Rebel (Legend, #4)(68)
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.
We step between the rooms without speaking. There are old videos from the JumboTrons, the pledge that we used to recite every morning, giant maps hanging by steel cables from the ceiling, indicating how and where the borders of America had changed over the years. There are even rooms dedicated to America before the Republic, when we were unified with the Colonies. I stare, overwhelmed, at placards describing the events that led up to the war that divided us. They’ve named it Coranda’s War, after the young general who first staged a coup and became the first Elector Primo of the Republic.
They don’t call it the Civil War. There had already been one that split the nation before, hundreds of years ago, during a time when the enslavement of human beings was legal based on nothing but the color of one’s skin. There is an entire room dedicated to that, to the unified, sinister America before we existed.