I shrug. It’s hard to think about our old neighborhood when we’re staying in the middle of this Gem district. “I remember our street,” I reply. “John’s factory. Mom’s workplace. The alleys where we used to play street hockey. Why?”

In the night, shadows cut across Daniel’s face and hide his expression from view. He casts me a sidelong glance as he turns us in the direction of the humbler districts. It’s easy to see them from this hilltop view, the areas of the city where lights turn sparse.

“Just follow me,” he says, turning into a narrow street that leads to a set of tracks. “I figure it’s time I show you what my memory of our past looks like.”

It’s an old subway stop, the concrete thick with layers of graffiti. My brother nods down the track to where the first glimmers of a train’s light flicker in the darkness.

“Keep close to me,” he says. “We’re going to take it easy today, but over time, I’ll show you how I make my way through tougher areas of the city.”

Over time. “You mean, you’re going to take me with you on some of your outings in Ross City?”

He gives me a brief smile as the subway pulls up to a stop. “I’ll think about it,” he replies. “If there’s a Ross City to return to.” Then he ushers us into the train, and the glass doors close behind us.

Half an hour later, we emerge onto the cracked, humble streets of Lake.

I have a vague recollection of this intersection—it’s where I used to walk through on my way to school, at least before everything happened. I look curiously on as Daniel walks up to the building wall of an alley and tests his boot against the crumbling brick. Then he steps back and points up to show me.

“See this?” he says, touching the cracks in the brick. “If you step up on something at this height, you should be able to grab on to the second floor’s ledge.” Before I can respond, he backs up a bit, then darts at the wall and kicks off against the brick. He reaches up and swings himself onto the ledge, then shimmies over to the closest balcony he sees. I look on, stunned, as he swings his legs over the balcony railings and then hops up to perch against them.

“Okay,” I say slowly, eyeing the brick. “Just give me a sec.”

On my first try, my boot slips against the brick and I fall on my back. It takes me four more tries before I finally grip on well enough to grab the second-floor ledge. Then I pull myself up laboriously, inching carefully along the wall until I reach the balcony. Daniel grabs my arm and helps me climb over it.

I eye him, waiting for him to scold me for being careless, for that worried light to appear in his eyes. But he just shrugs. “The more you practice, the easier it’ll get,” he replies. “If you end up in trouble in the Undercity again, you’ll know how to make a quick escape.”

I look at him in surprise. “You’d actually be okay with me going down to the Undercity by myself?”

He gives me a withering look. “After everything we’ve already been through with Hann? You wandering the Undercity sounds like day care.” He nods to the side of the building, where a thick pair of cables crisscrosses between the alley’s two buildings. “Come on. I’ll show you where I used to stay.”

I follow him gingerly onto the cables. He steps rapidly along them, as sure-footed as if he were walking on the street. Where he used to stay. “John always said you never strayed far from the house,” I call to him as I try to keep my balance.

“I never told John about all the places I went,” he replies. “It was safer that way.”

Daniel waits patiently as I take an extra few minutes to cross the wires. Then we make our way onto a flat rooftop, and from there, take a metal ladder up another floor. With each step, we go deeper into the heart of Lake, until I can see the vast, dark shoreline, the water lapping idly below us. I’m drenched in sweat by now, and my breath comes shallow as I try to keep pace with Daniel.

Finally, he stops us on a street crowded with crooked sheds and shuttered stalls, all closed for the night. I’ve never been this way before. Trash piles in heaps on the sides of the streets, and tattered clothes line the sides of each stall. It looks like some kind of marketplace.

Daniel nods up at the second story of stalls stacked on top of the first. He points to an empty one, then the shadows behind it. I follow him up the side of the first-floor stalls until our boots clang against the tin metal sheets of the roofs. The second level of stalls is low enough that we have to duck our heads. Daniel leads us into the shadows where the stalls are stacked against the wall.

Here, the wall itself is crumbling away, so that there are tiny concave pockets of loose brick hidden behind the second-story stalls’ cloth drapes. It’s just enough space for a person to curl up without being seen.

Daniel crouches here for a moment, his eyes distant. His entire body is tense, and his hands fiddle restlessly. He swallows hard. It looks like it’s taking everything in him to be back here.

“When I first started roaming the streets,” he says, “I’d end up looking for these crumbling pockets in the markets. They were high and dry, for the most part, and the street police wouldn’t bother you if they did a sweep through the neighborhood. You could get a decent night’s sleep and no one would ever know you were in there.”

I stare in disbelief at the tiny pocket of space. It’s filthy and dark, littered with brick and dirt. “You’d sleep here?” I whisper.

He nods. “For years. It wasn’t so bad. I liked that it was right in the markets. Made it easier to steal food.”

His lips have tightened now. I look at him, wondering what kind of effort it takes for him to dredge these memories up. He has never talked about the details of his street life with me before. I knew nothing about how he survived, what he had to do, where he had to live. Now I try to picture my brother—the legend of the Republic, the star of Ross City—curled into a tight ball in this pitiful place, scrounging for a meal.

And I’d never understood. I’d never bothered to understand his abhorrence of this kind of surrounding.

He shakes his head at me, then starts climbing back down the side of the stalls. I follow him.

He leads me to the back alleys behind the markets, pointing out the trash bins. They are overflowing, with heaps of garbage piled around them. “This hasn’t changed much since I lived here,” he tells me as we walk. “Another place you could get food, albeit during more desperate nights. Sometimes Tess and I would camp in alleys like this one. The street police only did their sweeps through here every other night, you know. Lack of funding and manpower.”

He pauses at the end of the alley, then points out to the water. “See that?” he says.

I look closely. Rising out of the water some fifty yards from the shoreline is an old, abandoned skyscraper, hollowed out and long gutted for parts, its skeleton towering dark and foreboding against the night. These structures litter the entire lake.

Daniel hops onto the end of a dilapidated, abandoned pier leading out into the water. He nods for me to follow. I do. Together, we make our way along the pier’s rotting floorboards, hopping over parts where it’s all caved into the lake. As we reach the end of it, Daniel jumps onto the lowest floor of the skyscraper rising out of the water.