The Girl Who Dared to Lead

by Bella Forrest

  We had come to a stop just under the archway, and I turned to face him directly, letting him look fully into my eyes and inviting him to see the bleak darkness within them. I knew what they looked like: hollow and dead, devoid of any emotion save a deep, vacant emptiness that made me feel like I was nothing but muscle and skin, carved out and gutted like a pumpkin.

  He sucked in a deep breath, his pupils dilating slightly. “Liana…” He trailed off, his brows drawing close as pity flooded his eyes. I looked away, not needing to see it. I didn’t want his pity; I just wanted to be alone so I could think.

  Lewis reached out and touched my shoulder. My eye twitched, but I didn’t jerk away from him, even though I wanted to. My mother had touched me there, too, once. My mother had squeezed me there, just as Lewis was doing now. My mother had told me she loved me, that she was proud of me.

  God, what was wrong with me? She’d told me she loved me—once—and she’d never told me she was proud of me. Why was my brain inventing crap like that? Why was it trying to revise our history into one that justified all of this pain?

  Why was it making me hold my breath, imagining that her voice would be the next one I heard? Imagining what it would be like to be pulled into her arms one more time, to hear her telling me that it was all a mistake, that she was safe and sound.

  And why did it make me want to cry when all Lewis did was give me a gentle and gruff “Be careful” before letting me go?

  Like she had let me go.

  More tears came, but I angrily fought them back, moving forward instead, stalking onto the bridge, guided only by what I could make out through my blurred vision, and the grim determination that I had to fix myself.

  Because I couldn’t keep going on like this.

  2

  My tears eventually dried as my feet unerringly followed the route I had taken every night for the past three nights, led by memory alone. I took an elevator buried inside the narrow halls that riddled the inner walls of the Tower and rode it all the way up to the hundred and thirtieth floor. Once there, I followed the uniform passages, navigating them like I had done since I was fifteen years old.

  I reached a door and pressed a button, bracing myself. The door slid to the side with a hiss, revealing nothing but open space and a view that was breathtaking. From here, I could see into the heart of the Tower, from the white, gleaming walls of the Medica to the geometric precision of the Core, illuminated in blue, to the dark, twisting architecture of the Citadel, all of it laid out before me, one structure right next to the other.

  I stepped through the opening onto a ledge that was eight inches wide, and then slid along, using handholds cut into the wall to help guide me. The door closed behind me with a hiss, but I ignored it, focusing on making my way down the narrow walkway and around the corner. As soon as I was past that, the ledge I was walking on widened, leading to a platform roughly five feet wide and eight feet deep, framed on three sides by the sloped edge of the interior part of the shell.

  Zoe, Eric, and I had discovered this area years ago, and it had become our official meetup spot when our classes and duties took us farther and farther away from one another. Now, it had become my refuge—the only place I could go where I didn’t have the prying eyes of the Tower on me at all times. Sure, Zoe and Eric would probably think of it if they woke up and found me gone, but they hadn’t the past two nights, so the odds were in my favor that they wouldn’t tonight.

  I stepped onto the platform and walked along the edge until I was roughly at the middle. Then I sat down and dangled my legs over the side. I pulled my hat off and set it down behind me, so I wouldn’t accidentally knock it over the ledge, and then lifted the bag over my shoulder and set it next to me.

  I took a moment to stare out at what had once been one of my favorite views in the Tower, trying to find some semblance of beauty in it. I failed. Instead, I was left with an emptiness, a lack of… anything. Nothingness. Oblivion.

  And rage. It seethed and twisted deep inside me—yet another unchecked thing that had formed since my mother’s death. It was the other half of what had dragged me up here, a vicious compunction that I couldn’t seem to shake. Even though I’d never given in to it before, still it came, and for a moment, I was powerless to stand against it.

  I closed my eyes and exhaled. Then I turned. I opened the bag. Stared at the glowing, clear box inside. Pulled it out, gripping the edges of it tightly between my hands. Ignored their trembling as I extended my hand, and the box, away from the bag and toward the ledge. Held it over empty space.

  My breathing had intensified, and I stared at the box. My eyes burned. My lips trembled.

  “Just drop it,” I told myself bitterly. “It’s what you want, isn’t it? Vengeance, right? Plain and simple, short and sweet? Or would it be justice? She made your mother fall. She killed her. You could just let her fall. Never mind she didn’t want to do it. Never mind that she was forced to. Never mind that it won’t help you find the bastards who really did it. Just do it. Just let her go.”

  My grip tightened around the box in my hands, so much so that the entire thing creaked slightly. Or maybe it was my knuckles—I couldn’t tell. They were bone-white from the pressure with which I was pressing my fingertips into the box. Even though the anger in my heart screamed at me to do it, just do it, my words helped keep me anchored, prevented me from letting go.

  But, Scipio help me, I really wanted to do it. I wanted it so bad that I could taste it. If I just relaxed my fingers, it would happen. She would die. The thing they put into the sentinel to make it kill. Jang-Mi.

  And all I had to do was let go.

  Yet my fingers stubbornly refused to do so, and after several agonizing heartbeats, I pulled my hands back and thrust the hard drive containing Jang-Mi back into the bag. A moment later, I pushed the bag backward, away from me, and then wiped my hands against my pants, trying to scrub them free of the taint of holding her. Repulsed by her, myself, what I had been thinking about doing…

  This was the worst part of everything I was going through. The anger, as misdirected as it was, burned in my gut, telling me that the thing in the hard drive should die. Even though I knew it was wrong, it kept finding ways to creep up on me when I least expected, forcing dozens of images of me destroying the hard drive into my head.

  It took everything in my power to keep from dropping her. She was important, not only for tracking down the monsters who had directed her toward my mother, but to help Leo fix Scipio.

  Because someone—likely the same people who put Jang-Mi in a four-hundred-and-fifty-pound death machine and sent her on a murder spree—had done something to the great AI. Something that everyone in the Tower thought was impossible. They had tampered with his programming, carving out massive chunks of codes and then hiding it from the members of the IT Department, which was responsible for and dedicated to protecting him from harm. All in order to control him and make him do what they wanted.

  For what reason, you might ask, and to that I would tell you, “I have absolutely no friggin’ clue.”

  I only knew certain things. The innovator and creator of the Tower, Lionel Scipio, had created Scipio using five AI programs based on sophisticated scans of his neural pathways, and those of the other founding members. Those AI programs were then run through a battery of simulations that would emulate problems in the Tower, forcing them to find solutions and deal with their ramifications, over and over again, until only one remained—Lionel’s, in point of fact. Those who failed were not discarded. Instead, Lionel had heightened the strengths they demonstrated during their simulations and then incorporated them into Lionel’s AI clone, forming the completed version of Scipio, who was now housed in the Core.

  Later, the council would decide to destroy the original prototypes, but Lionel saved one of them—his own—against the council’s wishes. That one was Leo, and he was currently housed inside a net inside the body of my braindead boyfriend, Grey, trying valiantly to repair the damage to his
brain and restore him to the man he once was.

  And I was pretty sure he had a crush on me.

  Which, in my current emotional state, was just another litany of problems I couldn’t deal with. And wouldn’t until I figured out why I was spiraling out so badly. It was why I was up here, for crying out loud! Yet every time I sat down, out came Jang-Mi and the anger, and I kept hovering on the edge of something dark and sinister, barely able to hold it back. It scared me—not only because of how intense it was, but because I couldn’t seem to control it.

  I never would’ve imagined my mother’s death would affect me this badly, and I needed to stop this vicious cycle. Every second of each minute that had passed since my mother’s death, I had been failing to focus on the multitude of problems we were facing, the biggest one being the secret group that was in all likelihood trying to kill me. Legacies, these secret groups were called, and each of them seemed to be undetectable to the scans of the Tower. In fact, they were hiding themselves within the Tower, with an ease and access that was as incredible as it was terrifying.

  Then, there was Jasper, another AI fragment I had befriended in the Medica. He’d saved my life twice, only to be ripped away before I even knew what he was. I’d been aching to go after him since I’d learned what happened, but everything had gotten derailed by the Tourney. Not to mention, he had been downloaded directly into the head of IT’s computer terminal.

  Having met CEO Sadie Monroe, I had no doubt that Jasper was there against his will. I had so many questions about him, for him. Yet the answers were elusive, and largely irrelevant. I needed to focus on how to rescue him, not only because he could help us figure out what we needed to do to save Scipio, but also because he was my friend, and I owed him. To make matters even more complicated, he was the only one who knew the formula for the drug called Paragon—the drug that could mask an individual’s rank (often confused with someone’s worth), and which we desperately needed in order to recruit people and make our escape.

  Which was why rescuing Jasper, and getting the formula for Paragon, was so important. But I was at a loss for how to even go about it, considering every five minutes my mind would drift back to my mother and my heart would begin to ache from loss.

  It seemed like my entire life was like that now. Just when I thought I should contact Lacey to find out what was going on inside the council regarding the Tourney, I’d start to cry, thinking of the final challenge, of the line being cut, of my mother falling to her death, and felt certain that I couldn’t ever bear to go through anything like that again.

  Rationally, I knew it would help me prepare for the off chance that they decided to re-do the last challenge. But I also knew that she held me responsible for the death of her cousin, Ambrose.

  Should I even do the challenge again, if the council decided to repeat it? It might be a moot point, though; if I was found guilty of cheating, they wouldn’t let me compete, anyway. But if they let me do it… would I?

  The very idea was downright exhausting, and pointless, unless I could get myself under control. If they set me loose on the Tourney now, I’d likely fall to pieces at the drop of a hat.

  “Why do you feel like this?” I asked out loud. “Why do you miss her so badly?”

  Was it guilt? I did feel guilty; that much was certain. I replayed the moments leading up to her death a thousand times in my head, imagining different ways that I could’ve saved her and then stopped the sentinel. All of them burned a hole in my stomach, making me feel a thousand times smaller, but that didn’t explain why I kept imagining us as if we had been better than we were.

  Tears burned hot tracks down my cheeks, rolling over my chin and dropping onto my hands, which I noticed were grasped tightly into fists, shaking. I felt the press of my nails into my palms, and squeezed tighter, numb to all pain save the one raging inside the tattered place where my heart had once sat. A place that was now an empty, cavernous space that seemed to hold only the echo of a heartbeat.

  I sat frozen, but inside I struggled to resist the torrent of pain, trying to understand the source of all of it. It wasn’t guilt. Could it just be loss? The very thought that I was never going to see her again?

  It was frustrating not being able to peek through the veil and find the root of the problem. It was in my nature to fix things when they were broken, even myself, and the only one preventing me from doing so was me.

  Time passed—I wasn’t sure how much—and I just stared out at the Core, searching for answers and finding none. Then a soft scraping sound just around the corner of the ledge pulled me back into the present. I had enough energy to shift my eyes over, and watched as a crimson-clad leg swung into view, followed by an arm, and then a familiar head with dark blond hair that was slightly mussed and a strong, square-cut jaw speckled with a few days’ growth.

  It was hard to look at Leo without seeing Grey. It was his body, after all.

  Leo stepped onto the platform and then slid his hand through his hair, pushing the tangled mass back. He met my gaze and opened his mouth.

  “Are you alone?” I asked, cutting him off as I turned back to my view. “Or are the others right behind you?”

  “I am alone,” he announced softly. “May I sit?”

  I considered his question, but I still wasn’t ready to talk. So I shrugged by way of an answer, and a second later his legs appeared over the edge at my side, swinging into place about a foot away from my own.

  We sat there for a long time, the silence between us spinning out slowly.

  “Liana, tell me what I can do to help you,” he finally said, clearly unable to stop himself.

  I blew out a breath. He’d been saying something like that constantly for the past few days, and it was one of the most frustrating statements anyone had made to me. It filled me with a resentment and irritation that was hard to push aside because he was basically asking me to advise him on how to advise myself. And clearly, given my late-night obsession with coming up here every night to hold Jang-Mi’s hard drive over the edge and really contemplate the justice of dropping her… I needed the help. But help with what?

  Was it failure? That had definitely been the source of my guilt with Ambrose, but here it didn’t ring true. I didn’t feel like I had failed her. We had been working as a team. She had gone after my father—that was a mistake—but I had let her. Had I failed her by letting her go after him?

  “How did you find me?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject, still trying to figure it out.

  Leo sighed softly. “I woke up and found Eric sleeping and Jang-Mi’s hard drive gone. I woke Zoe and asked her where you might be, and she suggested here. She said it was your favorite place, which makes sense, considering you like a good view. It really is beautiful.”

  As he said that, the lights on the walls of the Tower changed and began to grow brighter, indicating that the sun outside was rising. The dim settings for night—a white that was almost blue—began to shift in tone, the blue shade lightening and then disappearing altogether. The white dimmed slightly, and then suddenly changed to a warm, dusty orange, brightening until streams of light were hitting the three structures inside. I’d watched the simulated sunrise dozens of times, and each one had felt more spectacular than the last.

  But this time, the sight did nothing for me, except remind me that it was a new day. A new and terrible day. A day that I had been dreading since I got the announcement.

  “Not from where I’m sitting,” I replied, suddenly feeling drained. I was exceptionally tired. Scipio help me, I wasn’t ready for today. I hadn’t fixed a damn thing. I glanced over at him, eyeing him warily. “You sure Zoe isn’t with you?”

  “No. I convinced her that you were probably craving some alone time, and it would be better if I came by myself. I just wish you had told someone. You shouldn’t be out here alone.” His voice held a note of reproach, and I shifted as a dull throb of guilt hit me. My friends cared about me—were concerned for me—and I was willfully ignoring the
m. It wasn’t very thoughtful or considerate of me, and it certainly didn’t make me a good friend.

  At the same time, his implication that coming up here was unsafe struck me as unusually funny, given that I had gone out the past two nights unescorted and nothing had happened to me, and I laughed bitterly, in spite of myself.

  Leo cocked his head at me, his facial expression reminding me of a baffled dog who didn’t understand what was happening. I decided to let him in on the joke. “Nothing’s happened the last two nights I’ve come up here, Leo. If anyone was going to try anything, they would’ve already.”

  I looked back out at the Citadel, suddenly growing morose. Maybe I had been wishing they would try—or even succeed. Maybe that was why I had been drawn here night after night, like some sort of ghostly echo of a girl who used to be. Maybe it wasn’t guilt, or failure, or loss. Maybe I was trying to punish myself.

  “I made it easy enough for them.”

  The words escaped me without me choosing to let them, giving Leo a glimpse into the dark inner workings of my brain. I cursed it bitterly for betraying me. That was why I didn’t want to talk to people. You had to give up a part of yourself to do it, and I wasn’t prepared to share my pain. Especially today.

  “You’ve come up here the last two nights alone?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “With Jang-Mi?”

  I looked at him from the corner of my eye. I wasn’t surprised that he had noticed her absence, but the slight question in his voice made me burn with shame and resentment. I hadn’t hurt her—I’d managed not to the last three nights—but I was embarrassed that he knew I had taken her. I hadn’t wanted anyone to know.