The Girl Who Dared to Endure

by Bella Forrest

  Tension ran under my skin as I bit my lip, waiting to see what would happen first. It would either be the alarm signaling to the Knights that a one was in the area—or his rank sliding upward again. Seconds ticked by, and nothing happened.

  “It’s not going to work,” he said. “It’s too late. You have to arrest me, Liana. I’ll tell them everything was my fault. It’ll be okay.”

  He had just closed his mouth again when his rank morphed from red to purple, jumping from a one to a seven on his wrist. I held it up to him, showing him that he was safe, and then let out a sigh of relief and staggered a few steps back. I closed my eyes for several seconds, lightheaded from the panic of everything, and then pried them right back open again.

  I wasn’t done—not by a long shot—but for now, at least I had made sure my brother was safe.

  Now I just needed to keep him that way. I took a moment to study him, noting the look on his face and the way he couldn’t seem to stop twitching, and realized he needed sleep. He’d been in shock mere minutes before, and was already starting to backtrack into it, judging by the stunned look in his eyes. I reached out and took his hand again, and this time he followed me with little resistance as I guided him back toward the war room. As soon as I got him settled, I’d race back to the others to help them in whatever way they needed, whether it was getting Leo back in Grey or helping Quess with Eric.

  I stopped outside of Leo’s room long enough to open the door, and then pulled Alex inside. The room was still a mess from Grey’s temper tantrum earlier, but it only took me a minute or two to put the mattress back into place. Alex didn’t help, but then again, as soon as he’d come in, he’d stopped and started staring at a spot on the floor.

  “Alex,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. I felt spread too thin, but I had to remind myself to be patient with him. He was more fragile than me now. “Take off your uniform and get in bed.”

  He looked up at me, his gaze blank. “Why?” he asked. “I don’t think I could sleep.”

  “You have to try,” I told him. “What happened today…”

  “I killed a man,” he said, his voice empty. “I beat him to a pulp, and then I killed him. Possibly even two, if you count Leo. How…” He trailed off, looking so undeniably lost that I couldn’t help but hurt for him.

  “You were trying to defend me,” I told him gently. “And I love you for it. We really should—”

  “What have I become, Liana?” he whispered harshly. His dark eyes were filled with torment as he stared at his hands. They trembled violently, and he squeezed his eyes shut against them, as if denying the blood on them and failing. “I killed a man. I wanted him dead! I… This wasn’t how it was supposed to be!”

  Seconds later he was falling to his knees, his arms wrapping around his shoulders, and I rushed over to him, throwing my arms around him. He wasn’t crying, but he was shaking as if he were a leaf caught under a ventilation duct. I held him close, stroking his temples and hair, trying to reassure him that I was there and he was safe.

  “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he told me some time later, his voice less broken but every bit as empty as before. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I hate it here so much. I’m so alone and isolated in the Core, and I have nothing to do but worry about you and watch Scipio slowly degrade into nothingness. I’m beyond useless, and I just jeopardized everything you had been working toward.” His voice caught in the end, and he shot me a hopeless look. “What good am I to anyone?”

  My heart fractured. “Alex, no… You’re good for me,” I told him. “You help me. You’ve always taken care of me and loved me, even when I was being a colossal brat. Please don’t give up hope. We’ll figure this out; we’ll work through it. It’s my turn to take care of you.” I shifted my weight, my legs numb below the knee from the kneeling position, and he straightened up.

  “I think I’ll go lie down now,” he told me. “You have to check on Eric and…” He paused long enough to swallow audibly before adding, “Leo.”

  I slowly got to my feet, and helped my brother into bed, getting him out of his uniform and under the blanket. I sat down next to him and continued to stroke his shoulder and arm. “I’m going to go check on Leo,” I whispered to him. “But I’m sure he’s going to be just fine. You try to get some rest, and I’ll be back soon. I love you.”

  My brother didn’t reply, and after a moment, I realized he wouldn’t. I felt conflicted as I got up, as a part of me wanted to stay and continue to comfort my brother.

  But I had to check on Leo and Eric. They were my responsibility, too.

  15

  I was halfway to the war room when Grey appeared at the other end. I stopped in my tracks, blinking at him and wondering who I was looking at. “Grey?” He shook his head, and relief poured through me. Still, I wanted confirmation. “Leo?”

  He nodded, and I shot off like a bullet toward him, needing the feel of his arms around me. I barely even gave him time to open his arms before I was in them, wrapping my own around his waist and pulling him tight to me. “Are you okay?”

  He hesitated a second before returning the hug, and then slowly smoothed his arms over my shoulders and back. “I’m okay,” he told me. “Your brother didn’t hurt me.”

  Something inside me started to break, and I gave a little cry. “What about Eric? Is he?”

  “Grey gave him all the blood he could,” Leo said. “Quess recovered the bullet, but it punctured a lung, ricocheted off a rib, and nicked his liver. He stopped the bleeding internally, but he lost a lot of blood, and what Grey was able to give him wasn’t a lot. He’s stable, but it’s now a waiting game.”

  “But what about Grey?” I asked. “Is he okay? He was so scared and confused before, and—”

  I stopped as my shoulders started to shake, a sob catching me unawares, the terror of the last five—ten?—minutes finally starting to hit me. Leo’s hands pressed me closer, one going up to stroke my hair lightly. “Grey’s… fine,” he hedged. I started to question his hesitation, but he cut me off. “I know you are upset, and I understand why, but we’ll have to talk about Grey later. There’s something more important that needs our attention first.”

  His words gave me pause, and I looked up at him, blinking back my tears. “What is it?”

  Leo’s mouth turned down into a frown. “We have to get rid of Baldy’s body. Cornelius’s sensors were shut off in regard to undoc alerts, but not in regard to death, and I can’t access Cornelius with Jasper and Rose’s programs in the state they are in—they might interpret it as an attack and try to take control of his systems. We have only a few minutes to get it out of here before he automatically syncs with the council server and informs them that there’s a corpse in your quarters. As long as the body isn’t here when he syncs, he won’t be able to inform them.”

  I blinked, not comprehending. I truly didn’t understand. “Won’t he be able to tell them we moved the body?”

  He pulled away from me. I had expected him to take my hand, as he always had after something traumatic happened. But he didn’t, and a wave of disappointment crashed into me. Instead, he turned away and began walking back to the war room, talking to me from over his shoulder. I had little choice but to follow, or stand there looking like an idiot over the fact that he hadn’t taken my hand.

  “No. He’s a computer program and can only follow the protocols set up for him as they are laid out. No body equals no report. It’s an oversight in his programming, but one we plan to exploit. But it only works if we get Baldy out of here as soon as possible. I just can’t figure out where to put him. The escape hatch would work, except ours leads straight up to the roof, so there’s no place for us to leave him in there that wouldn’t have him falling back down on top of us.”

  I heard the dangerous undercurrent of his words and realized that him not taking my hand was definitely the least of our worries. We had to remove the body, but to where? It had to be a place no one could find it; we had left forens
ic evidence all over him, and if his remains were discovered, the trail would lead back to us—and mostly right back to Alex. Even if it wasn’t the legacies that found him, the consequences would be the same. Imprisonment and death.

  If the escape exit hatch was out, then almost everything else was as well. Nothing ever remained hidden inside the Tower: there were dozens of places to hide a body inside of it, but they would be discovered eventually, and the jig would be up. Alex’s DNA was all over Baldy’s face, from hitting him over and over again. His rank had dropped and risen in a matter of minutes, and even if no one had seen it when it happened, a quick check of his performance log would show them the truth. They’d know we had found a way to mask our ranks, and they would immediately try to figure out what it was, so they could put a stop to it. I’d be immediately implicated, because it had happened under my watch.

  I’d be arrested and executed as a dissident and enemy of the Tower.

  We entered the war room and saw Quess and Maddox already lifting Baldy’s body and setting it inside a black body bag. I had no idea where they had gotten that from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Cornelius had procured it from one of the nearby supply rooms. The request would be recorded, but I was betting Leo could go back in and delete it later, once everything calmed down. Eric was still on the floor, using Zoe’s lap as a pillow, his eyes closed and his lashes dark against his pale face.

  She looked up at me, her blue eyes bleeding with hopelessness. “Quess won’t let me move him,” she whispered. She reached down and tugged at his bloody uniform where Quess had unzipped it, trying to cover him up. “He needs to be under a blanket.”

  I moved over to my best friend and wrapped my arms around her, while Quess grunted out, “I’m sorry, Zo, but I can’t be sure that moving him won’t kill him yet. I told you, go get a blanket from the room, and I promise, we will clean everything up as soon we figure out what to do with this.”

  I heard a rattling thump that told me they had dropped Baldy’s body into the bag, and I gently pulled away from Zoe. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her in a soft whisper.

  Her face broke, and her shoulders shook as she took a breath. “He’s the light of my life, Liana. How did this happen? You said we were coming here to be safe!”

  Her last sentence was an accusation, and my heart plummeted into the pit of my stomach. I looked over at Leo and saw horror and guilt written all over his face.

  “Everything was fine,” he said, his voice twisted with raw emotion. “Everything was fine. I was learning about him and who his people were, what they had done, what they were planning. But then he just… woke up, and somehow jerked control from me. I’ve never felt anything like it. And I couldn’t do anything to stop him. He shouldn’t have been able to keep me from reacting, from putting his body out of commission, but… he did.”

  My face paled at his description, and I swallowed convulsively. Either Leo was arrogant about his skills, or Baldy had a much stronger mind than either of us had given him credit for. Either way, it scared me, and I worried about whether Grey could do that, now that we had woken him up before putting Leo back inside him. I wondered suddenly how Maddox had managed to handle Grey, but there wasn’t time for that now.

  I had to help the others move a body and figure out where to put it.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I instructed everyone. “Zoe, go get Eric a blanket. We’ll move him together when we get back.” I stood up and turned to the others. “Where can we put the body?”

  “Down an elevator shaft in the shell,” Maddox suggested. “Or one of the plunges.”

  “That’s the first place the legacies will check for him,” I replied. Both were common dumping grounds for bodies, whenever there were any. The plunges were a better choice, but only if you could be certain to hit the bottom, which you never really could be. If his body landed on a bit of twisted-up rebar or a crossbeam, they’d find him. That meant that disposing of the body in a place they could never find him was the only solution.

  But there wasn’t any place in the Tower like that! The entire thing was a self-contained system. Bodies could be hidden, for a while, but eventually they would be recovered. And forensic evidence could be harvested and tested years after the victim had died. I had no idea how long this legacy war was going to last, so I had to plan for the future.

  Which left only one place. “We need to throw him off the Tower,” I said, walking quickly toward them.

  Maddox’s brows drew together, forming a deep crease that jutted down the bridge of her nose like a dagger, while Quess’s mouth simply dropped open, wide enough to catch flies if he wanted to. Leo was the only one whose eyebrows rose—but almost a second later, he was nodding.

  “She’s right,” he said. “The sensors on the outside of the Tower aren’t designed to pick up and report a dead body.”

  “Yeah, but that’s still…” Maddox did some quick calculations and frowned. “Almost eighty floors up from here. The security in the Attic is not the best, but there are still cameras everywhere. Someone is eventually going to notice four people hauling a full body bag to the roof.”

  “Then we do everything we can to make it look like something else,” I told her. “It’s the only thing we can do. As soon as we get him out into the main part of the Tower, the sensors won’t register that he’s dead, and as long as we keep him in the bag, no one watching can be sure of what’s inside. We’ll spray our faces with Quess’s spray so the cameras can’t identify us. As for it being eighty floors up…” I pointed up the stairs at the column that controlled my quarters. “I’ll lift the room up to the topmost level, and then we’ll only have forty floors to go.”

  “Forty floors of stairs,” Quess griped, and I empathized. I wasn’t looking forward to it either, especially since we would have to wear neural scramblers to mask our net IDs, which meant we couldn’t use the elevators. At least Quess had managed to extend the time we could use the scramblers without risking our nets frying our brains, but I wasn’t particularly looking forward to putting the scrambler back on. It was annoying and started to give headaches after a while, and I had already been wearing one earlier. Yet they gave us time and anonymity to do the deed, and between the four of us, I was certain we could handle it. We didn’t have any choice.

  “Zoe, you stay here to take care of Eric and keep an eye on Tian and Liam. We won’t be able to net you, so don’t panic if we’re gone for a little while. Leo, start moving the platform. Quess, find out if there’s a way we can get into the Attic from here without going into the Citadel itself. How much time do we have, Maddox?”

  She checked her indicator while the others scrambled to follow my orders, her finger tapping on the face to change it from her rank to the time, and her features pinched. “Six minutes until Cornelius syncs with the council server. It’s going to be close.”

  “We’ll be fine,” I said reassuringly.

  I wasn’t sure if it was a lie or not, but it was the best thing I could offer.

  The platform began to rumble at the same time as I heard my brother’s voice announce, “I’m coming with you,” from the hallway. I turned and saw him standing there, his uniform back on and a bleak look in his eyes. “I have to clean up my own mess.” It dawned on me that he probably hadn’t even tried to sleep before getting up and dressing again, which meant he had heard the tail end of the conversation and knew what was going on.

  I stared at him, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to go back to bed and let me handle it. But then I remembered his words, how broken he had looked, and how much he wanted to be useful, and I found I couldn’t deny him, especially given that we needed the help. Not to mention, I couldn’t cut him out again. It was partially what had gotten us into this mess.

  “The help would be appreciated.”

  16

  For the second time in twenty-four hours, I was carrying Baldy through the labyrinth of corridors in the Attic. This time, however, I had help, and w
e took turns carrying him down the hall, the bag swinging heavily between the two people whose turn it was. My arms and legs felt leaden from all the exertion today, and I was certain that if I let my eyes close for too long, I would pass out. The fear was enough to keep them wide open, and only added to the press of my nerves as we made our way down the hallway.

  Getting here had been simpler than I had thought it would be, but getting up had been more difficult than I had anticipated. I had assumed there were staircases between the levels spread out through the floor, but the forty topmost levels of storage space could only be accessed through the elevators. We couldn’t use those, as they were heavily monitored by live techs, to make sure no one was using them to transport illegal materials. That meant we had to use the stairs in the shell.

  It took us forty-five minutes to get from where my apartment elevator dropped us off to the thick wall that led out into the shell and our designated staircases. It took another hour to carry him up them. At any given point, I would’ve loved to just open up a hatch and shove him out, but there was too much risk of a crosswind carrying his body onto one of the farming floors that extended out from the sides of the Tower. The safest place to drop him was from the corner of the roof. Even if there was a breeze, it wouldn’t carry him far enough in either direction that he’d hit one of the farming floors, and he likely wouldn’t be seen on the way down.

  So together we climbed, silently, moving as quickly as we could go without sapping all of our strength. Even still, Leo and I had to take more breaks than Alex, Quess, and Maddox, though they were understanding enough. By the time we reached the last level and trudged another forty-five minutes to get to the center of the 215th floor, where the only staircase with access to the roof existed, it was my turn to carry again, along with Quess. And Quess was complaining. Again.

  “I just don’t see why we didn’t call Lacey and ask her to throw him in the forges,” he said for the umpteenth time.