speaks up now, in her clear, steady voice. “You may think you’re taking a huge risk, putting your trust in us like this. But we’re risking
everything here too. Our friendships. The people we love. Our lives.”
I don’t know what Hann might be thinking. He might kill us on the spot now, furious with us for having brought his personal problems into this. Or he might toy with us, capture me to use me again as his pawn. Or maybe, maybe, we’ve managed to strike him in just the right way.
Hann takes a few more steps toward us. His head is bent down, as if in deep thought. He stops right in front of us.
“Luckily for you both,” he says, “the AIS and your brother did indeed try to make a deal with us an hour ago. They announced it in the central city, then set up their people to trap me.” He holds out his hands. “As you can see, I’m still here, and they failed. But it looks like your information was good.”
So the false trap had already been triggered. I let out my breath, hoping my relief looks like it’s directed at being right about what I told Hann.
He extends a gloved hand in my direction. “You’re not in the clear yet, Eden,” he says. “I’ll be watching you very carefully, as well as your friend here. But if you do as you say, then I’ll agree to shift my tactics. I’ll hold you to it.” He gives me a tight smile. There’s something there that resembles trust. Something sincere. And even now, I feel like I want to believe it.
I nod and shake his hand. Pressa does the same. But the look in his eyes makes me afraid even as I feel a twinge of sympathy for him. My words had sounded so real and true to him because a part of me had believed what I was saying. Because I’m still convinced, even a little bit, that Hann’s mission is a good one.
What does that mean? When the time comes for us to move against him, will I be able to do it? And what will happen when he figures out that we’ve betrayed him?
I tremble at the thought as Hann turns away and motions for us to follow him.
If he figures us out, he’ll kill us.
DANIEL
My vision blurs. I can’t even feel my hands. A shout bursts from my chest. Before I can even register what I’m doing, I’m running, heading toward the stairwell and down to the street toward where the explosion had gone off.
June. She had been there. Right there, right where the explosion happened.
A thousand images, each more horrible than the last, flash through my thoughts. I readjust the mike on my ear and keep calling into it, even as police dart around me in a chaotic scene.
“June! June? Can you hear me? What happened down there?”
No answer. I spit out a swear and reach the stairwell. I don’t even bother taking any of the steps—with one leap, I’m on the railing and hopping from one turn of the stairwell down to the next, grabbing hold with my hands and swinging down to each lower floor until I land lightly on my feet at the bottom floor of the building. I race out into the street.
Rubble and white dust obscure the air. I squint as I race through it. Already, a patrol of soldiers is down here and directing others from June’s squad back to the main building. None of them look injured yet, but their faces look bewildered and coated in ash.
“June!” I call out again as I stop before the pile of broken concrete that used to be the building where she was supposed to be staked out. It’s a twisted mess of broken stone and metal now. A wave of light- headedness sweeps through me, and I sway. She must be in there somewhere, trapped underneath all the debris, she must be injured, dead
—
A hand suddenly materializes out of the white dust and seizes my wrist. My head jerks to one side.
It’s her.
June has a grim smile on her face. “You don’t think that could take
me out, did you?” she says.
Every bone in my body turns weak at the sight of June. Her hair’s rumpled and dirty, and ash smears her cheeks, but otherwise, she looks unharmed.
“You’re the goddy worst,” I snap at her. “What the hell happened? I saw you there, and then I saw the explosion—”
She’s already pulling away and tugging me along with her back toward the tower where I came from. Her eyes are dark and serious. “You thought you saw me there,” she corrects me. “I had a decoy team stationed instead, fully aware of the risk of a potential attack from Hann.” She squeezes my hand in apology. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I wanted Hann to think that he’d succeeded, and he would if he noticed your shocked reaction.”
I’m so relieved to see her safe that I have no strength to be angry. “You play some dangerous games,” I say instead, shaking my head.
June holds out the device from earlier, then brings up a transmission that looks like it came from somewhere underground. “Obviously, he heard this transmission,” she says. “And with that display, he’s going to think he struck a blow against us. It should also make Eden look trustworthy enough to him, that he came to warn him about a plan that actually happened, that clearly you didn’t want to happen.”
We walk in silence for a moment before we return to the command center. There, the other transmissions are being analyzed. None of them had seen a similar explosion go off.
I point to an area underneath the eastern border of the city. It’s near the outskirts, where the biodome ends and the Antarctican tundra begins. “This general area,” I muse. “It’s likely all his people are stationed near there—otherwise we might have seen more reactions to the other transmissions.”
“And it looks like Eden’s successfully made contact with him,” June adds.
Eden. My heart seizes again at the thought of my brother back under Hann’s control. I look to where June points at the footage of the explosion looping on one of the screens in the room. “It was what Eden said he would suggest Hann do, as a reaction to our offer.”
“Any word from him yet?”
June shakes her head. “Nothing yet. But we should get something tonight.”
I nod, trying not to let my fear show through. I push away from the table, then go to stand in front of the window looking out over the city. Over the speakers in the center, I can hear Director Min talking with their officers, getting updates on what’s happening.
The sooner this is all over, the sooner things can return to normal. But as I look out at the city, at the chaos that has filled the Undercity’s streets, I wonder if that normalcy is even possible.
A revolution within a revolution.
June isn’t the only one working without telling everyone every detail.
Change never happens unless you force it.
EDEN
The only way I can tell that night has fallen is by the blackness of the skylights in the building. Outside, beyond Ross City’s biodome, the open tundra must look like nothing more than a pitch-dark sea. Even from inside, I can hear the roar of the wind across the empty plains.
Pressa and I are alone with Hann now, in a room that looks like it’s operating as his office. Outside the doors stand his guards. Inside, it’s just him, seated wearily against a chair, and for the first time, he looks like a vulnerable man.
Pressa stands over him and holds out a single vial. “These may make you cough a little at first,” she warns as she presses one into the palm of his hand. “But they’ll start to kick in soon after you swallow it. You’re supposed to take one a day.”
Hann gives her a wary look, but doesn’t move to stop her. His guards outside aren’t looking out at the rest of the building, but inside at us. Their guns are hoisted. If they sniff even the slightest hint of us trying to poison or sabotage Hann, they’ll fill us with bullets faster than we’ll ever be able to explain ourselves. So Pressa moves slowly, emphasizing each of her words.
I find myself marveling yet again at how calm she can stay.
“How long has your family lived in the Undercity?” Dominic Hann asks her as she pours the contents of the vial into a cup and mixes it with hot water. Pressa doesn’t say anything for a second. Her concentration stays on the mixture she’s preparing. “As long as I can remember,” she replies. “My grandparents came to Ross City when they were fleeing chaos in their own country. They ended up in the Undercity. My dad says the apothecary first
belonged to them.” “I see,” he says.
He’s testing her, I realize, with the way he watches her as she stirs the concoction. He’s looking for something unusual in her gaze, the secret of why we must really be here.
But he doesn’t stop her as she works. I realize that, maybe, he’s genuinely hopeful this will work.
As she works, I speak up. I clear my throat and lean forward from the desk I’m seated on. “Like you said,” I tell Hann, “the military’s not going to stay back forever. We don’t have much time. What do you need done on your system?”
Hann tilts his chin at me. “You’ll be in charge of installing a hack on the system that redirects all Leveling to be under my control,” he replies.
A chill courses through my veins, as cold as winter wind outside. Our assumptions had been right, after all. He’s going to make himself the sole dictator of what’s legal and illegal. I blink, feigning shock instead at the scope of the hack. “A program that can do that?” I ask. “It’ll take far too long.”
Hann observes me with his penetrating stare. “Not if you’re working on it,” he replies. “I’m told it’s a simple matter of installing a new chip on the system. You’ll take a look at it tomorrow night.”
Tomorrow night. It’s too late. If I’m going to keep with our plan, I need to dismantle things and install our own chip sooner than that. I frown at Hann. “Show me the system tonight. If it needs to be done manually, I’m going to need all the time I can get.”
Hann studies the liquid in his mug. Nearby, Pressa holds her breath. “You’re going to do it when I tell you,” he replies. The command in his voice is cool and detached, so used to being obeyed that he doesn’t even bother questioning whether or not I will.
“But—” I start to protest again.
In the blink of an eye, he whips a hand out at Pressa and seizes her wrist right as she starts to pull away.
She gasps. I freeze.
Hann looks at her with an unblinking gaze—and then finally releases her. There’s an unspoken threat in his words as he turns his eyes back to me. He’s suspicious of why I want access so soon to his system, why I’m not questioning his ambition. He’s telling me that he could easily snap Pressa’s wrists, that he could slit my throat and leave our bodies in the streets like he’s done with so many others.
It’s easy to forget that Hann is known for being a cold-blooded killer. The sudden flip between this and his vulnerable, exhausted self leaves me reeling.
“After you,” he says to her, as he holds out the mug that she’s handed him. To my amazement, Pressa doesn’t falter. Instead, she nods and holds the mug up. She takes a long sip. I have to stop myself from reacting as she does
and giving us all away, but my muscles feel weak with tension at her move. Does this mean the effects will hit her too? Did she guess this might happen?
“You might feel a little weak tonight,” she says to Hann when she’s swallowed some of the drink. Her voice has a slight tremor in it, but she manages to keep her words slow and measured. “Some clear liquid may come up in your coughs, but it’s a good sign that the medication is working. If the liquid looks dark, we’ll need to give you some antibiotics.”
Hann waits, watching her. But she just meets his gaze with her own calm one, and if I didn’t know what we were doing, I’d think she was genuine, nothing more than someone following through with what she’s promised him.
For a moment, I don’t think we’ll get away with it.
Then his cold gaze disappears. He leans back, looking more satisfied now that Pressa has drunk enough of the serum herself.
“I’ll show you the system tonight,” he says to me. “Tomorrow morning, I expect you to have an efficient solution for implementing what I want. I should be able to tell that you’re the top student in all of Ross City.” He gives me a brief smile at that.
I nod back and let out a slow breath as Hann rises to his feet. He straightens his jacket, looks once at Pressa, and gives her a terse nod. “Tomorrow, we’ll talk again. I appreciate your help.”
It’s not spoken with gratitude. There’s a promise in there, a confirmation that tomorrow we’re going to have to face him again. I just follow Pressa and murmur in agreement, then head out of the room behind him. My eyes stay lowered, but I keep my attention on Pressa beside me.
If we can survive the night, we just might make it out of here. But if things go wrong, I may just have overreached for the last time.
* * *
Pressa and I are allowed to stay in the same room, with a set of twin bunks stacked on top of each other. Guards are stationed right outside the entrance. We’re to take our dinner in here, and I’m going to be shown where the system is kept.
The instant we close the door, Pressa reaches into her pocket and puts a pill in her mouth.
“What’s that?” I ask her.
“The antidote,” she murmurs to me before she swallows it. She makes a face. “Ugh, so bitter.”
“The antidote?” I shake my head in disbelief. “You’d planned for him to
ask you to do something like that.”
She blinks. “Of course,” she replies. “You always have an antidote for every concoction you make. We feed our customers this stuff.”
I realize with a pang that she still talks about the apothecary as if her father were alive. “You handled that like you’ve always known how to do it,” I say.
She shakes her head, then motions for me to sit down on the bed beside her. “With any luck, he’s going to be down and feverish all night, tossing and turning in bed. I don’t expect him to wake up until late morning.”
I nod. “It should give us enough time to work,” I reply.
She looks at me. That lopsided smile I know so well from her appears on her lips, and for a second, it looks like she’s going to lean forward and kiss me. My heart leaps in terror and excitement at the thought.
I don’t know if Pressa saw something in my expression, because she abruptly backs away and clears her throat. “Remember the first drone race I ever took you to?” she says instead. “You were shaking so bad, I thought you were going to pass out.”
I laugh along with her nervously. It had only been a couple of years ago, but I felt ages younger then. “It was the first time I’d ever been to the Undercity, period,” I reply. “You didn’t even give me a heads-up. You just tossed me right into the fray with the bets and the crowds.”
“I was saving you some time. It’s better to jump into cold water all at once, instead of painfully edging yourself in.”
“Right.”
We’re silent for a moment. “Let’s say we succeed in all of this,” I say in a low voice. “Let’s say everything just resets back to how it used to be. Are you going to be okay? Your father?… His shop?”
Pressa shrugs, trying to play it cooler than I know she feels. “If we make it out of here in one piece, maybe the AIS will help out Dad’s apothecary, give me a stipend that lets me pay for the repairs.” Her words trail off, and for a moment, we sit in silence, the weight of her father’s death pressing down on us.
“I mean, I might have some connections,” I say to her. But I feel a pang in my chest. If for some reason our plan to interfere with the Level system doesn’t work, Pressa’s going to go back to her life in the Undercity, battling her way through the Levels just like everyone else. I can see the struggle in her eyes as she thinks the same thing.
Finally, she looks down and says, “If we make it out of all this, I’d like to
leave the Undercity,” she says. “Go somewhere new. Find an adventure.” She’s silent for another beat. “I stayed for my father. Now he’s gone, and I don’t know what to do.”
Then she laughs and shakes her head, as if this is an impossible dream forever out of her reach.
I touch her hand. “You’ll know,” I tell her. “You always have.”
Pressa gives me a tired smile. We sit without speaking for a moment before she looks at me again. “Do you feel sorry for Hann?” she asks, her voice softer now. “I mean—I’m not saying that he’s someone we should sympathize with, but…”
Do I feel sorry for him? I’m about to say no, of course not … but something makes me stop. I think of the way Hann has to have his medicine tested. “A little,” I end up replying. And I realize that maybe she’s asking because she does.
Pressa nods down at the medicine bag she tossed onto the bunk bed between us. “I think he might have been trustworthy, a long time ago. He has the characteristics of someone from the Undercity, you know? You always find a way to make things work, until the world makes it impossible. And even then, you have to hang on.”
I’m quiet at her words. The world had thrown Pressa out, and yet she somehow still managed to hold on to the goodness in herself, had never truly wavered from what was right. And I found myself wondering about the fine lines in our lives that turn us one way or the other—that the hardships my brother or June faced twisted them in one direction, while Hann went in another.
“When this is all over,” I finally say, “I’m going back to the Republic.”
Pressa smiles again. It’s a sadder expression this time, like she’d known all along, and the sadness twists my heart into a knot. “I never thought you were going to stay here in Antarctica,” she replies.
I look at her. “You didn’t?”
“Eden, you’ve lived your whole life with your shoes pointed in the direction of the Republic. That glint’s in your eyes every time I see you. It’s where you belong.” She puts a hand on my arm, and I think back to when she’d helped me up after the others in the university had shoved me to the ground. I think about what she’s doing right now, with me. If I head back to the Republic, I won’t get to lean on Pressa anymore.
“I…” I don’t know how to finish my sentence. I’ll miss her? I’ve liked her ever since we first became friends? That when we hang out late at night, I
love watching her beautiful eyes flash in the dim light, reflecting the glow of everything around her?
She just smiles at me and leans closer. “Just visit me sometimes, okay?” she whispers. “So I can see how you’re doing.”
I swallow, searching for a good way to tell her how I feel. And in the middle of that search, I realize that what I’ve wanted to do all along was just to show her.
I lean toward her in the silence. Then I kiss her.
It’s a light kiss, my lips gentle against hers. She stiffens in surprise at my gesture, enough for me to pull away and give her a hesitant look. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so forward about it.
But before I can apologize, Pressa wraps her arms around me and pulls me back. She kisses me again, harder this time.
Every thought I have scatters. I can’t believe that I never knew this is what should have happened between us, that I never made a move earlier. There’s a bitterness in our kiss that reminds me how little time we might have left. I pull her close, wanting more, regretting that I’d held back so long.
At last we pull apart, our breaths shallow. Pressa looks down, a rare moment of fragility coming across her face. She laughs a little. “I’ve always wanted you to do that,” she murmurs, peering up at me through her canopy of lashes.
“Well,” I murmur back, “thank goodness I did something about it.”
Our conversation’s interrupted by an abrupt knock on the door. We dart apart as one of the guards comes in. He doesn’t smile at us. Instead, his eyes lock, cold and unfeeling, on mine. “Hurry up, both of you,” he tells us. “Hann doesn’t have all day to waste showing you the system facilities.”
I stand back up and give the man a firm look. Beside me, Pressa rises and lifts her chin, steadying herself back into calmness.
“Right behind you,” I say to the guard.
He glares at me again, casts an ugly glance at Pressa, and turns around, motioning for us to follow him. It won’t be long now before all our plans come to a head. Pressa and I exchange a quick glance before I follow the man out the door.
That’s when I realize that the tiny insect drone Daniel gave me is no longer in my pocket.
A jolt of panic rushes through me even as I try to keep my expression calm behind the man. But Pressa senses my sudden fear. She gives me a questioning look before she realizes what happened. Her eyes widen.
Maybe the drone fell out of my pocket.
But a feeling of dread swells in my chest. Somehow, I know that it wasn’t an accident. Somehow, I know.
Dominic Hann took it.
