Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Read More by Bella Forrest
The Girl Who Dared to Think 3: The Girl Who Dared to Descend
Bella Forrest
Copyright © 2017 by Bella Forrest
Nightlight Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Read More by Bella Forrest
1
Before the Tower, history was riddled with stories about humanity defying the status quo. Regimes would come and go, nations would be united and then divided, treaties would be brokered and broken… The list went on and on, each generation inventing new ways to seize power, fight power, restructure power. The goal was always the same: change what you didn’t like into something you did.
Before the End and the Tower, humanity fought against tyranny, battled their oppressors, and their tales and deeds became noteworthy enough to survive despite the history we lost—kept alive by people who didn’t seem to want to fight anything anymore.
But I sure as hell did.
I swung helplessly between several sets of hands, unable to tell if there were only two people carrying me, or four, thanks to the black cloth bag covering my face and neck. The sound of heavy boots on the metal floor of the halls I was being unceremoniously slung through told me there were too many to fight.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to.
I had been in the middle of trying to wrap my head around the fact that my boyfriend was now being inhabited by the AI predecessor to Scipio—the master AI that controlled most of the day-to-day life of the Tower. My version of the AI—not that I could claim ownership in any way—was one I had discovered in a sealed office after narrowly avoiding death (or worse) at the hands of Devon Alexander, Champion of the Knights. Who had just been killed by Leo (my AI). Who was currently living inside of Grey’s (my boyfriend’s) body.
It had been a busy day. Days. Weeks? Scipio kill me, had this mess been going on for months?
It was hard to even remember at this point, so much had happened. And was still happening.
I shifted and wriggled. My knees, hips, and shoulders were all beginning to feel the strain of being dangled between people like this.
“Be still,” a male voice said.
“Then let me down to walk,” I grunted, continuing to struggle. “C’mon, Lacey, this is ridiculous. And it’s starting to hurt.”
I didn’t use her honorific, although I should have: she was the head of the Mechanics Department, which meant I should refer to her as Engineer Green. And I knew she was there—only a few seconds had passed since I heard her voice telling me to calm down. Or at least I thought it had only been a few seconds. To be honest, my head was still reeling from the fight that I’d just been a part of back in the Medica.
Devon had almost killed me. I shuddered, recalling the violent and angry look in his dual-colored eyes, and tried to steel my stomach against the creeping anxiety. My neck ached, and I knew I was going to have bruises there, imprints of his fingers that would remind me of how close I had come to death. Even after they faded, I knew the memory would continue to haunt me for a long time.
Scipio help me, I wanted nothing more than to curl up in Grey’s arms and cry on his shoulder. He’d listen—he was good at that. I craved the warm feel of him against me.
But even that thought broke my heart. Devon had shorted out Grey’s net in the fight, using his baton to fry the strands of silicon fibers that stretched over Grey’s cerebral cortex. I’d seen the brain scan afterward—the black, cracked tissue that should have been a bright, shiny pink. It had looked like cracks radiating around the outside of a bowl. Cracks wide and cavernous enough that it seemed like it would never be reassembled.
Leo said that he could repair the damage, using the special net that Lionel Scipio—his creator, and founder of the Tower itself—had designed. He’d downloaded himself into Grey’s net to help heal the damage to Grey’s brain and recover his mind. He’d done it to save Grey, and I appreciated the gesture, especially since he’d potentially sentenced himself to death in the process—because if we couldn’t find a place to put him once he was done healing Grey, he would die.
But that didn’t mean I didn’t wish that Grey were with me right now, instead of Leo wearing Grey’s body.
“Lacey’s gone,” the voice said, and I blinked away the tears that had started to form. I had gotten caught up in my sadness and fear—and had forgotten that I was still in the middle of being kidnapped. There was a keen sense of disappointment, followed by irritation, both caused by the same thought: Lacey being gone did not help get any of my questions answered. Nor did it tell me where they were taking me—or what their plans were.
And why was she gone? What was she doing that necessitated her attention while her people were moving a known fugitive and murderer across the Tower?
“Just let me stand up and walk,” I replied, recalling the thread of conversation. “And seriously, if this is all meant to help us, can we lose these black bags? We’re enemies of the Tower. We’re certainly not in a position to reveal your identities and have it be believable.”
There were a few chuckles at my statement, and I smiled in response. If I could get these guys to laugh, then that meant they had a sense of humor. People with a sense of humor were good people, but rare in the Tower. The ones I knew from experience would generally see reason. I just hoped my hypothesis proved to be correct.
“Well, no. The bag is there to keep our identities from you entirely,” the voice replied, still thick with wry humor. “If we have to follow you in the future, it’s better you don’t know our faces.”
“I know your voice, now,” I replied, bristling with impotent frustration at the fact that I was being forced to have this conversation while dangling between them. “Surely that won’t help.”
I was acting more confident than I felt. The fact that he was admitting to following us, or that he might need to in the future, made me afraid. I had been certain no one had followed us back to Sanctum after I had first met with Lacey and Praetor Strum, the head of Water Treatment. We’d been so cautious! But then, how had they found us? How had they known where we were—and where we were going to be?
And why would they need to follow me in the future?
I thought of Eric. They knew his face, because he’d gone with me to that first meeting. Had they followed him, too—and when he’d been with Zoe? What about Quess and Maddox—had they even made it out of the Medica in one piece? Leo had said as much, but now… how could I be certain, with how quickly they had found me?
There were too many unknowns, and my active imagination didn’t help. My mind began to reel at all the possibilities, each one worse than the last. I was going to freak out before we ever got to where we were going—and that would make me useless.
I needed to focus and try to stay in the moment.
“Well, the next time I’m set to tail you, I’ll do my best to refrain from speaking.” The line was delivered dryly, and achieved more chuckles from the people around us. I fumed.
“Seriously, keep the bag on, but let me walk,” I said. “This is ridiculous, and I—”
“Shut up,” the voice ordered in a brusque whisper that was low and thick with urgency. “We’re nearing a public area, and we need to keep you hidden. The entire Tower has heard about what you’ve done: a second raid on the Medica, killing the Champion of the Knights. You need to remain quiet if we’re going to help you through this without getting caught. We’re almost there, and we have a ride for you. Lift her up, lads.”
I felt myself rise, thanks to the increased pressure of their hands, and then a surge of vertigo hit me as they dropped me. I flailed, certain they were throwing me right into the plunge, but the fall was short, the landing soft. I had a second to sit up and start to feel around before my hands were roughly seized and yanked behind my back.
“Seriously?!” I demanded, struggling against the hands holding me firmly in place.
“The bag remains, and if you keep talking, I’ll undo it enough to gag you. Now stop fighting us, and submit.”
I sucked in a deep breath, trying to put a cap on my temper, and relented somewhat, although it stung my pride to do so. Still, it was better than enduring the humiliation of a gag, so I bit my tongue and waited. I could be compliant for now, but if they tried one thing…
They bound me quickly and efficiently—the knot not too tight, merely tight enough and high enough to elude my fingers no matter how much I twisted and turned them. I still had circulation, which told me that this was not their first abduction.
I was pushed onto my side, and then something landed on me with an “oof.” I froze as what felt like an arm and a leg shifted on top of me, sliding around and groping, and then wriggled as the hand grew too close to a private area.
“Grey?” I asked, my voice a harsh whisper.
There was a pause. “I’m not sure if I should respond to that.” I breathed a sigh of relief at the sound of Grey’s voice, but then remembered that it was Leo who was answering, and I could hear the question in his hushed words.
“Yes,” I said, pitching my voice low so we couldn’t be heard. “You absolutely should—if we start going around calling you another name…”
I paused. Now that I thought about it, I supposed it didn’t really matter. No one would have any idea that Leo was inside Grey—they’d have no reason to suspect anything, other than someone who preferred a nickname. A damned odd one, certainly, but nothing worth being alarmist over.
But then I thought of Devon, and the other two legacies who had been with him in the room before we had attacked them. I wasn’t sure what had happened to them after our fight—I was certain we hadn’t killed them. What if one of them had been conscious while Leo was downloading into Grey? What if they had heard something about Leo?
Devon himself had asked about Leo, before Leo killed him. He had heard me talking to him in the Medica. What had he asked? Something about it being a sentient, or another dummy replicate program? What did that even mean?
And if he had heard something, did that mean the other two had? I wasn’t sure, but now suddenly I was completely coming around to the idea of making sure we called him by Grey’s name.
“Liana?” his voice asked, and I realized that I had trailed off mid-sentence and fallen silent.
“I’m still here,” I replied. “I was just thinking about those other two men who were in the room with us. They might’ve heard me use your name. We definitely have to be careful.”
“I agree. So, um. Do you know what’s happening to us?”
I opened my mouth to reply when suddenly things began to fall down onto us. I tensed at the first one—a heavy-feeling object that draped over my hip and legs. Then another fell, and another, until I was covered in them. When something fell on my hands, I immediately began to touch whatever it was, eager for some sense of what was happening to me.
It was microthread, with a texture that matched only one thing: a Tower-issued uniform. It was hard to tell which departments the uniforms belonged to—only the color and design would denote that. Then a smell, sour and pungent, invaded my nose. My hands felt further around as I stretched my legs out, touching the rough woven and plastic walls for any sort of opening. And then it hit me: we were in a laundry bin.
“Liana, what’s happening?” Leo asked, a thread of fear and anger in his voice.
“It’s okay,” I whispered soothingly. “I know the people who grabbed us. They’re using a laundry bin to move us and keep us hidden.”
I was suddenly sad that Zoe, my best friend, wasn’t there. She was missing one of her favorite tropes in any fiction: laundry bins being used to smuggle the heroes to safety.
Of course, I didn’t want Zoe anywhere near this. It was bad enough that Grey was—I hadn’t told him or anyone else about the meeting I’d had with our abductors. We’d been so preoccupied with our attempt to save Maddox that I hadn’t wanted to distract from it. That, and Lacey and Strum had made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want any of my friends to know. Now I realized it was a mistake. I had kept them blind, and even if they were still free, they wouldn’t even begin to know where to look for us or how to find us.
Even if they had been grabbed, I still should have told them. So, at the very least, they could have some idea of what was happening to them. I prayed Lacey and Strum had ignored them. They wanted their identities secret, didn’t they? They wouldn’t touch my friends, not unless they were willing to jeopardize their identities.
I tried to take solace in that. Tried to believe that Zoe and Eric had made it back to Sanctum after having broken Maddox’s leg to get her sent to the Medica—where we could save her. That they were hidden, safe behind the paint Quess had created, with Tian, and hopefully Maddox and Quess as well.
And that they were trying to come up with some way of tracking us down and rescuing us. I hoped we didn’t need to be rescued, but it would be nice to have a backup plan nonetheless.
We started to move, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until the sound of the wheels on the corrugated floor became overwhelmingly loud, even through the layers of soiled uniforms over both of us. The hard surface beneath us began to rattle and shake, and my shoulder and hip began to ache where they rested against it, absorbing every impact.
“Where are they taking us?” Grey… Leo asked, pitching his voice high enough to be heard over the clatter and clank of the bin.
I shook my head on impulse, and then remembered he couldn’t see me. “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. Somewhere safe, I hoped, but I couldn’t be certain. In Lacey’s eyes, I had completed the task she had set before me. Now we were going to find out if she was going to honor it, or get rid of any witnesses to her crime.
“Why did they grab us?”
/>
I sighed. He was in this with me. He deserved an explanation. “The people who grabbed us contacted me the other day with a job—to kill Devon Alexander. I hadn’t told anyone about it, because they had given me a week to decide, but they said they would take his death as an acceptance of their deal as well.”
Leo was silent for a long second, and I wriggled around on the floor, trying to shift some of my weight off my hip and shoulder and onto my back.
“So when I killed him…”
“You apparently set off whatever contingency plans they had to find us and grab us. Which… I’m still wondering how they could’ve done, by the way.”
“It is a mystery,” he said a handful of seconds later. “Do you trust them?”
I hesitated, debating between telling him the truth or not, and then opted for honesty. We’d come this far already. “I’m not sure.”
“Shh,” the voice from above said urgently, and the two of us grew very quiet, the conversation dying under the prospect of danger.
The cart rattled along, and soon I could hear the sound of voices carrying past me, too difficult to discern until someone drew close. Whenever I could hear a voice clearly, I stopped breathing, my heart pounding hard against my ribs as my mind conjured images of a Knight marching up and demanding to inspect the bin.
All they would have to do was slide a few uniforms aside, and bam—Tower enemy number one, and the girl who they assumed had just killed their leader. I wondered if they’d even let me make it to a trial, or if they would beat me to death in the halls. After thinking about it, I decided both options sucked.
If they came, I’d fight them, and hopefully Lacey’s men would back me up.