Rebel (Legend, #4)(34)
Daniel just shakes his head. “You don’t get it,” he mutters. It’s all he resorts to, turning me back into the little brother.
But we aren’t brothers here. He’s my father, and I’m his son. The feeling of distance, along with the fear of everything that happened tonight, now threatens to smother me.
In disgust, I turn away. “When I leave for the Republic,” I say, “maybe it’d be best if you didn’t come with me. You should just stay here.”
Daniel winces, and I feel an urge to take it back. But instead I turn from him and head to my room.
Behind me, Daniel raises his voice. “Wait, Eden,” he calls out.
I pause as he hurries to my side. “Please,” he says, taking a deep breath.
“What?” I mutter.
He hesitates and his gaze hardens on mine. “Fine. Go to the Republic by yourself.”
He’s letting me go? I narrow my eyes at him. It surprises me how his comment cuts me. But my pride refuses to let me show that. “Fine,” I repeat.
Daniel winces again, as if he’d been hoping I’d say something different. But we each stay on our own side, no longer able to understand each other. It’s like I’m looking back at someone I haven’t known since I was a baby.
Then I turn away again. This time, Daniel doesn’t stop me as I head into my room and close the door between us.
* * *
“This won’t take long. You may feel a little buzz.”
Beside me, my brother folds his arms and turns his mouth down in a concerned scowl. “Go easy,” he replies to the woman. “He’s never used this system before.”
I grit my teeth at his familiar condescension and ignore him. I’m standing in the middle of a circular room at the top of the AIS headquarters with Daniel, a half-dozen other investigators, and the woman who had just spoken to me—Min Gheren, the AIS director herself. Glass windows stretch from floor to ceiling and curve around the chamber, giving us a stunning view of Ross City.
My eyes dart briefly to the endless plain of skyscrapers outside, each interconnected by webs of walkways. From up here, you can’t see the Undercity. It’s like it doesn’t exist at all.
I jerk back to the scene as one of the others in the room comes up to me and presses a thin metal bar against the back of my ear, where my chip is installed. “What are you doing?” I ask the director.
She fixes me with a piercing stare. “Mr. Wing,” she says to me, and Daniel shifts uncomfortably nearby, “it was right of your brother to inform AIS of the fact that you crossed paths with a man we’ve been struggling to track down for months. You need to understand that Dominic Hann never appears at gatherings like the one you attended last night. He does not need to show his face when his underlings can do the job for him. So imagine what it means that your performance so interested him that he decided to speak to you in person.”
The director pauses, then looks to her side at Daniel. She gives him a stern nod. “Tell him,” she says.
Daniel looks at me. His gaze is cool and calm this morning, like we didn’t have our argument the night before. “AIS has a system where we can replay and pull your memories up as a virtual scene,” he explains. “It’s all stored away on your chip. When we activate your system in here, it allows us to see the memory as you did, while trying to pick up on clues that you may not have noticed.”
I exchange a silent look with my brother. He doesn’t say more, but there’s a difference in the way he stares back at me. He’s not angry with me anymore; he’s afraid.
“Sounds like a plan,” I say.
The director gives us both a nod of approval. Then she waves a hand before her. A virtual screen hovers between us. From the way Daniel’s turned his head toward it, I can tell that it’s visible to everyone else in here too.
ALLOW MEMORY ACCESS TO LAST NIGHT?
I take a deep breath. “Granted,” I reply.
The screen disappears. A strange tingle starts at my temples, sweeps up to my head, and then all the way down my body. I shiver. The world around me takes on a blue tint. The chamber, the glass walls, the floor and ceiling—all of it fades away, leaving me and the others standing against a black backdrop. I sway, dizzy at the sight.
Then a scene rushes into place around us. It’s everything that happened the evening before, just as I remember it—I see myself walking through the tiny bar and stepping into the makeshift elevator. The rusted interior of the elevator shaft appears all around us, like a weird reenactment of the scene in which Daniel and AIS agents are also heading down with me. We stop at the bottom. Then we follow the memory version of myself out into the same hall, stopping ultimately out in the underground arena, where the countdown is on the wall and the drone race is setting up.
“Pause,” the director says beside me.
The scene around us halts abruptly, like a movie stilled in three dimensions. The waving arms of the audience freeze, their voices go suddenly silent, the countdown stops.
Min walks around the scene, studying the walls and the crowd. Daniel waves me forward, and I walk uneasily through my frozen memory with him. My brother stops before one of the halls on the other side of the room, where my memory of it goes a little fuzzy. It translates as a grainy view before us.
Daniel points to one of the halls. “Dominic Hann came out of there,” he says to the director. It’s something I hadn’t seen in the heat of the moment.