The Girl Who Dared to Lead Read online

  I threaded my fingers through his and nodded. “All right,” I breathed, and I got to experience a moment of pleasure as his face lit up.

  It was quickly trampled by mortification at the collective “Awwwwwww” that erupted from behind me.

  Cringing, I realized Leo and I had come to a stop (probably ages ago), and out of habit, we had turned our backs to the wall that the Champion’s quarters sat behind to face the entrance of the elevator. I turned slowly to see Maddox, Quess, and Tian standing in the doorway watching us.

  “That was really sweet,” Tian sniffed, dabbing at the corner of one eye with one of the torn bits of fabric from her wispy, tattered skirt. She smiled tremulously at me. “I’m glad you’re letting Leo try with Jang-Mi,” she added nervously, rising up on her toes. “I think it’s very brave of you.”

  It was so hard not to roll my eyes at her. Not because I didn’t believe she was being genuine, but because I knew that she was, and it annoyed me. I still couldn’t help the anger I felt whenever anyone else was empathetic to Jang-Mi’s plight, but for Tian, I could resist it. Unfortunately for Leo, however, it meant I had to squeeze his hand tightly to do so. To his credit, he didn’t wince, but instead squeezed mine gently in return, reminding me that he was here—and that it was okay.

  “Thanks,” I managed. I looked at Maddox and Quess and then focused on Maddox. “Any word from Dylan?” As my Lieutenant, it was her job to liaise with the Commanders and central, and give me reports when they grew more relevant. Central command was undoubtedly tracking Dylan now and giving Maddox updates when Dylan couldn’t.

  “Still in pursuit,” she replied. “The people who attacked you split up, and most of them were lost, but she’s still on one. I gotta say, she’s pretty determined. She’s been going for ten minutes.”

  “So are they,” I replied. They were managing to keep out of her reach, and that wasn’t a good sign. The longer it went on, the higher the chance that the person she was after would get away. “She has backup, right?”

  Maddox nodded. “Yes, but these people aren’t showing up on the scanners. I think they might be undocs, but the alarms aren’t going off. They might be using neural blockers.”

  Neural blockers attached to a person’s net above the skin and basically kept the scanners from reading the credentials stored inside, while making them believe that they had. It kept the scanners from alerting Scipio to the fact that someone who didn’t belong there was in the area, while simultaneously keeping us from figuring out who they were. But if they were undocs, it wouldn’t matter, because there wouldn’t be any net data for us to scan in any case.

  And it would make tracking them really difficult.

  “Maddox is handling it,” Quess announced. “You two get in here so I can evaluate you. Dylan reported you were both injured, and Liana, your ear looks like a crime scene.”

  “Take care of Liana first,” Leo said, passing my hand over to Quess’s without any hesitation. “I want to get to work on the firewall so we can transfer Jang-Mi into the terminal.”

  Another stab of anger hit me, but I let it go and relented, letting Quess pull me out of the elevator. My knee was hurting too much to keep standing around, anyway.

  16

  I made Quess take me to the war room before I would let him check me out. Though I had agreed to let Leo put Jang-Mi into the terminal, I was still nervous that he wouldn’t be able to contain her and that something would go wrong, and I didn’t want to be too far away if it did. Luckily, Quess didn’t take too much convincing, and didn’t complain about having to act as my walking stick as we made our way down the hall.

  I sank into one of the chairs at the conference table as soon as we were close enough, sighing in relief as I did so. My knee was throbbing so hard I could feel it in my hip, and if I never had to stand on it again, it would be far too soon.

  Quess immediately pulled out a chair next to mine. “Leg here,” he said, patting the seat. “And get undressed. I’m going to run and get my kit. Do you need clothes or water?”

  I smacked my lips. I was thirsty—fighting had been sweaty work. “Water, please.”

  “No problem,” he replied with a smile. “I’ll be right back.”

  Gratitude coursed through me, and I smiled back at him. “Thanks, Quess.”

  “Thank me after I look at that knee,” he replied good-naturedly. “I’m going to have to touch it.”

  I laughed, remembering the last time he’d had to doctor me up, when I’d insisted on trying to keep him from touching my injuries. “Fair enough.”

  He left, but moments later Leo came in with Tian, whose hands were filled with Jang-Mi’s hard drive. I raised an eyebrow at them. “Already?” I asked, both surprised and alarmed. Yes, I had wanted to be here when they transferred her. But I had expected Leo to spend a little time working on the terminal first.

  “Not quite,” Leo said, offering me a sympathetic look as he came down the stairs. “Tian just wanted to show Jang-Mi where her new home was going to be.”

  I turned my attention to Tian and watched as she raced up the stairs of the dais, already talking to the box. “So, Liana likes to call this the ‘war room,’ but I think that’s a dumb name, so the first thing we’re going to do once you get in is to make it a library and a nap room combined. We’ll call it the nappary room, and replace everything in here with cushions and beds and shelves and so many books.”

  She continued talking to Jang-Mi, but I looked back at Leo, who had stopped just a few feet short of me. “Does she know Jang-Mi can’t hear her?” I asked quietly, keeping my voice low to prevent the words from reaching Tian’s ears.

  “I don’t think she cares,” Leo said with a crooked smile. “It’s nice that she thinks of Jang-Mi as a person.”

  Even though I knew he didn’t mean it, the comment hit hard and left me hurt and guilty. I’d called Jang-Mi a thing more than once now, and even though I knew she wasn’t a monster, I still considered her just that, emotionally. I couldn’t help it, and I wasn’t sure I could ever get past what she had taken from me. My shoulders dropped as helplessness followed that thought—because Leo would never forgive me if I backed out, so I couldn’t, even if my every instinct was telling me that she would kill us all.

  Leo must have noticed what I was going through because an instant later he was on one knee next to the chair, his hands engulfing one of mine between them. “I’m going to be right here the entire time,” he reassured me. “I won’t let Jang-Mi hurt anyone. I promise.”

  A part of me didn’t want to believe him, but I nodded, ignoring it. His gaze searched mine for a second more before he seemed satisfied that I wasn’t going to lose my temper, and reluctantly he let go of me. I watched as he walked around the table and headed up the stairs to join Tian, who was currently having a one-sided debate with Jang-Mi about what should be done with the screens once the nappary room was completed. He managed to extricate the hard drive from her hands before sitting down at the desk and beginning to work on the terminal.

  “You’re still dressed,” Quess said from behind me, and I swiveled around to blink at him in confusion before remembering that he’d wanted me to take my uniform off.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I got distracted.” I quickly began to unzip my uniform while Quess made his way over, his arms filled with supplies. He set a glass of water next to me as I slid my uniform over my shoulders, and I paused long enough to down it, thirstier than I had originally thought.

  I continued undressing while Quess set up his medical equipment, pausing only when he pulled out a canister of the pink bio-foam to seal up the cut in my ear, but needed help when I got to my knee. The joint was so swollen that my uniform refused to budge. It took no small amount of yanking and pulling to get my leg free, and eventually, when the pain got too bad, he gave up and cut the cloth away.

  I slumped back in the chair when it was done, exhausted, and slightly chilled in my thin undergarments, and Quess left to go get me another gla
ss of water before he started poking and prodding. I looked over to see Leo giving the terminal his entire focus, his fingers dancing over the keyboard.

  “How’s it going?” I asked casually, wanting to know what was happening.

  “I’ve located the controls over the defenses,” he said absentmindedly. “I’m in the process of creating a firewall around them so she can’t have access to them. I’ve already built one around Cornelius’s program as well, so she can’t hijack his connections to the Citadel’s servers. We should be ready in a few minutes.”

  A chill ran through me at the thought of Jang-Mi getting into the Citadel’s servers, and it was suddenly on the tip of my tongue to tell him to stop. But I managed to swallow it back—barely.

  “What’ll be ready in a few minutes?” Maddox asked, entering the room. “Jang-Mi?”

  I nodded, but didn’t say anything more about it. I wanted to know what had happened with Dylan. “Did Dylan catch the guy she was after?”

  Maddox’s mouth pressed into a thin line, and she shook her head, green eyes sparkling with annoyance and disappointment. “She lost him in Cogstown, and he somehow managed to slip past the checkpoints I had set up while you and Leo were on your way back.” I was impressed. Barely a few days as my Lieutenant, and she was on the ball and running things on my behalf with central command. I kept it to myself while she continued. “She’s coordinating with the Cog security force to make sure he’s not hiding in the department somewhere, but there are so many ways out of there, and we can’t cover them all.”

  I sighed and rubbed my forehead, disappointed that we hadn’t been able to catch any of them. They were gone, just like ghosts, and I had no idea what they wanted or why they were attacking me. They had to be Sadie’s people—she had to be a part of this—but I couldn’t go after her without evidence. I had to get the guys who’d attacked us and make them tell me who they were working for first. I wanted confirmation that she was the head of it all before I went after her with everything I had.

  And then there was Dylan. Had that man gotten away, or had she let him get away? Was she helping them? Had she let him escape because they were working together? Or, worse, had chasing after them just been a ploy to earn my trust? How could I trust her, knowing that the legacies had sent the sentinel into the Tourney to kill all the other candidates save the one meant to win… and she had been the one to get to the end first?

  I found myself hoping that it was all a coincidence, that Dylan’s win at the Tourney had come as a complete surprise to the legacies and that she wasn’t working with them. But I wasn’t certain. I wanted to give her a chance, but I didn’t quite know how. I needed more time to think, and more insight into who she really was.

  “How did Dylan sound when she reported in?” I asked, and Maddox cocked her head and then shook it.

  “Upset and angry that she didn’t catch him,” she replied. “She’s still running search parties, but I told her to come up here to debrief us if nothing turned up within an hour.”

  I nodded. A part of me wanted to question Maddox more about what had happened during the pursuit, to see how much Dylan had reported (and whether it was suspicious), but I figured it was better to see what Dylan said when she got here. I’d get a better measure of her honesty that way, and it would give me some more time to make up my mind about her role in all of this.

  “All right,” I said. “Then let’s table it until she reports in. We have more pressing issues, anyway.” Like how we could all be murdered by Jang-Mi before Dylan even got here, rendering the entire issue moot. “How’s it going, Leo?”

  “Just finishing,” he replied, his voice muffled. I shifted in the chair to see him pulling long cables out from under the desk, and then saw the hard drive still on the desk, with several cables already connected to it.

  I straightened with alarm, my eyes going wide. They couldn’t be plugging her in now, while I was still stuck in this chair with an injured knee. If she got online and went crazy, I’d be unable to escape her before she turned the defenses on us.

  “Quess!” I shouted, panic touching my voice. I needed to be able to move, which meant he needed to finish fixing my knee. Now.

  “I’m here!” he shouted back, his voice muffled by the walls of the hallway. He emerged a second later, glass in hand, his eyes wild and concerned. “What’s wrong?”

  “Get a patch on my knee, now,” I ordered, my fear adding a slight bark to my voice. He frowned, but hurried over.

  “Okay,” he said, putting the glass down on the table and grabbing a sheet of the gelatinous material. “I take it Leo’s almost ready?” he asked lightly.

  I nearly growled at him, not liking the teasing tone in his voice. What Leo was about to do was dangerous, and while I was certain he was taking every precaution, I could not shake the feeling that this was the worst idea in the history of ideas. Was I overreacting? Yes. Did I have good reason to? Hell yes.

  “Knock it off, Quess,” Leo snapped, and I looked up to see him glaring at the other man. “Liana has every right to be nervous and upset about this. So patch up her knee, and then help her up the stairs. I promised to hold her hand through the entire thing.”

  Quess paused in fitting the plastic sheet to my knee, and then flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely, his eyes lifting to meet mine. “I didn’t mean for it to come off like I was teasing you.”

  His apology was genuine, and it went a long way toward helping me control some of the panic. “It’s okay,” I said, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “I’m being oversensitive; I know I am. It’s… I’m trying to work on it.”

  “It’s understandable,” he replied sympathetically, returning to his work on my knee. “I know this can’t be easy for you.”

  I smiled, finally feeling a little validated, and relaxed slightly. I knew it was silly, but sometimes the simplest gift we could give each other was the acknowledgment of our feelings, and it felt good to know that my friends understood how difficult this was for me. It made me appreciate them all the more.

  “Liana, it’s going to be okay,” Tian crooned, patting the hard drive lightly. “Jang-Mi is my friend, and once she realizes that we aren’t going to hurt her or make her do things she doesn’t want to, she will help us. You’ll see.”

  I wished for Tian’s confidence, but couldn’t help but fear what would happen if she was wrong and Jang-Mi’s insanity was beyond Leo’s ability to control. I shifted my gaze over to him and saw him looking at me with warm brown eyes that were begging for my trust.

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” I told Tian softly. “I just want to make sure we’re as safe as possible, okay?”

  Her head bobbed as she smiled at me. “Okay.”

  “All done,” Quess announced, his fingers pressing down to seal the sheet in place. My leg already felt a hundred times better, and I was confident I could put weight on it. Still, I let Quess and Maddox help me out of my seat and up the stairs, as I couldn’t quite flex the joint the way I needed to for stairs with the patch in the way. Leo pulled the chair out for me when we reached the top, and I quickly sat down. I was putting a lot of weight on my other side to compensate for my injury, and it was more taxing than I had expected.

  I took a moment to collect myself, and then looked at everyone. “So what do we do?”

  Leo lifted a hand, and I noticed he was holding a computer cable. “We plug it in. She’ll download in a matter of minutes, but we can start interacting with her sooner. I’ll monitor the screen for how her program is reacting to the new environment.”

  “And how do we cut it off if she decides to kill us?” I asked.

  Leo frowned and looked at the hard drive, and then back up to me. “If we can’t calm her down, we’ll have to smash the hard drive before she finishes downloading. But I would like that to be a last resort if possible, as she could die.”

  I pressed my lips together, keeping the words “better her than us” locked tightly beh
ind them. It was a knee-jerk reaction at this point, but at least I was doing better at preventing myself from saying it. Instead, I swallowed and nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Leo hesitated, and then handed the cable to Tian. “I promised to hold Liana’s hand, and this might mean more if it’s you who does it.”

  Tian beamed and accepted the cable, while Leo moved closer to me and held out his hand, his eyes questioning. After a moment or two of internal debate about whether this would continue to feed into his attraction for me, I gave him my hand, realizing it wasn’t just about that, anyhow. It was about comfort.

  And I needed some comfort for this.

  Tian approached the box, and my heart skipped a beat and then broke into a wild gallop, fear exploding into my senses. All I could see was the flash of light, followed by my mother’s severed lash line, followed by her falling… falling… falling…

  Oh Scipio, what if she didn’t need the defenses to kill us? I squeezed Leo’s hand, on the verge of telling Tian to stop, and his grip tightened as well, as if he were trying to transfer his strength and confidence into me. I swallowed some of my panic back and clung to him, warily watching Tian as she pushed the cable into a port on the hard drive.

  My eyes leapt from the hard drive to the terminal, and I watched the glowing yellow ones and zeroes streaming by on the screen, searching for a sign of her program. I honestly didn’t know what I was looking for, but as the seconds crept on, my trepidation steadily grew.

  “Wha—”

  It was all I got out before a flash of purple cut across the screen and the speakers began to emit a high-pitched “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

  17

  I clapped my hands over my ears. The noise seemed to dig its way into my brain, which felt like it was being split in half. “WHAT IS THAT?” I shouted, barely able to hear the sound of my own voice over the piercing noise.

  I looked at Leo, my gaze questioning, and saw that he was shouting something up toward the ceiling. I followed his gaze to the monitors hanging from it and saw more purple flashes cutting through the yellow code on the screens there. The sight of it triggered a very brief memory from the legacy net of a darkened sky being split with the sharp, white jolt of lightning, and the comparison was not inaccurate. It was like lightning was spreading across the screen, cutting the code there to pieces.