The Girl Who Dared to Think

  He gave me a pointed look, and I kept my face neutral, revealing nothing—though my heart was beginning to pound again. It was stupid, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit pleased that he thought me so capable.

  Zoe rolled her eyes and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hi,” she said. “I’m the one who hacked the elevator. How did you know we had done that?”

  “Lucky guess. Also, I saw the pad in your satchel. It’s an IT design, right?”

  Zoe raised an eyebrow, clearly impressed, and nodded. “It is. And you’re right—I don’t want anyone to see me doing it. So… thanks for escorting us, and we really should get going.”

  “No arguments here. Shall we?” They both looked at me expectantly.

  I didn’t want to leave, but I also couldn’t argue that we had to get going before the residents of Cogstown started messing with us. Grey was apparently being kind and offering to walk us out, which I hoped was his way of making up for being a jerk earlier. I remembered the kiss from earlier and felt myself turning pink as I let him take the lead, climbing down after him, the air full of thick steam and the smell of shaved metal.

  We reached the elevator without incident, which gave me time to think. Grey’s appearance meant another chance, another opportunity to try to get the truth. I just had to find the appropriate moment, and an idea was already spinning in my head. Grey went to the security box and slipped a little metallic chip into the top. It turned blue, and a platform slid out expectantly.

  Zoe stepped forward onto the platform and looked back at me.

  “You coming?”

  I looked between her and Grey, then shook my head. “I need to talk to him for a minute. Go on ahead.”

  She frowned, but didn’t argue. Instead she looked over at Grey and speared him with a lethal look. “I’d better see her soon,” she informed him, and he flashed her a charming smile.

  “Hey, she wants to stay to talk to me,” he announced, but she didn’t back down.

  “Yes, and you were the one who stole a kiss using underhanded trickery,” she snapped back, and, to his credit, Grey paled slightly. “So I reiterate: I’d better see her soon. I know great places to deposit bodies so that they’re never found. I’m just saying.”

  “Zo, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

  Her face softened as she looked at me. “All right, but I expect details. And I want to know more about whatever it is that’s going on with Roark.”

  “If I find anything else out, I’ll tell you,” I promised, and she nodded before giving me a hug. She let go at the last possible moment, and I watched her begin to rise.

  “You know that if you do find anything out, you can’t tell her, right?” Grey asked casually, and I gave him a sharp look.

  “Why not?”

  He looked over at me and then shrugged. “Not important. You wanted to talk?”

  There was no dismissing what Grey had said, and my mind had already pounced at the opening. He was here, he wanted to make sure I understood that I couldn’t tell Zoe anything… he was going to tell me. I knew it.

  He leaned a hip against the elevator console and crossed his arms, looking at me expectantly. I wished he weren’t so handsome when he did that—so free and so casual, as if things in this Tower weren’t messed up and everything was fine. I guessed having a nine on your wrist meant a certain peace of mind. I wanted that. Desperately.

  “You have something that could help me,” I said.

  He looked away. “Roark said—”

  “If I wanted to talk to Roark, I’d have stayed and done that,” I said.

  He looked back at me, and some of the haughtiness fell away. “I’m sorry,” he said, “about earlier. You were just pushing me around, and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to hurt you. It was the first thing I thought of that might get you to back off. It worked… I just didn’t expect you to take me seriously.”

  I sighed, lashed myself up to a beam overhead, and perched on it, needing to sit down. Grey shot me a curious expression, and I tapped the spot next to me, an open invitation. He sucked in a deep breath and began climbing up one of the vertical beams supporting the one I was on, using the tips of his fingers and boots, and doing it with some ease. He walked out to me, confident, even though the beam was only a foot wide, and then paused, giving me a questioning look.

  “Don’t make a girl feel awkward,” I said. “Sit.”

  He did so, looking at me uncertainly, as if I were a poison he wasn’t certain he had the antidote to, and we sat there together for a moment, watching the machines churn and hiss.

  “I’m not stupid,” I said after a long moment. “I know you took that medicine and it made you a nine. I also know that you aren’t acting like a nine—you’ve got far too much personality for it to be believable. Which means that either the meds he’s working on are a genuine cure for negative thoughts, or he’s created something to cheat the system.”

  Grey said nothing.

  “And I get that you can’t tell me why,” I added. “I live in the Citadel, and am training to be a full Knight. My parents are both Knight Commanders, both ranked ten. I’m the last person you’d want to admit anything to, and I get it. But… I’m not joking when I say I need this. I don’t want to be thrown out of my department, but I don’t want to be a zombie anymore, either. I promise, if you tell me, I won’t tell anyone.”

  He looked at me. “If I am a nine,” he said carefully, “then you just asked an upstanding citizen for a way to undermine Scipio. Aren’t you afraid of the consequences of that?”

  I let my head fall into my hands. My fingers felt cold against my forehead, every strand of hair like a nerve ending as I tried to hold my anxiety inside my body and stop it from bursting out. Saying it felt wrong—like I was committing sacrilege. It took every ounce of courage I had to answer his questions.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still want to do it,” I admitted. “Because I can’t keep being the version of me that they want. I won’t survive another day on this stuff, Grey. I can’t. The last week is a blank slate for me—I remember nothing, but everyone treats me as if I was walking on water, instead of drowning in it.” I sniffled and scrubbed my cheeks, trying to keep back the tears that were threatening to spill over. “If I have to cheat to get my number and keep my sanity, then it’s worth the risk.”

  He looked at me for a long time while I sniffled and snuffled, still fighting back an overwhelming sense of despair. Finally, he sighed heavily and, from out of nowhere, produced a clean handkerchief.

  “My parents were eights,” he said. “I was a seven.”

  I dabbed my eyes with his handkerchief and looked at him, baffled by his sudden change of topic. “But what does that have to do with—”

  “Shut up a minute,” he growled, and I stiffened reflexively, but relaxed when I realized he wasn’t angry or irritated. Whatever he had to say was painful. “My parents, they were eights, but they wanted to be more. They wanted me to be more, and when I wasn’t… well. They started piling on responsibilities. Duties. They forced me to keep a ‘positive thoughts’ journal, and to list three things every day about the Tower that made my life better. You know what happened?”

  “Your number went down,” I replied. The story was almost too familiar. In fact, it was similar to mine: my parents had demanded more and more of me after Alex left, but my ranking only ever went down. It was exceptionally demotivating and incredibly depressing. I guessed Scipio never considered that some of us were far too sensitive for the ranking system. All I knew was that it was beginning to feel rigged.

  Silence.

  “Yeah,” he said eventually. “It went down. Way down. So far down that they dropped me.”

  He grimaced and shook his head. I knew most of that from his dossier, but I still hurt for him. He had been abandoned because they’d demanded more—and then shamed him when he couldn’t perform to their expectations. It was unjust, and it had ripped him away from the o
nly home he had ever known, and thrown him into the Tower all alone, to fend for himself. He was lucky another department had picked him up. If they hadn’t, he would’ve been rounded up with the other underage kids, who, when they turned eighteen, were shuffled down into the dungeons of the Citadel if they couldn’t get into a department of their own, slated for restructuring.

  My parents had been oppressive, controlling, downright mean at times, but they had never even mentioned dropping me. It had been unconscionable for them. Maybe Sybil’s death had changed them in that regard. I couldn’t really be sure. It was a marked improvement over wanting to have me killed at birth, so…

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I could think to say in that moment.

  “Roark took me in,” he said with a shrug. “And things have been fine. Good, even. I feel like I have a purpose here, and my number is high enough now that nobody even bats an eye at me. It’s funny—I don’t do anything different, but nobody cares. All anyone ever cares about is the number.”

  That, too, rang true. I found myself leaning in a bit, drinking in his words. After hearing about positivity for so long, and moving forward with your chin held high, no matter how much you were hurting, it was refreshing to see someone so down to earth. So real.

  He looked at me, and I felt my heart skip a beat. I snapped my eyes away.

  Don’t be stupid, I thought. You don’t even know him.

  “Roark and I,” he said, seeming not to notice my embarrassment, “we want to help people, like he helped me. But he has a grudge against Knights, and honestly it’s hard to argue the point with him.”

  I scowled. “Why? What did we do?”

  Grey’s voice was soft as sunlight, and cold as wind. “The Knights killed his wife,” he said simply.

  I sat there, my head already shaking in outright denial of his words. Knights didn’t kill. We just didn’t. We captured, guarded, and protected. To kill a person was to break one of Scipio’s cardinal rules. It was to instantly reduce yourself to a one, and be tagged for arrest and exile.

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  “Tell that to Roark.”

  “I will. Right after I call him a liar.”

  “Wait—are you mad?” he asked, leaning back onto the palms of his hands and eyeing me. “Why are you mad?”

  “Because that was a lie,” I said, still upset. “The Knights don’t kill. If he says they killed his wife, then he is a liar.”

  “Whoa! Roark might be a bit touchy, but he’s not a liar. Besides, if they were killing people, do you think they’d let a Squire know that?”

  “My parents are Knight Commanders,” I said. “They could never have killed anyone. They couldn’t.” Except for me, that was.

  “You also said they were tens,” he fired back. “You think they’d clue you in to something that’s probably a secret?”

  I glared at him, my jaw clenched so tight that it ached. “I want to go. I want to go right now.”

  I began pulling my lash out, intent on swinging out of Cogstown if I had to, but he reached out and laid a hand on my wrist. “Wait.”

  Looking over at him, still seething that someone was going around accusing Knights of murder, I was surprised to see a contrite expression on his face.

  “I’m sorry. This is clearly a sensitive topic for you, and I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  I pursed my lips at him, considering him for a long moment, and then sighed. “Why did you come after Zoe and me? Was it really just to walk us out?”

  He sighed too and pulled something out of his pocket, cradling it between his hands. It rattled, and I realized he was holding a bottle. Our gazes met, and there was a stillness between us, so intense that I was afraid to breathe—or maybe the air was too thick.

  “These are for you,” he said hoarsely, offering them to me. I hesitantly held out my own hand, and he dropped a bottle into it. Pills: small, white, and unmarked.

  “Take these,” he said. “You might find them a more palatable alternative to the Medica drugs.”

  I looked between the bottle and him, something warm curling up in my throat.

  “But Roark said he—”

  “Roark’s not here,” he said, rising to his feet. “And one benefit of being dropped is you develop sticky fingers.” He held his fingers up and wagged them back and forth, then stepped out into the air. I reached for him, but somehow he twisted and caught the edge of the beam with his fingertips before dropping the remaining three feet to the ground below. He moved over to the elevator and inserted his chip, and I used my lash to lower myself gently to the floor, the pills clenched between numb fingers.

  “This is you,” he said, guiding me onto the waiting platform. “See you later, Squire Castell.” He gave me a sweet smile as the elevator began to rise. “Oh, and only one a day!”

  “Goodbye,” I said, still stunned by the change of events. I looked down at the bottle in my hands and felt the weight on my shoulders lighten significantly. “And thank you!” I shouted as an afterthought.

  Belatedly, I wondered if he had, by filching these pills, gotten himself into trouble with Roark… but then decided that if he had, I would do something to help him out of it. Even if it meant going down and talking to Roark again—although I wasn’t sure I could do that and let his insidious rumors about the Knights slide. But I was willing to give it a try.

  Especially if it meant having access to more of this medication in the future.

  I looked at my wrist, and was unsurprised to see a four gleaming there. Only this time, I smiled at it. But it was more like a baring of teeth, really.

  11

  I stayed away from home for as long as possible, taking time to net Zoe just to tell her that I was okay—I didn’t want to say anything more yet. The walk back to my room was a silent affair. My number, which had since dropped even further to a three, drew stares, and people muttered as I passed. Strangely, I felt more at home this way. At least it was honest. At least it was me being judged.

  I stopped outside the door leading to my quarters, knowing my mother was waiting inside, and took a deep breath. Under no circumstances could I let her see the new number—not before I got a chance to try Grey’s medication. If she did, she’d haul me off to the Medica and Dr. Bordeaux, and they’d probably make me take the pills in front of them.

  Pressing my ear to the door, I waited until I was certain she wasn’t in a front room, and then slid the door open and closed. The only movement between the two actions was me stepping quickly through.

  “Liana?” I heard my mom’s voice call from her bedroom as I moved down the hall.

  “Hey, Mom!” I shouted as I made it to my door. “I’m not feeling well, and I’m going to go to bed early. See you tomorrow!”

  “Okay. Feel better, honey.”

  I slid my door closed and engaged the magnetic locks, exhaling slowly and closing my eyes, trying to press away the panic that had formed in the short distance between the door and my room. She’d bought it, and she didn’t know. I was safe… for now.

  I moved to my window and sat down on the sill to stare at the bottle of pills in my hand. I shook one out and pulled the other from my pocket, and compared the two. They looked identical, but without any markings it was hard to tell. It could be that they were some sort of poison or memory-loss pills, but I didn’t feel like Grey would do that to me.

  I pressed one to my tongue and swallowed it dry. Dropping the second one back into the bottle and screwing the top back on, I stared out the window, and idly wondered how long it would take.

  My view from my window was one of the better ones, in my opinion. It held the normal loops and swirls and lines of the Citadel, but through it, I could see Hadrian’s bridge—one of the bridges that ran from the Citadel to the shell. It was a calliope of colors, set in a mosaic. The artificial light was starting to go down, turning orange, and the white rails of the bridge glistened and gleamed, while bright blues, greens, and oranges blazed throu
gh the dark arches.

  A pair of Squires lashed past, playing some sort of game that appeared to have no rules. I leaned forward, watching how they handled their lashes and twisted their bodies, and was moderately impressed. They were fast and accurate, but could improvise. Those were critical skills for lashing.

  I shifted, following their progress, but eventually my eyes drifted down to my wrist, the urge too strong to resist.

  The pills from the Medica had evidently hit me instantly—I certainly couldn’t remember anything after taking the first set. I could barely remember getting fry-bread before swallowing them. I didn’t know what to expect with this pill, or how long it would hold, but I expected it to work almost instantaneously.

  But no—not these, apparently. Not according to the angry red three that still adorned my wrist.

  I sighed and got up, moving over to my bed and lying down on it. I kicked off my boots, letting them fall to the floor at the foot of my bed, and undid the front fasteners of my uniform before shrugging the coat off and tossing it to one side. The pants quickly followed, and I climbed under the blankets. I shifted back and forth, trying to get comfortable, and then looked up at the display. The entire ordeal had taken two minutes.

  I looked at my wrist. The three glared stubbornly back.

  I sighed. Again.

  Lowering my arm, I stared up at the dark ceiling and began to feel doubt. Maybe Grey had given me a placebo. Maybe I was immune to them. Maybe he’d tricked me. Maybe I needed to take another.

  Over and over my thoughts tumbled while I lay in bed, keeping my mind active even when I closed my eyes. I tried to doze—to make my mind go quiet enough to sleep—but it didn’t work. It couldn’t be stopped.

  Liana?

  I started in surprise, my heart skipping a beat and kicking the air out of my lungs for good measure. I had been so engrossed in my thoughts that I hadn’t even noticed the buzz starting at the back of my head. I looked down at the indicator on my wrist, and sure enough, Alex’s name was displayed on it.