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 back into my pocket and hide it away. The Undercity. The danger and noise and chaos. The need for it to fill my mind and push everything else out.
“I’m heading down now,” I confirm. “Meet you at midnight.”
DANIEL
It’s a cold night, but I don’t mind the sting of the air against my skin. There’s something familiar about the wind against my face at a place high above the city, where I can see everything—the pulse of the hundreds of floors below me, the menagerie of bright lights lining the walkways that connect each high-rise, the flickering of virtual notations over people shuffling by below. Tonight, the skyscrapers nearest ours have a set of virtual murals of the ocean overlaid against their walls, of bright corals and rainbow-hued fish swimming between each building. As I look on through the augmented-reality system installed in my chip, a virtual whale colored neon turquoise and pink glides lazily in the air between two skyscrapers, its massive body materializing out through one wall and into another like a ghost.
I admire the moving art in silence.
Back in the Republic, I would climb to the top of a building and look down at a scene of haze and dirt, concrete and steel and red banners and metal waterwheels. At night, there would be patches of the city that were completely dark, areas where they cut the power to conserve it for military use. I have fragments of memories about those rolling blackouts, nights when Tess and I would light a roll of trash as a torch to navigate the pitch-dark alleys. It was a place that always seemed broken.
All I see here is a sea of eternal lights and colors. Yet, somehow, everything still has a feeling of precarious balance—like this whole goddy city’s sitting on a neglected, crumbling foundation, teetering on the brink of something sinister.
Dominic Hann.
The AIS has been tracking him for so long, and yet we still have no good leads. Not even a public sighting of him. The only thing I know for sure is that he’s got some powerful friends and a lot of spies. No doubt he knows that we’re after him, and he’s found a way to keep out of our sights.