The Girl Who Dared to Descend

by Bella Forrest

  “I’m working on it,” Leo said, his hand reaching up to brush over the backs of my fingers. I snatched my hand away. It was impulsive, but the sensation of the calloused pads of Grey’s fingers tracing over mine, plus the knowledge that it wasn’t him, made the feeling distinctly uncomfortable and left me slightly nauseated, like I was somehow betraying Grey by letting someone else even touch me.

  To say it was confusing was an understatement.

  “What do you mean, you’re working on it?” Maddox asked.

  Leo was staring deep into my eyes now, his expression a mixture of hurt, concern, and alarm, but when I didn’t explain myself, he turned to Maddox. “I’m Leo,” he said simply, as if that explained anything.

  Quess took a step closer, his brows coming together. “Okay, now I’m worried. Grey, you’re not Leo, you’re Grey. Liana, did he get hit on the head?”

  “No,” I said, my throat tightening around the words. “He’s Leo. Grey’s net got overloaded, and the damage was…” I swallowed, trying and failing to keep the image of Grey’s brain from my mind. I sucked in a deep breath and plowed forward, not wanting to waste time breaking down on everyone. “The damage was extensive. Leo used the net to implant himself into Grey, with the hopes that he and the healing abilities of the net can restore him.”

  Silence met my statement, and I glanced at everyone to see how they were processing the news. The short version seemed to be: not well. Maddox and Eric were staring at Leo with a mixture of confusion and fear, while Zoe’s eyes were on mine, brimming with concern and horror as she tried to imagine what I was going through. Quess was downright shocked, his eyes wide with awe. But there was nothing I could do about it, except face several more questions, many of which I doubted I would have the answers to.

  The wheel squeaked suddenly behind us, and I turned quickly, alarm radiating down my spine.

  “Liana?” Zoe asked, her voice harsh with fear and panic.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, trying to reassure her.

  The wheel continued to turn, though, and then stopped, hitting its limit with a dull clang. The door swung open, revealing first Praetor Strum, and then Lacey.

  And between the two of them, hands clutched tightly in front of her, was Tian, her back hunched, her blue eyes wide and darting around.

  3

  The little girl shifted uncertainly as she stared at us gravely, her hands fidgeting in front of her. “There were a lot of them,” she said tentatively, twisting to see if either Strum or Lacey was going to stop her from saying anything. When they didn’t, she continued breathlessly, as if they could cut her off at any moment. “I tried to fight them off. I even managed to get one of them in the face with a lash bead, but they just kept coming. I…” She paused, her face starting to crack apart under the brunt of a great sorrow.

  I was taking a step forward, ready to tug her behind me and get in Lacey and Strum’s faces about the treatment of a little girl, when she produced a satchel from behind her back and dug into it, pulling out a large stuffed bear, and his smaller, now unattached arm. “They hurt Commander Cuddles!” she wailed, tears pouring down her face.

  While her distress was quite palpable, I had to fight back a laugh, especially when she reached up and used Commander Cuddles’s severed arm to wipe away her tears. I heard several other chortles from behind me, but managed not to break. Lacey couldn’t keep the amusement off her face, though, while Strum couldn’t seem to stop his eyes from rolling in their sockets.

  The only one who was unaffected by our humor was Leo, who looked both concerned for Tian, and mortified that the rest of us were greeting the crying girl with smiles and laughter.

  And he was right. While to us, the loss of Commander Cuddles’s arm wasn’t the end of the world, to Tian, it was. Laughing at her tears was probably the quickest way to upset her more, given her attachment to the bear, and the last thing we wanted to do was hurt her. Even if she was being unintentionally cute.

  Luckily, Tian would never lack for rescuers. But the hero for today did surprise me a little.

  “Hey, hey, hey, Tian Bo-bian,” Eric said loudly, his voice booming in the small space. “Guess what? I’m a super-secret bear surgeon, and my official prognosis is: we can fix him.”

  Tian blinked back her tears and sniffed a few times. We all waited patiently for her to speak.

  “Really?” she squeaked hopefully, her tears beginning to dry up. She took a few steps forward, perched on the tips of her toes, and then paused, clutching Commander Cuddles to her chest and resting her chin on his head.

  “It’s true,” Zoe chimed in. “He’s the best damned bear surgeon in the Tower. I give you my word of honor.”

  Tian looked at me for confirmation, and I gave her a confident nod, even though I had no idea what skill Eric possessed that could help her.

  “Do you sew?” Lacey asked, echoing my thoughts.

  Eric’s smile faded as she addressed him directly, and just like that, the tiny spell that Tian had cast upon her arrival popped, and we all came back to reality. Current reality being that our potential captor was asking us a question after having us kidnapped, black bagged, and shoved in a tight water closet with no means of escape—and with no clue about what was coming next.

  Tension crept up my spine as I nodded at Eric, signaling that it was okay to answer.

  “I have one sister, four female cousins, and I’m the youngest,” he replied carefully. He didn’t say any more, and I didn’t let her ask him anything else.

  “Tian, there’s one other person who’s happy to see you.”

  Tian smiled, her eyes going misty. “I know,” she whispered, her eyes already locked on Maddox. “My Doxy?”

  Maddox smiled, tears coming to her own eyes, and she nodded. “My Tian,” she replied, and within seconds the young girl had raced over to Maddox, leapt into her arms, and wrapped herself around the bigger girl.

  I moved forward, worried about Maddox’s leg, but she caught Tian easily and hugged her back. I watched them for a moment, relieved that I had been able to keep my promise to Tian and Maddox both, and then turned my back to them. Lacey had broken the rules of our engagement, and hurt my friends. This wasn’t the time for sentimentality; it was the time for questions. Namely mine.

  “How did you know where to find us?” I asked, stepping closer to Lacey and Strum and dropping my voice low. “And what gave you the right to go after my people? That wasn’t part of the agreement.”

  Strum and Lacey exchanged looks, and to my surprise, Strum was the one who spoke first. “We never anticipated that you would move so quickly on this,” he said, his voice still surprisingly deep for such a slender man. “I know we said if you did it within twenty-four hours we would take that as a yes, but you moved even faster than that. We assumed you would want more discussions, perhaps his schedule or routine and possible schematics first—but you didn’t. I’m glad we had the foresight to have a failsafe in place. Otherwise, our plan might have been jeopardized. Considering we had to collect you all before anyone else found you.”

  He tried to hide it, but I could tell he was impressed. That told me a few things: for one thing, they thought this was our plan from the get-go. They believed that my team and myself were highly coordinated and fast acting, which had earned us a modicum of respect. It meant a more even playing field.

  I considered that for a long moment, and decided to keep back the fact that Devon’s murder had been completely accidental. I had no idea what they had in store yet, but if they thought we were that good, maybe it would make them think twice about trying to hurt us in any way. And maybe it would ensure that they held up their part of the deal.

  “Well, I assumed you gave us all the relevant information at the first meeting. And if you had told me you needed everyone in one place for your plan to be effective, I would’ve just had us all meet you there,” I replied sarcastically, giving him a withering glance that I hoped looked moderately annoyed. “But again, I ask: how did
you know where to find us?”

  Lacey coughed, and I saw a flash of a smile before it disappeared behind her hand. I studied her; she’d changed her hair since yesterday when we’d met, and it was now braided tightly against her scalp in tiny, narrow braids that twisted into an intricate pattern along the crown. The rest of her hair stood out around the back of her head, in a poof that seemed to ripple like water when her head moved. I eyed it enviously, my own hair feeling like grease and dirt had just gone ahead and decided to raise a family right there on my scalp.

  I wouldn’t say I would kill for a shower, but it would be tempting at this point.

  “We infected you and your friend with a designer bacteria,” she admitted. “We needed to be sure that we could grab you when you were ready to move.”

  “A designer bacteria?” I asked, my eyebrows drawing together. “Quess, you ever hear of a designer bacteria?”

  “Oh yeah, we experimented with them all the time in the Medica,” Quess called back. “Not all bacteria are bad, you see, and—”

  “Thank you, Quess,” I called, not wanting him to reveal too much of his backstory in front of Lacey and Strum. I didn’t think they would use it against him, but the less they knew, the better. “Tell me more about it later.” I had broken eye contact with Lacey while I talked to Quess, and now that we were finished, I could sense that she was waiting. Impatiently. I turned back to her. “What is it? What does it do? How did you do it? And why do it in the first place? You asked me to help you, so why risk an already fragile trust by doing something so invasive?”

  “Well…” Lacey paused and looked at Strum, who shrugged. “Designer bacteria can be used in all sorts of ways to help further medical studies or find health problems, but this one was designed specifically for us. Remember the bags over your heads before and after the meeting? They were laced with the cultures, and when you inhaled, you drew them into your body and infected yourselves. Don’t be alarmed, though—it can’t hurt you. All it does is raise your body temperature to a certain level so that we can track it through the nets.”

  What? I shook my head twice and wondered how the heck she could track body temperatures through the nets. I looked at them both and raised an eyebrow. “Quess—”

  “No, wait.” Lacey sighed and ran a hand over her face, and I realized right then that the woman was tired. She looked about as tired as I felt, only she wasn’t riding the tension high like I was, so she felt it more. “Look, the nets take your temperatures up until the fifth point after the decimal. It’s just a way to gather as much information as possible for Scipio to process and refine his algorithms. It’s also used to study how fast nets are currently degrading, and so forth and so on. As you know, we all run a little hot as a side effect of the nets, but that temperature fluctuates naturally. The bacteria strain we have raises your body temperature to a specific point, designated by us, to the fifth decimal point. We have a backdoor into the thermal scanners, and we just had them scan for that exact temperature.”

  I frowned, thinking. There were tens of thousands of people inhabiting the Tower, and odds were likely that someone else could’ve been coincidently running the same temperature at that time. I opened my mouth to make that observation, but Lacey’s approving smile stopped me.

  “You’re asking yourself how we picked yours over anyone else’s that was, at that moment, the same?” I nodded, and her smile grew. “I knew you were smart; that’s why I like you. In answer to your question… turn around.”

  I didn’t, because I knew exactly what she wanted me to look at: my friends. “I transmitted it to them,” I said with a groan. “You just had to see where the most people with the same number were concentrated.”

  “Indeed,” Strum supplied. “Shared communal spaces, talking, kissing, sharing food… You infected the others. We never would’ve found you all otherwise—which would have meant we didn’t follow through on our promise to you. Our people tell us the paint that you put up is quite effective at blocking net data. While you’re in there, of course, Ms. Euan. As soon as you stepped outside, we picked you up. It wasn’t hard to figure out where you were hiding after that.”

  He winked as he purposefully used the last name of the fake ID that I was hiding behind, but I just narrowed my eyes at him. “Let me make this clear to you: you came into our home,” I said, stressing the word. “You had people go in there and scare a young girl. That wasn’t part of the deal, and I say again: if you wanted me, you should’ve let me know to meet you somewhere.”

  I was being obstinate, but I wanted them to understand that this was serious to me. They needed to understand that I didn’t take intrusion into my home, or the kidnapping of my people, lightly. By demanding an answer, no matter how good their intentions, I was showing them where my boundaries were—which would make them think twice before crossing them again.

  “We didn’t have a choice,” Lacey replied. “I’m sorry, Liana, but we didn’t. You’re on everybody’s radar now. Everyone in the Tower wants you. I had to risk six of my people for you and Mr. Farmless alone, and even then, we were damned lucky that you’d somehow overcome the lockdown procedures of the Medica and were able to get that elevator to take you to a higher floor. The Medica is one of the few places we can’t seem to break into, so if you’d gotten trapped in there…” She trailed off and frowned. “Speaking of which, how were you able to do all that?”

  “That’s my secret,” I replied, keeping my eyes on her. I had no intention of telling her about Leo, or about his residence inside of Grey—and if I looked at him, it would be noticeable. Not because they could ever guess that there was an AI actually inside of him, but because they might question him, and realize that a huge part of his memory was missing, like his designation number, and just… general knowledge about his life or the Tower itself. That was what Leo was working desperately to save, and I couldn’t have them looking into his memory loss and discovering the damage. Or the net. “And I’m not sharing.”

  Strum looked ready to argue, but Lacey reached out and laid a hand on his forearm. “That’s fair enough,” she said with a nod. “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to. I also want to assure you that your home is fine. We didn’t take anything, except for maybe a few samples of that paint.”

  I considered her statement. “So you stole from us as well.”

  “Guilty, but as you can see, we aren’t exactly on the right side of the law, either, and that paint could be useful to us.”

  “Then make a deal with us for it,” I said flatly. Strum and Lacey exchanged surprised looks, but I didn’t stop. “If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about being part of the fringe community of the Tower, it’s that we’re going to have needs while we’re in hiding. You now have a sample, and presumably it won’t take you long to figure out how to make it. You took it, and now you owe us.”

  Lacey opened her mouth, paused, and then shook her head. “Fine,” she said. “You’re right, we shouldn’t have even taken that. It was bad form on our part, and we’ll try to think of some way to reciprocate.”

  “Deal,” I replied, breathing out quietly. I actually wasn’t sure where all of that had come from. I wasn’t the type to think so materialistically, but there it was. A rationale I hadn’t even considered before, but one that came spilling out as soon as Lacey admitted that she had taken something from us.

  Truthfully, I was pleased with the way this conversation was going. If they were willing to strike a deal for something unknown in the future, then that meant we had a future. I just needed to know what that future was.

  “So what’s this plan?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject. “How do you plan to get me and my friends off the hook after we’ve committed murder and conspiracy?”

  “Well, your two friends… um… him and the young one…”

  I looked where Strum was pointing and realized he meant Quess and, of course, Tian, while he continued to speak.

  “They were never really
on the Tower’s radar for this. We just grabbed them because they were with you. As such, they won’t even be brought up.”

  “They will be cared for,” Lacey added, before I could even ask. “New identities and nets, placement in whatever department they want and are qualified for. I give you my word.”

  I stared at my friends, thinking. Maddox and Eric were watching us closely from a few feet away, and I was certain both were ready to spring into action if things went wrong. Not that I thought they were going to anymore. Quess and Zoe, meanwhile, were distracting Tian right behind them, and Leo was standing the closest to me, watching our exchange in silence. I met his gaze, and then turned back to Lacey and Strum. If this could buy them some protection, and get the Knights off of us, it was worth it—if only so that we could hide in plain sight for a little while.

  “What about Zoe and Eric?” I asked, nodding to them. “What’s their role in all this?”

  “Victims…” Lacey trailed off and pulled a pad from the front of her orange coveralls. “It’s easier if you just read this. There isn’t a lot of time, and we’re about to be late for the council meeting.”

  She held it out to me, and I took it and stared at the rectangular square. “What council meeting?” I asked slowly.

  “Well, less of a council meeting, more of a trial. Yours and Mr. Farmless’s, to be exact.”

  “A trial?” I sputtered. I looked around again and saw my fears echoed on all of my friends’ faces—except for Leo, who looked eerily delighted by the prospect—and turned back. “That’s your plan?”

  “It is,” Strum said solemnly. “It’ll be much easier if you just—”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to stop you right there.” I took a deep breath and tried to ease some of the panic that was threatening to make me come apart and really lose it. An official trial presided over by the council was complete and utter lunacy. Scipio had been tampered with—they both suspected as much, but I knew it to be true. Even with Devon gone, I knew for a fact that there was someone else working on… well, whatever their plan with Scipio was. All it would take was for Scipio to render a judgment of guilty—which, if he was being controlled by Devon’s allies, he would! Surely, they didn’t think that with Devon gone, Scipio would fall right back into line!