ACCOSTING CLASSMATE | −10 POINTS
The text pops up over my view before I can stop myself, and the negative points glow red in my account.
Emerson gives me a mock look of shock. “Oh! Sorry—I didn’t see where they were.” He holds his hands up. “It was an accident. Don’t get too rough.”
This is how they treat me every day. It’s a careful kind of bullying, one that doesn’t trip the Level system. They’re not saying anything obviously cruel to me. They’re not pushing or shoving me. So the Level system doesn’t catch it, doesn’t deduct points for harassment.
Emerson hands my book back to me, then pats me twice on the shoulder. “Well, hope you have a fun time with the janitor.” His voice stays friendly and warm. Yet another way he tricks the Level system. “If you see your brother, tell him I said hi.”
Jenna brightens at the mention of Daniel. “Tell him I said hi too.”
The last time Daniel came to see me at the university, Jenna had blushed bright red and giggled all around him. Emerson and Alan had peppered him with questions about what it was like being the champion for a nation. Daniel, as usual, kept his answers polite and distant, but it didn’t change how I felt standing there on the sidelines.
I stare at the dried flowers in my hand, feeling like an idiot. How would Daniel do here, at Ross University? He was never the studious type, because he never had to be. Daniel is Day. He can run up the sides of buildings. Evade the police. Jump through a fourth-story window.
Me? I’m the nerd with bad eyesight who likes building things and framing flowers. When I speak, my voice is higher and softer than my brother’s. He is the hero who never has nightmares anymore. I am the odd, quiet one that he still treats like a kid.
I shove the crumpled flowers in my backpack, then crush them further by dropping my book into the bag on top of them. Anger simmers beneath my skin, along with embarrassment.
“Hey!”
Pressa’s at the front of the entrance, leaning against a tree and waiting for me. Her face is round and smooth and light brown, the shape of her eyes slender, and when she gives me that easy smile, one of her teeth is endearingly crooked.
Her smile vanishes immediately at the look on my face. “What happened to you?” she asks as I approach her.
I got to know Pressa when I started showing up early at school every morning to work on my inventions. I helped her speed up her work by installing additional code into the cleaning bots. We’ve been hanging out ever since. In a university full of hostility, she’s been a lone comfort.
I think about telling her everything that just happened. If anyone understands what it’s like to deal with some of these seniors, it’s Pressa. But the words lodge in my throat, refusing to come out. Real men don’t press flowers into their books. They don’t spill their insecurities to their friends. Daniel certainly doesn’t tell me about all the things that happened to him in his past. Real men suck it up and change the subject until their hearts wither to dust inside them.
So I fold the words back into my mind and smile instead. “Nothing,” I reply. “Just glad to be out of class.”
She gives me a sidelong glance, as if she doesn’t really believe me, but she doesn’t push me further. Her arm loops through mine. “Still want to head to the Undercity?” she asks me.
I nod as we head toward the elevators. “I’ve been ready all day,” I reply.
She grins and gives me a wink that she knows always improves my mood. “Good. Because there’s a drone race happening later this week, and at least a hundred thousand corras waiting to be won. I figured we should go enter our bets.”
Drone racing. Gambling. These are dangerous activities in the seediest part of Ross City, but it’s the one place where I feel good about myself. I grin back at her, admiring the way her bobbed hair forms a straight line with her jaw. Then I unhook my backpack from one shoulder and reach into it. I pull out a small, circular tube.
Pressa’s mouth forms an O as she studies it. “Is that what I think it is?” she whispers.
I smile a little. “If you’re thinking it’s a drone engine, then you’d be right,” I reply. “I’ve been working on it for weeks.” Good thing Emerson didn’t dig any farther than my dried flowers. “This time, we don’t have to just place a bet. We can enter the race.”
Pressa shakes her head and grins. “Sometimes I wonder if you belong up here in the Sky Floors,” she says. “You have way more in common with the rest of us down below.”
I don’t answer her as we head into the nearest elevator and start making our way down. Maybe she’s right. I don’t fit in up here, in the Sky Floors where everything’s perfect until it isn’t. My heart belongs to the lower floors, the part of this place that hosts things like drone races and gambling. The part that Ross City doesn’t advertise.
The Undercity.
DANIEL
Eden’s not picking up his phone again.
I tap off the virtual ringing icon in my view, swear under my breath, and try calling him one more time.
Maybe the connection’s bad. I am currently in the pockmarked streets of the Undercity, after all, perched in the shadows on top of a crumbling neon sign overlooking a crowded street. This is the lowest rung of Ross City, the ground floor, where sunlight never reaches and where neon signs advertise the rusty jumble of cheap storefronts lining either side of the road.
It’s not like this is the best place to make a call to the Sky Floors.
No answer again.
I take a deep breath and try not to be annoyed. When we first moved here to Antarctica, I promised myself that I’d never lose my temper with Eden. He survived a goddy revolution. He lost our parents and nearly his life.
He’s my little brother. And nothing would ever be worth getting angry with him about, as long as he is alive and healthy.
Still. You’d think a kid could get around to calling his brother back now and then. Maybe he’s hanging out with classmates. I don’t know much about who he talks to these days. Last time I visited him at school, he seemed friendly with some seniors named Jenna and Emerson—but they’re headed into their finals for the year. That means he’s going to be out more, doesn’t it?
The concept of a university, of taking exams without real consequences, is so foreign to me that trying to figure out Eden’s life nowadays gets me nowhere. June would probably understand him better. I wonder for a moment if I could use this as an excuse to call her, get her opinion on how Eden might be feeling.
My thoughts always wander to June. I fiddle idly with a paper clip ring on my left hand, try to force her out of my head, and call my brother one last time.
He doesn’t answer.
I sigh, give up, and turn on the geolocation tracking on him. That’s another feature of Antarctica’s Level system. You can at least find out where someone is.
“Any sign of her?” a voice comes on in my earpiece. It’s from my AIS co-agent, Jessan.
I let Eden’s geolocator keep searching and instead focus back on my job. My eyes scan the bustling marketplace below me. “Not yet,” I mutter.
Jessan sighs over the line. “She’s late. Maybe she’s not heading out today.”