The Girl Who Dared to Endure Read online

  He started laughing then, but it was short-lived, as Alex suddenly stepped close and rammed his fist into Baldy’s jaw. There was a sharp, wet snap, and Baldy’s head jerked to one side, blood spurting from his lip. He sat stunned for a second or two, and then gave a surprised, huffing laugh, interrupted only when he spat out a mouthful of blood.

  A part of me wanted to stop Alex, but Baldy’s words had set fire to a deep, bitter rage and acrid hatred—and that part of me took pleasure in watching him hurt.

  “Gonna have to do better than that, boy,” he chuckled, looking up at my brother and tonguing the area where Alex had split his lip open. His grin broadened, his eyes sparkling with something that looked like madness. “You can’t stop what’s coming, just like you couldn’t stop what happened to your mother.”

  Crack. Baldy’s head snapped back as my brother struck him again, this time from the other side. He shook for a second, and then laughter began to erupt from his throat. “Can’t protect Mom… Can’t protect Baby Sister…” he sang tauntingly. “Gonna watch them die, Big Brother. Can promise you that.”

  “Shut up!” my brother shouted, and his fist lashed out again, catching Baldy in the nose with a sharp crunch. Blood spurted from the wound, but Baldy continued to chortle, his bound boots slapping the ground. “Tell me who you work for!” Alex shouted.

  Smack.

  I flinched, the fourth hit feeling like a step too far. “Alex,” I said softly. “Stop.”

  But my brother ignored me, driving his fist into Baldy’s stomach again and again. The breath exploded out of him in sharp grunts, and he began to hack and wheeze for air, the laughter dying out.

  “Tell me where to find your people!” my brother shouted, his face dark with the promise of violence. I’d never seen him look at anyone like that before, and it was starting to scare me. His arm swung again.

  “Alex,” I said more sharply, moving toward him even as another wet crack filled the air. This was spinning out of control. “Stop! I—”

  His fist fell again, and then again, and when I put my hand on his shoulder to pull him off, he pushed me back and continued to pummel Baldy, shouting, “Tell me what you did to Scipio! Tell me! Tell me!”

  “Quess, Leo!” I yelled, catching my balance from his shove. “Help—”

  “LIANA!” came a loud, horrified cry, and it was loud enough to make my brother freeze. My eyes widened as I recognized it, and I whirled to see the youngest member of our makeshift family, Tian, standing there, her blue eyes wide and filled with horror.

  But what was worse was the boy standing right next to her, bound up in her lashes. His face was pale, making the freckles on it stand out in stark comparison, and he was staring in abject terror at the man on the chair. I recognized him from my attack in the Attic. I’d been following him, and he’d led me back to his legacy home, where Baldy and at least thirty others lived.

  And he’d just seen us beating one of his fellow legacies.

  6

  I quickly blocked Tian and the young boy’s view and ushered them out of the room, telling Tian to find somewhere to hide for the next hour and then come back with her guest. Tian’s face was tight and nervous as she looked at the boy, whom she awkwardly introduced as Liam, and his face was grim, eyes full of anger and hatred directed at all of us. I couldn’t blame him. We’d attacked someone who must have been tantamount to a family member while he was helpless. We were monsters to him.

  Then again, Tian had kidnapped him, so we hadn’t really started off on the right foot to begin with.

  Which really sucked. Because while getting Baldy to talk was clearly not happening, persuading the boy to join our side might’ve been a golden opportunity in disguise, and completely possible—had we not been smashing the face of someone he knew. Earning any form of trust now was going to be difficult, and I wouldn’t blame him if he never gave it to us.

  Once they were gone, I turned back to Alex and Baldy, and noticed that Quess was already kneeling next to Baldy’s chair, administering first aid. Alex was watching, his eyes dark and brooding, occasionally waggling his curled fingers in a move I recognized all too well; they were hurting from all the punches he’d delivered.

  I considered him, wondering what I was supposed to do. On the one hand, Baldy had hit a very sore spot for both of us, and a part of me felt like he deserved what he got. On the other…

  I looked down at the blood splatters on the floor around the chair, and my stomach clenched. Baldy had tried to kill me multiple times. First in the Medica when we went to rescue Maddox from Devon Alexander, the former Champion, and then on the catwalk when Leo had been pouring his heart out to me. And then finally in the Attic, when he had cut my throat.

  But even with all of that stacked against him, what I had been allowing to go on was unconscionable—not for him, but for me. For my soul or spirit or heart, whatever you wanted to call it. I had felt it even before Tian showed up, but the look on the young man’s face sealed the deal for me. I didn’t want to be the sort of person who could condone torture, no matter who the prisoner was or what they had done. I couldn’t let this happen again, no matter what Baldy had done to me.

  I approached my brother slowly, coming up beside him. He made no move to acknowledge me, but I waited for him to, wondering what he was feeling. In a way, I was guilty for his response to this; I’d cut him out, left him with unanswered questions and an anger burning in his heart.

  But that didn’t excuse the fact that he had lost control and might’ve beaten Baldy to death in a mindless, uncontrolled rage.

  Yet given that was his reaction to Baldy’s claim that he was a failure… Was that the root of Alex’s anger? Our mother had just died, and neither of us had a particularly good relationship with her. In my case, however, things had been shifting toward the end of her life. So when I lost her, it had hit me harder than I thought it would, because I’d been starting to see a possibility for reconciliation, only to have it stolen away from me.

  In his case, though, it had been over a year since he’d seen her. Not since our birthday dinner, when they had fought over Alex’s decision to join IT instead of the Knights. She didn’t understand why he didn’t want to be a Knight, and now I wondered if my brother wasn’t questioning that decision himself, thinking that maybe if he had followed a different path, he would’ve been able to keep us safe.

  I imagined that stung a lot. And when he’d reached out to me, trying to make sense of everything, I’d blown him off, or forgotten to net him. I’d left him alone to deal with his pain. And though I’d wanted to be alone to process my pain, that didn’t mean he had. He had needed his best friend, his sister, his twin, and I hadn’t been there for him. I’d failed him.

  “Alex,” I said hesitantly. “Are you—”

  “I’m not sorry,” Alex interrupted abruptly, and I blinked and looked up at him, alarm spreading through me at his words. “This guy deserves much more—and worse—for what he did to you.”

  For several seconds, I was stunned by the vehemence of his response. I had expected guilt out of him, for losing control, but not this deep rage that seemed to be consuming him. Once again, I felt like I was being confronted by a total stranger, but that couldn’t be possible. This was Alex, my twin.

  I considered what he said for several moments, trying to rationalize this new behavior, as I watched Quess straighten Baldy’s broken nose by pinching the bridge between two fingers. I could comprehend his anger to a certain extent; it was an understandable reaction to the injustices we had suffered at the hands of our enemies. But in my brother’s case, his rage was borderline unhealthy, a way of easing the pain inside through some form of immediate and violent action. But that wasn’t justice. It was vengeance. And if my brother continued down this path, I feared what would happen to him.

  “You lost control, Alex,” I said softly. “I told you he wasn’t going to talk.”

  “You were right,” he said before I could form any sort of conclusion, an
d a curious warmth curled through me. I was? “He wasn’t going to talk. And he’s still a threat. We should kill him.”

  I pressed my lips together, disappointed that he wasn’t admitting to the fact that he’d lost control. Was he really blind to it, or did he believe that what he had been doing was right? I wasn’t sure, but either way, it was starting to scare me.

  Especially because it was so shortsighted. “If we kill him, then we definitely lose any chance of getting the boy Tian brought back to help us, if we haven’t lost it already, after… what happened.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Quess cut in, and I could tell from the discomfort in his voice that he was angling to change the subject. “Did you get an explanation from her as to how and where she found him? Were there others? Was she seen?”

  I exhaled, trying to tamp down my irritation. The answer was that I hadn’t gotten an explanation, and the reason was that I couldn’t bear to see Tian’s or the boy’s faces looking at us like that anymore. I’d get the story from her later, once I got this taken care of.

  “No,” I told him simply. “Let’s get through problems A through D first.”

  Quess snorted as he pressed the bone-mending patch over Baldy’s broken nose. “We’d be lucky to have only four problems,” he muttered, and a startled laugh escaped me. There was truth in his words, and, Scipio help me, it made me tired more than anything.

  The momentary levity slowly melted away as I heard my brother make an aggravated noise and shift his weight. “We’d have one less problem if you’d just stop patching him up and kill him already,” he snarled. “He’s a threat, he’s no good to us, and keeping him alive is dangerous. If he breaks free from this room and lets his people know what we know, they’ll hunt us down and kill us all. Why are we still talking about this?”

  My lips formed a thin line, and I fought the rising urge to shake him at his continued shortsightedness and bloodthirsty attitude. It was really starting to scare me, but even more than that, it lacked any rationality. Even if we couldn’t get answers out of Baldy, that didn’t mean we couldn’t use him for something. Not to mention, the boy Tian brought in knew Baldy. There had to be a way to exploit that connection. But not if we just beat on Baldy for no good reason.

  “Alex, he’s still valuable, alive or dead. You need to take a breath and slow down. We have a ton of information to go through from Sadie’s computer, and once Leo gets Jasper and Rose separated and back online, they might be able to help us learn what’s actually going on. We’re going to figure this out. Together.”

  On impulse, I reached out to touch his forearm, to comfort him, but as soon as my fingers stroked over his uniform, he jerked away from me, whirling around to present me with his back.

  “Alex?” I asked, concerned and hurt by his reaction.

  He stood there for several seconds, his back and shoulders rising and falling as he tried to calm himself, catch his breath… something. I couldn’t tell what was going on. All I knew was that it was dark, turbulent, and seemed to be consuming him. My twin. The only other human being in the world I felt fully connected to.

  “Alex,” I said pleadingly, my heart overflowing with worry and concern. “Talk to me. I know I’ve been a crappy sister, but—”

  He whirled around, his eyes blazing behind his glasses. “I don’t want to talk. I want to do something. I want to find the guys who hurt you and killed Mom and make them pay. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Why are you hesitating now, after everything that has happened? Do you not care that they’re killing Scipio? Do you not care that thousands of people are going to die if they get what they want?”

  My brows drew tightly together, and I took a step back, the sting of his words and insinuations almost enough to make me want to walk away. I tried to remind myself that this wasn’t Alex—that he was in pain and upset because things were moving too slowly.

  But I was rapidly running out of excuses for him, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this person wearing my brother’s face, because it certainly wasn’t him.

  “Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I heard Leo say angrily from behind me, and a second later I felt his hands sliding over my shoulders, holding me upright just as I was about to falter. I shot him a grateful look, but he ignored it as he speared Alex with a glare. “She cares more about the Tower and the people in it than I’d wager most do, and I won’t let you say anything to the contrary! Of course she cares, and she’s working on it. We all are. But it isn’t something we can rush, no matter how much you want to, so stop attacking your sister. She is doing the best she can, and you should acknowledge and respect that.”

  His words helped take away some of the pain from Alex’s words. But only some.

  My brother glared at him, and then made an irritated noise. “You’re right,” he finally said, but there was still an angry undercurrent to his voice. “She is doing the best she can. I’m just… frustrated. I’ll go for a walk and try to clear my head.”

  “You do that,” Leo said, and there was a firmness in his voice that said Alex was going to leave whether he liked it or not. I didn’t like it, but I realized that maybe he needed it.

  My brother was already turning to walk away but grunted an acknowledgment over his shoulder, followed by an, “I’ll be back soon.”

  The words filled me with an ominous dread, but I kept my mouth shut and let him go, hoping that Leo was right.

  7

  The juxtaposition of the nonstop adrenaline rush that had been the last twelve hours or so and the quiet waiting that occurred in the long hours after was like the slow twist of a dagger, agonizing in both its intensity and anticipation, as I wondered when the end would come. Even though we had more than enough to occupy ourselves while we waited for Sadie’s call to the council to report her quarters malfunction, it never seemed like quite enough to distract us from the relentlessly slow movements of the clock. In short, we were spread out, thinner than rice paper.

  Staying busy was the only thing that kept me from freaking out as time churned on, and luckily, there was a lot to do. I started with putting the walls and furniture of the apartment back in place and added two modified rooms for our prisoners. I wound up fiddling with the details for an hour, trying to kill some time while I waited, but at a certain point it became annoying and tedious. I wanted to move on to something else, even though I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. Baldy, still unconscious from the beating earlier and bound using a pair of cuffs, went in one new room, and the boy, Liam, went into the other. Tian opted to stay with him, to see if she could convince him that we weren’t going to hurt him, but after what he had seen, I knew only time and space would allow him to see that.

  After that, Maddox had to go meet with the Knight Commanders to keep up appearances, and Quess went with her, as a Knight Commander of an internal department. I envied her for that, but also recognized that if I had gone, I would’ve gone insane from the anxiety.

  Besides, doing all of those things did nothing to answer one of the other things causing my stress to mount as time wore on—what was happening to Jasper and Rose. So, I busied myself with trying to help Leo, going through Lionel Scipio’s files to try to figure out why Jasper was attacking Rose, while he worked tirelessly on trying to separate the two programs.

  Unfortunately, the files were two parts technical and one part psychological, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it, beyond a few extra details that didn’t help us much. It was beyond frustrating, as I was the least technically savvy of our group, and as each moment went on without news of either AI’s welfare, I grew more and more agitated by my limited capabilities. I tried to absorb as much as I could, scanning for some hidden clue in the detailed notes.

  Luckily, some of it was interesting. Even if it didn’t do much to pass the time.

  The AIs had been created using neural scans of the five founders of the Tower, those scans stripped of all the human memories, save one: each founder’s “core memory.” Th
ose memories were the cornerstones for the new AI personalities, the seeds from which they developed. Jasper was based on the founder of the Medica, Samantha Reed, and apparently her core memory had centered on her relationship with the grandfather who had raised her, and who had been some sort of famous detective. The memory in question was her playing with some sort of puzzle that he had laid out for her to solve, and from it came Jasper’s analytical and diagnostic skills. These, his most successful traits, were incorporated into Scipio’s coding once they were joined.

  Learning that had taken me all of thirty-five minutes. No word from the council. No progress with Jasper and Rose. I stopped long enough to study Leo, and then picked up another file when I realized asking him anything would only disrupt his focus.

  Rose, on the other hand, was based on a woman named Jang-Mi, whose core memory was centered around the loss of her daughter, Yu-Na. That loss translated into Rose viewing all the citizens of the Tower as her children and being ruled by a desire to protect them from harm. It was what had carried her program far during the trials. But it failed her when the loss of human life became too high, and her grief became too powerful for her to continue. From her came a lens of maternal love, which Scipio was supposed to use when thinking about the citizens of the Tower.

  I sighed and closed the file. Another half an hour gone. Still nothing. My skin crawled, and I was hyperaware of the time, but I ignored it, knowing it was too early to give in to panic.

  Then there was Kurt, the protector. I found that role for him a little odd, considering his program was based on Ezekial Pine, the man who had murdered Lionel Scipio and tried to kill Leo, the backup version of Scipio. But apparently his core memory was based on his experience in the military, and a situation where he’d pulled nearly every one of his soldiers from danger and saved them in an act of altruistic brotherhood. Clearly Pine’s views of brotherhood had limits, but perhaps Kurt was different. I’d recently learned from the legacy net Lacey had given me that her family had recovered him, but I hadn’t had a chance to confront the head of the Mechanics Department yet.