As the engines start and the jet lifts into the air, I look out my window and down at the city below us. Smoke rises from the lowest streets, hazing the still-glittering lights on the higher floors. Without the colorful overlays on the city, the place looks more vulnerable than I ever imagined—the buildings stark white, empty of substance. Tiny dots of people run back and forth on the pathways that connect each of the buildings like a web.
It looks like war. It looks like something I’ve seen all too much of in my life. As we rise higher and the scene below fades behind the clouds, I find myself wondering if there is ever a time in history of peace, if we can ever find a way to escape the cycle of destruction we bring upon ourselves.
If there is, I sure as hell haven’t seen it.
LOS ANGELES
REPUBLIC OF AMERICA
EDEN
I spend the entire twelve hours on the plane sketching one schematic after another.
It’s the same habit that emerges every time I’m trying to distract myself from my anxieties. My drawings are of what I remember from working on Dominic Hann’s device, but they’re not enough—I hadn’t gotten access to everything, and as a result all I end up with is an unfinished idea of how he managed to take down the entire Antarctican system in Ross City in one fell swoop.
“Eden.”
It takes me a while to realize that Pressa is saying my name. I startle out of my sketching to see her staring pointedly at me, a cup of steaming tea in her hands. She puts it on the table before me.
“Thanks,” I mutter, forcing myself to sit back in my seat and wrap my hands around the cup. The heat of it scalds my skin, but the sudden shock feels nice too.
Pressa turns her dark eyes toward the window. She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Thanks for taking me with you,” she says in a low voice.
She’s been quiet for most of the trip, her eyes hollow and red with grief. Now she glances uncomfortably around the Elector’s jet. It’s a luxurious space, its rounded ceiling high and its sides lined with smooth couches and chairs. Behind us, two full-length beds with thick curtains draped over them bookend the back of the plane, along with a bathroom that rivals the one in our apartment.
Her gaze settles again and again on the Elector, who sits at the other end near the front of the plane and talks in low voices with June. Daniel lounges beside her, his face trained idly on the scene outside the windows. Despite his attempts to look like he’s not paying attention to what they’re saying, I can tell he’s taking in every bit of it. Just like how he’s noticing where I am right now and what I’m doing, even though he’d never show it.
Pressa’s eyes dart briefly to my schematics, then up to me. “You’re gonna need to rest if you want to make any more progress, you know,” she finally murmurs. “You’ve been at it nonstop for the entire flight.”
“I know.” I rub my bleary eyes. “I just… The Level system was destroyed because of me. My own engine powered that machine, and I just let it happen. I have to figure this out.”
Her eyes soften at me. “This wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it, though?” I put my cup down in disgust.
“I never should have taken you to the drone race.”
“What choice did you have?” I say gently. “You were trying to help your father. And instead, I gave Hann the last piece of the puzzle that he needed.”
And now Mr. Yu was gone. I see fresh pain cross Pressa’s face and bury my head in my hands. Numbers and blueprints crowd my exhausted mind.
Finally, Pressa shakes her head. “Hann would’ve gotten it somehow, with or without you. He couldn’t have moved as fast as he did otherwise.” She leans her elbows against the table between us. “How long must it have taken him to set that up? Months? Years?”
I flip incessantly through my useless sketches. “Long enough that no one noticed him building up that kind of infrastructure.” The only consolation I have is that at least hediduse a part of something I’d created. It gives me some starting point to try to figure out the rest of his puzzle, at least. But there isn’t much time for that.
As I think about Hann, I feel a strange tug in my chest of something uncertain. The memory of the man’s grave eyes comes back to me, along with the story he’d told me about what had happened to his family.
You remind me of my son.
Those words of his shouldn’t stick with me. For all I know, they could be a lie. But the grief in his eyes as he’d said them…
He’d let my brother go. He’d letmego.
He’d taken down the very system that Daniel had argued against to his superiors, that I’d hated and defied every chance I could get.
It’s his fault that Pressa’s father is dead, I try to remind myself.
But was it Hann who had killed him, or Ross City’s system?
