by Lu, Marie
Daniel!
Except there’s a familiar voice. I whirl instinctively in its direction to see a line of Republic soldiers standing along the end of the street, barricading it. Behind them, struggling to get to me, is my older brother, John.
Overhead, along the horizon, the ominous black silhouette of a Colonies airship approaches, and with it comes a field of distant screams, like a swarm of locusts rushing in my direction. The ground in the distance is obscured with dust. John is trying in vain to break through to me, and I am pushing through thick air as I struggle to run toward him.
He reaches his hand out; I do the same. Just a little farther …
And then the distant screams draw close, and suddenly we are engulfed in a dust storm, shrieks whistling all around us. A bright light overhead grows steadily brighter until it makes me squint. I call out John’s name over and over, but he doesn’t answer. It’s too late to save him—but where’s Eden? I have to—
I jerk awake, trembling, sweat trickling down my forehead.
The light overhead turns into a blinding lamp. I blink away tears in my eyes as the world gradually sharpens, my dream turning blurry around the edges. Already I’m having trouble remembering what I saw, but John’s outstretched hand, his blue eyes mirroring mine, remains clear.
It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed about the Republic like this.
The next thing I realize is the throbbing of a dull headache. My limbs feel sore and bound. My gasps are muffled behind a tight gag, and as I become more aware of my surroundings, I realize that I’m tied firmly to a chair. The chamber around me is luxurious in its sparseness—thick, monochrome rugs and clean-cut sofas, the wallpaper a minimalistic gray and white.
It takes me a moment to pinpoint exactly what’s off about the room. There are no windows.
“About time,” someone says, and I turn my head slightly, wincing, to see a man in a suit sitting on a couch beside me. There are others stationed near the chamber’s door too.
The man tilts his head at me and speaks again. “He’s awake now. What do you want us to do?” He’s talking to a superior, I realize.
There’s silence, followed by a few grunts of agreement from him and the nod of a head. Then he settles back against the couch to wait again.
“Mr. Hann thought we might’ve given you too much chloroform,” he says to me. “Good thing you pulled through, saved us all a load of trouble.”
Dominic Hann.
Eden. Have they taken him too? A rush of terror courses through me at the thought, and suddenly the gag feels like too much, and there’s not enough air in the world for me to breathe.
Calm down, I tell myself firmly. They had wanted Eden. It’s probably the entire reason why I’m here. And if they have me as collateral, it means Eden is alive and likely unharmed, if possibly held against his will.
Alive. Unharmed. It’s all I want to know.
I stare at the man for a while before studying the room again. There’s no obvious clue of where exactly we are, and as expected, my system has been powered off, with nothing but a warning blipping in the corner of my view. Wherever this place is, it’s nowhere I can connect online.
One of the others near the door leans back from the wall and strolls over to me. She looks bored. “How long do we have to stay down here?” she mutters as she reaches me and bends over to inspect my face. “I didn’t sign up to be a babysitter.”
“You’ll stay until you’re told otherwise,” the man replies in exasperation.
She smiles slightly at me. I glare back at her. “So this is the world-famous Day,” she muses. “He’s even younger than I thought.” Then she directs her words at me. “You don’t look like you’ve lived through a war, kid.”
Too bad this goddy gag is in my mouth, or I’d be able to answer her. Instead, I meet her gaze steadily until it seems to unnerve her. She shoves my chin away so roughly that I have to catch myself to keep the chair from tipping over.
“What the hell are you looking at?” she snaps, then straightens and crosses her arms.
Behind her, one of the other women by the door sighs. “Leave him alone,” she says. “We’re not supposed to touch him.”
“Or what? He was staring at me.” The first woman scowls.
“Just wait until the others head down to get us, all right?” the man on the couch says with a sigh. “It’s not like he’s going to do anything or get anywhere like this.”
Head down. We’re probably somewhere in the Undercity. My head pulses with pain again, and I wince, my thoughts scattering. Leaning against the wall at midnight, being wheeled down a hospital corridor in a gurney, collapsing to the fl oor of a train. Bright fragments of memories come back to me now, along with a phantom pain of what I’d once gone through.
I’m suddenly filled with a rush of anger. I did not live through a revolution and take my brother all the way to Antarctica to be strapped down by some stupid mob boss who somehow thinks he’s important. I did not come here to be intimidated by a bunch of trigger-happy trots.
The AIS’s communication system. If I can get close enough to one of the guards, I can try to tether my system to theirs, get a connection going—if only for a second. Had June received my last message? I have a vague memory of trying to send her a call with nothing but a few seconds of static, but I can’t be sure it ever reached her. Or if she knows that it means I’m in trouble.
I jerk hard against my bonds. The chair clatters forward, scraping against the tiles.
To my satisfaction, all my guards startle at my movement. I smile a little behind my gag. Haven’t lost my touch yet.
“Stay still,” the man on the couch orders me, his frown deepening. He looks reluctant to come to me, though, and his hesitation just makes me more reckless.
Or you’ll do what? They can’t kill me if I’m supposed to be collateral. They need Eden to stay compliant and do what the boss says. So I push harder and bang my chair loudly against the floor. My hands wring behind my back.
“Damn it all,” the man hisses between his teeth as he finally gets up and walks toward me. He smacks me once in the face and then grips my chin hard. “Stay still, unless you want your fingers to go missing one by one.”
Idle threats. I stare fiercely back at him. In his eyes, I can see that what he’d said earlier is true. Hann had instructed them not to touch me, and it bothers this man right now to be forced to discipline me.
Link.
I send out the command on my system with my mind, and it catches his nearby account. A loading circle spins in my view. Attempting to connect, it says.
The man shoves me roughly back away from him. The connection attempt stalls.
I pretend to choke on my gag, coughing uncontrollably. At first the man laughs, smug at the thought of my suffering—but when I keep going, putting on a show of struggling to breathe, his smile wavers a bit. One of the women nods at him.
“Readjust his gag, for chrissakes,” she calls out. “Don’t want him choking to death.”
The man grimaces but does as she says. He comes over, pauses in front of me, and unties the gag from my mouth.
I instantly lash out at him. My teeth close down hard on one of his fingers.
He lets out a yell and shoves me back so hard that I topple over with my chair. My body hits the ground with a painful thud and my head rings from the impact. The coppery taste of blood lingers on my tongue. Above me, the man stalks around in a circle, swearing up a storm, his hand cradling his bleeding finger. In rage, he spins around and kicks me hard in the stomach.
It knocks all the wind out of me. I gasp, my eyes widening at the blow.
“Goddamn little AIS shits,” the man shouts down at me, spitting once on my face as the woman hurries over to force the gag back on over my mouth. Behind her, the man snaps his fingers impatiently, shouting for servants to come clean up the spots of blood on the rug.
I just squeeze my eyes shut and act like I can’t hear anything he’s saying,
because at that moment my connection starts up again.
Link successful.
The warning in the bottom of my view disappears, replaced with a glowing green circle. I’m online.
“Tell Hann to hurry the hell up so we can move him,” the man barks as he wraps his finger in gauze. “I have better things to do.”
This link won’t hold for long. I don’t waste another second. As I lie on the floor, I think a command to my system. Location.
My system can’t seem to pinpoint my exact area, but it does give a general read for where it thinks my signal is coming from, and a map appears, displaying a top-down view of the south side of Ross City.
Send to AIS, I think.
The system sends the map. The upload speed down here is slow, and the progress bar inches along.
But before the message can finish sending, the man steps far enough away from me to sever our link. Everything in my display vanishes again, replaced by the blinking red warning.
Damn it.
The first woman yanks my chair back upright and shoves me against the wall. My curled hands hit the wall wrong, and I let out a muffled gasp as the ring finger of my right hand breaks. Searing pain lances up my arm.
She hears the snap of my bone, then smiles at the pain on my face. With a toss of her hair, she leans down and bends so close to me that our faces nearly touch. “Next time, that finger’s coming off,” she murmurs.
I keep my eyes down until she steps away. Behind her, the man I’d bitten is impatiently waving in a couple of servants dragging buckets of soapy water and brushes to wash my blood off the rugs. They look scared.
Then the guard who I’d bitten hits me across the face again, this time hard enough to send my head slamming into the wall.
Everything goes dark.
EDEN
They lead me into a private elevator station. Then they blindfold me.
I tremble in the familiar darkness. Their hands firmly on my arms, their low voices, the faint lurching of the elevator—every bit of it feels like the Republic again, those terrifying moments when I would lie inside a glass cylinder, rocking along with the train car, unsure where they were taking me. I couldn’t see anything. The world looked like nothing but a blur of strange shapes.
I’ve never spoken to my brother about those days when we were first separated. There’s too much to say, and it all bleeds together into one continual nightmare. Screaming at the searing pain of injections. Lying exhausted in a pool of my own vomit. Shaking uncontrollably from fever. Feeling like my body was on fire, like I would die. Shrinking away from horrifying hallucinations. Feeling cold, stiff corpses lying beside me. Being moved over and over again, without being able to see.
In the first years after it all ended, I was a child who could push it away. But the darkness of those moments have clawed back year after year into my dreams. And now I have returned to that same place, reliving the nightmare of being forced into the dark.
My brother. The image of his unconscious face, his closed eyes, and gagged mouth haunts my vision. The thought of where he might be now is almost more than I can bear.
I can’t tell how long we stay in the elevator. Too long. Then their hands are gripping my arms again, and I stumble out with them. They shove me onto a seat, and a moment later we’re moving again, this time forward instead of down.
Finally, after an eternity, we stop. They shove me out roughly and sit me down onto what feels like a couch of some kind. The darkness over my eyes shifts as one of them unties the knot at the back of my blindfold.
They lift it away. I squint in the sudden light.
I’m in a luxurious living room that looks like it’s part of an estate, except that there are no windows. The couch I’m sitting on—all the furniture in the room, actually—is severe in its elegance, all clean, rectangular lines and muted colors. The lights embedded in the ceilings fill the room with a cooling glow.
And standing before me is Dominic Hann himself, dressed in a tailored shirt and trousers. He smiles as my eyes meet his.
“Eden Bataar Wing,” he remarks, scrutinizing me. His voice is as rough and grainy as I remember, as if he suffers from some kind of chest infection. “Your brother has quite the reputation.”
Always known in relation to Daniel, even down here. I narrow my eyes at him and clench my teeth. “What have you done with him?”
“He’s safe. I didn’t bring you here to terrify you, although I’ve been told it’s a bad habit of mine.” Hann steps toward me, and that’s the first moment when I realize that he isn’t physically in the room with me. His figure is slightly translucent, and as he moves, I see his shoes pass through the thick surface of the rugs.
Too afraid to be in the same place as your guards? I want to say archly to him, but the thought of Daniel captured somewhere here keeps my retort at bay. Instead, I say, “And what’s the point of all this?”
He pauses beside me and sits down on the couch, as much as a hologram can sit. I can see the cushions through his body. He coughs forcefully enough that his shoulders hunch from the force. When one of his guards gives him a questioning look, he waves her away with an impatient hand.
“You’re a Sky Floor citizen,” he begins when he’s cleared his throat enough. “There are few in this country who can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle than yours. And yet there you were, in the Undercity, risking your level and your reputation in order to enter a drone race.” He looks sidelong at me. “What brought you down there?”
I can’t help the sarcasm that rises now in my voice. “You went to all this trouble just to ask me why I was down in the Undercity?”
Hann smiles. A couple of his guards smile along with him, and when he laughs, so do they. “There’s a spark in you,” he says, genuine fondness in his voice. “You’re made for our world down here. I don’t attend Undercity events. I haven’t watched a drone race in years. There’s no reason for me to show my face and risk my own safety for an event that my guys are going to bet on for me anyway. So why do you think I showed up after one of them told me about you?”
“My drone,” I answer without hesitation.
He nods, pleased, and some small part of me feels oddly complimented by that. “You told me you built all of that yourself.”
“Where are you going with this?” My anger is starting to triumph over my fear. “Are you going to tell me what you want or not? Where’s my brother?”
Hann leans back in ease and ignores my questions. “I looked up your files. Seems like you’re a star student at Ross University. And yet, here you are, coming down to the Undercity week after week. That’s not the typical behavior of a Sky Floor kid with their entire future ahead of them.”
“You didn’t bring me here to be my therapist.”
At that, Hann laughs. His guards join in. “No, I didn’t. I brought you here because I think you are the kind of talent that I see only once in a generation.”
“Show me my brother,” I demand. “Then we can talk.”
“Rest assured, he is safe, and I will do you the favor of keeping him that way.” He leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, then regards me with a piercing gaze. “But this is not about him. I’m not interested in your brother. This is about you.”
His words are hitting some part of me that yearns to hear it. This is not about him. If Hann is trying to manipulate me, he’s going to be smart about it, I warn myself. He understands exactly what my weak points are.
Where is Daniel? What has Hann done to him?
The man frowns at my expression. “You’re not used to hearing that, are you? That you’re the focus?” He rises from the couch. His hoarse voice is oddly gentle, with that same warmth that had drawn me in when I first met him. “Come with me, please.”
As he steps out of the room, he snaps his fingers once without looking back at me. At first, I think his guards will drag me up and force me forward—but instead they bow as they approach me, then nod for me to follow Hann out of the room.
I hesitate, afraid, but then start walking.
We head out of the room and down a narrow hallway. As we make several turns, the clean walls and elegant corridors vanish, making way for a smooth concrete floor and steel walls and ceilings. Here, they usher me into what looks like a train inside a tunnel.
This must have all been salvaged and renovated from an old, abandoned part of the Undercity.
We ride in silence for a few minutes before the train comes to a gentle halt. Then we step out into a hall that opens up into a vast, cavernous space.
I balk at the sheer size of it. It looks like a factory filled with halls of identical machines, each of them blinking blue in unison. There must be millions and millions of them, and when they’re all stacked together like this, they look dizzying. Overhead, sheets of cold white lights shine down on the building.
Giant vents run along the ceiling, and tall steel beams tower up in rows. In the center of the room, though, is a large, circular structure that looks like some strange combination of steel and glass and … twisted, fractal mesh. Like something halfway between machinelike and organic. It has a soft blue glow about it. Surrounding it are metal supports, and in the center is a large, circular platform where several workers now stand. The platform’s floor changes to a smooth, dark metal, and my boots clank against the new surface as I step onto it. A couple of the workers look up to see us enter.
“You are getting exclusive access here, Eden,” Hann says to me as he strides toward the structure. “This is a world-class engine I’m building, so I suppose you could say we have similar interests.”
“What does it do?” I find myself asking, momentarily overwhelmed by it and resenting my own curiosity.
“You answer none of my questions, and you expect me to tell you anything?” He smiles at me. “The drone you built for that race, it had a perpetual engine?”
