As the man reaches me, he casts me a quick glance. Then his eyes dart to the space right over my shoulder.
It’s all I need to see.
Thieves.
I suddenly break into a run. The man beside me stiffens in surprise, then whistles to his partner to go after me. His footsteps pound the pavement behind me. I don’t look back. I just keep going.
But he’s too fast for me. One second, I’m nearly to the end of the alley. The next, a rough hand grabs me by the collar and sends me flying backward. My back slams hard against the wall, and then there’s a hard blade pressed against the skin of my throat. I find myself staring into a pair of hard eyes.
“Well,” he says, smiling as his friend saunters up beside him. “Got us a skyboy.”
I try to struggle, but the man’s got at least fifty pounds on me. A buzzing sound of panic seeps into my thoughts. I have to get out of here.
That’s when I hear his voice.
“One more time. I dare you.”
It comes, as it usually does, from somewhere up high, echoing against the alley walls. I turn my head up. He’s perched on a second-floor balcony. One of his legs is dangling idly over the edge, and the crisp black shirt he’s wearing under his black suit is lazily buttoned, the collar half up and half down. His blond hair is short and disorderly.
It’s my brother. Daniel. His eyes are trained on my attackers. And right now, the smirk on his lips is the dangerous kind.
I groan and hang my head.Oh, hell.
DANIEL
The would-be thieves don’t wait around.
I see their eyes dart to me—not even to my face, but to the telltale black suit I’m wearing—and instantly, fear washes over them. They know exactly who I work for.
“Let him go,” one of the thieves snaps to the other.
The man holding Eden’s collar releases him, then sheathes the knife he was carrying. The two of them start sprinting down the alley. One of them chances a glance back at me, then shudders and speeds up.
For a second, I think about chasing them down. Jessan and Lara are still here—I could call them and tell them to track those two men with the Level system’s geolocator and have them arrested the instant they’re cornered.
But I’ve already had a woman die in my arms today. My strength for dealing with the Undercity’s crimes is pretty exhausted.
Instead, I turn my glare down at my little brother. My smile feels like a line drawn in stone against my face. “Well,” I call down at him as I shift my footing against the balcony. “You told me you weregoing to stay late at the university, yeah? Fancy running into you down here instead.”
Eden doesn’t look relieved that I’ve saved his ass. He shoots an irritated glance up at me and crosses his arms over his chest. “You followed me?” he says incredulously.
I’m not about to tell him that I tracked his location. “Don’t flatter yourself,” I reply. “I had real work to do down here.”
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 thepast few years, our conversations have turned into this, in which neither one of us really knows what to say to the other.
