The Girl Who Dared to Think 7: The Girl Who Dared to Fight

“They’re all dead,” Dylan gasped. “All the Knights we came with.”

“I know,” I said, spotting a bridge across the stream that encircled the Council Room. “I screwed up. I thought we had everybody, but… argh!”

I stopped mid-step, a wave of turbulent emotions threatening to overwhelm me. I wanted to scream and rant and rave. To hit something and destroy. But I also wanted to break down and cry. I had pushed to end this, to try to stop every legacy at once, and because of one stupid oversight, it had backfired colossally. Thanks to me, Sage had been forced into accelerating his plans—again. But this time it was much worse. He seemed to know and have everything he needed. Except for Leo. And if he reached him, then it would be over for all of us.

It was my responsibility, my mistake, and I had to fix it.

“Liana.” Dylan coughed, and I blinked and looked at her only to find her giving me a fierce look. “Your fault or not, we need a plan. I need a medical kit, and then we have to—”

“Lacey has a medical kit,” I interjected, not wanting her to think I was breaking down. I’d done that enough in the all-too-recent past—and I was over it. “I managed to get her out, but she’s been shot.” I paused, took a deep breath, and then looked at the bridge. “C’mon, I left her nearby.”

Dylan nodded, and together we made our way down the handful of steps and across the bridge. My head was constantly swiveling as the shadows grew deeper and darker the farther we moved from the fire, searching for any sign of Sadie or the other sentinel, but the area seemed deserted.

I did, however, spot Lacey lying on the ground in front of a second bridge, and moved toward her. I wasn’t sure whether she’d crawled there and passed out, or walked there and fainted, but she clearly needed more medical attention than she’d been able to administer herself. I pointed her out to Dylan, and within moments we were moving toward her.

I slowed to a stop and started to lower Dylan down when we arrived, her weight beginning to grow oppressive. The girl cursed as she settled down on the ground, baring her teeth against the pain.

“Sentinel stepped on my leg,” she muttered. “It’s probably broken.”

“I’ll look at it in a second,” I replied, holding my gun out to her. “Take this and watch for any sign of trouble while I check on Lacey.”

She stared at the gun in confusion, and I jerked it up, fired once at a tree—making her flinch—and then held it out with one hand. I hated wasting the bullet, but because Dylan had never seen one before, I needed to show her what it could do. “Trigger,” I said, pointing at it. “You just point this end at the person you want to see dead and squeeze this. And if you see a sentinel with purple eyes, don’t fire. She’s our friend.”

“Our friend?” she spluttered. “Liana, what is going on?”

I ignored her question to focus on Lacey for a second, grabbing her shoulder to turn her over onto her side. She groaned loudly as I flipped her over, her eyelids fluttering.

“Liana?” she whispered, before giving a wet cough. “I don’t feel so good.”

“You don’t look so good,” I replied, unhooking her coveralls and pulling them down and her shirt up. She’d sealed up the wounds on her abdomen, but I could see dark bruises starting to form, deep purple against her skin, and knew she was bleeding internally. The bio-foam was great, but it didn’t work unless it had direct access to the damaged area.

Lacey had sealed the entrance hole, but not the internal damage.

“And you’re doing a lot worse,” I told her gravely, grabbing the medical kit to see what I could do for her with the medicine inside. “You’re bleeding internally. I gotta get you to a doctor, but the only one I know is Quess. We’re going to go to the Citadel.”

“Can’t,” Lacey panted, shaking her head. “We have to… Tony.”

“Tony’s gone,” I told her, grabbing a vial and plugging it in to the pneumatic injector. “Sage took him. This is a painkiller, and it’s going to make you feel a little better. Okay?”

She nodded, and I quickly pressed the injector against her abdomen, right next to the wound, and injected a dose. I did the same with her shoulder. I removed the vial and put in another one—one that held a medication that would slow a person’s heartrate considerably, to slow down traumatic blood loss, if I remembered correctly—and injected that into her neck. I finished her drug cocktail with a mild stimulant, to keep her awake and lucid.

She gave a shuddering breath with the last one, her eyes widening and becoming more alert, and started to prop herself up on her elbows, but I held her firmly in place. “Try not to move so much. I didn’t find any exit wounds, which means the bullets are still inside of you. You could damage yourself more.”

“Fine,” Lacey spat. “But we can’t go to the Citadel. Not yet. We need to get Tony first.”

I frowned as I pulled a medical scanner out and started running it over Dylan’s leg, using the X-ray function to search for broken bones. Lacey clearly hadn’t heard anything I just told her. “Lacey, I said—”

“No, listen to me,” she hissed, reaching out to grab my forearm in a vice-like grip. “I didn’t bring Tony with me. I brought a transceiver. We designed it so that when it was plugged in, it would trigger a wireless download. I planned to destroy it if anything went wrong, but then things went wrong in all the worst ways.”

My eyes widened at what she was saying, and then terror caught me hard and fast, reminding me of something that I had almost forgotten. My net. Sage could be watching it right now! He would know I was alive, see what we were talking about, and—

I shut off my thoughts mid-stream and focused instead on what I needed: the laser cutter. “Liana?” Dylan said weakly. “What’s—”

“Shut up,” I ground out. “Both of you. My net is still in, and Sage has a way of monitoring it.”

There was a pause, and then the two women fell silent while I dug the laser out of the first-aid kit. I quickly pushed my hair aside and pressed my fingers against the back of my neck, feeling for the incision point. It didn’t scar, not exactly, but there was a hard ridge under the skin that showed where to cut. I felt for it with my fingers, and then spread the area flat between them, trying to give myself guidelines that I could use to cut blindly. I made sure the laser was set at the lowest setting, and then prayed that I didn’t make too much of a mess when I made the incision.

I winced when I activated the laser, the back of my neck starting to sting, and carefully dragged it down, only shutting it off when I felt the tendrils of the net in my brain begin to retract. The sensation was disconcerting, but finished within seconds, and I quickly reached in with my fingertip to remove the hard chip that the net formed in its inactive state.

I released a breath I hadn’t known I had been holding as I held it up to look at it, my fingers and the chip red with blood, reminding me that I was still bleeding. I set the net down and quickly squeezed some bio-foam out onto my fingers, then pressed them against the wound and smeared the pink goop inside. The wound closed, and I quickly wiped off the net and tucked it into my pocket. Even though I knew Sage could sense my thoughts on it, I might need it at some point, and hopefully if I kept it out for long enough, he would think I was dead and stop monitoring it. I turned to Lacey.

“Okay, what are you talking about?”

Lacey rolled her eyes and reached forward to grab my lapels. “Tony is in Cogstown! We still have time to get him! If we can keep him out of Sage’s hands, we can—”