Hann stays even-tempered. “You can tell yourself whatever you want,” he replies. “I understand that it would be difficult to do this, because you would be separating yourself completely from your brother. But I know this is what’s in your heart. You want to change things, just like I do. And you’re tired of other people getting in your way. Tired of being unable to help the ones you care about the most. Tired of being unseen.”

I stay where I am, my mind whirling with confusion. On a surface level, he’s someone I’d need to avoid at all costs. But this …

“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 just gone.

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—not enough 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.

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, but gone. Wiped.”

A cold fist tightens around my chest. It’s impossible, I want to say—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.