The Girl Who Dared to Stand Read online

  Light blossomed from a flashlight in Quess’s hand, and he shone it around the tight space, revealing a terminal on one of the walls. He crossed over to it, pulling his bag around to his side. I moved up next to him, taking the light from his hands and holding it up while he rummaged inside the bag. A moment later, he withdrew his hand, holding a notebook, and dropped the bag on the floor.

  “One second,” he said as he opened the book, his eyes tracing over the small but legible writing inside. He handed the notebook to me, and I took it, keeping it open for him while his fingers began to fly over the console’s controls, putting in lines of code and text at a speed that rivaled Cali’s. The process still took several moments, and when it was done, he stepped away from the console and sighed.

  “Well, now all we can do is wait, and I’m not really sure how long it will take for him to get back to us. If it gets too close to two hours…”

  “I’ll go,” I assured him. “I trust you to take point with Mercury. But… I’m not sure if we should tell Mercury about Scipio.”

  “Yeah, about that. I’ve come up with a few new names. Do you think he’ll let us call him something cool, like Harbinger or Death of a Tyrant?”

  “You know, I’m not sure he’ll like those, but feel free to bring it up.”

  “Oh, I will. Getting under his skin is fun.”

  “He doesn’t have skin,” I pointed out. “And I’m serious right now, Quess. I don’t think we should tell anyone about him.”

  Quess sobered immediately. “Why not? I mean, Mercury’s helped us before.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s going to help us now,” I said. I still wasn’t sure if I trusted Mercury, and I had no way of knowing how he’d react to the fact that I hadn’t waited for him before going after Zoe. I was certain he’d blame me for what had happened, or at the very least, be less willing to help. Still, that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t want to tell him about Scipio. “Anyway, that is not why I don’t think we should tell anyone about him.”

  “Why, then?”

  I bit my lip. I knew this was going to sound paranoid, but I wasn’t going to lie. “Because I keep asking myself, what if that Prometheus group that Scipio mentioned still exists in some form today?”

  “Yeah, but…” He trailed off, and I saw the realization dawn. “Right… if it got out that we had another Scipio and they learned about it, they’d come looking to finish the job.”

  “And probably kill us to keep the secret from getting out.”

  “So it’s better to sit on it?”

  I nodded. “Unless you come up with a better plan.”

  Quess laughed bitterly. “Oh, no. We already have more than enough stuff we can’t deal with on our plate for me to want to add another helping. We don’t have a way of manufacturing more Paragon, so getting out of here doesn’t seem like much of a possibility, because we won’t be able to control our numbers. We also have to think about the people who are already using it, because I’m sure Mercury will want them warned. And if we can’t make more… twenty-nine is a lot of people to try to hide. I’m not sure we can even find enough places for all of them in time. We should already be looking for another place, as it is—a backup in case we’re discovered.”

  I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. I did not need Quess reminding me of the multitude of what ifs that kept running through my head. Our options were severely limited, if we didn’t want to get caught.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Which is why I’m hoping Mercury can give us something, anything, to work with. Because if he can’t, the five people back there are going to break long before the Knights ever find us. We need something to focus on, to distract us from our fear, to give us a goal. Without one, we’re just stumbling around blindly.”

  “Whoa, Liana,” Quess said, taking a step back and looking suddenly uncomfortable. “That’s a little bleak, isn’t it?”

  I exhaled, and rested my head against the wall behind me, looking up into the shadows Quess’s light was creating on the ceiling. “Probably,” I admitted. “I swear, I’m not trying to be, but I’ve been trying to figure out what to do, and it just feels like everything has broken past the point of repair.”

  Quess chuckled dryly. “We’re all feeling that way, Liana. But we’re tough, and we’re going to figure things out, okay? I mean, we may have forced leadership on you, but we’re not going to let you do this alone.”

  I closed my eyes and felt my hands curl into two angry balls at his mention of last night. “Yeah, about that. What the heck?”

  “You mean your boyfriend’s little tantrum? I was wondering about that myself! Any chance that means you’ll be single soon?” He grinned at me, his eyebrows twitching upward in what I assumed was his attempt at looking seductive. “Might get a little chilly in here while we wait,” he added when I didn’t say anything. “Maybe we should snuggle for the body heat.”

  I straightened my head and arched an eyebrow. “Not going to happen. And I wasn’t talking about Grey. Just… how the heck did all that happen?”

  “Maddox,” Quess said simply. “I mean, say what you will about her social skills, she has a practical streak a mile wide and ten thousand miles deep.”

  “It certainly surprised the hell out of me.” I paused, thinking about the stoic young woman. About her fiery-haired mother who had shared her piercing green eyes. Which led me to think about Devon and Cali during the fight.

  I had noticed it then, but in the chaos and grief, my mind had slid past it to deal with the immediate future. Now that things had calmed down somewhat, and I had some time to kill, I suddenly wanted to know more. In fact, I was surprised it hadn’t come up sooner. Honestly, Maddox had to be upset that her father had killed her mother, right? Unless… Cali had left him for someone else. But that didn’t track with their exchange at all. He’d made it sound like he hadn’t been able to find her, implying she had left the Knights completely when she disappeared. And according to her, that was what she had done. How would she have kept herself hidden for long enough to conceive Maddox? I supposed it was possible that there was someone else, but based on what Cali had told me, it just didn’t make any sense.

  “Hey, Quess? Could you, uh, tell me more about Maddox?” I asked, meeting his gaze. Maybe he could shed some light on why she hadn’t mentioned Devon earlier.

  “Maddox?” Quess’s eyes widened in surprise, and he cocked his head at me. “Why do you want to talk about her?” He looked around, as if suspecting some kind of trap. “Is this a chick thing? Is… Maddox somewhere waiting, in case I say anything bad about her?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No, this is not a chick thing,” I said, a touch bemused. “Honestly, do you think that there is some sort of… conspiracy between women out there?”

  “Well, yes.” He arched an arrogant eyebrow. “You telling me there isn’t?”

  “Okay, there is just so much there that I’m not really prepared to unpack, so let me just tactfully withdraw, and return to my original question about Maddox.” As much as I wanted to tease Quess for his semi-sexist remarks, I didn’t want to derail the conversation from the task at hand.

  “I mean, sure, I guess I could tell you about her,” Quess said, lowering himself to the floor and adjusting his long legs. I followed suit, realizing we were going to be here for a while before Mercury got back to us. “It kind of depends on what you want to know.”

  “Fair enough. I guess I’m just trying to understand why, of all the things she’s upset about, the fact that her father killed her mother seems to have been entirely overlooked. I mean, is she even coping with that?”

  He stared at me with a look on his face that made me feel like I had suddenly grown two heads that were singing backwards in Cogspeech. “I’m not even sure I’m coping with it,” he said after a moment, breaking the pregnant silence between us. “What are you talking about?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Isn’t… Maddox Devon’s child?”

  “What?
No. That’s impossible.”

  I looked over at him and shook my head. “When they were talking, Devon said something about how he came home and Cali was gone. Twenty years ago. Maddox is nineteen.”

  Quess’s brows drew together, and he looked away, his posture radiating deep thoughtfulness. I let him stew while I contemplated what I had just done. If Quess didn’t know, and Maddox wasn’t talking about it… it was very possible that she didn’t know, either. Which made me wonder why Cali had kept it a secret.

  Had it been too emotional, or was there another reason? Why had she hidden that detail from everyone? My mind raced over the brief conversations Cali and I had shared, scrubbing them for any clue. She had mentioned Maddox’s father once—and had spoken about him in the present tense. She had also mentioned once that Maddox had convinced her to escape the Tower once her number started getting lower and lower. Which meant Maddox would have been old enough to know. That meant she had to know, didn’t it? And why hadn’t he asked after her? I mean, he wasn’t so far gone to also want his daughter dead, was he? Did he just not care?

  I realized all this speculation didn’t matter. All that did matter was the fact that I might have revealed a secret about Maddox’s heritage that even she didn’t know. I looked up at Quess, prepared to tell him to just forget about it, when he began to speak.

  “Cali never talked about who she was married to, but she once told me that their marriage had to be kept secret because of their positions. I always assumed it was because she was the Knight Lieutenant, married to a Knight Commander. But… maybe it was a lot bigger than that.”

  I suddenly recalled that Cali had served as Devon’s Knight Lieutenant, acting as his advisor and right-hand woman shortly after the Tourney. I had almost forgotten, but that was because there weren’t many classes on the Champion’s second-in-command at the academy. There were not many rules about dating and marriage inside the Knights, but there were rules about it when it came to their respective positions. The biggest issue was the fear that nepotism between a Commander and their partner might cause them to act emotionally in a crisis. It was also strictly forbidden for the Lieutenant and Champion to become involved, as they had critically different responsibilities: the Champion was the head of the department, and served on the council to help make decisions on behalf of the Tower. He still commanded the Knights, of course, but his Lieutenant not only served as his advisor, but the voice of the Knights beneath him. They were expected to tell the Champion how the Knights were feeling about a particular issue, and expected to advise the Knight on how best to serve the council and the Knights. As such, a relationship between the two positions would be seen as… messy, to say the least. The other problem was that the Knight Lieutenant was the only individual in the Citadel who could go to the Tower to report a Champion as being unfit for leadership. The rule was enacted after Kyle Pine, the fourth Champion, reportedly started ordering (and sometimes even forcing) the Knights to act more violently toward citizens, encouraging public beatings and the like. Kyle’s Lieutenant had tried to reason with him, but when that failed, he pled his case to the council, and Scipio recommended enacting a new protocol within the Knights department itself—namely that the Lieutenant could request a vote to have the Champion removed. The case was discussed in great detail in our lessons, because it was significant for setting new precedent. It was the first time that the council had enacted a departmental exclusive protocol, and it was the first bloodless coup of a department in history.

  If Cali and Devon had been married, then that meant their roles as Champion and Lieutenant had been, at some point, illegal. That could explain why no one had ever mentioned it.

  “When did she leave?” I asked, unable to help myself.

  “Right after she found out she was pregnant with Maddox. Her number had been dropping for a while, especially after all of the information she was being made privy to as Devon’s Lieutenant.”

  I frowned. “No, wait. That doesn’t track at all. Cali said Maddox convinced her to leave.”

  Quess shrugged and raised an eyebrow. “Cali did tend to get poetic about all the sentimental stuff. I’m sure she meant that she found out she was pregnant, and that convinced her.”

  “Oh.” I frowned as another thought occurred to me. “Wait, how does Maddox have a net? She’d need one to move around the Tower without triggering the undoc alarms.”

  “How do you think?” Quess said smugly. “I made one.”

  I gave him an incredulous look, not buying into that at all. I didn’t know everything about nets, but my brother had told me a lot. He’d gotten quite fascinated with them during his second year as a Bit for the IT department and I couldn’t get him to shut up about them. Most of it I didn’t understand, but basically, the nets were comprised of long strands of silica-wrapped microfilaments. Before they were implanted at the base of the skull, their dormant shape looked like a computer chip, the long silica laces that would eventually curl across and over a person’s cerebral cortex like the legs of a daddy-long-legs settling its small body down over its prey.

  The nets needed power, which was fine when they were implanted. The human body generated a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees, and the heat from our blood in our brain was a great source of thermal energy, which it happily harvested. When the nets were in their dormant stage, a small battery, no larger than a pin prick, provided them with enough energy to survive for up to two years on a shelf.

  Once an ID was uploaded to a net, it could never be used again. It wasn’t common knowledge, but I had learned in the academy that, in the early years of the Tower, black market dealers dealing in old world supplies started harvesting nets from corpses and hijacking them to give other criminals fake IDs, so they could hide from the law. A one-time transferrable fail-safe had solved that problem.

  Quess had worked in IT – I’d give him that. And IT was where the nets were created, in a secret process that Alex had only ever touched on briefly in our conversations. But I was pretty certain that Quess was pulling my leg, mostly because the resources to make them were hard to get ahold of, and they also required a very special clean environment to be made in. Quess had neither, and I doubted Cali would have let him put anything less than a pristine chip into her daughter’s head.

  “Nice try,” I said, and he grinned at me cheekily, unashamed.

  “It was worth a shot. And to answer your question, Mercury managed to get one for her. I was figuring we’d ask him for some clean ones, so we don’t have to worry about using the scrambler or getting pinged by the Tower.”

  “Good call,” I said. New nets with clean IDs would go a long way to making me feel safer. Even now I felt exposed, in spite of Quess’s reassurance that the scrambler would work.

  My mind drifted back to Maddox, and I sighed. “So is there a chance Devon doesn’t even know he has a child?”

  “Whoa, I’m not even remotely ready to accept that Devon is Maddox’s father. Just… let me get my head around that. I mean… are you sure?”

  I hesitated, going over it yet again in my head. “I mean, I’m fairly sure. Devon… He was angry.”

  “He was there to kill us,” Quess pointed out. “Maybe he’s the type of person who needs to be angry to do that.”

  A shudder came over me, and I looked away, closing my eyes to the image of Cali falling into the torrid waters below. “Maybe, but I heard what I heard and I saw what I saw. They were married, and Maddox is their daughter. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  But if Maddox didn’t know, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. It would do nothing but hurt her further, and maybe even cause her to go off the handle a little bit.

  “I can’t believe this,” Quess muttered, and he shifted around on the floor, angling himself so that he could look me directly in the eye. “What are we going to do?”

  “Do?” I asked. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Maddox has a right to know who her father is. If Cali never
told her, or even lied about it, then doesn’t she have a right to know the truth?”

  I blinked at him, and immediately shook my head. “I don’t think we should tell her,” I said. “It’s only going to hurt her more to know. And I can’t really see what it would achieve in the end. I sometimes think ignorance is better than truth.”

  “That is really jaded, Liana.”

  I shrugged and gave him a pointed look. “Hey, you tell me how this information will somehow be helpful to Maddox, and I will support it.”

  “Well…” He trailed off, looking thoughtful. Then he shrugged. “What if we could use her to spy for us? Like… have her approach Devon and tell him—”

  “Okay, I’m going to stop you right there,” I said, unwilling to let the insanity continue. “No offense, Quess, but that idea is two steps over the edge of the Tower. For one, Devon isn’t going to trust her, and two… do you seriously think that Maddox is going to be able to control her anger at him for long enough to say hello, let alone spy on him?”

  Quess raked a hand through the swatch of black hair topping his head. “No, you’re right. It’s a dumb idea.”

  I sighed and leaned back onto the palms of my hands. “No. Well… yes, but your heart is in the right place. I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. It was just bothering me that she wasn’t talking about it! I never considered that she just didn’t know. But no. I really don’t think we should tell her. We should just focus on the things we can do something about, and leave the rest of it behind.”

  He nodded. “So… do you really think we should try to use Scipio 1.0 to replace the big bad one?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe, but… I mean, a part of me is asking who am I, and what can I even do to fix that whole mess upstairs? Everyone worships Scipio, which means they worship everything he stands for. Sure, it might not be general knowledge that they are executing ones, but will anyone really care when they find out? Really? The council even supported the decision! Should I execute them in return, for blindly following Scipio’s recommendation? Besides, how would we even do it? According to Office Scipio, he’s not exactly up for the task, size-wise. How are we going to figure out a protocol to purge and replace the bad Scipio with the good?”