“What if I choose not to work for you?” I say. “Will you still let me go?”
Hann nods. “If you choose not to, then what’s the point of keeping you here? Life is too exhausting to hold someone hostage every time I need something to get done.” He waves at the door. “Go. Confide in your friends. Find your brother. Never see me again. I won’t hunt you down at races; I won’t have my guards stalk what you do. All I can tell you is that you’re about to see what Ross City should actually be like, once it rises from its ashes. It’s time for someone else to run this place.” He leans forward on his knees. “Then you’ll soon ask yourself… who are you helping, exactly, by refusing my offer?”
I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know how to prove him wrong. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Ross City.
All I do is step toward the door. I go through the entrance and into the hall. Just like he’d said, his guards are waiting to take me wherever I want to go. And Hann is still behind me, sitting in my chamber.
I turn my back on the estate. Hann’s words ring in my mind, lingering, haunting.
Who are you helping, exactly, by refusing my offer?
And right as I consider those words, a high-pitched sound crackles around us.
I press my hands to my ears. The chip implanted near my temple seems to grow warm. My heart jumps into my throat.
Then everything goes silent.
It’s over as quickly as it happened, like an electric shock that blitzed right through the walls and floors and us. The guards, too, felt it—they hunch for a second, flinching, then look at one another in bewilderment before everything settles back down.
But something is missing. I open my eyes and see nothing virtual hovering in my view. No numbers, no account, not even the persistent warning that I’m unable to connect down here. There’s a weight to the silence, like the kind of quiet that you hear when you’re truly severed from civilization. The buzz and hum of technology. It’s all justgone.
He’s done it. It worked.
Dominic Hann has ordered the real signal to trigger. And he has just eliminated Ross City’s entire system.
DANIEL
It happens the next morning, right as June and I reach the AIS headquarters.
I’m awake by dawn, pulling my shirt and trousers on and tugging smooth my suit. Beside me, June’s already ready, as impeccably neat as any soldier trained in the Republic.
I don’t know what to say about what happened between us last night. Neither does she, I think. All we can do is glance occasionally at each other as we get ready. When I do speak, it’s about Eden.
“AIS messaged,” I tell her as we step out of the apartment and into the hall. “No luck hunting down Eden’s location. But my description of the underground has narrowed it down to a rough patch of the city.”
“What part?” June asks.
I bring up a map between us as we enter an elevator station, then point to a section of the grid. “This area was once in development to expand the Undercity to floors beneath the surface,” I explain. “They were going to house Undercity folks down there, in cramped spaces underground. It turned out to be a disaster, though—notenough escape routes up to the surface in case of fire or flood, not enough emergency ventilation. There was a huge fire that ripped through the space. After that, no one bothered with the maze of tunnels.”
“And it sounds like what you saw when you were down there?”
I nod. “The kind of building I saw, the construction site… it had the kind of infrastructure that reminded me of that story.”
June looks down at the city through the elevator’s glass windows. “We’re going down there, then, aren’t we?” She glances skeptically at me. “Are you sure you can do this?”
“I have to,” I reply. “I’m not going to keep lying around up here, waiting for AIS to find something.” In desperation, I bring up Eden’s account again and try one more time to track his location.
That’s when I feel it.
There’s a spark of something electric, as if every particle in the air were suddenly charged—followed by a sharp crack in my ears. It’s so loud that I flinch. June does the same in unison.
“What was that?” she exclaims.
But as soon as she says it, every single one of our Levels flickers out. June’s name and Level vanishes from over her head. The faint glow on the handles of her glasses disappears. The numbers and bars in my view fade into nothing. The elevator shudders to a stop on one of the middle floors of the building. When I glance up at the ceiling, I notice that the power’s out. None of the elevator’s panels are lit.
What happened? A short circuit in the system?
My first reaction is to turn on my grid lines—but there are none. Nothing about my system works at all. It’s as if it turned off.
