“News about Antarctica has been all over the news here,” Tess says as she swivels around in her seat to look back at us. “Is it true, what happened to their Level system? I thought that was supposed to be completely secure.”

“Nothing’s completely secure,” Daniel says in the silence afterward. “We didn’t know how fast it could go down, though. Everything works until it doesn’t.”

“Now what?” June looks from Daniel to me, her eyes quicksilver as bars of sunlight and shadow slide through the car’s interior. “What is this man’s plan?”

Daniel shakes his head. “You crumble a place’s foundation, crack its walls, and anything can get in. There are fires in the streets—everything’s chaos. And chaos is exactly what someone like Dominic Hann likes best.”

There’s real anger in his voice. With this blow, Hann is going to take advantage of this mask of liberation to seize power for himself. In chaos, monsters rise quickly.

Whether or not Hann actually is a monster … I’m still not sure.

Tess frowns at us, then shakes her head. “We all know what chaos can do,” she says impatiently, waving a hand at us. “But I think what June’s asking is what he wants to do with that chaos. Specifically.”

At that, Pressa straightens beside me, shaken out of her daze at the overwhelming introduction to the Republic. She tilts her head at Tess. “I hadn’t thought about that,” she says. “Hann’s taken down the entire system. What if he knows enough about it to bring it back up? Put it back in place and change it to suit him?”

Tess nods back at her. “It’s what a dictator would do,” she replies. “Pure anarchy is never what they’re going for.”

A thought snaps into place. Sometimes I forget that Tess is a girl who had scraped by on the streets and barely survived the same revolution we had. She’s no stranger to understanding how a society falls apart.

It seems like an obvious next step. Why would Hann go as far as taking down a system of control just to throw it away?

And suddenly, I find myself thinking about my schematic doodles in a different light. I dig into my pocket and bring all the papers out in a crinkly mess. Then I straighten them in my lap. Pressa looks over my shoulder as I do.

No wonder there were so many parts of the machine that felt to me like they didn’t need to exist. Maybe it’s because the machine was never meant to just take down the Level system. Maybe Hann’s invention is also designed to bring it back up.

When I glance up, I see Daniel’s eyes locked on mine. This, at least, is something he recognizes in me—when he sees the flash of an idea on my face.

“What are you thinking, Eden?” he asks.

It’s time for someone else to run this place. Hann’s last words to me flash through my thoughts, searing and clear.

“What if Hann is going to rebuild it?” I say automatically. “The Level system, I mean?” I point to several parts of the machine that I hadn’t figured out. “What if he’s going to implement a new system, one that has him at the helm?”

The pause that follows is thick and ominous.

June finally nods at me. “How much do you know about his device?” she asks.

“Not enough,” I reply.

“Any is better than none.” She raises an eyebrow at me. “I hate to say it, but your meddling might be just the thing that takes Hann down.”

DANIEL

Everything about the Republic feels familiar and strange.

I’m quiet as I walk with June during sunset through the streets of inner Los Angeles, where we’d met so long ago. When I’d first come back here with Eden, I hadn’t had the time or guts to wander through my old haunts. Now that I do, I remember why I’d hesitated.

June walks with me, content to let me take it all in. Antarctica’s slick high-rises and chaotic, jumbled floors are a distant world compared with this place. The red-gold haze hovering over the lake in downtown Los Angeles, iron waterwheels churning in the water. The smell of fried dough and boiled goose eggs and pygmy-pig hot dogs filling the streets. The divide between the rich and poor, the Gem districts and the other districts, still stark. These images are clear between the holes in my memory, and with them, I think I can piece together the rest of what my childhood had been on these streets.

But there are things I don’t recognize. No more Xs spray-painted against doors. No more plague patrols haunting the streets of my own neighborhood. There are vegetable gardens now, patches of green striping the ground here and there, the result of people being allowed to create and sell products. And most of all …

Scaffolding. Everywhere. Buildings—crumbling towers, subpar housing—are being torn down and built back up again, and the bones of steel construction sites line the horizon. Plans for parks, private shops, safer neighborhoods.

“It’s been a decade,” June says as she notices my gaze lingering on the horizon’s cranes. As always, she is breaking down my thoughts. “But change is still slow to come. Anden has been trying to bridge this gap with some new work projects. We can’t afford any of this, but Anden’s confident he can get international investments to keep our pace going. I hope he’s right.”

My thoughts waver from the Republic to the feeling of June’s smooth hand sliding into mine. She edges closer to me as we near the water. The awkwardness between us is still there, lingering, but at least it’s been dulled. I savor her touch. The memory of her in my arms several nights earlier comes back to me now in a wave of warmth. Somehow, beside her, this whirlwind of lost memories and dark places stills in me, and I can remember things better.

I pause at an intersection marked with the edge of the lake on one side and a pair of towers rising up on the other. One of the towers is old, just as I remember it—ramshackle layers of concrete long streaked by water and grime, the lowest floor a barely lit entrance to a bar and the upper floors made colorful with lines of drying clothes and plants draping haphazardly down rusted balcony ledges.

The other tower is new, a structure of straight lines and polished stone, its sides draped with crimson-and-black Republic banners. Over the steps leading up to the entrance are words I’ve never seen engraved on a building here: REPUBLIC HISTORY MUSEUM.

I look at June, and she gives me a terse nod. “Come on.” She tugs slightly on my hand and starts making her way up the stairs. “They just finished it this year.”

I nod wordlessly and follow her. It’s better than standing in the middle of the street, lost in memories I don’t want. Trying to keep the fear of my past at bay.

Inside, curators in red and black stand at the entrances of the museum’s many rooms. They bow their heads in recognition at the sight of us. Our boots echo against the stone floors.

We stare at the exhibits in silence. This is a memorial to the horrors of the past. The child-size outfit of a Trial taker, plain and white, now framed and hanging. A plague patrol uniform encased within glass, its gas mask rusted and faceless. Portraits of the late Elector and those who came before him, all lining the back wall. Anden had banned his portrait being hung everywhere not long after the end of the war with the Colonies. I guess one of them ended up in here.