The Girl Who Dared to Think

by Bella Forrest

  “Yup,” she said after thumbing through a few pages of her romance novel, a smile on her lips. “Guys tricking girls and stealing kisses? Classic romance trope. I wonder if he had this book before I did.”

  I gaped at her. “Seriously? What, are you predicting our marriage?”

  Zoe gave me an incredulous look. “What? No! Life isn’t like a story, Liana. So, what information were you trying to get from him?”

  “I can’t really talk about it,” I lied. It took me a moment to figure out why I was so determined to hold this back from Zoe. I had to remember Grey’s behavior during our conversation, confirming my suspicion that there was something illegal about the pills. I didn’t want her to have any knowledge about it, just as a precaution, until I knew more. “Not until I have something more concrete. I know he knows something. I just can’t get him to tell me. I practically begged him, Zo. It was humiliating, and I’m so embarrassed. Especially after that stupid kiss.”

  “You went through all that and he still didn’t tell you anything?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Not a thing.”

  “What an ass.”

  I smiled. “My words exactly.”

  “So what do you want to do about him?” she asked, and I smiled. This was what I loved about Zoe the most: she was a woman of action. You came to her with a problem, and she immediately focused on the solution. It was what made us the best of friends.

  “I’ve got to do something if I want to keep my number from dropping. I’m just not sure what I can do as long as he’s a nine.”

  “Well, all you want to do is get him to answer some questions, right?”

  “Right—but I have no idea how to figure out where his assigned quarters are. I could’ve when I was a six, but now that I’m a five…”

  “Oh, leave that to me,” Zoe said with a wide grin. “I’m interested in meeting this guy, and giving him a piece of my mind for bamboozling a kiss out of my best friend. And possibly giving him a boot to the rear, as well.”

  “Oh, Zo, I missed you,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and giving her a hug. She squeezed me back, and I could feel her smile.

  “I missed you, too,” she said into my hair, and for a moment, I felt like everything was going to be all right.

  9

  Zoe’s method of tracking Grey, it turned out, was to rely on the natural paranoia of the citizens of Water Treatment.

  “They hate outsiders,” she needlessly explained as we raced away from an older woman who had given an extremely detailed report of exactly where ‘the suspicious-looking man with brown eyes’ had gone. “We’ll have his location inside of an hour—I’m sure of it.”

  She hopped onto a pipe, then grabbed onto the rung overhead to swing out and over a wide gap that ran several floors deep. Reaching out with her other hand, she grabbed another handhold. I watched her overhand progress as she practically flew over the gap, and then used my lashes to follow, more confident in my abilities with them. I landed on one knee next to Zoe, who was stretching out her arms, and stood up. We shared an exuberant grin.

  “Oy, Knight!” came a voice.

  I turned to see an old man’s head peeping up from a narrow gap between the floor and a large pipe, bushy eyebrows furrowed in concern. I trotted over and knelt down, instinctively hiding my number behind my back.

  “I’m a Squire,” I informed him. “Can I help you?”

  “Bah,” said the old man, craning his neck to try to get a look at my wrist, then giving up. “I heard you two were looking for someone.”

  I blinked in surprise and then furrowed my brow. “How’d you hear that?”

  “The pipes, girl!”

  “We tap out messages on the pipes,” Zoe said, stepping on the tail end of the man’s statement. “We have the fastest gossips in the Tower,” she added.

  “It’s not gossip—information is critical down in the pipes, girl,” the old man admonished, pulling himself out from the narrow gap with two skinny arms. “And you shouldn’t peer down your nose at the ways of your people, especially when those ways save lives.”

  Zoe flushed, her cheeks bronzing over, and I recognized the frustrated look, having worn it myself a time or two.

  “Sir, did you see someone?” I asked, trying to put the conversation back on track. The old man pulled a cloth out of his pocket and opened a sliding hatch over one of the pipes. He dipped the cloth in the water racing by and then began washing off some of the grime and soot that had collected on his face.

  When he spoke, his voice was muffled by his ministrations, making it difficult to hear. “Saw a young man, dark blond. Had a suspicious look to him. Too expressive, if you know what I mean.”

  I did. That description matched Grey to a T. Still, I needed a bit more to go on—after all, how could I be sure it hadn’t been some other dark blond man who looked super happy after getting kissed sometime earlier?

  “Was he a one?” I asked, and the man turned and gave me a look, water dripping from his eyebrows.

  “A nine. That’s what was so odd about him. I told myself, that right there is a suspicious thing.”

  I grinned, glad I wasn’t the only one who saw the oddness of Grey carrying a nine. After all, nines never exhibited much in the way of emotions. “Which way did he go?”

  The old man jabbed a finger toward a beam of grayish light filtering upward. “I asked him, and he said he was going to Cogstown, which meant he took the elevator,” he said, a note of disdain in his voice. “Can’t say I’m surprised. Cogs always been trouble, since day one. And this one had damned beady eyes, you know?”

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t agree, but I kept my opinion to myself. “Thank you, Diver,” I said, and he waved a dismissive hand over his head.

  “Give me a ride,” Zoe ordered as soon as I turned around, and I groaned, but bent over while she climbed up on a pipe behind me. She gently settled onto my back, and I took a moment to adjust and shift her weight around until she felt balanced. I switched the settings on my suit so that the leads came out of my waist. I needed them lower to help center our collective balance. If I was going for speed or accuracy, I used the wrists. Her arms wrapped around my neck, and within moments I was lashing us both up and toward the beam of light the man had pointed out.

  I landed on a platform about midway up, the yellow markings next to it telling me the elevator was ahead. Zoe slid off my back and looked down the narrow hall.

  “This area always gives me the creeps,” she said softly, flicking on her flashlight to provide more illumination than the dim red bulbs provided.

  “Me too,” I replied, eyeing the gloomy shadows that threatened to swallow the hall in the flash of one bulb blowing. It was a simple, primitive fear—the fear of the unknown that could be lurking there—but it was fear all the same. “So… do you have a way to get us into Cogstown proper, and not the reception hall the elevators dump all non-Cogs into? Because I don’t have the ranking to override the elevator protocols.”

  “I’m going to hack the elevator,” Zoe replied with a grin. Her hands dipped into her bag, and I gaped as she pulled out a small black pad, modified, like the ones the Eyes always carried. Upon closer inspection, I could see that it wasn’t exactly the same; in fact, it looked like she had pieced it together out of odds and ends from around the Tower.

  “How’d you get that?” I asked, warning bells going off.

  “This thing was five months in the making,” Zoe said excitedly. “I’ve actually hacked two elevators with it already—nothing too exciting; I just wanted to see if I could do it.”

  “Zoe!” I said, wide-eyed as I watched her drop to her knees in front of the shaft. She rummaged around in her bag, pulled out a screwdriver, and began unscrewing something from the back of the black metal control panel that sat just outside of the elevator, a long metal rod holding it up in the air.

  “What?” she said. “I had a manual on how to fabricate your own pads—in case of emergency—and it was too f
ascinating to pass up. I had to learn how to code, and it took me ages to find something that taught me how to do that. The Eyes really don’t like their manuals floating around.”

  “Zoe, if you get caught—”

  “I’m not doing anything that could hurt the Tower,” she insisted. “I’m not touching the security protocols, or any of the base functions. I’m just overriding the controls to make them think we’re Cogs, okay?”

  “Yes, but this is pretty serious. I just want to make sure you’re sure you want to do this.”

  Zoe gave me a withering look as she lowered the now freed panel to the floor. “You asked me to be here. Besides, do you want to find this guy or not?”

  I did. Still, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. Zoe was tampering with the Tower, and that was a severe offense, and always came with a charge of terrorism. Altering anything in the Tower without permission was like that, as the smallest change could cause catastrophic failures (or so the department heads wanted us to believe). In Zoe’s case, it would be made worse, as she was tampering with something that didn’t fall under Diver jurisdiction—another big no-no in the Tower. I looked at my wrist and found myself wondering if I was actually carrying some sort of psychological contamination. If Zoe’s number fell because of me, I would never forgive myself.

  “Damned thing!” Zoe said as sparks shot out from where she was connecting a wire. She shook her hands and stared down at the pad, the screen turning her face a soft aqua blue. A screen popped up, and she sat down and began inputting commands into it. “So, I found a pretty exploitable flaw in the elevator’s security protocols, and have written an algorithm of my own to make use of it. I trick the system into performing what it thinks is a test, and tell it what floor to go to.” A platform slid out of the wall, covering the shaft, and she grinned victoriously as she began disconnecting the lines and screwing the plate back into place, making the entire thing look just as it did before.

  I looked around while she did this, keeping an eye out for anyone approaching, but the halls were deserted. She stood up and nodded toward the elevator.

  “Let’s go,” she said, gliding over the ramp and coming to a halt on the platform.

  I followed her quickly, crossing my arms in preparation for the inevitable elevator lecture, and then smiled when the voice never came and the lift began to descend. Apparently, it couldn’t chastise people during a test, and I wasn’t going to complain.

  I felt a trill of excitement as it moved—this would be my first time actually inside Cogstown proper. Cogs were very protective of their home, and didn’t like uninvited guests visiting. Knights with a rank of eight or higher could overrule the protocols, but Gerome and I had never had cause to go down there even once during my apprenticeship. Suffice it to say, the two of us were going to draw some attention.

  “I’m still surprised you didn’t accept recruitment into the Eyes,” I commented after a second, and she gave me a sharp look.

  “The Eyes aren’t the only ones who need to know how to code. The big machines that keep us alive are run by computers. Only the best Cogs can speak the language, and that’s only because IT tried to revoke all of the copies that contained coding, citing that all computers and codes fall under their jurisdiction. They actually got a majority vote in the council initially, and got their hands on a lot of the copies before the Cogs managed to get the council to overrule their decision. Of course, it was too late—and the IT department had secured, and then conveniently misplaced the books taken in the first place. But some of them still exist, hidden by their owners before they got confiscated, and—”

  “How do you know that?” I asked with a frown. “That’s not taught in school.”

  “My grandmother was a Cog, remember? When I was young she used to tell me all sorts of things about the history of Cogstown, ranting about the IT department and the many ways they’ve tried to eliminate the entire Cog department.”

  “What?” I said with a laugh. “That’s preposterous. All of the departments are necessary to keep the Tower functioning. None is more crucial than the other—it’s part of the Oath.”

  The Oath was something we’d had to recite every morning, afternoon, and evening in our interdepartmental education centers, when we were young. It was basically a way of remembering that we were all in the struggle to survive together, and an acknowledgement of our dedication to serving the Tower, ensuring our continued survival.

  Zoe shrugged and shook her head, her eyes watching the numbers as they dwindled down. “I guess if you did something to try to eliminate an entire department, you wouldn’t really want anyone knowing about it, would you?”

  It was an excellent point, but I still wasn’t convinced. Interdepartmental spats had existed pretty much since the inception of the Tower. Jurisdictional disputes, departmental reorganizing, and more than a few hotheads had created rifts over the centuries of forced cooperation. Rumors always flew this way and that during those times; someone would get blamed for something or other, and then legends were born, with heroes and villains. The legends would become part of a department’s history, and a lot of them were taken out of context and got a little out of hand.

  Her grandmother had probably just told a story from her own mother. Likely, if I were to go back into the public history of the department, it would result in finding a memo about the coding books being collected by IT to ensure that all data was input into the computer, so that in case of a catastrophic event, like, say, the loss of a department, the other citizens could have the knowledge available to try to salvage the situation. It had been blown out of proportion—like most interdepartmental memos were. Centuries of living together and serving the Tower meant that sometimes departments would start fights with each other, at times erupting into full-blown group attacks and guerilla warfare. But the whole idea that a department had ever moved against another to wrest more control for themselves was unrealistic to say the least.

  “Heard back from the Cogs about your transfer?” I asked after a moment, and she frowned, shoving her hands into her pockets.

  “No,” she said glumly. “I’m worried my mom intervened or something. She’s close with the Praetor, and I’m one of their best workers.”

  “Can he intercede like that?” I asked, blinking at her. Praetor Strum was the head of Water Treatment, and had the final say on who could and could not transfer into or out of his department. He also served as the head pontifex of the Water Ways, giving sermons to his people once a week. Unlike IT, who never allowed people to transfer out and only a handful to transfer in, they were normally more relaxed about department members’ changeover. In fact, I wasn’t aware that they had ever stopped anyone before.

  “He can, if he can make a strong enough case against inducting a Diver to the ranks of a Cog. It would be harder to do, since I’m first-generation and my mother came from the Cogs, but…” She trailed off with a sigh and ran the edge of her thumbnail over one brow, as if massaging a headache away. “I just like machines.”

  That was true. For as long as I had known Zoe, she had loved to tinker. Give that girl parts, and she’d show you a robot. Or an IT pad. I felt an empathetic pang for my friend, knowing that all she wanted was to work on the big machines, and that politics and interdepartmental disputes were getting in the way of her happiness.

  I knew that if she were a Cog, she’d be a ten in no time flat.

  Wrapping an arm around her shoulder, I rested my cheek against hers and hugged her close.

  The concrete wall suddenly transitioned to glass, and I lifted a hand to block out some of the bright light from the beams on the ceiling, the lift continuing to drag us down. After a moment, the light grew far enough away for me to lower my hand, and I blinked as I took my very first look at Cogstown.

  Steel girders jutted out everywhere, some of them making a frame, others ending abruptly in thin air. I could see the wide spaces in between—as if they were their own levels. In some ways they were, thanks to the metal
plating that had been welded over the gaps. The makeshift levels were awash with activity. Men harnessed to safety lines climbed girders, while others crossed massive gaps, sliding down a single line. Parts of the open spaces were welded over, creating rickety-looking landings. The landings grew denser as we descended, and I could see more and more people.

  There were improvised homes everywhere, but with no doors—open, much like the greeneries, only more chaotic and busy. Hammocks hung over empty spaces, while metal baskets lifting heavy tools rose and fell all around them. I saw one man sleeping while a heavy basket with a spanner half my size swung dangerously close, missing him by inches as it was hauled up.

  I stepped out of the shadow of the platform, and made for the light. Girders were rooted to the floor all around us, and the makeshift floors above were blocking out the light, giving the wide space we were in a terribly exposed feeling as we moved forward. We walked for fifty feet before we stepped into the light, and I got my first direct look inside Cogstown.

  Great, ponderous machines turned and growled, the gears slicing into shafts of light to create strange shadows as they moved up and down. Cogstown was seemingly built around and over them, catwalks and rope bridges running to and fro overhead, people climbing everywhere. The base of the village was here on the ground floor, with tent huts built around the machines, hammocks inside, and electric cooking elements everywhere, topped with pots or pans. I could see stalls of fruits and vegetables—this morning’s shipment from the farms—and people shopping for supplies, their ration cards out and at the ready.

  Zoe whistled as she looked around, spotting one of the vendors with corn cobs. She shot me a glance. “You ever had Cog-style corn before?” she asked, and I shook my head.