Rebel - Marie Lu Page 0,1
smile and the earnest face and hear the breathless, rapid-fire chatter about the inner workings of a machine. They don’t see the boy who startles awake at the sound of fireworks popping outside, convinced that it’s the thunder of gunfire as soldiers break into our home. They don’t see the boy who forces himself to stay up one more hour just so it means one less hour of calling for his mother in his dreams. So it means not feeling embarrassed for still not being over her death.
I like to show my bright side because it puts people at ease. Eden, who’s going to be just like his brother when he grows up. Not even Daniel seems to get who I really am. When I pretend I’m okay, it makes my brother happy. And when he’s happy, I can believe that I am too.
But at night, my dreams are filled with scenes of the Republic. They seep into every corner of my vision, all the good memories and the horrific ones, blending together so thoroughly that sometimes I can no longer tell one apart from the other.
Does Daniel have nightmares? If he does, he’s never mentioned them to me.
The Republic, my past … these are things I haven’t been able to figure out. To understand. Maybe that’s why I ended up applying for an internship back in Los Angeles. Because I miss it, because I want to make it better by turning the Trial stadiums into hospitals, universities, and museums.
But also because it haunts my dreams, those old streets and faded memories. Because I can’t stop thinking about it in the quiet and the dark. The brother that Daniel and I lost. The mother we will never see again. The father I never knew. Their ghosts walk my sleeping world, calling me back home.
I think about the Republic all the time. I wonder what it was like when I was small. I mull over and over the few broken memories I have. I read every article about the Republic that I can find. It’s the hole in my past, the part that makes no sense to me, and I’m obsessed with understanding it. I need to comprehend what happened in my childhood. How I managed to survive one of the darkest moments in our history.
But maybe that’s stupid, you know? Because, sometimes, it’s impossible to understand something. Sometimes things don’t happen for a reason.
The family we lost. The war that engulfed our lives. There is nothing to figure out, there is no how or why.
Sometimes things just happen.
* * *
To understand Ross City, my home, you need to tour it in two separate halves. Let’s start with the Sky Floors, where Daniel and I live.
Ross City is the capital of Antarctica, one of the most advanced nations in the world. Compared with the Republic of America, it’s an absolute utopia. Its towering skyscrapers are stacked to the heavens, sealed securely inside a biodome that keeps temperatures comfortable and simulates a regular day-night cycle during the long summer and winter months. Don’t ask me how it works. I’ve searched online for years and worn my brother down with questions about it, but it’s still a fascinating and somewhat frustrating mystery to me.
Daniel and I live in one of the wealthiest sectors—the Sky Floors, the top half of the skyscrapers where there are sunlight and stars and fresh air, where the buildings are interconnected like a web by long walkways covered in green ivy. Up here, each floor is made up of luxury homes, shops, fancy restaurants, schools … not a single crack in the pavement, not a flower or shrub out of place. A kaleidoscope of massive virtual commercials and murals lights up each side of every skyscraper, all the images in a constant state of rotation. Looking out across the city from up here is like staring out into a rainbow sea. In the winter, the skies light up with the aurora australis—the southern lights—and paint the nights with brilliant bands of turquoise and gold. In the summers, the biodome simulates the night for us, and we get the same effect with virtual displays.
To people who have lived here all their lives, this is a completely normal neighborhood perched high in the sky. To me, it’s a multicolored wonderland—as alien a place as the Colonies of America.
And it’s where I am now—at Ross University, on the top floor of Building 23 in downtown Ross City, where I’m currently trying to