Rebel (Legend, #4)(60)

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.

“It’s citywide?” June asks.

Jessan nods grimly. “As far as we can tell. We can’t reach anyone. No calls going in or coming out.”

If the entire city’s system is down … the pandemonium on the streets in the Undercity must be unimaginable. My heart seizes at the idea of Eden still being trapped somewhere underground there.

“I’ve seen what happens when you have a complete blackout in a city as divided as this one,” June says as we run. Her face turns grimmer. “When people who have been held down for decades suddenly realize that their chains have been removed, things unravel quickly. It can take less than an hour for a society to destabilize.”

Jessan looks sharply at June. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“I mean, you’d better make sure your military is down in the Undercity right now, before things get out of hand,” June replies.

I think of the constant outages we had in Lake, the unrest that would take over the streets. June’s right. There had been one particular outage that once affected the entirety of Los Angeles—and within the hour, fires had broken out all over the city as the poor sectors clashed with the Gem ones. I remember seeing the tanks rolling down the streets to bring order back. My mother had forced us to stay inside for two weeks as police swarmed through the neighborhoods.

“Ross City is not the Republic,” the director says stiffly to June.

“No,” June replies, just as severely. “It’s worse. This is a far more concentrated place, and the effect will be swifter. As far as I can tell, without your system in place, the Undercity will crumble, and it will happen soon if you can’t get your system back up.”

Damn, I’ve missed hearing her talk when she’s breaking down a situation. Min scowls at the bluntness in June’s voice, but she doesn’t argue back this time. Instead, she returns to trying to place a call out to the President.

“Emergency power’s still not up,” she swears under her breath after a moment.

“Head northeast as soon as we reach the ground,” I say to June. “We’ll go in the general direction where we’ve been hunting for Eden.”

She nods without hesitation. I have no idea what we’ll do after that, or how we’ll find our way down, but it’s the best bet for finding my brother.