by Lu, Marie
Even though he’s a lanky young man now, his wavy blond curls darker than they used to be, his eyes slender and pale, his glasses perched against the same kind of angular nose that I have—all I can see is the version of him that’s still a small boy. The boy I once thought I’d lost to the Republic. The boy who had stumbled out of a hospital room, blind, calling my name. The boy who had sat with me on a cool tile floor and held my hand as I fought through an illness that almost killed me.
The boy I’d bled to protect.
He doesn’t say a word as he pushes away from the wall. I pull my shades back over my eyes, swing down to the first floor, and fall into step beside him.
“Are you going to tell me anything? Or do I have to start?” I say to him.
He doesn’t even look at me. “Why? Are you going to tell me what job brought you down here?”
I shake my head. “You know I can’t talk about what I’m doing.”
“Then I guess I don’t have much to say.”
I sigh as we fall into an uncomfortable silence. When we’d first moved to Ross City from the Republic, Eden had still been small, and he’d been happy to follow me everywhere I went. But over the past few years, our conversations have turned into this, in which neither one of us really knows what to say to the other.
“Have it your way,” I say, at last, as we cut through the main food market. People make a wide berth for us when they see my black suit. “What were you doing down here?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” I repeat, shooting him a sidelong glance. “I mean, that’s why people come to the Undercity, of course. To do nothing.”
Eden glares at me. “Are you extra sarcastic today because you haven’t been on a date in a few days? Have you finally seen every girl in the city?”
“I’m being serious here.”
His expression darkens. He looks away from me and picks up his pace. I try to ignore the whispers that follow us.
Look at his suit.
It’s the AIS.
Don’t stare.
“You were here to see that girl, yeah?” I say, after another long silence. “What was her name? Pressa?” We’ve left behind the worst part of the Undercity, and up ahead, I can see the station with the elevators leading back up to the Sky Floors.
Eden shrugs, but I can tell from his reaction that I’m right.
“Her father’s running an illegal apothecary, you know,” I go on. “I’ve actually told the AIS not to intervene because it would shake up their community too much. But—”
At that, Eden’s eyes flash at me. “Is that a threat? Are you trying to tell me to stay away from her because she’s a dangerous influence? Are you using her against me or something?”
“No, I’m trying to warn you so that you and your friend don’t end up crossing the AIS. I only have so much influence in the agency.”
“Thanks. But I don’t need your help with Pressa. Isn’t June coming to town tomorrow? Why don’t you worry about that instead?”
His casual mention of June stings, and he knows it. June—the person who changed my entire life, the one who lingers so strongly in my mind that I can’t bring myself to stay in a relationship with any other girl for longer than six months—will be in Ross City tomorrow, accompanying the Elector Primo as he visits us to discuss a trade deal between the Republic and Antarctica.
Suddenly, I’m very aware of the paper clip ring around my finger.
I try not to let him see how vulnerable her name makes me feel, and I shift the topic back to him. “I’m not mad at you,” I say in a level voice. “You know that, right?”
I look for a reaction on his face, but all I get from him is more stony silence. We reach the elevator station. As we walk under its entryway, a pleasant ding sounds, the indication that our Levels—me, Level 87; Eden, Level 54—are high enough to allow us to use this transit station. Behind us, a man at Level 26 tries to sneak in behind us. An alarm beeps, and he’s stopped by an invisible force field.
I halt in front of a private elevator made specifically for AIS agents to use. It approves my account, and I scan Eden in as my guest.
Finally, as we step into the elevator and it seals us inside its cool, glass interiors, I turn to face my brother.
“You gotta give me something here, Eden,” I say. “Or do you seriously not trust me with anything anymore?”
Eden studies me. “Why aren’t you mad at me?” he asks.
I blink. “What?”
“Why aren’t you mad at me?” he says again. There’s an edge to his voice. “You caught me wandering around the Undercity, the most dangerous place in Antarctica. I lied to you. And now I’m not talking to you. You should be furious.”
“You want me to be angry with you?” I narrow my eyes at him. “What good does that do?”
“It would be something,” he snaps. “An emotion, at least.”
I take a deep breath. “Listen, I know it’s been rough. You don’t talk to me about what’s happening at the university, so I don’t know what it’s like—but I’ve been able to read you since you were a baby. You’ve seen happier days.”
“I’m fine,” he replies, in a way that tells me he’s obviously not. “And I’d be a lot happier if you didn’t chaperone me all the time.”
“I don’t chaperone you all the time.”
“You tried to call me nineteen times in one hour. Was that just for casual chitchat?”
“All you have to do is answer the phone once, you know.”
“It’s not your business where I go during the day.”
“Everything you do is my business. I’m in charge of you.”
“You indulge in your life. Let me indulge in mine.”
“Is that why you come down here? To pretend you’re something you’re not?”
“That’s what you think?” Eden asks. “I go to the Undercity to play at being poor?”
“I’m saying I hate it when you put yourself in danger when you don’t ever have to.”
“Maybe our definitions of danger are different.”
“Excuse me if I thought you looked like you needed some help back there.”
Eden’s gaze pierces me. “You tracked me with the geolocator, didn’t you?”
I hesitate for just a fraction of a second, but it’s long enough to give him the answer. He makes a disgusted sound and turns away. “I thought I disabled it,” he mutters.
I swallow my rising annoyance. Disabling a geolocator should be impossible, so of course Eden was figuring out some way to hack it.
“The city’ll fine you for that if they find out,” I tell him. “How many times are you gonna make me cover for you?”
“Like you’ve always been a law-abiding citizen.”
Behind his glasses, Eden’s irises have their faint purple tint in the light, the color that never entirely faded since he recovered from the plague. It’s my constant reminder of what it was like to almost lose him, what it could be like again if I’m not careful.
“I used to break the law because I had to,” I say coldly. “What are you breaking it for?”
Eden turns to face me fully. “You want to know the real reason I was in the Undercity today?” he says. “Because it reminds me of Lake. When I walk down there, I’m home. All that smoke and grease and grime, the rags and barred windows … I feel safer down there than I do anywhere else in this city. When I’m there, I think of John and Mom.”
I can tell there’s more he’s not telling me, but my temper sharpens at his mention of our mother and brother. “How about you don’t bring them into this?”
But Eden doesn’t stop. “Sometimes I think you’ve forgotten where you come from. When you’re in the Undercity, it’s like you can’t wait to leave it behind.”
He has no idea how wrong he is. How often I used to do exactly what he’s been doing. I try to remind myself that Eden never saw the way I used to wander aimlessly down the streets of Lake. Back when I’d first been accepted into the
Republic’s inner circles, when I was working with June but still felt like an outsider at all the Republic’s goddy balls and banquets … I’d walk the quiet streets of my old neighborhood and take in the rust and the grime. The humble homes and dirty coasts.
But Eden doesn’t remember that. He was too young. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to crawl your way out of that kind of life, to want to keep your younger brother from ever having to see what you’ve seen, endure what you’ve endured. I took him here to get him away from Lake. But he keeps ending up down there anyway.
And I get it. The corner of my heart that’s still Day, the boy from the streets, begs me to explain that to him.
Instead, I say, “It’s because I don’t ever want to walk those streets again. That’s our past, not our future. We didn’t move all the way here just to go back to that. And yet you’re in the Undercity every other week.”
Eden crosses his arms over his chest. “I can’t spend an hour away from home before you ask where I am. I can’t stay out a second past midnight before you come searching for me. Soon I’ll be working for the Republic. Remember? I have a life that’s completely separate from yours.”
“Forgive me if our past has made me a little paranoid about your safety.”
“Daniel.” For an instant, Eden’s voice softens. “I know. Believe me. But it’s not up to you to watch my back every second of my life. You can’t always know where I am. I’m not twelve years old anymore.”
“Well, to me, you’ll always be twelve.”
Eden flinches as if I’ve hit him. I suddenly notice that he’s been arguing eye to eye with me. When did Eden get so tall? Has it really taken me this long to notice? Then the initial sting leaves his expression. He looks away from me and out through the glass, back down at the Undercity far below us.
The elevator finally reaches our floor. Eden steps out first and doesn’t look back. “No need to follow me,” he calls over his shoulder. “I know the way home. Or did you want to supervise me through the front door?”
And before I can protest, he’s left without me, his figure fading down the hall.
EDEN
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 Republi
c’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.
