Rebel (Legend, #4)(94)

Agents swarm around his body, their guns all pointed down at him. Hann’s guards have already backed away from Daniel—their hands are up, their weapons on the ground as soldiers head up to our walkway. Among them, I see a young woman with a lean figure, her shoulder-length hair swinging as she races up the steps toward us. June.

I sink to my knees. I look at my brother, who staggers toward me, still bleeding from his chest. He crouches down beside me with a weary look. We’re both bruised and battered, but we’re alive. How long ago it seemed that Pressa and I joined in on the drone races, when I couldn’t bear to stay away from the Undercity, where I could still see echoes of my past. Maybe not much has changed since then. Tonight, after I go to bed, will I still be haunted by my nightmares? Will I see Pressa crumpling to the ground, bleeding—will Hann’s final gaze lock on to mine as he falls from the railings?

I don’t know if he’s dead. I still don’t even know if he was entirely wrong.

Daniel puts his hand on my neck. The sudden surge of adrenaline is waning now, and we lean against each other in exhaustion. Our lives have always been a war. Maybe that war won’t ever be over. But at the end of it all, we still have each other. It’s this thought that keeps me whole.

As Antarctican soldiers approach us, I pull back to give my brother a tired smile. “Still here,” I say.

He smiles back. “Still here,” he echoes. “And not leaving anytime soon.”





DANIEL



June tells us that Dominic Hann ultimately survived his injuries. I can tell you from personal experience that it’s possible to live through a four-story fall if you know what you’re doing and learn how to land right. Hann’s not the kind of man you kill easily. But his days of terrorizing Ross City have come to an end. He won’t be leaving prison anytime soon, not with the level of security they have on him.

It doesn’t mean things in Ross City have been resolved.

Eden and I get the update as we sit at the hospital, where doctors are tending to our injuries. My brother hasn’t said much since we were escorted from the outskirts and brought back to the center of the city. Already, most of the Level system has been restored, and with it, everything else: signs hovering over the buildings, virtual banks and stores, the elevators that restrict people to the floors where their Levels allow them to go. It’s all back up and running, as if nothing happened.

Almost as if.

Now I sit in the waiting area alone, looking out at Ross City while Eden is visiting Pressa in her hospital room. From here, I’m so high up that I can’t make out the Undercity. Before everything happened with Hann, I’d let myself believe I was relieved to not have to see the troubles down there all the time. Now I feel uneasy that it’s invisible from this vantage point.

Eden’s past arguments with me echo in my mind. How had I let myself become so far removed from that world? Why had it taken everything falling apart here for me to understand what Eden had been trying to tell me for years?

I look down at my hands and trace the faint scars here and there. Old scratches from my days running buildings. Cuts from the fights I used to get into. They are memories of a past I thought I wanted nothing to do with anymore. After all, Hann had been consumed by his past, had let it twist him further and further until he withered away into nothing but rage.

But I can’t just pretend that my past never happened, either. The comfort of not remembering is an artificial thing. I rub my hands together, then sigh and lean against my knees. The scars are still there, long since healed over.

“Hey.”

I shift instinctively at the touch of her hand on my arm. It’s June. Today she’s not in her formal military uniform, but in a breezy collar shirt tied casually at her waist, her hair pulled loosely back into a low, messy braid. She smiles at me, then takes a seat beside me.

“I head back to the Republic tomorrow,” she says.

I try to keep the disappointment from my face. “So soon,” I reply.

Her expression wavers. “Anden’s currently talking to your President, figuring out the details of us resuming our trade routes.” There’s a slight pause as she glances at me. Loose strands of her hair fall from her braid, and I pull back the urge to tuck them behind her ear. “I heard the Level system is back in place.”

She says it with a question hanging at the end. I don’t answer right away, either. I nod out toward the city. “More or less,” I reply.

Except it isn’t really the same. Eden’s chip installed something else onto the system, a few alterations to what it had once been. June knows it too, and when I meet her gaze again, she doesn’t seem surprised.

“I hear there’s a protest planned in the Undercity tomorrow,” she says.

In the old Level system, a protest would have been too hard for Undercity citizens, those with lowly, single-digit Levels, to participate. The penalty for going against the government is having your Levels halved, and your future Leveling severely punished.

But with Eden’s new chip and our alterations, that won’t be the case any longer. Across Ross City, people will gradually find out that they won’t be penalized for protesting. Or marching. They won’t be punished for doing what Pressa had been doing for her father—trying to transfer her own points to help him reach a Level where he could buy the medications he needed. There are a dozen differences we’d secretly implemented onto the Level system.