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

“We can’t!” she cried. “The sentinels—”

A metal hand slid through the door and wrapped itself over Cyril’s head. He gave me a pleading look and his grip tightened on my arm, but before I could even pull my gun and fire at Alice, he was viciously ripped away, hard enough that I was slammed into the door with him before our grip on each other broke.

I stumbled back, my entire arm and side throbbing, and then raced toward the gap in the door. “Don’t!” I cried, not wanting to lose him, but it was too late. With a loud grunt, Neela drove her weight against the wrench and sealed the door closed. I stopped just short of it, staring at it, unable to understand that it had closed.

“He was still out there,” I said softly, my stomach churning as I fully comprehended what closing the door meant to the people on the other side. I could hear their fists beating on the door, their screams begging to be let in, and it was more than I could bear. “They need help!”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Neela bit off tearfully, her angry tone so deep and wounded that I turned and considered her in a new light. She scrubbed the tears from her face and gave me a fierce look. “Engineer Green ordered me to protect Cogstown at all costs, and that meant letting the people in the hall die to save it. I’m going to have to live with that for the rest of my life, so I do not need you to remind me of it right now.”

I stared at her, and then immediately felt contrite. She was absolutely right, and it had been sanctimonious of me to act like she had done it out of maliciousness. I knew that Requiem Day meant hard choices, but the reality was far different than I ever could’ve imagined. “I’m sorry,” I exhaled, turning toward her. “You are absolutely right. I just… I wish we could’ve saved more.”

“Me too,” she said, wiping the tears from her lashes and taking a moment to collect herself. “And I’m going to. There are more doors that need opening. But you two need to go find Lacey. There’s a medic station down the hall—that’s where I told the sentinel to take her. Go left at the fourth intersection and keep going straight. You’ll see it.”

I nodded, and on impulse, reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “Thank you for your help, Neela.”

She nodded, and then turned to a few of the Cogs, who were fitting expandable braces to the gears in the door and the wall opposite from it, to make sure it stayed wedged shut. I watched them for a second, wondering what sort of struggle they were in for, and realized that it would be nonstop until I could find a way to put an end to Sage.

And the first step of that was getting to Tony. “C’mon,” I said to Dylan. “Let’s hope Lacey’s still awake and can give us Tony’s location.”

Dylan nodded and began moving down the hallway, her limp less pronounced now. I followed close behind, checking my watch. It had been an hour and a half since Sage had given the order to kill the power and started scaling the wall, which gave us thirty minutes to get to Tony before Sage did, provided Lacey’s timetable was accurate.

Even if it wasn’t, that was all the time I was willing to spare on this. My friends were trapped in the Citadel, and I had to get to them before Eustice and the other legacies did.





10





We followed Neela’s directions and spotted a white sign sporting the Medica’s insignia after only a few minutes of walking. The power was still working in Cogstown, so the door opened as soon as I pushed the button outside.

Inside, Anna was racing around a diagnostic table where Lacey was sitting, setting up tools and equipment. She looked up as we entered, and then back down at what she was doing. Beside Lacey sat a man, whom I recognized as one of her lieutenants in the legacy arm of her operation, and a transfusion tube was dangling between the two. Rose was standing in the far corner of the room, trying to look as diminutive as possible.

“There you are,” Lacey said hoarsely. “I’ve been waiting forever.”

“No, I’ve been waiting forever,” Anna spat hotly, folding her arms over her chest and taking a step back. “She wouldn’t let me start the operation until you were here!”

I looked at Anna and then back at Lacey. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Anna that it was the right call on Lacey’s part, given that we needed her to tell us where Tony was, but I held back, knowing that I didn’t want Lacey to die just because she had held off from the surgery waiting for me.

“Lacey, where is Tony?” I asked, taking a step toward her. “In your quarters, or—”

Lacey gave a hacking laugh and shook her head. “Needed to put him somewhere he could escape from easily,” she rasped. “He’s… in the… door…”

Her breathing started to catch, and the monitor over the diagnostic table began to flash red in warning. “The internal bleeding is starting to fill the cavity around her lungs!” Anna shouted, tapping on the screen. A moment later the monitor depicted the image of what were presumably Lacey’s lungs, showing the area filling with darkness, the lungs slowly deflating. The young intern stared at it for several seconds, her eyes wide and mouth open, but before I could snap her out of it and tell her to get to work, something took over and she grabbed a pneumatic injector from the small table of items she’d gathered, inserted a vial, and pressed it against Lacey’s neck.

I realized she was humming to herself as she tossed the injector down and retrieved another bit of tube, this one hooked to a giant needle. She hooked one end of the tube to a nozzle on the wall—a vacuum, I realized a second later. Lacey gasped helplessly, like a fish, as Anna pressed a shaky hand to her side, right under her armpit, her fingers probing the space between ribs. I was trying to keep from telling Anna to just do it, or Lacey was going to die, when Anna blew out a slow breath and shoved the needle into Lacey’s side. The vacuum that Anna had hooked into immediately began removing the blood, and Lacey’s breathing grew easier.

But her eyelids were getting heavy from whatever medicine Anna had administered. I could see that she was slowly losing her tenuous grasp on reality and was about to be unconscious. I had no way of knowing how long Anna would take patching her up and had no clue what Lacey meant by Tony being in the door. But it was now or never. I took a step toward the woman on the table and leaned over her.

“Lacey, focus. Where is Tony?”

Lacey blinked groggily at me. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” she asked heavily. “First Ambrose… then Strum… All my work and preparation, all for nothing.”

I stared at her for a long moment, not sure what I could say. I understood how she felt, because I felt defeated as well. Even after everything we had done to get us here, I wasn’t certain we could win this fight. What did it matter if I got Tony or saved my friends? I had no idea what Sage was planning, or even where he was. Finding him during Requiem Day would be nigh impossible. Yet here I was, still fighting.

And I wasn’t about to let Lacey give up.

“You’re not going to die,” I told her. “Anna is going to patch you up in no time. You just wait and see.”

Lacey gave me a weak smile. “You know… Liana… I really, really couldn’t stand you… for the longest time.”

I gave a derisive laugh and shifted a little closer to her. “And now?”

Her eyelids blinked heavily. “I still can’t,” she admitted. “But… at least I know I can trust you. Lynch?”

“Yes, Lacey,” the man giving her blood said, standing up. “What is it?”

“Get the Champion and her people to the server farm, to the door controls. I put Tony in there to protect him. He—” She broke off, a yawn catching her by surprise. “Those are some really good drugs,” she told Anna as soon as the yawn finished, and I heard a slight slur to her words that told me she was going out. “Liana?”