June glances at me with a frown. “It looks like it’s not limited to our building,” she says, nodding out at the city.
Sure enough, she’s right—every building close to us also looks blacked out, with no hovering virtual info on any part of them.
June glances at me. “AIS? Can you contact them?”
I shake my head. “No. Everything about my system is disabled. Come on.” I step off the elevator, then motion for us to head down to the walkways. We start sprinting along the halls. Here and there, we run into a few other people also coming out of the elevators, looking bewildered.
One of them shouts at us as we pass. “Your systems working?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No,” I call back. So it’s not limited to our accounts, either. A heavy feeling starts creeping into my chest. Something has gone severely wrong—and a part of me knows it must be somehow tied to what Hann was doing.
What he had stolen my brother for.
As we sprint down the stairs, I almost run right into Jessan and the director, right as they exit into the stairwells from the headquarters.
“Wing!” Director Min exclaims. “You’re not supposed to be up—”
I ignore her comment and keep going. “Your systems?” I ask. “Anything working?”
She looks pale as she shakes her head back. “Our Levels—everything—our data—all the info that the government displays and tracks and keeps. All of it’s gone—not just reset, or flattened, butgone. Wiped.”
A cold fist tightens around my chest.It’s impossible, I want tosay—because everything I know about the infrastructure of the system, how spread out across the city and how decentralized everything is. But I’ve seen too many goddy impossible things come true to believe those words.
“It’s citywide?” June asks.
Jessan nods grimly. “As far as we can tell. We can’t reach anyone. No calls going in or coming out.”
If the entire city’s system is down… the pandemonium on the streets in the Undercity must be unimaginable. My heart seizes at the idea of Eden still being trapped somewhere underground there.
“I’ve seen what happens when you have a complete blackout in a city as divided as this one,” June says as we run. Her face turns grimmer. “When people who have been held down for decades suddenly realize that their chains have been removed, things unravel quickly. It can take less than an hour for a society to destabilize.”
Jessan looks sharply at June. “What do you mean?” she asks.
“I mean, you’d better make sure your military is down in the Undercity right now, before things get out of hand,” June replies.
I think of the constant outages we had in Lake, the unrest that would take over the streets. June’s right. There had been one particular outage that once affected the entirety of Los Angeles—and within the hour, fires had broken out all over the city as the poor sectors clashed with the Gem ones. I remember seeing the tanks rolling down the streets to bring order back. My mother had forced us to stay inside for two weeks as police swarmed through the neighborhoods.
“Ross City is not the Republic,” the director says stiffly to June.
“No,” June replies, just as severely. “It’s worse. This is a far moreconcentrated place, and the effect will be swifter. As far as I can tell, without your system in place, the Undercity will crumble, and it will happen soon if you can’t get your system back up.”
Damn, I’ve missed hearing her talk when she’s breaking down a situation. Min scowls at the bluntness in June’s voice, but she doesn’t argue back this time. Instead, she returns to trying to place a call out to the President.
“Emergency power’s still not up,” she swears under her breath after a moment.
“Head northeast as soon as we reach the ground,” I say to June. “We’ll go in the general direction where we’ve been hunting for Eden.”
She nods without hesitation. I have no idea what we’ll do after that, or how we’ll find our way down, but it’s the best bet for finding my brother.
We finally reach the bottom floor. The stairs lead out to a tall set of heavy, barred metal doors, and when we slide them open, they reveal the streets of the Undercity.
We step out into a scene of chaos.
All around us, the names and data hovering over each street stall, each shop, each person, are gone. When I look up, I notice that virtual overlays have vanished from over the elevator stations too. There’s nothing we look at that isn’t already real.
My eyes go to June, but she’s looking down the street. Some are taking advantage of the moment already, and the space in front of a station is starting to flood with people. My first, fleeting thought is that all the stations have also powered down instantaneously—if everyone’s Levels have been flattened, then everyone is trapped wherever they happen to be.
But that’s replaced almost instantly by my second thought: Our Levels haven’t just been flattened, they’ve beendeleted. In one fell swoop, Ross City’s Level system—the class system I’ve always argued about with AIS, the same system that Eden rebelled against by constantly coming down here—has been cleared.
