Daniel doesn’t come home until late that night. I’m in my room, working by lamplight on my perpetual engine machine, when I hear the alarm ding over our front door, followed by a pleasant, automated voice over the speakers installed into our walls.
“Welcome home, Daniel Wing.”
Out in the living room, I hear my brother take off his shoes, then the sound of the refrigerator door opening and the pouring of a glass of water. Instinctively, I breathe a sigh of relief and relax my shoulders. Then I turn off my own tracking of his geolocator. My brother may be overly paranoid about me, but he’s the one with the dangerous job that he never talks to me about. How many hours has he worked today? What kind of mission is requiring him to pull these late nights?
I don’t leave my room to greet him. Our argument from earlier still rings fresh in my mind, and I’m not about to be the first one to cave. Instead, I hunch lower over my machine and keep working, half listening to Daniel in the kitchen. He seems to drink his water, then sets the glass down with a clink and opens the fridge door again. I’d pulled his dinner out of the freezer and into the fridge to thaw. He wouldn’t have remembered to do it earlier, and he won’t remember now that he never did it.
It’s one of those small things left over from our Republic days: his spotty memory. He remembers things that happened when we were kids, or from decades ago. But sometimes he can’t recall a place he was just at several minutes earlier. Or a name. A face. A task.
Physical reminders can sometimes help trigger a lost memory for him, and occasionally I’ll catch him just standing there with a thoughtful frown on his face, struggling to place the feeling of déjà vu that a familiar street sign or narrow alley has awakened in him.
He takes daily medication for it and runs several programs on his Level system that pop up constant reminders for him. I try to make up for the rest of
the times when things slip through the cracks. But it makes his job doubly precarious. I have enough nightmares about him never coming home. So I keep a constant eye on his location and his daily habits.
Well, to me, you’ll always be twelve.
The words make my temper flare again, and I go back to working on my perpetual energy machine with a vengeance.
It’s a smooth, elegant design, a small ring of a battery that I now fit with a coil of wire around it. Beside it sits my drone, which I’ll soon attach to the engine. The race notice from Pressa sits folded in my pocket. I check the time
—nine o’clock. Just a couple of hours left before I head off to see her.
A light knock sounds against my door.
I don’t respond. Daniel knocks again, and I half expect him to call through the door for me to open it. But he doesn’t. I can almost picture him standing there, leaning casually against the frame, his shirt rumpled and a plate of food in his hand.
When I was little, we’d leave our doors open and I’d go back and forth all the time, peppering him with questions until he’d tell me to leave him alone. But that was back when I felt like I knew him. Then he took this AIS job, and now spends all his time keeping his secrets. So I keep mine.
The knock comes a third time, but I still don’t answer. Finally, his footsteps turn away and he heads off into his own room.
I try to concentrate on attaching the new engine to my drone. When had we stopped really talking to each other? Why is it so hard for him to understand me now? How can he possibly go to the Undercity for so many missions and not feel the same pull to it that I do? Hadn’t he grown up in Lake too?
It just reminds me of why I don’t tell him about my nightmares, the way I cringe at loud noises or tremble over little things that remind me of the past. My brother had gone through worse than I had, and somehow he seems to have come out of it relatively unscathed. Functioning. Practical.
But things linger in my head. They don’t go away.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I really am still a kid who doesn’t know how to move on.
An hour ticks by slowly. Finally, I finish attaching the engine and test the drone by hovering it quietly over my desk. It’s a sleek design inspired by a Colonies jet that had once been flown by a girl named Kaede, who carried my brother and June Iparis across country lines during the heat of the Republic’s war. The wings are swept and narrow, the shape of the drone so sleek that it
resembles a needle. The engine underneath it glows a faint blue, humming serenely.
From the other room, I don’t hear anything. Daniel must have gone to bed by now. After a while, I get up and leave my room without a sound. Then I peer over at his door and give the handle a try.
It’s locked.
He’s probably fast asleep already, in a perfectly made bed. Where my room is a mess, his is always tidy. Something about Daniel’s years on the streets has made him more careful with his stuff than I am. Everything is always in its place: computers and devices arranged neatly on his desk, his bed made without a single wrinkle in the blankets. He has few mementos from our life back in the Republic on his shelves. A dangling pendant from our father, always polished. Medals and badges from the Republic are all put carefully away into a box. He doesn’t display them openly.
I turn away from his door and head back into my room. With any luck, he won’t hear me leave and he won’t notice when I come back. I turn off the lights in my own room, then put the drone away in my backpack and start throwing on my jacket. The patterns from the city lights outside stretch against my ceiling. Everything’s silent and dark. All I can hear is the crowd of thoughts in my head.
Finally, I’m ready to go.
As I turn to head out the door, a motion outside stops me.
I pause in the darkness, then grab my glasses from my dresser and walk over on silent feet to the sliding glass door that leads out to the long balcony that wraps around our home.
My vision at night has never quite recovered from the Republic’s experiments, and there is a faint halo around the lights glimmering outside from windows. But I can still make out my brother crouched precariously on the ledge, his face turned out toward the massive city.
This would be a terrifying sight to anyone else. The way he’s sitting, Daniel looks like he could plummet to his death at any moment. But instead, he is perfectly balanced and at ease, one elbow propped up against a raised knee, his other leg hanging down over the side of the balcony, the foot pressed flat against the railings. With my blurred vision, a glow of light from the skyscrapers behind him outlines his figure in blue-white.
Guess he’s not asleep after all.
I wonder what he’s thinking. Whether or not he still has nightmares like I do. What he sees when he gazes out at Ross City. Surely, he can’t walk
through the Undercity on his sweeps and not think about where we came from. He can’t possibly pass those ramshackle vendors, the people who huddle in the alleys, and not think of his days struggling to survive.
Maybe he’s thinking about seeing June tomorrow. A needle of guilt pricks me as I remember how I’d brought her up to him earlier in the day. He’d switched the topic back to me so quickly. But that’s the thing about him now. He’ll spend all his time digging into my life without ever telling me anything about what’s going on with him. I don’t even know if he’s still in love with her.
There used to be a time when all I wanted to do was talk to Daniel. Now I don’t know what I want. For him to understand me, I guess, except that seems impossible.
I watch him until he stands up on the ledge, turns, and hops back down.
He disappears back inside his room.
A call from Pressa comes in. I accept it, then answer in a hushed voice, “Hey.”
“Hey.” She sounds breathless and excited. “Looks like you’re officially on the racing roster. You still in for tonight?”
For just a second, I hesitate.
I made a promise to Pressa, said it right to her face. But Daniel is still an AIS agent.
If the AIS ever gets a whiff of how Pressa really makes her money, how she’s been paying her father’s medical bills by betting on illegal drone races, she’ll be jailed and her Level flattened before I can take a breath to speak for her. Even Daniel doesn’t have the kind of power to save her.
I fold the drone notice and tuck it back into my pocket. The Undercity—the danger, the noise, the chaos. I need it to fill my mind and push everything else aside.
“I’m heading down now,” I confirm. “Meet you at midnight.”
