The Girl Who Dared to Rise Read online

  12

  The final vestiges of the ubiquitous noise that had filled the cafeteria quickly died down as Astrid began to speak. I pressed my lips together as well, trying to focus on what she was saying.

  “Ambrose’s death is a tragedy,” Astrid announced to the room, a wireless microphone amplifying her voice. “Let us be clear about that. Enemies of the Citadel, and therefore of the Tower, stole into our home and ended the life of one of our own. There are no words that could possibly touch the pain we are feeling. But we are here.”

  She fixed her steely eyes on the crowd, and they shouted their approvals.

  “We are strong!” More affirmations shouted, louder this time. “We remember!” Louder, even stronger. I found myself wanting to shout as well, but some part of me held back, uncomfortable with it. We were here to remember Ambrose, not make ourselves feel better about being alive.

  Astrid paused and let the crowd noise ease down before she leaned forward slightly. “And we will not let Ambrose’s murder go unanswered,” she declared, and the crowd fell apart, screaming their approval. Someone started chanting, “Justice for Ambrose,” and within moments, it had spread like a virus, until all the crimson-clad figures were raising their fists in unison.

  My eyes widened at the rabid fanaticism they were displaying, and I sucked in a breath. I had come here to remember Ambrose, not incite a frenzy. Knights leaving here to go on patrol today would be frothing at the mouth, looking for any sign of Ambrose’s killer, and that was dangerous to the other citizens of the Tower. I gave Astrid a long look, wondering why she had felt the need to rile them up like that, but wasn’t able to find a shred of motivation beyond “that’s just how she feels about it”.

  “Knights of the Citadel,” Astrid said, raising her arms in a universal sign for “calm yourselves”. “Knights, please! I know we are angry, and justifiably so. But please, we are not only here for our anger, but to mourn a man who is burning at the heart of it all.” She paused long enough for the crowd to collect itself and settle back down, before continuing. “I’m saddened to say that I did not know Ambrose personally. However, I have brought together some people who did, and they would like to say a few words about our fallen brother. Lend them your hearts and ears, and learn from their stories of our brave compatriot. Please welcome Knight Commander John Deveraux.”

  She was following up her speech with Deveraux? I couldn’t help but smile; he was one of the most boring teachers in the Academy. Talk about going from a high to a low.

  Deveraux marched onto the stage and up to the podium, and began speaking almost immediately in a flat, monotonous voice. “I first met Knight Elite Ambrose Klein when he petitioned for me to be his academic mentor six years ago. He, like me, shared an interest in the near-calamitous events that have occurred in the past two hundred and fifty years of our history. His specialization was Requiem Day, and the economic windfall that occurred afterward. You see, he believed that the—”

  I tuned him out. It was automatic after enduring three long years of his academic lectures, but this time, there was an anger behind it. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting, but this was not it. What did Ambrose’s studies have to do with who he was as a person? How was this going to teach anyone about what he believed in, what he hoped for, what he dreamed of?

  “I cannot believe him,” Dylan whispered next to me, breaking through my angry thoughts, and I glanced over to see a dark, hot look on her face. She glanced at me and pursed her lips. “Can you believe this? What the hell is he talking about? Ambrose only took him as his academic advisor because he felt bad for the man. Nobody wanted him.”

  I smiled. Part of it was because of her story, and part of it was because I wasn’t alone. She felt the same way I did. “Yeah, I know. This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.”

  “Same.” She looked down at her pad, a grimace on her face. “Makes me a little self-conscious about my speech.”

  My smile grew as I tried to picture Dylan being self-conscious, and failed. The woman was too self-assured, even just standing there. If I was perfectly frank, it was a bit intimidating. We were chatting now, but I had to keep in mind that in a few days, we’d be competing against each other in the Tourney.

  But this was now. “It’ll be fine,” I assured her. “As long as you’re remembering Ambrose, I think it’ll be perfect.”

  A beatific and grateful smile crossed her face. “Thank you,” she said. She pressed her lips together, and her smile faded into a frown. “I asked him to be on my team, you know.”

  “You did?” That was news to me. And a bit disappointing. Dylan’s all-girl team had given me a little feminine thrill of pride when I first discovered it. Now that I knew she had originally wanted Ambrose on the team… Well, that was okay. She still got a girl group together. “Why didn’t he say yes?” I knew the answer, but I was curious to see what he had told her.

  She rolled her eyes. “He said that he wanted to be Champion, not see me win. Stupid jerk.”

  There was something about the way she muttered the last part that made me give her a considering look. It bore a note that suggested she had really cared about him. Had Ambrose and Dylan been… intimate?

  Dylan caught me looking and smiled, her eyes twinkling. “Nothing like that,” she assured me with a chuckle. “It sounds really lame, but Ambrose was just… kind of cool. He didn’t give me any crap about my height or my size. He was always straight with me. We weren’t close or anything, but I kind of wish we had been.”

  Ah. Regret. That I could understand. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged it off. “It’s not your problem, but thank you.” She sighed then, and ran a hand over her face. “I’ve got bigger problems, anyway.”

  “Oh?” Deveraux was still droning on, and showed no signs of stopping, and talking with Dylan helped pass the time.

  “One of the girls on my team turned out to be one of those infiltrators,” she said, her free hand curling into a fist. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice.”

  My eyes widened as surprise coursed through me. She’d had an infiltrator on her team? “Really? How did that happen?”

  She rolled her eyes again. “I trusted the recommendation of both of the other girls I recruited. I thought they had known her for a while. Turns out they had only met her a few days before, and just really liked her.”

  “What was she like?” I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.

  Dylan shrugged, her mouth twisting downward. “Really… normal. She seemed nice. Respectful. Eager. Cracked a few jokes here and there.” She shook her head. “Nothing stood out to me.”

  It was disappointing, but not unexpected. Those infiltrators, whoever they were, had come into the Citadel for the purpose of taking Ambrose out and eliminating the competition. As much as I wanted to catch them, I knew that any lead we came up with would only be met with a dead end—they were prepared, and had supporters helping them.

  “So your team’s going to be dissolved?” I asked, and Dylan nodded.

  “I seriously do not understand why they didn’t just let us pick from the next ten candidates with the next best scores from the qualifying round. There were ten people in there who deserve a chance to be in the Tourney, but weren’t because the infiltrators scored higher than them! In what sort of world is that fair? Not to mention, there is every chance I am going to get stuck on a team that is supporting someone else as Champion. It sucks.”

  I frowned. Dylan made an excellent point, and I felt bad for her. My team wasn’t being broken up, but then again, we hadn’t been infiltrated. The designers were likely worried that the infiltrators could’ve been working with someone on the inside, and in the interest of disrupting their plans, they were willing to sacrifice a genuine candidate’s rights to try to ensure safety. It wasn’t fair.

  I wished I could complain to Astrid or the test designers about the way teams were being broken up just because an infiltrator had managed to work their way in. It onl
y punished those teams who had been duped, which wasn’t right. And in a different world, maybe I would’ve protested. Everyone deserved a fair chance, after all. But it wasn’t a different world, and I couldn’t risk Scipio and the Tower’s fate—even if I thought Dylan would make a good Champion.

  “Whoop, I’m up!” Dylan exclaimed softly, breaking my train of thought. I blinked and realized she was already moving away from me, climbing onto the stage as Deveraux came down. There was a collective round of applause—the crowd seemingly grateful that she wasn’t Deveraux—and she quickly took her place at the podium, setting her pad down on it.

  There was a pause of a few seconds, and then Dylan began to speak.

  “I met Ambrose shortly after I joined the Academy. We had one class together: Combat Training, taught by Midge McCafferty, or as we used to call her, the Beast from Below.” The crowd and I chuckled together. McCafferty was a well-known tyrant who micromanaged her Knights’ training right down to their skivvies. Dylan chuckled as well, and then sighed. “Well, the rest of us did. Ambrose? He wouldn’t. He’d always refer to her as Instructor McCafferty, no matter how hard we tried to get him not to. And let me tell you, we tried. We begged, pleaded, cajoled, blackmailed… We were obsessed. We needed to hear him say it.

  “But Ambrose refused. He was never a jerk about it; he just refused to do it. So one day, he and I are on patrol, and I mean… I just had to know why. Why wouldn’t he call his C.O. this one little name? It would certainly be good for our morale if he simply joined the group.

  “So I asked him. And to this day, I will never forget what he told me. He said, ‘Dylan, it’s easy to complain. It’s easy to be dismissive or derisive. But I didn’t come here for easy. I came here to do the right thing. And it’s never right to call your instructors names. It’s petty.’”

  Dylan rolled her eyes dramatically then, and the audience laughed, captivated by the way she lowered her voice and exaggerated her words. Dylan laughed with them, but that smile slowly melted away into sadness, and a hush fell over the crowd.

  “I dismissed him that day, too, figuring he was just taking his job too seriously. But that’s who Ambrose was: a serious person. To him, being a Knight wasn’t a job. It was a calling. Both a duty and an honor that held a deep place of reverence in his heart. And, if I’m completely honest with myself, I think he would’ve made a great Champion.”

  Her voice roughened at the end, and she leaned away from the podium, as if taking a moment to compose herself. I, like the rest of the audience, was enraptured by her speech. I thought she had done a good job with it.

  She tilted back toward the microphone, and I straightened, preparing for her to introduce me.

  “Which is why we can’t do the easy thing. We can’t sit back and let those who killed him get away with it. Ambrose would’ve hunted down anyone who had hurt his brother or sister, and he would’ve seen that the justice they met came at the end of a very long drop from a plunge! He believed that a threat to one of us was a threat to the Tower, and vice versa, and I happen to agree. Because we have been threatened, brothers and sisters! And we have been hurt! I want your promises, right here and now, that we will make the ones who did this to us pay!”

  The crowd exploded into pandemonium, clapping and cheering wildly. I, however, felt my stomach shrink in on itself, and suddenly I felt very vulnerable and exposed, like I was surrounded by a pack of wild dogs ready to attack the first thing that moved. Dylan’s speech had ended up being another cry for war, and the crowd was eating it up.

  Scipio help me, that was terrifying. Dylan had only added fuel to the spark that Astrid had kindled, and once again, I thought of all the other citizens in the Tower, and wondered how they would suffer if the Knights were left unchecked. I had to do something to put a damper on this. Or else it was going to spin out of control.

  I needed to think, and hoped that Dylan’s speech would go on for a few more minutes.

  “Thank you for letting me share this small part of Ambrose with you,” Dylan declared into the microphone, and I sighed. There was never enough time. “Please join me in welcoming Liana Castell, Ambrose’s teammate from the Tourney!”

  The crowd complied with Dylan’s request by continuing to cheer, and I breathed in, squared my shoulders, and went up on stage. Dylan flashed me a dazzling smile and a thumbs-up, and I pasted on a polite smile of my own and pointed it in her general direction. I really hadn’t liked her eulogy, but at least she had given an anecdote about Ambrose, so I could manage to be congenial.

  But just barely.

  I moved up to the podium and made a show of putting my pad down, stalling for time. How could I make a room full of scared and angry people calm down? I had to be smart about whatever speech I made; if they thought for a second I didn’t want justice for Ambrose, they would turn on me in a heartbeat.

  And I needed their support.

  “Thank you, Dylan,” I said into the microphone, buying a few more seconds of dead air as I turned on my pad. The eulogy I had written earlier popped up, but now it seemed ineffective. I had to do better.

  For Ambrose, at the very least.

  “I met Ambrose shortly after what had to be the hardest time in my life,” I said into the microphone. I honestly had no idea where I was going with this, but I let my heart take control over my mouth, believing that I could find my way to the right combination of words. Words that would turn the crowd’s anger back to sorrow and grief. “It was hard being back, after everything. To everyone here, I was an enemy suddenly turned ally, and no one was really sure what to make of me.”

  An uncertain shift happened in the audience, and through some of the bright lights, I saw a lot of people looking around and away. So I decided to go for a laugh, to see if I could put them at ease. “I mean, c’mon… the girl who killed the Champion on the orders of Scipio? I barely know what to make of it, and I was there. I could certainly understand my fellow Knights’ nervousness.”

  I got a collective chuckle from most of the audience, and breathed a sigh of relief. I had clearly made them uncomfortable by talking about my own role before easing them into it, but the joke lessened that discomfort, which meant I held their attention again.

  “But Ambrose didn’t concern himself with that. In fact, he only had one question for me: was I satisfied with the investigation I had run on Devon?” I paused to let that sink in for a moment, letting them wonder whether I was implying that Ambrose hadn’t been satisfied with Scipio’s findings, before continuing. I was confident I had found my way forward; I just needed to refine the angle.

  “Ambrose wasn’t questioning Scipio’s decision. He wholeheartedly believed that the future of the Tower rested with keeping Scipio safe, and following the great machine’s advice. But he knew that Scipio’s decision was based on my investigation, and he wanted to make sure that I hadn’t screwed up.”

  That earned another chuckle from more than a few people, and I continued. “You see, Ambrose knew that people are flawed, and can make mistakes. He knew that we can act impetuously, or come to snap decisions before having all the evidence. And it was important to him to know that I hadn’t.

  “Ambrose believed in justice with every fiber of his being, and that earned my trust. That’s what made me want him to be the next Champion: his unwavering belief in the Knights’ ability to see that justice, true justice, was dispensed around the Tower. He believed it was our duty to put our personal feelings aside so we could make sure those who deserved it, truly deserved it, could be punished.

  “I know we’re all angry. I know we’re all hurt. I know we all want to hunt down the people who did this, the people who hurt Ambrose. And I understand that. I do. But… Ambrose was my friend, and I owe him more than that. I owe him an image of the Citadel that he could believe in. I want to be a Knight he would have been proud to know. But most of all, I want to honor his memory in the only way I know how: by letting Astrid and her people find his killers and bring them to justice. I ho
pe that you’ll join me in keeping this part of Ambrose alive.”

  13

  I stared across the sea of faces, my heart pounding in my chest. For a second, nothing happened, and I was convinced I had missed the mark. But then somebody started clapping, a slow, steady sound that more and more people began to join in on, until it was a cacophony of hands slapping together.

  Someone shouted, “Honorbound!” from the back of the room, and the next thing I knew, the crowd was chanting the deed name that had been bestowed upon me. I flushed, embarrassed, snatched up my pad, and aimed for the stairs. Astrid was on her way up, and gave me a curious smile as she moved past me, heading for the podium.

  I didn’t care. I just needed to get out. My feet found their own path down the steps, and I made for a side door that had been sealed to prevent entry. A Knight was standing guard in front of it, but made no move to stop me as I plowed through it.

  Once I was outside, I came to a stop in the middle of the hall and sucked in a deep breath, thinking about what I had just said. I hadn’t expected the response to be that thunderous, and on the one hand, I was grateful.

  But on the other hand… I had just fabricated an entire part of Ambrose’s personality, as a way to get the Knights to back off their feelings of needing revenge. That was a horrible thing for me to have done, and it left me with an acrid taste in my mouth and a large, pointy rock in my stomach.

  Ambrose deserved far better than he got, and during my one chance to share with everyone who he was, I had failed him and his memory.

  I let that wash over me for a moment, and then asked myself what I could’ve done differently. And the answer was… not a whole lot. Attitudes in the Citadel were about to boil over, and if telling a few white lies about Ambrose could keep it from happening, then that was what needed to be done.