My eyes dart briefly to the endless plain of skyscrapers outside, each interconnected by webs of walkways. From up here, you can’t see the Undercity. It’s like it doesn’t exist at all.
I jerk back to the scene as one of the others in the room comes up to me and presses a thin metal bar against the back of my ear, where my chip is installed. “What are you doing?” I ask the director.
She fixes me with a piercing stare. “Mr. Wing,” she says to me, and Daniel shifts uncomfortably nearby, “it was right of your brother to inform AIS of the fact that you crossed paths with a man we’vebeen struggling to track down for months. You need to understand that Dominic Hann never appears at gatherings like the one you attended last night. He does not need to show his face when his underlings can do the job for him. So imagine what it means that your performancesointerested him that he decided to speak to you in person.”
The director pauses, then looks to her side at Daniel. She gives him a stern nod. “Tell him,” she says.
Daniel looks at me. His gaze is cool and calm this morning, like we didn’t have our argument the night before. “AIS has a system where we can replay and pull your memories up as a virtual scene,” he explains. “It’s all stored away on your chip. When we activate your system in here, it allows us to see the memory as you did, while trying to pick up on clues that you may not have noticed.”
I exchange a silent look with my brother. He doesn’t say more, but there’s a difference in the way he stares back at me. He’s not angry with me anymore; he’s afraid.
“Sounds like a plan,” I say.
The director gives us both a nod of approval. Then she waves a hand before her. A virtual screen hovers between us. From the way Daniel’s turned his head toward it, I can tell that it’s visible to everyone else in here too.
ALLOW MEMORY ACCESS TO LAST NIGHT?
I take a deep breath. “Granted,” I reply.
The screen disappears. A strange tingle starts at my temples, sweeps up to my head, and then all the way down my body. I shiver.The world around me takes on a blue tint. The chamber, the glass walls, the floor and ceiling—all of it fades away, leaving me and the others standing against a black backdrop. I sway, dizzy at the sight.
Then a scene rushes into place around us. It’s everything that happened the evening before, just as I remember it—I see myself walking through the tiny bar and stepping into the makeshift elevator. The rusted interior of the elevator shaft appears all around us, like a weird reenactment of the scene in which Daniel and AIS agents are also heading down with me. We stop at the bottom. Then we follow the memory version of myself out into the same hall, stopping ultimately out in the underground arena, where the countdown is on the wall and the drone race is setting up.
“Pause,” the director says beside me.
The scene around us halts abruptly, like a movie stilled in three dimensions. The waving arms of the audience freeze, their voices go suddenly silent, the countdown stops.
Min walks around the scene, studying the walls and the crowd. Daniel waves me forward, and I walk uneasily through my frozen memory with him. My brother stops before one of the halls on the other side of the room, where my memory of it goes a little fuzzy. It translates as a grainy view before us.
Daniel points to one of the halls. “Dominic Hann came out of there,” he says to the director. It’s something I hadn’t seen in the heat of the moment.
The director nods before she shifts to analyzing the crowd. We walk through the scene again until we reach the center of the arena. She points out a face near the front of the audience. “There,” she says. “One of Hann’s men. They were running this show.”
Daniel calls for the scene to continue. As if in a dream, I see myself with my drone, then everything that happens in the race.
“Pause.” This time, Daniel says it, and my drone halts in midair. He nods down to the corner of my memory’s scene, where the blur of the audience’s faces is. He points to the man that the director just called out as one of Dominic Hann’s people.
The man isn’t watching anymore. He’s standing up, exchanging a few words with someone else as his eyes dart toward me.
The race continues. We halt the scene several more times whenever my view returns to show Hann’s person. The man walks out with another associate as the race ends, and they disappear into the hall that Daniel pointed out earlier.
Then an hour later, halfway through the second heat, I see Hann emerge.
Daniel sucks his breath in, while Director Min lets out a low whistle. Her eyes veer to me. “So,” she says, “Hann came out to the race specifically to seeyou.”
Even as I hear her words, the scene continues to play, and I see the virtual version of Dominic Hann walk up to me. The unease that ran through me then—the instinct that told me this man was someone unusual—now washes back over me.
He looks so realistic that, for a moment, I genuinely believe he’s in the room with us. I take an unconscious step back as he approaches me. The virtual world around us shudders and blurs, and a haze fades the images around us.
Daniel steps toward me. “Pause. Clear,” he says, his gaze on his director. The scene halts, and Dominic Hann and the Undercity fade into white before the AIS chamber comes back into view. “Give hima rest. His emotions are interfering with the quality of the memory playback.”
“I can do this,” I say to him.
But the director’s not paying attention to Daniel anymore. Instead, her stare is fixed on me. She narrows her eyes. “What were you doing down in the Undercity, Mr. Wing?” she asks me. “You know drone races are strictly banned.”
She’s going to dock my Level hard for this, I know, but in this moment, I hardly care. My lips tighten into a line. “I don’t think it’s relevant to why you needed me here,” I reply.
She raises an eyebrow at me and glances at my brother. “Well, I see where he gets his attitude from,” she says wryly to him before returning her attention to me. “We’ll need to pull an earlier memory from you, of how you heard about this race and what sent you down there.”
