The Girl Who Dared to Lead

by Bella Forrest

  Once she stopped glaring at me like she wanted to see my throat torn out. Or when I managed to stop doing the same.

  I sighed and rubbed a hand over my head. “Look, I know why you’re calling, and I’m waiting on the files from the investigation to be sent over to me. But I also need the files from the investigation into the sentinel. The people who stepped forward to assume responsibility are lying, and I want their names so I can hunt them down and ask them questions.”

  Ever since Astrid told me about the results, I had been itching to get my hands on them and tear into them to get to the truth of the matter. The people who had taken responsibility were clearly lying about what happened. And I wanted to know why.

  “Liana…” Lacey studied me for a second, and then looked to one side. “You can’t do that.”

  “The hell I can’t,” I snapped back, incensed that she would try to block any line of inquiry from me. “Those people were told to lie! I will find out who told them to, then track them down to find out who told them to do it, and go up the chain until I am standing face-to-face with the person who is responsible for my mother’s death.”

  “And Ambrose,” Lacey hissed sharply. “Don’t you dare forget about him, Liana.”

  “Believe me, I haven’t. Now, are you going to send me those files?”

  “No, I’m not. You can access them if you want, but let me lay this out for you: those people weren’t lying. Or at least, they didn’t think they were. They checked out a sentinel between the challenges to prepare it for the last one. It disappeared shortly after the final checks were completed, about an hour before the final challenge. Around that time, our monitoring of Scipio showed an extreme mood shift that normally accompanies someone making him do something, and we assumed the other group made him move it. Then a sentinel appeared in the arena and started attacking people with a Class B weapon. Astrid and everyone else on the council assumed it was the same sentinel that those engineers had lost, and by the time the sentinel you disabled in the arena showed up in the investigation rooms, it was the original sentinel—serial numbers and all.”

  “Wait, are you telling me there were two sentinels in play, and they switched them?” A second later, I realized that if that was true, that meant one of them was still unaccounted for—and in their hands. They might not have Jang-Mi to pilot it for them anymore, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t work around the problem.

  She nodded. “It’s not the first time something like this has happened, but believe me when I say they are good at this. They’ve been setting people up like this for years.”

  A chill ran down my spine. I knew my enemies had a significant number of people, but the fact that they had managed to steal not one, but two of the sentinels the Tower had kept because of the Technological Preservation Act, in order to cover their tracks, was impressive. And terrifying.

  No wonder I rarely felt safe anymore.

  “Fine,” I said, giving it up and focusing on a new question. “Then here’s a question: how secure is my little personal assistant thing? Is it possible Devon had it hacked? Could someone be monitoring us right now?”

  Lacey’s eyebrows rose, and a surprised smile flashed across her face… and was gone again in the blink of an eye. “Okay, dial back the paranoia and relax. The program is fine. They are systematically wiped and reinstalled between department heads, so even if he was hacked, that hack is now gone. You’re fine.”

  That was a relief, but only a mild one, and quickly it gave way to a different line of questions. “What about recovering Devon Alexander’s vid files from this room? If we could do that, maybe we could figure out who he was working with on the council.”

  Lacey rolled her eyes and leaned back in the chair she was sitting in, leaning onto one of the armrests. “It’s not possible. Those files are gone, destroyed in the system wipe. Even if we tried to recover them, they’d be severely degraded and next to useless. Let this go and move on to more productive things.”

  “I seriously don’t buy it,” I insisted. “Every system has a redundancy, just in case. There’s got to be a ghost server somewhere, and if we find it, we can just—”

  “You are going to waste time on this,” Lacey cut in flatly, her face growing hard. “I want Ambrose’s murderers yesterday, and trying to dig out the old vid files on Devon is only going to slow you down in finding them. Let it go and move on.”

  I pressed my lips together and fought the urge to push harder. I was right about this—I knew I was—but Lacey was apparently finished with the subject. Still, something about the exchange was weird, and after a moment’s consideration, I filed it away for later pursuit. “Fine. What now?”

  “Now that you’re on the council, you’ll obviously need to know how to vote on certain issues. I’ll get you a cipher key through Zoe. Use it to decrypt messages from us on how we want you to vote, and on points we might want you to bring up during a council meeting.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’ll give me my own discussion points? Am I at least allowed to add or detract from them so I can best represent my department, or am I just going to be your little vote-generating machine?”

  “The last one, definitely,” Lacey deadpanned. It took me a second, but I realized she was serious and rolled my eyes, amazed by the presumption that I would just blindly follow her lead. “Let me make this perfectly clear, Liana. I know you’re only in this for as long as it takes you to get out from under my thumb. I’m a reasonable woman, and I don’t want you for an enemy, so I’ll keep my word as soon as you deliver Ambrose’s killers to me. But I won’t be surprised when you run after that. And why wouldn’t you? You never wanted to do the Tourney in the first place.”

  She spoke with a sneer so intense I was certain that if it were weaponized, it would instantly vaporize anything with which it came into contact. Luckily for me, they were just words. But as one of my instructors used to say, “them’s fightin’ words”, and a wash of anger erupted at the tail end of them.

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “I stepped in after Ambrose died, knowing what was at stake and in the balance if I didn’t.”

  “You stepped in to cut a deal for yourself to keep me from turning you in,” she replied. “Don’t pretend it was for some noble cause.”

  “Screw you, Lacey,” I shot back, my temper exploding. “You have no idea how hard this was to do, knowing that losing the Tourney meant losing thousands of people when that other group finally does what it plans to do! I lost my mother getting involved in your little legacy war, so you could accomplish your goals!”

  No, what I lost was a chance to have a good relationship with her, I reminded myself firmly. I needed to remember what was behind this fiery response, and pull it back.

  “For which I am truly sorry,” she said, sighing. “I knew they were capable of some depraved things, but this one went above and beyond.”

  Her apology and admission helped curb some of the anger I hadn’t managed to push back, but only a bit. It was still there, tightly capped but ready to explode. “Yeah, well, once I find the bastard behind all of this, I plan to rip him limb from limb.”

  “You’ll get him if there’s anything left to have after I’m through with him,” Lacey replied haughtily. “You promised me Ambrose’s killers, and that means all of them.”

  And with that, the anger was back in full force. How dare she try to hog all of them for herself? I had just as much right as she did to exact revenge, and if she tried to take it from me, there’d be hell to pay.

  Once again, I considered arguing with her, but put it aside, knowing that if I did, it would only invite her to mistrust me. “Fine,” I spat from between clenched teeth. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes,” she replied primly, looking away for a second. “There’s a council meeting tomorrow. Cornelius has the agenda for you to peruse, but I wanted to tell you that the expulsion chamber law is up for a vote. It—”

  “It is?” I asked, suddenly very interested. Th
e expulsion chambers were disgusting, and the fact that we used them to murder ones—legally—was even worse. It spoke to a dark part of our humanity that we should turn our backs on. Except nobody had. I couldn’t wait to change that law.

  “Scipio initiated the process to repeal it right after your trial, but without a full council, it has been waiting on the docket for review and voting,” she replied, and I realized she was trying to answer my vague question.

  I hadn’t realized that, but it made sense; you couldn’t make important decisions like that without having each department represented. “Have they at least suspended the expulsions until after the vote is completed?” I asked, knowing that the answer wouldn’t be the one I wanted.

  “Of course not,” Lacey said with a shake of her head.

  “Then it’s a good thing we’re voting on it tomorrow,” I replied. “’Cause that law has got to go.”

  “Yes, well, Strum and I are still coming up with suggestions for what to do with the ones after they are caught, so—”

  “Oh, interesting,” I said, interrupting again as I grew even more excited. “I bet I could whip up quite a few ideas between now and then.”

  “Yes, but it’s not that simple. You should know the process will take some time once it starts.”

  “So what? I’ll give orders to stop using the expulsion chambers in the meantime. We’ll convert the chambers into cells and get some beds and food down there for those people while we wait.”

  Lacey shook her head and sighed. “Look, I’m late for an appointment, and I am not in the mood to fight with you. I’ll explain to you why that’s a bad idea later, but for now, just hold off on doing anything rash, okay?”

  Oh man, I could tell this was going to get old real fast. Lacey was already treating me like I was a child about to mess everything up, and if that went on for much longer, we’d fight, and it wouldn’t be pretty. I was barely keeping it together as it was.

  “All right,” I said guardedly. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “For the council meeting?” Had she forgotten already? If so, I could understand; grief had a funny way of making you absentminded.

  She stared at me for a second and then smiled. “Right. That. Have a good afternoon, Liana.”

  “You too,” I mumbled, caught off guard by the weird shifts and ambiguous nature of her response. There was something going on there—something she wasn’t telling me—but I imagined I would find out soon enough, during the meeting.

  The screen went dark seconds later, and I rocked back on my heels. All in all, I wouldn’t say the conversation went spectacularly well, but at least I knew what she expected of me. I didn’t like it, but I could play along for a while until I got a handle on things. And in the meantime, I could sit down and talk with my friends to establish some sort of game plan.

  Just as soon as I figured out what we were going to do next.

  7

  I was busy scribbling things down on my pad when Cornelius suddenly said, “Zoe Elphesian and her guests are in the elevator requesting access. Should I let them in?”

  I paused mid-stroke and looked up. “Yes. Show them back here. And give them a tour while you’re at it.”

  “It is my honor to serve.”

  I leaned back in my chair and looked at my indicator, swiping across the glowing ten of my rank and going to the time. It’d been just a few minutes since Lacey and I had finished talking, and I had attempted to figure out what we should do next, but it was hard when there were three different goals: getting out of the Tower, restoring Scipio, and finding the people responsible for what had happened.

  Escaping the Tower had always been the original plan, but without a steadily flowing supply of Paragon, we were powerless to recruit any more people toward accomplishing it. We were barely able to keep up with the people Roark had already recruited, and that was after we made the doses weaker. What we had wouldn’t last, and without the people we had recruited, we would be unable to build an escape vehicle large and safe enough to pass through the radioactive wasteland that surrounded the Tower. They were people I had never even met, and yet they were an integral part of this mission. What was more, we needed further recruits. Which meant making more Paragon. Which meant we needed to go after Jasper, so he could give us the formula.

  Jasper could also help with fixing Scipio, another one of our goals, so going after him was really doubly important. Getting him, however, wasn’t going to be easy. Sadie Monroe, who currently had him, lived in an apartment similar to my own, and entering it wouldn’t be a simple task. We’d have to figure out a way to get around her computer assistant so our passage wouldn’t be recorded—and we wouldn’t be killed before getting through the door. We’d also have to coordinate some sort of distraction to make sure she was out of there at the time, so we didn’t risk running into her.

  Finding Ambrose and my mother’s killers was important, too, though, because of Lacey, and because that was what I wanted to do the most. However, I was self-aware enough to realize that it was also dangerous for me on a personal level. I was too emotionally compromised—and too hungry for vengeance—to trust myself. If I found even one of the bastards who’d had anything to do with the sentinel…

  I exhaled and straightened as I heard Cornelius’s voice drawing closer through the speakers he had set up after I finished designing the rooms, alerting me that the tour was nearing completion. Standing up, I took a look around my new war room, and then decided that I shouldn’t be on the raised dais when they came in. It’d make me look imperious and arrogant.

  I went down the stairs I had created, feeling slightly anxious. I hadn’t exactly been at my best over the last few days, and I knew my friends were worried about me. They were the closest thing I had to family now, next to my brother of course, but I hadn’t been able to let them in. I hadn’t wanted to talk about my mom because I didn’t know what to say.

  Now that I did, I still wasn’t ready, it seemed.

  But luckily, I didn’t have to yet, either—I had something we all could focus on. Which meant, I hoped, that we could get back on even footing again.

  Cornelius’s voice was still droning on about the bedrooms, so I just about leapt out of my skin when he abruptly announced, “You have an incoming net transmission from one Alexander Castell. Shall I connect him?”

  I took a moment to calm my beating heart and then frowned. I had forgotten to net Alex after Astrid left, but then again, I really hadn’t wanted to. He didn’t need to be involved in this, not with his position in IT being so precarious. Still, I couldn’t exactly ignore him. He was my brother.

  “Yes, please,” I said to him. “Directly to my net.”

  “Of course.”

  A second later, a fine-tuned buzz began to erupt from the filament strands draped over my cerebral cortex, setting my teeth on edge.

  Liana, I am still in the Citadel. Where are you? My brother’s voice was hot and angry in my ear canal, causing me to wince slightly.

  “Alex, I’m in my new quarters getting things set up.” Okay, not a total lie, but not the complete truth, either. As good as I was at lying, I really didn’t like doing it to the people I cared about, but the less Alex knew, the better. I didn’t want his temper getting the best of him—and besides, it wasn’t like I had much to tell him. “It turns out my first council meeting is tomorrow, and I need to prepare. I’m going after the expulsion chambers. I’ll be able to put them out of commission.”

  To hell with that, Liana. What about Mom? The investigation, tracking down her killers!

  I bit my lip and sighed. I knew my brother well enough to know that when his family was threatened, he became the most protective. But his questions were dangerous and liable to draw even more attention to him. Hell, the legacies could be watching him right now and listening in, trying to see how much he knew. I needed to be careful about how I handled him and what I revealed.

  “Alex, I don’t have
access to those files right now,” I told him. “I know you expect me to jump in feet first, but I have a really big job now, and I need a little time to get a handle on it.”

  That’s bull. I saw Zoe and the others leave the wake together, and I know they’re going to meet you right now. I know it’s going to come up. I want to be in on this meeting. I can help you.

  I pursed my lips. Alex could help us to a certain extent, given that he was in the IT Department and could figure out where Sadie’s quarters were, if he didn’t know already. But Sadie was also watching him, and the slightest misstep on his part could get him caught up in charges of terrorism and treason—charges that came with a death sentence. I couldn’t risk him getting caught doing anything, and I couldn’t risk telling him anything that might lead to rash action on his part.

  Still, I did need to get him to ease off a little, and for that to happen, I had to approach this reasonably.

  “Yes, the others and I are going to have a meeting. And yes, we will be talking about Mom’s death, but only so that I can tell them to let it go for the time being. The council is watching everything closely right now, and if anyone starts digging, they’ll be all over it, wondering why. I promise you that as soon as it’s safe, we will look into it together, but for now, I just need you to keep your head down and watch your back, comprende?”

  “Comprende” was our word, the last connection with our heritage from before the End. I was hoping that using it would make Alex see the wisdom in my words—lies that they were—and back off.

  I don’t believe you. Let me come to the meeting. She was my mother, too!