The Girl Who Dared to Stand Read online

  Grey blinked, his gaze growing distant, and then he nodded, confirming my estimation on the timeline. “We were here late, maybe two or three in the morning.”

  “Thank you. I’ll deactivate for a moment to let you get changed in privacy.”

  The screen cut out before I could ask any questions about the plan, and once again, I found myself in the awkward situation of getting changed with Quess and Grey in the same room as me.

  I quickly turned and began to change anyhow, hearing the sounds of their movements behind me, and in order to distract myself from the discomfort, began to talk.

  “Well, with Leo in the system, I think we have a real chance to get Maddox out of here.”

  “The problem is with Devon,” Grey said from where he was standing behind me. “I don’t like the idea of going up against him.”

  “Neither do I,” Quess agreed. “I mean, what’s our plan here?”

  I hesitated, and then filled them in on what I had worked out in my head. I’d given it a lot of thought on the way up, and the best way was to use non-lethal force to render any guards unconscious. I wanted to avoid an all-out fight, as that would draw way too much attention. I kind of hoped that this would be the first mission we pulled off without anyone learning about it until after we had left.

  “I figured we’d just ask Jasper—Leo, now, I guess—to let us borrow one of those injection things filled with some sort of knock-out drug. With the uniforms, we could go in under the guise of being trainees, get close, and then inject them.”

  “Knock-out… drug?” Quess said, smiling at me. “You’re talking about a fast-acting general anesthetic, and unfortunately, they do not keep them in the wall units. It’s a high-end item in the black market, so it’s kept under careful lock and key.”

  Disappointment flared over me, but I pushed through it, trying to think of some other way. “Well...” I said, thinking about it. “Look, I don’t know—if we could find a way to take them out all at once, preferably without a fight, that would be ideal. If you guys come up with something, let me know, but let’s move and think, okay? I’m getting nervous standing around in here. Leo only bought us limited time with our Medic. Let’s not waste it.”

  “Agreed,” Grey said. “Are you decent?”

  “I am,” I said, turning back around.

  They turned as well, and we did a mutual inspection to make sure our uniforms were smoothed of any wrinkles and folds, giving us a pristine look that would keep us moving unnoticed. Our regular clothes went into a bag Quess was carrying, while our batons came out, Quess handing one over to Grey and me.

  “Devon’s in there,” Quess said. “Do you think he’s talking to Doxy?”

  I exhaled and tightened my grip on my baton. I hadn’t forgotten Leo’s words, but I had been ignoring them for as long as possible. Devon was in the same building as I was. In fact, he was so close that I could practically taste him. My stomach churned, and a deep fear settled into my bones, as I recalled the look on his face as he’d detached Cali’s lead.

  There had been nothing there, no trace of humanity or empathy—just a pure, deep calm, and certainty that was so unfathomable to me that it was still haunting my dreams. How anyone could be so blasé about killing another human was beyond me.

  The councilors’ offer suddenly came to mind, and I tightened my hand into a fist. If we could figure out a way to knock Devon out, it would be all too easy to just finish the job. They’d given me their permission to do it, and they would consider that my acceptance of their deal.

  Killing him went against my initial plan to leave here with Maddox unnoticed, but it was tempting to reconsider. The only thing that gave me pause was the fact that Scipio 2.0 knew the moment a person expired—and in the case of unexpected death, would notify the nearest Knights to investigate. Killing him now would jeopardize our plans to save Maddox, and I refused to do that.

  He could die later. I had a week, after all.

  “Are you all dressed?” Leo asked, mercifully providing me with a distraction from the thoughts now circling inside my head.

  “We are,” I said, and his face returned to the screen.

  “I’ve got a path to Maddox for you. They’ve patched up her leg, and the Medic is just grabbing some additional medicine for her at the request of the Champion.”

  “How close is she?” I asked, thinking of all the people we would undoubtedly come across. The farther we had to go, the more chance of discovery, but we had no way of controlling that.

  “Not far. Maybe a minute away, but you’ll be going up a few floors.”

  “Good. Let’s get to it, then.”

  “I’ve got the net,” Quess said, crossing over to the wall unit to retrieve it. We were going to need it again to transport Leo once it was time to leave.

  “Right. Follow the indicators. Hopefully I’ll be able to transmit to your net shortly. I’m still trying to get the net relays connected to the system under my control, but it’s taking time. I’ll do my best to guide you.”

  “Thank you, Leo,” I said, and in response, a portion of the wall slid back, revealing an opening. I realized that it wasn’t the side where we had come in, and then followed Grey through, my heart already pounding.

  30

  The hall Leo led us into was different than the ones we had walked through to get there. It was a narrow corridor, barely wide enough for two people, and I looked around nervously, searching for any sign of life. Luckily, it was currently empty.

  A glimmer of something on one of the seemingly plain white walls caught my attention, and I watched as a dot appeared, followed by a series of lines reading Follow Me. The dot shot off to the right, disappearing around a curve and leaving a green trail behind it.

  “Stick to the right side of the hallway,” Quess whispered. “This is a service-way—the Medics use it to get around quickly from room to room. You always walk to the right.”

  That was smart—it created mutually exclusive lanes that allowed for an easy flow of traffic in the tight confines of the hall.

  “Is this how they always manage to enter and exit without you ever running into them in the hall?” I asked as I began to follow the trail.

  “Yeah,” Quess replied from behind me. “Everyone at the Practitioner level and above has access to these halls. Residents and Students are relegated to the main halls, to deal with patients out there.”

  I listened carefully to the new information, quickly determining how it would affect us. I realized that if anyone challenged my status as a Medic, I would need to, at the very least, make sure I knew what rank I needed to pretend to be.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  It was hard to resist the urge to creep down the hall, and I had to remind myself to act like I belonged. With every step I took forward, the stiff white fabric of the uniform felt tighter and more confining. My baton was tucked along my side, held tight under a stiff arm. I might have been disguised as a Medic, but when and if the time came for a fight, I wanted to be prepared.

  Hence the baton.

  A Medic rounded the corner, heading the opposite direction, and for a moment I was certain that he was going to take one look and recognize us. After all, we had just been here to bust out Zoe. He had to have seen so many images of my face, of Grey’s face, that even our altered hair and eye color wouldn’t spare us.

  I kept my eyes glued to the dark onyx floor, reminding myself that Myra had interacted with us without noticing anything, and held my breath as he drew nearer, my hand ready to catch my baton as soon as his shout rang out. He was taller than me, but I was fast, and all I had to do was touch him and he’d be down.

  He drew even closer, and I tensed, watching his movements from the side of my eyes, waiting for him to do something—anything… and then he was past. I heard Quess give a congenial, “How’re you doing?” as they presumably passed each other, and then nothing, save our footsteps as he walked farther and farther away from us.

  I e
xhaled slowly and tried to work some of the tension from my shoulders. This was going to work. I looked back to check that Grey and Quess were okay, and noticed that they seemed just as relieved as I was. It made me feel better knowing they were with me on this, and I turned my gaze back down the hall, following the green light. Even though that man hadn’t recognized me, it didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t, so I had to be careful and not get too confident.

  The green dot led us to a flight of stairs leading up steeply to where the hall continued, some eight feet off the floor. We crossed up, and came to a hall with a low ceiling—low enough that I had to walk through while ducking slightly, and then emerged on the other side with an identical staircase heading down. It took some idle puzzling on my part, and I realized that, from the width and shape, we were crossing over one of the patient halls below. The inner design was fascinating; I had no idea these halls were even here, let alone how they worked, but they were well designed, running through and around every patient room, like a honeycomb.

  It was truly fascinating, actually; we had to periodically stop when a hall would suddenly become blocked off, walls sliding up from the floor to create the entryway to each patient room. Some of the service-ways ran just between the rooms and the public halls, and in order to keep the patients from cutting through the service-way unexpectedly, the walls shot up out of the ground to stop the flow of traffic inside them, while letting the patient think they had stepped directly into the room. Another wall would drop down behind them once they stepped into the room, creating the inner walls and hiding the hall. Medics would wait patiently, watching a display that came up on the walls blocking their way that showed the patient’s movement. Once the patient was inside, the walls blocking the service-way would drop back down and the Medics could continue moving unimpeded.

  We passed several other Medics moving through the halls, and after seeing so many without any response, I began to relax into my disguise. It was working.

  Now I just wished we would get to Maddox already. Even though I was fairly certain that we’d only been walking for a few short minutes, it felt like it had been much longer. Maddox had just been checked, but a broken leg was an easy fix. One day in a weaver cast would fix her right up, and it was simple and quick to put one on—I’d gotten familiar with the process during my apprenticeship classes.

  I followed the green trail down another hall, my nerves practically split ends from my tension and fear, and I almost missed the dot holding fast to one spot and pulsing slightly, like a beacon. I picked up the pace as soon as it registered that we were finally here, and motioned to Grey and Quess. We came to a stop in front of it.

  A line of text appeared, reading, Line up behind Liana. Confused, I looked back at Grey and Quess, who shrugged and then moved into position behind me. There was a soft hiss as the walls came up, sealing us inside.

  “Sorry about that,” Leo said softly, his voice sounding from the wall next to us. “But I have to be careful not to trip the security settings, and using the speakers in the hallway would definitely have given my presence away. As such, thank you for trusting me.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Are we here?”

  “See for yourself.” A moment later, the wall in front of us seemed to dissolve. I took a step back into Grey, my heart pounding in terror. Devon Alexander was standing two feet away, staring right at us.

  My baton was already in my palm before Grey’s strong hand gripped my shoulder, holding me in place. “Wait,” he whispered, and I hesitated, trying to understand what he saw that I didn’t. “He can’t see us,” he added, and I looked up at Devon’s face, realizing Grey was right. Devon’s dual-colored eyes weren’t focused on us at all. In fact, they looked distant, as if he were caught in some deep thought and staring at a fixed point on the wall.

  It was only coincidence that we happened to be standing behind it.

  “Sorry,” Leo said. “I should have warned you.”

  I took a moment to collect myself, a sharp tingle of nerves radiating across my skin as if I were being stabbed by a thousand needles at once. I still couldn’t get over how close Devon was to me. Just behind that door. One small wall panel away.

  And as Champion of the Knights, he could override the door if he really wanted to.

  Or their Medic could come back at any moment.

  I looked at the walls on either side of us. “Leo, can you bring up video of the hall? Are you monitoring it?”

  “I am. I am also redirecting traffic around us, but I can only do it for so long.” My stomach churned, and I knew that it was risky to wait much longer. We still had the potential threat of Myra returning to our original exam room and discovering we were gone. Once that happened, it would only be a matter of time before the alarm was sounded. We needed as much time as we could squeeze together to figure out how to get the drop on the three men inside.

  “How long?” Quess asked sharply, and the walls flickered for a moment—something that had also happened back in the office when Leo was thinking. My eyes dragged back up to the wall, where I saw Devon turning away, and I was relieved to see that the lights were only affected in here.

  “About four and a half minutes,” he said. “That’s as long as I can redirect traffic before someone picks up on the fact that the area has somehow become off limits.”

  “That’s not enough time,” Quess whispered. I looked at him, already in agreement. “We still have to figure out—”

  “He’s talking,” Grey said.

  Quess paused while I turned my focus back to the room and saw Devon moving off to one side to stand opposite a bald man with a dark goatee and flat black eyes. His uniform was black, too, marking him as an Inquisitor. Behind the two men, Maddox lay on a table, her eyes closed. Her leg was encased in a bio-cast, which would already be working on the bone Zoe and Eric had broken.

  She was clearly unconscious. They had likely drugged her with something, whether it was before or after she got here, I didn’t know. But it meant they felt confident that they could speak in secret. They would be saying something they didn’t expect anyone else to hear.

  And we were in a position to hear it.

  “Leo, can you get audio for us?” I asked, and three seconds later, Devon’s voice filled the room.

  “—a match, and that changes everything.”

  The bald man raised a black eyebrow and shook his head, his face stoic. “This changes nothing. We are imbedded too deeply at this point to turn back now.”

  “She is my daughter,” Devon spat, one arm snapping out to point at her. “I need time to explain her heritage to her! To teach her about what we’ve been doing. If I die before that…”

  So Devon was a legacy after all. Lacey and Strum had said as much, but they hadn’t provided any evidence to support their claim. I found myself warmed by the news, in spite of how alarming it was, because it meant that they had been right about their suspicions and they hadn’t asked me to kill a man for the wrong reasons.

  Not that I needed a particularly good reason to want him dead. He’d already taken so much from me—Cali… Roark… possibly even Gerome, my former mentor and the man I was accused of murdering. But he was not my mission right now. Only Maddox was.

  “It is a risk you’re going to have to take,” another voice said, and I watched as a second Inquisitor came into view from behind the wall closest to the door. He must’ve been leaning there, watching them talk, and even now he only half came into view—just enough to block our view of Maddox.

  “Four minutes,” Leo announced as the newcomer continued. I continued to watch, my mind still trying to come up with a plan for how to get Maddox out of the room.

  “This plan has taken half a century to enact, and never before have any of the sects been as close as we are now! We cannot afford to take a back seat while you train your progeny.”

  “Besides, there’s no guarantee that she will even take to your teachings,” the bald man said, still looking rather bore
d—and I got the feeling that this was his general demeanor all the time. But that still didn’t make him look any less dangerous. “You killed the girl’s mother.”

  “I regretted having to do that, but she knew too much!”

  Baldy looked over to the man standing with his back to us, and the man shrugged his shoulders. Devon looked back and forth between the two of them, and crossed his arms over his chest. “What is it?”

  “She had a legacy net,” Baldy said, and Devon stiffened.

  “There was nothing in her background to indicate—”

  “It was there, but buried deep. We traced her line back to one of the earlier families we eradicated within the first seventy-five years. We’re not sure how, but apparently one of the nets slipped past us, and was likely passed down from generation to generation with no one knowing what it was. Perhaps it was in a keepsake that broke—who knows? All we know is that she figured out what it was. We pulled it out of her when we recovered her body.”

  Even though I was watching and trying to come up with a plan, I couldn’t help but hang on their every word as they spoke, intrigued by their conversation. So much was being revealed here, things that generated a flurry of questions inside me. They’d been working for half a century doing what? They’d come closer to what than any other group before? Who were the other sects, and why weren’t they working together? And what the heck was a legacy net? It clearly wasn’t a standard net, given Devon’s reaction to it. If anything, it seemed like it was a net passed down between family members, which tracked with what Lacey and Strum had told me about these groups being kept within family units.

  And Cali… They seemed surprised she had been in possession of one, and so was I. Why hadn’t she mentioned it to us, and why was it important? What did finding one on her mean to them?

  “I want it,” Devon said, but Baldy shook his head.