The Girl Who Dared to Think 6: The Girl Who Dared to Endure

by Bella Forrest

  Lacey was sitting at a table, leafing through an orange Mechanic manual, but she wasn’t alone. To my surprise, Strum was here as well, leaning over her shoulder and staring down at the manual she was flipping through.

  “It’s about time you got here,” the woman said, putting the manual down with a loud slap. “I thought we were going to have to wait forever.”

  I stared at her, trying not to roll my eyes at the thinly veiled hostility in her voice. Instead, I made a show of pulling back the sleeve of my uniform to reveal the flat black disk of my indicator and swiped it over to the clock function. “Three minutes early,” I reported tightly.

  Lacey’s mouth tightened, but she didn’t reply other than to cross her arms and lean back in the chair. “Call me a little suspicious, then. I thought I told you I didn’t want any more face-to-face meetings until you caught Ambrose’s killers.” Her brown eyes widened theatrically as she craned her neck around, searching for people she knew for a fact weren’t there. “I don’t see them. Are they invisible?”

  “Do you want to know why we requested a meeting or not?” Maddox retorted, losing her temper in the face of Lacey’s bitterness. “Because we can go and—”

  “It’s fine, Maddox,” I said, interrupting her. I gave her a look that told her there was no point in getting upset, and then turned back to Lacey. “We found them.”

  “Who?” Lacey asked, her eyebrows coming together. “Ambrose’s killers?”

  I nodded, and a slow, predatory smile developed on her face. “Where?”

  “It’s not so simple,” I told her, sitting down in a chair across from them. “It’s not just Ambrose’s killers, but the entire legacy group that you’ve been after.”

  Lacey blinked at me several times, her expression wavering between disbelief and eagerness, and it was Strum who took over for her. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Because we broke into Sadie’s quarters,” I replied. “Speaking of which, I’m going to need both of you to reset your quarters using the virus on this.” I reached into a pocket on my sleeve and pulled out a data stick as I spoke, setting it on the table and sliding it toward Lacey. Strum reached out and caught it, his long fingers snapping it up.

  “You reset your own quarters?” Lacey asked, and I was amused at the dumbfounded look on her face. “Wait. You broke into Sadie’s?” The alarm in her voice and eyes was only rivaled by the impressed look Strum was giving us. “Are you insane? Sadie’s assistant—”

  “Was knocked offline,” I said, cutting her off. I didn’t want her to start nitpicking over the details of my plan. We didn’t have time. “The virus reset it, covering all the records of our coming and going. So you can relax; she won’t know it was me. However, it would be helpful if at least one of you would reset your own quarters, to make sure Sadie buys that the rooms resetting themselves is just an unfortunate glitch.”

  “Why did you do this?” Strum asked, finally breaking his silence. “What was in Sadie’s quarters, and how does doing this relate to Ambrose’s killers?”

  I took a deep breath and prepared to drop my first truth bomb. “Sadie is a legacy. I’m not sure if she’s at the top or if there is someone above her, but we uncovered evidence in her terminal that proves it. She also has a legacy net.” Lacey gave me a look that read, ‘How do you know that,’ and I shrugged and said, “I had to wear it to get access to her quarters.”

  Lacey’s jaw dropped, and then quickly snapped shut. A moment later, she was up and moving, pacing back and forth across a small stretch of floor. “So Sadie’s another legacy. I thought we’d weeded them all out of the council with Devon, but… argh!” She stopped suddenly and kicked out a nearby chair, sending it flying into the next room. The violence of it surprised me, and I leaned back, studying her.

  “Calm down, Lace,” Strum said. “We couldn’t have known.”

  “No, you’re right, we couldn’t have known! That’s the point, Strum. We never know! We are fighting in absolute darkness! For every one of them we kill, another three move around and get their fingers into something else! When is this ever going to be over? When are we ever going to be done?”

  “Soon,” I said, giving her an answer that I knew the Praetor couldn’t. That brought their attention back to me, and I rolled with it, knowing we had a lot more ground to cover. “I have a list of her entire network, including spies stationed inside the other departments. There are a few details I need to collect before I can act, but once I have them figured out, I’m going to make a move on every single one of them. But I need your help to do it.”

  “Our help?” Lacey folded her arms across her chest and looked at Strum, seeming to communicate something to him nonverbally. For all I knew, they were communicating using their neural transmitters to have a private conversation while we were here. But honestly, I didn’t care. If it helped them come to some sort of consensus sooner, I was all for it. “I suppose we can assist you in executing them,” she said.

  I blinked. That wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting, and it definitely wasn’t a good sign. If their first response to the problem was to kill everyone, without even considering a legal option, it meant that they weren’t going to take too kindly to the idea when I presented it. If anything, they could deny us the manpower outright, and then we’d be in a little bit of trouble.

  But they were just going to have to get over it. My information, my rules. “We’re not going to execute them,” I informed them. “We’re going to arrest them, all of them, and then we’re going to hold a special council meeting to try to convict them.”

  For several long seconds, no one said anything. Then Lacey said, “You’re serious?” I nodded, and she suddenly sat down, as if her knees weren’t capable of holding her up. “But… can you prove what she’s done to Scipio?”

  I inhaled and exhaled slowly, and then seized upon the entrance her words had given me. “Not in the way you think, but definitely, yes. We both can.”

  “We both can?” she repeated, looking confused. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s simple. I let the fragment AIs I’ve managed to rescue from Sadie’s legacy group testify, and you let Kurt do the same.” I watched her closely, worried that I was pressing her too far with the demands today.

  Lacey’s face paled, her eyes growing wide. “How do you know about that?” she demanded. “How could you possibly—”

  I reached up and tapped the back of my neck. “You gave me the net,” I told her. “You didn’t think I would wonder why I couldn’t retain certain memories after they happened?”

  “You tampered with the security lock we put on there.” Lacey exhaled with a groan. “Of course you did. I knew giving you a net was a mistake.”

  “Mistake or not, it doesn’t change the fact that I know about Kurt, nor that I have Jasper and Rose. With them giving testimony about what happened to them, we can—”

  “I don’t have Kurt,” she cut in abruptly, and now it was my turn to frown.

  “But the memory…”

  “Lacey’s great-grandfather, three generations removed, and his sister,” Strum said, his face grim. “My family was allied to Lacey’s even then, and my ancestors found their bodies thirty-three minutes after they downloaded Kurt—in that same room, where they were murdered. Kurt was never recovered. Presumably he was stolen by the murderers.”

  I leaned back in my chair, my heart pounding. Lacey didn’t have Kurt? Then who did? He wasn’t on Sadie’s computer—Leo would’ve found him if he had been. But if he wasn’t there, was it possible she was keeping him somewhere else? And if so, how could we find him? If she didn’t have him… then who did?

  And how were we ever going to learn what happened to him?

  I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t change our course of action. Just having Rose and Jasper should be more than enough to convince Scipio that he had been tampered with, and force Sage—if he wasn’t our enemy—to support the arrest of the two council members who were.

 
; “That’s disappointing,” I said in a gross understatement. “But it changes nothing. I still have two fragment AIs—”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t have one,” Lacey interrupted coolly. “I do. It’s just not Kurt. It’s Tony.”

  “Tony?” I asked, blinking. “Wait, how did you get Tony? Did you manage to steal him before someone else got him?”

  Lacey shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “Tony found me. And I do mean me. When I was twenty years old, before I ever became Lead Engineer. He somehow managed to break free from Scipio’s code in the Core and transferred himself into the Cogs’ mainframe, trying to escape the legacies before they took him, too. We started developing all of these glitches, and I was dispatched to figure out what was causing it. To my surprise, it was both a who and a what. But I’m not sure how much his testimony is going to help you. He’s… practically a child in his mannerisms.”

  It took me a moment to respond to her comment, mostly because I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Tony had just shown up in the Cog mainframe. I supposed it was possible that had he feared for himself and figured out a way to disconnect from Scipio to keep the people who were stealing the other fragments from getting him, too.

  The fact that he was a child in his mannerisms was a little surprising to me, given what I had read in the report on him. From all accounts, he was Scipio’s creativity, but they never mentioned him being childlike. Still, I doubted Scipio would care about that when it came to testimony. Besides, he needed to know what had been done to him. And if Tony only came into Sadie’s life twenty years ago, then it stood to reason that he had witnessed every other fragment being taken. He might be the best possible witness.

  “He will need to testify,” I told her. “His story is just as important as the others.”

  Lacey gave me a look. “I don’t want to risk his safety.”

  I smiled with what I hoped was more reassurance than dark, bitter humor. “If we manage to grab every single legacy in one night, then we won’t be risking anything. They won’t be able to control Scipio’s response, and we’ll have all the evidence.”

  “Not to mention one of the councilors in handcuffs,” Strum said.

  “Two,” I retorted, earning me a shocked look. “Plancett has been working with Sadie to keep his people out of the expulsion chambers.”

  “He might’ve also fathered an undoc army,” Maddox added. “Him, Sage, or this old Knight named Jathem Dreyfuss. Someone has been kidnapping women from around the Tower and forcing them to have their children, and we’ve narrowed it down to three men.”

  “Based on what parameters?” Lacey asked. “Who is Jathem Dreyfuss?”

  I hesitated, and then dismissed the question with a simple “It’s not important. What is important is that we need a way of running another blood comparison outside of the Medica, so as not to tip Sage off. I have the DNA from each of those men, but I need a comparison made to the files we have, to figure out who is fathering those undocs.” I produced a second data stick from a different pocket and handed it to Strum, while Maddox placed the plastic-wrapped cup, handkerchief, and hair we had taken from the three men on the table. “Can you do it?”

  “I can,” Strum said. “Which is which?”

  “I’m not telling you that,” I told him, standing up. “I don’t want either of you running off and killing him before I have a chance to arrest him and bring him up on charges. As soon as I have the information I need, and everything’s confirmed, I will tell you—but I want him taken alive, along with the rest of them. Is that acceptable to both of you?”

  The two were silent for a long time. “It is,” Strum said. “If it finally ends all of this once and for all… then it is.”

  “Good,” I said. “Send me the results as soon as you get them. I’ll keep you updated as things occur.”

  “Good,” Lacey said. “It’s about time you started improving in that area.”

  I shot her a death glare as I left, but to my surprise, she smiled—and it looked genuine.

  I just wished it didn’t look quite so bloodthirsty. But I let it go. I had my support, and soon would know which of the three men was responsible for fathering over thirty people. Then I would just need to figure out where the undocs were now.

  36

  The waiting was the worst part, but luckily Maddox, Leo, Quess, and I still had a lot to do in regard to creating our case against Sadie, which provided us with a productive way to pass the time. We also had our evening check-in with Alex, who was fine, but didn’t have anything new to update us on as far as the Patrians were concerned. The next morning found us all planted in the war room, continuing to sift through the files Jasper was still decrypting, trying to collect as much information about Project Prometheus as possible. There was a lot of extraneous data to sort through, even with Jasper pulling the unrelated stuff out. Schematics, blueprints, lists of people, dates, names, times… Not to mention a detailed list of everything they did to Rose to make her revert back to Jang-Mi. Nothing to tell us what their final plan for Scipio was. Nothing to tell us what their ultimate plans for the Tower were.

  To make things easier, we had split certain things up. Medical reports from Dr. Smiley went to Quess, so he could figure out what they were about, while Maddox handled schematics and blueprints, trying to identify places and devices that would be perfect for sabotage. Leo handled anything AI-related and was searching through those files to see if he could figure out exactly how the legacies were influencing Scipio’s vote. Removal of the fragments wasn’t enough; they had to be using something to force him to vote the way they wanted, and we needed to know what that was, so we could make sure to destroy it.

  Or at least make Scipio himself aware of it. I was praying that he could break out of it himself, once he understood it was there, but I didn’t know for certain. None of us did, really. Not even Jasper.

  But we were hoping that understanding would help, which was why Leo was on it. I was helping Maddox with the blueprints, although my goal was slightly different from hers: I was looking for possible locations for the undoc legacies. Tian had told me that she had caught Liam outside of Water Treatment, so I was certain their new home was somewhere in there, and I was betting that in all of these files, there had to be a clue regarding where they were. I wanted to do everything I could to try to find it before I was forced to go in and start questioning Liam.

  A momentary pang of regret came over me, and I set the pad down for a second and rubbed my eyes. I really didn’t want to have to question a sixteen-year-old boy as to the whereabouts of his family members, but as soon as Lacey got the test results back, she would be on me to know when we were going to make our move against the legacies. And I already had a deadline set in place by Marcus Sage.

  Tomorrow. The council meeting wasn’t until later in the morning, but it wasn’t a lot of time to have everything in place. And if we didn’t, then Sadie was going to find out we were after her people and move them again. Which would make Liam’s information useless, as he likely wouldn’t know where the new place was.

  “Liana,” Quess said, interrupting my thoughts. I blinked up at him and saw an excited grin on his face.

  “What is it?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “I think I figured out who Dr. Smiley is,” he replied, his smile growing. “And I was right. Looking at the pictures did help.”

  I cocked my head at him, confused. “I’m going to need a little bit more than that. How did the pictures help?”

  “Look, there are over one hundred legacies running around, and excluding those who are too young to be used as spies yet, that left about eighty who had gotten the surgery at one point or another. After compiling the before-and-after pictures to create a record of the changes made, I noticed that there was one person we’d seen before whose picture has never been included.”

  It took me a second to understand the significance, but when it hit me, I was impressed by Quess’s cleverness. W
hoever the plastic surgeon was couldn’t operate on his own face, so there would be no file for him to send. And if we’d seen him before, then that meant Quess would recognize when he was missing. “Who?” I demanded.

  “The other guy who was in the Medica with Devon and Baldy after they took Maddox.”

  Plain-Face. I had been wondering how he fit into this. “Do we know where he is?”

  “Yes,” Quess replied. “I fed the pictures into central command’s mainframe, and was able to match everyone but the undocs, except for one person. I looked him up, and it’s him. His name is Eustice Crowley.” He tapped on his pad, and the lights on the holographic table coalesced into a profile, complete with pictures of a creepily plain-looking man whose eyes seemed to be watching me even now. I recognized him instantly, and my hand balled into a fist. “And he’s never had any plastic surgery?”

  “Not once. But what’s more, his file shows that he was Medica-born and bred. He even got into medical school, but transferred out in his third year to go into IT. And he’s definitely related to the others. Blood was collected at the scene that matched the other samples taken from the bridge and the legacy house in the Attic.”

  My lips thinned. He might be placed in IT, but it was only so he could perform the plastic surgery in an environment that Sadie could control. But that also meant we couldn’t grab him without alerting Sadie. It was going to take careful planning to get to him and the other legacies she had in IT, but we were one step closer now. “Good work,” I told Quess. “That’s one down, only a few more to—”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Jasper cut in smoothly, and I looked up and over my shoulder at the screen on which his face had appeared. “But you’re getting an incoming call from Eric and Zoe. Should I patch them through the speakers?”

  I blinked and looked down at my wrist. Sure enough, my indicator was blinking that I had a net call, but now that I had Cornelius, he fielded my calls for me. Which meant Jasper had taken over the job. “Yes,” I said. “Go ahead.”