The Girl Who Dared to Rise

by Bella Forrest

  The setup filled me with apprehension, as there was a stillness to the halls that gave me a bad feeling. It was hard not to think about the two hundred and sixteen floors above us—and that at any instant, we could be buried by them.

  It wasn’t a rational feeling, but it was there, burning in the back of my mind like a beacon, daring me not to think about it. And I obliged it, needing my wits about me for the upcoming fight.

  “We’re getting close,” Leo whispered over his shoulder, and I leaned over slightly to see our dot on the pad drawing closer to the big red one that was maybe fifteen or twenty feet ahead of us.

  I quickly tapped him on the shoulder, making him change positions with me. He might have the heightened reflexes, but I had the weapon. I fingered the bracelet on my wrist with Quess’s anti-sentinel toys and thought. All I had to do was rip one off and throw it. The easiest way to do that was to sneak up behind the sentinel while it was distracted, but there was a chance that it would see us through the gaps between the beams. We needed to be quiet, patient, and precise, and I needed to scope out the situation first.

  I turned back to press a finger to my lips, and then began to slowly creep forward, moving toward the next branch in the hall. I stopped at the corner, squatted down, and peeked around it. It dead-ended just ten feet away, in a T-shaped junction. There was no sign of Tian, but there was every chance the sentinel itself was down one of the adjacent halls, or even on the other side of that wall. If the sentinel’s back was to it, getting behind it would be impossible, but I had to figure out where it was placed, and how we could get to it.

  I made my way down it, moving slowly, when a sudden noise caught my ear.

  “Yu-Na?” It was the voice, the voice, from Dinah’s apartment! The mystery woman who hadn’t been there!

  “I’m here,” came a reply. Adrenaline surged as I recognized this one as Tian’s voice. “Are you better?”

  There was a pause, and I crept forward, moving toward the wall.

  “Better?” Another pause. “Oh no, Yu-Na! Did I…. Did I hurt anyone?”

  I paused, a frown coming over my face. Why would the woman controlling the sentinel be concerned about whether or not she had hurt anyone? What was going on here?

  “No,” Tian replied. “But you came close. And you almost hurt my friends.”

  I reached the intersection of the hallways and quickly checked both sides. Then I turned left, as there was an immediate branch-off heading to the right—the direction from which Tian’s voice had come.

  “Oh God,” the woman said, her voice breaking. I paused and frowned. There was something about the way her voice broke… that sounded so off. Like it was coming through a speaker. What was going on?

  “Oh, Jang-Mi,” Tian said soothingly, her voice growing louder as I eased along the wall toward the opening. I was almost there, the edge merely a foot away. “It really isn’t your fault. I wish you’d let me call my friends, though. I really think they can help you.”

  I stopped at the edge and took a moment to try to shake out some of my tension. I didn’t want to move too fast, in case the sentinel was standing right there, watching. Faster movements attracted its eyes, according to the blueprints, while it often failed to notice slower, more precise ones.

  I leaned out, letting the top of my head and eyes grow more and more exposed.

  “No! Yu-Na, we can’t trust anyone! These people… What they’ve made me do… What they tried to make me do to you…”

  The voice broke again, this time leading to sobs that once again sounded tinny and artificial. I let my eyes follow the sound, and I saw Tian standing, facing the sentinel, which had its back to me. It was slightly hunched, its shoulders bowed under the dark cloak.

  I had an immediate view of the area around Tian, which opened up slightly more into a box room of ten by twenty feet, interrupted by columns that ran from the ceiling to the ground every five feet or so, forming a forest of girders.

  The rest of the room was empty, which only served as confirmation that the woman I had heard in Dinah’s apartment was somewhere else transmitting through the sentinel.

  Perfect. Its back was to me, and all I had to do was get a few feet closer, and then toss Quess’s little magnet thing on it. As soon as it was knocked out, Maddox—whom I had allowed to come in the end due to her insistence—would get Tian out, while the rest of us would work on cracking open its hull and getting to the hard drive inside of it. If it started to get up again, I’d hit it with another shocker.

  Easy, right?

  Apprehension tightened its grip on my spine, but I ignored it, turning to the others and signing a quick message in Callivax. Wait here. I’m going to try to neutralize it alone. Have batons ready just in case. I waited until everyone had flashed me a thumbs-up, checked the hallway again to confirm that the sentinel hadn’t moved, and then eased around the corner, creeping up toward the sentinel.

  I was doing it so slowly that it even took Tian several seconds to notice me, although she was facing my direction. As soon as her eyes hit mine, I froze and began pressing a finger to my lips.

  But Tian, never one for following the plan, drew a deep breath and cried, “Liana, get out of here!”

  The sentinel whirled, not ten feet away from me, and I had the terrible displeasure of watching its lilac eyes bleed into a bright, angry red. Then it stood up and began making its way right for me.

  19

  My heart beat rapidly in my chest as I backpedaled, grabbing one of the discs and flinging it at the thing. I couldn’t see it after I tossed it, but a second later the beam the sentinel had just grabbed sparked violently, and tendrils of electricity wove their way up its arm to disappear under the cloak.

  The sentinel’s eyes flickered back and forth, and suddenly a high-pitched, digitalized, “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” emitted from its mouth as the charge continued to arc, streaming into the sentinel.

  I clapped my hands over my ears at the shrill and piercing sound, taking a few steps back and looking through the flashing white and blue light for Tian. I spotted her a few feet behind the sentinel, her mouth and eyes opened wide in horror, staring at the sentinel as it stood frozen under the force of the shocker.

  As suddenly as it had started, the process stopped, and the sentinel slumped. It didn’t fall, but its head slumped over and its free hand went limp. It still maintained a death grasp on the beam… but it was still. Deathly still.

  Wisps of smoke curled up and out from under its cloak, some of them wafting toward me. I caught a breath of the smoke and began to cough, the smell of burning electronics pungent and acrid. Waving my hand in the air to clear the stench of it from my nostrils, I looked back over my shoulder.

  “Grab Tian and get her out of here,” I ordered. “Everyone else, get up here and help me.”

  “No, wait!” Tian shouted, taking a few steps forward. “Liana, don’t—”

  The “knocked out” sentinel suddenly burst forward in a flurry of movements, moving out from between the two beams and coming directly for me. And I noticed that its hand was on its hip. It was going for its weapon. The weapon that cut people apart like chunks of meat.

  I made a snap decision and threw my lashes to the ceiling a few feet behind the sentinel, then activated the harness to reel me in, leaping forward into a clumsy dive. I disconnected the lines and retracted them before I could get too much height, and then arced my body to land between its widespread legs.

  The move wasn’t as graceful as I had hoped, and my hip hit the inside of its knee joint—a glancing blow, but it still hurt, and I wound up landing in a twisting roll on the floor. I somehow managed to avoid vertigo, and as soon as I came to a stop, I scrambled to my feet, my hands making wet slapping sounds on the floor. I had lost my baton somehow, but there was no time to find it—the sentinel was already swinging around, its hand wrapped around its own deadly weapon.

  “Jang-Mi, no!” Tian shouted, her voice terrified.


  I ignored her, surging forward to meet the sentinel before it finished its turn. I took two huge steps and then flexed my legs and jumped, throwing myself into a spin. My leg went up and then down, and a solid impact reverberated up my shin and spilled into my knee. I landed neatly—it was a move I had practiced countless times—and heard the sound of something metal skidding away.

  The sentinel was no longer in front of me, though, because my spinning kick had twisted me around, and I instinctively mule-kicked backward. That was a mistake, I realized. A mule kick was a powerful kick, but the sentinel was four hundred and fifty pounds of metal. It was like kicking a support beam.

  I felt the impact all the way up to my hip, my teeth immediately on edge with the age-old fear that I had just broken something, and then hands went around my upper thigh, the grip iron tight. I realized it was the sentinel, but before I could react I was being lifted up. And then the world began to spin. I got a glimpse of the floor rushing toward me, and then I landed on my side, my head ricocheting off of something hard, and I was sliding down into a heap.

  It hadn’t been the floor. It had been a wall. Thank Scipio for that; if it had thrown me into one of the support beams with that amount of force, my spine would’ve snapped.

  It took me a second to catch my breath, but I managed to roll to my side and look around dazedly. Leo, Eric, Zoe, and Maddox were now fighting the sentinel, driving it away from me. Behind them, Tian was shouting something that I couldn’t make out through the ringing in my ears.

  The sight somehow propelled me to my feet, and, in spite of my labored breathing and aching side, I stumbled forward toward the fighting. I spotted my baton a few feet to the right of the sentinel, grabbed onto a beam for support, and hobbled toward it.

  Then, quite suddenly, I could hear again, the ringing subsiding some. The first thing I heard was Quess shouting. “…You talking about?”

  “The back of the neck!” Tian screamed, dancing a few steps to the side to avoid the fighting. “Don’t hurt her, Doxy!”

  “Her!” Maddox grunted. “What about me?”

  “Just shut up and attack this thing!” Zoe screamed, her voice edged with panic.

  I scooped my baton off the floor, barely catching my balance as I started to tilt too far to one side, and then turned, ready to attack.

  My friends had the sentinel surrounded, and were swinging their batons back and forth, trying to find an opening in the sentinel’s defense, but it was pointless—the batons couldn’t penetrate the shell. I fingered another disc while I watched the fighting. My friends were moving, dancing around it, but if I could find an opening, I could hit it with another shocker, and then the rest of them if I had to, hard drive be damned. It wasn’t worth our lives, and the sentinel was clearly winning.

  I just had to find my opening.

  I started to shout “Duck” to my friends, already hobbling toward them, set to throw, but Quess suddenly broke through the gap between Eric and Leo, took several huge, leaping bounds, and threw himself onto the sentinel’s back, wrapping it in a giant hug. The sentinel immediately began to thrash around, heaving back and forth in an attempt to dislodge him, but he held on, the large muscles of his arms swelling with exertion. He hadn’t been able to get his legs around it, though, and his lower torso was flying free, driving the others back as his feet were inadvertently swung toward their faces. Finally he managed to bring his knees up between his body and the sentinel’s back, bracing them against the sentinel’s spine, and then began fiddling with something on its neck, avoiding the swiping grabs the machine was making.

  “Get off of it and get out of the way!” I ordered angrily, holding back my throw. I couldn’t throw the shocker while Quess was touching it, or part of the voltage would go into him, and he’d die. “Quess! Get off! I can get it!”

  “No, don’t!” Tian shouted. “You’ll only make her angry! Quess! Be gentle! That’s her beautiful mind you’re handling! Don’t hurt her!”

  “Are you freaking kidding me with this, Tian?” Quess shouted. “We’re the ones who are in actual danger!”

  “Shut up and just do what I say, Quessian Brown!” Tian snapped back. Then, her voice completely changing, she said, “Jang-Mi… it’s okay! These are my friends. I promise, they can help you!”

  She was talking to the sentinel, trying to soothe it, and the realization brought me up short, filling me with profound confusion. The sentinel wasn’t alive; it was being controlled! So then why was Tian acting like it was her best friend? What was going on?

  There was a sharp zap from where Quess and the sentinel were struggling, and I looked up in time to see Quess land squarely on top of Leo and Eric, dragging both of them down to the ground. Quess started convulsing immediately, and I realized that he had hit an activated baton as he went down.

  “Shut off your batons!” I screamed, surging forward to fill the hole, my arm uplifted to throw, my eyes searching for an angle. I couldn’t toss it with Maddox so close, though; if she touched the sentinel while the shocker was going off… I palmed it and held up my baton, hoping I could get the sentinel’s attention.

  The sentinel was back on the offensive, though, and was charging at Maddox, not even bothering to block her blows unless they came anywhere in the vicinity of her face. I heard Tian say something behind me, but couldn’t turn, as I was focused entirely on the sentinel in front of me. I signaled to Zoe to help me flank it, and she quickly slid into position. Then, with a nod, we rushed forward, our batons held high.

  I just needed to get it to look at me, and it would pursue me—I was certain of it. As soon as I got it away from the others, I’d throw the shocker. I just had to get it to see me.

  Coordinating our attack like that would’ve generally given us an advantage, as most humans lose a lot of their spatial awareness during a fight. But sentinels, apparently, had better senses than I did, because without even twisting its head, it rose to one foot and kicked Zoe square in the chest, while simultaneously punching me and Maddox with its fists.

  I wasn’t sure if it hit Maddox, but its metal fist slammed into my own jaw with enough force to make my teeth rattle, and I spun around, getting my arms up in time to keep myself from going face-first into a beam. My face slapped against my forearms—not hard, but hard enough for my vision to double. I blinked my eyes rapidly as I tried to get my balance, but the blow had twisted me around, and now my appendages felt like hindrances, weighted and sluggish. I fought the feeling, a fresh surge of adrenaline helping to keep me upright, but I knew my strength was failing.

  If I didn’t hit this thing with the shocker, we were all dead.

  I finally managed to catch my balance, my vision clearing, and I immediately began searching, looking for the sentinel. Then a shadow caught my eye. I realized it was the sentinel and moved to step back, but it was already on me, lashing out with a foot while shoving me with a shoulder.

  I fell, but this time my body remembered what to do, and I tucked my chin to my chest and slapped the ground with both hands, breaking the momentum. I started to get back up, but the sentinel clomped over to me and stamped one foot down on my chest.

  Then it began to press.

  Breath exploded out of me in a huff, and for several seconds my mind could only struggle with impulse: get this crushing weight off of my chest. Now.

  I shoved at its leg with both hands, straining even as my breath became shorter and shorter. Black spots danced across my eyes as I kicked and threw my weight into trying to break free. I realized that I had to use the shocker, or else I was going to die.

  Then I realized that if I used it, I would die, and the thought made me freeze. I couldn’t die. I wasn’t ready to. I had too much left to do. I renewed my struggle against the impossible crushing weight on my chest, my fingers searching for something, anything, that would make this relentless weight come to an end.

  But it was futile. The foot continued to press with a grim yet determined purpose, and I realized that this was it.
I was going to die. Even as I thought it, my vision became awash with gray, and I felt my muscles growing weak, starved for oxygen.

  “Stop it or I hurt Yu-Na!” a male voice proclaimed loudly, and I was suddenly rewarded with significantly less pressure, allowing some air to flood into my lungs with a harsh gasp that made me want to cough. Color began to fill in, bringing with it red and white blobs that obscured some of my vision, but eventually receded. I blinked, blearily gazing up at the sentinel’s tall body to see it looking a few feet to my right.

  Following its malevolent gaze, my eyes widened as I took in Leo gripping Tian tightly around her waist, her slim legs dangling from where he held her crushed against his chest. In his other hand, he held a baton, the glowing blue light sparking menacingly—mere inches from Tian’s head.

  His face was filled with dark promise as he regarded the sentinel.

  “Get off her,” he barked. The sentinel immediately lifted up its foot, stepping off me. This time I did cough, a reflexive action, and then sucked in a deep, life-giving breath of air that made me almost lightheaded with relief. Somehow, I managed to pull myself a few feet away, still weak from the onslaught of the sentinel’s attack. As soon as I had backed away, I fumbled at the bracelet, my numb fingers trying desperately to clasp one of the thin metal disks—and failing.

  “Liana, stop,” Leo ordered.

  I froze, then looked back up at him, following his eyes until I saw Zoe and Maddox dangling upside down. The sentinel’s hand was wrapped around Maddox’s ankle, and it held Zoe’s braid tightly, dragging my best friend up by her hair. I hadn’t seen them, but now that I did, I realized that if I used the weapon, twenty-five thousand volts of electricity would be passed through the sentinel… and directly into them.