“I’m going to let him go,” he repeats. “I told you that none of this was about him, and that my only interest in him was to find a way to get to you.” He holds a hand out at me. “But here you are. You’ve demonstrated your talent already by what you’ve done here.” He leans back in his chair. “So I’m going to do what I promised myself I would. I’m going to release him.”

He must be lying to me. It doesn’t make any sense for him to let Daniel go, not when he could keep using my brother against me. “How can I even trust that you’d do such a thing?” I ask.

He nods. “Because I’ll show you,” he replies. “I’ll send you a live feed of him being released.”

I shake my head, confused and wary. “I don’t understand.”

Hann sighs, then leans against his armrest and regards me carefully. When he speaks again, there’s a strange tinge of sadness in his voice. “You remind me very much of my son.”

“Your son?” I ask.

“Like I said. You’ve offered so much about yourself. It’s only fair that I now tell you a bit about me. It’s the only way we’ll build trust around each other.” He regards my question. “So let me enlighten you about where I came from.”

Everything about him now—his grave expression, the sudden exhaustion in his eyes, the weight on his shoulders—seems serious, and instinctively, I feel myself leaning forward to listen.

“I grew up down here,” he says. “In the Undercity, just like your friend Pressa. My mother and father worked a tiny stall in the markets, selling fried skewers. I remember running in the dirty streets, just like you, weaving through the crowds at the markets, helping my parents until the late hours of the night. Like you and your brother, I grew up learning how to fill the holes in my pockets with things I could steal from others. I had to, you see. We could barely feed ourselves.”

Something strange clicks in my mind. For an instant, I see John circling before me, as tall and rumpled as I remember, his hands burned from his factory shift. He slaps a stolen coin from my hands and kicks the money into the gutter. Don’t ever do that again, he scolds me. The next time, that money will come with street police at our door. It’s never worth it.

I shake the memory away, my stomach churning uneasily. My eyes dart for a second to the corridor behind us, where two guards stand now, and then go back to him.

“I married into the Undercity too, you know,” he continues. “I loved my wife, and we had a son that mattered more to us than anything else in the world.”

Loved. Had. The mention of his son again.

“Except he got sick.” His eyes flatten at that. The rasp in his voice trembles. “So did I. It was a common side effect in our neighborhood, located so close to the factories on the outskirts of the city. The smoke from the factories turned my son’s lungs black and shriveled. His grades fell in school, and his Level fell because of that. I began to cough blood.” He pats his throat once. “The infection in my lungs cost me my job. That lowered my Level further. They punish you for not working, you know. This government. And the lower my Level fell, the harder it became for me to qualify for work.”

There’s a brief silence from him. “So my wife took out a loan with the illegal businesses that run down here, made a deal with them in order to pay for our son’s illness. She agreed to something we couldn’t possibly pay back.”

“What happened?” I whisper.

“I came home one day to find her body in our ransacked apartment.”

His words make my chest tighten. He says it so calmly and quietly that I can tell it’s something he’s used to saying. Suddenly I see the soldier—Thomas, his name was Thomas—lifting a rifle to my mother’s head. John lunges in vain against the guards holding him back. June holds out a helpless hand in an attempt to stop him.

“They left a note, demanding payment by threatening our son. So I did the only thing I could. I offered to work for the gang, to pay off the debt.” He’s silent for a moment, the weight of it hanging between us in the air. “It didn’t matter, in the end. My son died a couple of months later.”

He could be lying to you. But I swallow hard, feeling sick at his story. There is nothing that feels false about these words.

“I don’t blame the Undercity,” Dominic Hann says, snapping me to the present again. “People are businessmen. They step in when no one else will. There’s a need for services like illegal loans down here, for the people forgotten by your government.” He points up at the ceiling. “No, I blame this entire damn system, the Levels and the floors and the hierarchy of this place that made it impossible for us to get out of our predicament. I blame the fact that the President sells the Undercity the dream that, if they only worked hard enough, they too could Level themselves up to the Sky Floors. I blame the fact that the dream is a fantasy.”

It’s as if he’s having the exact same conversation I’d had with Daniel. The Undercity has no choice but to be the way it is. I find myself staring back at Hann with a confused look, trying to understand how a ruthless, notorious killer can make so much sense. Can grieve a family he had lost, just as I’d lost mine.

“Is it still true, though?” I manage to say at last. “The things you’ve done to people here? You killed that councilman the other night. You—” I swallow hard. “You’ve murdered Undercity citizens in the same way that your own family was murdered.”

“You want to play a game?” he says coolly. “Play it down here, where there are no rules at all. Then it’s fair. You do what you have to do to survive. Everyone knows what the game they’re playing is. There are no unfulfilled promises, no special favors. It’s just business here.” His eyes harden. “That, I can work with.”

I look for that taunting edge in his expression—but Dominic Hann looks genuine now, his eyes lit up in earnest as if trying to convince me of his words. And for an instant, I can see him rising up the ranks of this dangerous world, drawing people to him with nothing but his own resolve.

Like Daniel.

The thought is so startling that I shove it away in fright.

“And if someone doesn’t want to work their way up like you?” I say through gritted teeth. Every hair on my skin feels like it’s standing on end.

His cold ease has returned. “Few don’t,” he replies. “Why wouldn’t they, when the system’s decks are stacked against them anyway? Surely you, of all people, can understand that.”

“Stop comparing me with you.”

“Why not?” He leans toward me. “You’re instinctively drawn to this place. This is where you feel at home, down here, where you can keep all those memories swirling in your head at bay.”

I wince. In spite of everything, I find myself struggling to breathe, impressed that this criminal—this murderer—has figured out secrets about me that my own brother hasn’t been able to understand. He knows me better than Daniel does. His words pierce straight through me, as if he could see the dreams that swallow me whole every night.

“You can’t understand why your brother is no longer in the same place you are,” Hann adds. “Hadn’t he been just like me, made his entire reputation off fighting for the people? But he’s left behind that dark place from his past. Now he works for the government, helping to enforce this system that’s crushing us. Working to dismantle what people like me are trying to do.”