“Readjust his gag, for chrissakes,” she calls out. “Don’t want him choking to death.”

The man grimaces but does as she says. He comes over, pauses in front of me, and unties the gag from my mouth.

I instantly lash out at him. My teeth close down hard on one of his fingers.

He lets out a yell and shoves me back so hard that I topple over with my chair. My body hits the ground with a painful thud and my head rings from the impact. The coppery taste of blood lingers on my tongue. Above me, the man stalks around in a circle, swearing up a storm, his hand cradling his bleeding finger. In rage, he spins around and kicks me hard in the stomach.

It knocks all the wind out of me. I gasp, my eyes widening at the blow.

“Goddamn little AIS shits,” the man shouts down at me, spitting once on my face as the woman hurries over to force the gag back on over my mouth. Behind her, the man snaps his fingers impatiently, shouting for servants to come clean up the spots of blood on the rug.

I just squeeze my eyes shut and act like I can’t hear anything he’s saying, because at that moment my connection starts up again.

Link successful.

The warning in the bottom of my view disappears, replaced with a glowing green circle. I’m online.

“Tell Hann to hurry the hell up so we can move him,” the man barks as he wraps his finger in gauze. “I have better things to do.”

This link won’t hold for long. I don’t waste another second. As I lie on the floor, I think a command to my system. Location.

My system can’t seem to pinpoint my exact area, but it does give a general read for where it thinks my signal is coming from, and a map appears, displaying a top-down view of the south side of Ross City.

Send to AIS, I think.

The system sends the map. The upload speed down here is slow, and the progress bar inches along.

But before the message can finish sending, the man steps far enough away from me to sever our link. Everything in my display vanishes again, replaced by the blinking red warning.

Damn it.

The first woman yanks my chair back upright and shoves me against the wall. My curled hands hit the wall wrong, and I let out a muffled gasp as the ring finger of my right hand breaks. Searing pain lances up my arm.

She hears the snap of my bone, then smiles at the pain on my face. With a toss of her hair, she leans down and bends so close to me that our faces nearly touch. “Next time, that finger’s coming off,” she murmurs.

I keep my eyes down until she steps away. Behind her, the man I’d bitten is impatiently waving in a couple of servants dragging buckets of soapy water and brushes to wash my blood off the rugs. They look scared.

Then the guard who I’d bitten hits me across the face again, this time hard enough to send my head slamming into the wall.

Everything goes dark.

EDEN

 

They lead me into a private elevator station. Then they blindfold me.

I tremble in the familiar darkness. Their hands firmly on my arms, their low voices, the faint lurching of the elevator—every bit of it feels like the Republic again, those terrifying moments when I would lie inside a glass cylinder, rocking along with the train car, unsure where they were taking me. I couldn’t see anything. The world looked like nothing but a blur of strange shapes.

I’ve never spoken to my brother about those days when we were first separated. There’s too much to say, and it all bleeds together into one continual nightmare. Screaming at the searing pain of injections. Lying exhausted in a pool of my own vomit. Shaking uncontrollably from fever. Feeling like my body was on fire, like I would die. Shrinking away from horrifying hallucinations. Feeling cold, stiff corpses lying beside me. Being moved over and over again, without being able to see.

In the first years after it all ended, I was a child who could push it away. But the darkness of those moments have clawed back year after year into my dreams. And now I have returned to that same place, reliving the nightmare of being forced into the dark.

My brother. The image of his unconscious face, his closed eyes, and gagged mouth haunts my vision. The thought of where he might be now is almost more than I can bear.

I can’t tell how long we stay in the elevator. Too long. Then their hands are gripping my arms again, and I stumble out with them. They shove me onto a seat, and a moment later we’re moving again, this time forward instead of down.

Finally, after an eternity, we stop. They shove me out roughly and sit me down onto what feels like a couch of some kind. The darkness over my eyes shifts as one of them unties the knot at the back of my blindfold.

They lift it away. I squint in the sudden light.

I’m in a luxurious living room that looks like it’s part of an estate, except that there are no windows. The couch I’m sitting on—all the furniture in the room, actually—is severe in its elegance, all clean, rectangular lines and muted colors. The lights embedded in the ceilings fill the room with a cooling glow.

And standing before me is Dominic Hann himself, dressed in a tailored shirt and trousers. He smiles as my eyes meet his.

“Eden Bataar Wing,” he remarks, scrutinizing me. His voice is as rough and grainy as I remember, as if he suffers from some kind of chest infection. “Your brother has quite the reputation.”

Always known in relation to Daniel, even down here. I narrow my eyes at him and clench my teeth. “What have you done with him?”

“He’s safe. I didn’t bring you here to terrify you, although I’ve been told it’s a bad habit of mine.” Hann steps toward me, and that’s the first moment when I realize that he isn’t physically in the room with me. His figure is slightly translucent, and as he moves, I see his shoes pass through the thick surface of the rugs.

Too afraid to be in the same place as your guards? I want to say archly to him, but the thought of Daniel captured somewhere here keeps my retort at bay. Instead, I say, “And what’s the point of all this?”

He pauses beside me and sits down on the couch, as much as a hologram can sit. I can see the cushions through his body. He coughs forcefully enough that his shoulders hunch from the force. When one of his guards gives him a questioning look, he waves her away with an impatient hand.

“You’re a Sky Floor citizen,” he begins when he’s cleared his throat enough. “There are few in this country who can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle than yours. And yet there you were, in the Undercity, risking your level and your reputation in order to enter a drone race.” He looks sidelong at me. “What brought you down there?”

I can’t help the sarcasm that rises now in my voice. “You went to all this trouble just to ask me why I was down in the Undercity?”

Hann smiles. A couple of his guards smile along with him, and when he laughs, so do they. “There’s a spark in you,” he says, genuine fondness in his voice. “You’re made for our world down here. I don’t attend Undercity events. I haven’t watched a drone race in years. There’s no reason for me to show my face and risk my own safety for an event that my guys are going to bet on for me anyway. So why do you think I showed up after one of them told me about you?”

“My drone,” I answer without hesitation.

He nods, pleased, and some small part of me feels oddly complimented by that. “You told me you built all of that yourself.”