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

“Rose!” I shouted, worried that she was waiting for me to give her the all-clear.

I was worrying needlessly, though, because even as her name left my lips, I saw her pulling herself through the door. The pod shook under her weight, and then dropped several inches, with a sickening shriek of rending metal. Rose ignored it all as she lifted her legs out, balancing only on her arms. She placed a foot against the hull and was carefully starting to shift her weight onto it when the pod dropped again, and then began to rock to one side, rolling. Rose’s response was even faster, and she quickly sprang up off the only foot she had planted, throwing herself from the pod and into the air toward us.

She landed hard, the glass cracking under her weight, but she quickly caught her balance and moved off the crack before she went crashing through.

The pod, however, was not as lucky, and with a final creaking groan and the tinkle of broken glass, it dropped through the rest of the roof, into the darkness below. I prayed it wouldn’t hurt anyone but couldn’t stick around to find out. My friends needed saving, and I needed to get to Leo to tell him everything that was going on.

“Let’s go,” I said to the others, turning away from the hole and toward the face of the Tower. “We need to get moving.”





23





While I could’ve used Lionel’s command code to open the door to the shell, I let Dylan and Rose do it manually as I kept an eye on the area around us. I had a feeling that at any second, the Hands were going to be making their way up to the hole, whether it was to escape, or to figure out who had just crashed through their ceiling. And I didn’t want to be there when they arrived.

The door opened easily under their ministrations, giving a creaking, metallic noise that had me turning and shouldering the plasma rifle, just in case something was waiting on the other side. As before, water began splattering out across the glass and through the door the moment it was open. The outer shell was still flooding but was not fully flooded. And even though the sun was still shining down brightly from overhead, the darkness inside already seemed imposing. I pulled my hand light from one of the bags on Rose’s back, wrapped the strap around my forearm, and clicked it on. Dylan followed suit, and after a moment’s deliberation, I handed her the handgun and extra clip, wanting her to have a way to defend herself that didn’t require hand-to-hand combat.

“In case you need it,” I told her when she looked up at me in surprise.

She favored me with a lopsided smile. “Show me again how to use it,” she said, and I quickly ran her through the basics: shooting, ejecting the magazine, clearing the chamber. She seemed nervous, especially when I told her exactly what a bullet could do, but it was an apprehension born from the realization that she held someone’s life in her hands when she pointed it at them.

Regardless, I knew she could use it responsibly.

She put the safety on under my watchful eye and then tucked the gun into a pocket on her hip. “I’m in front, okay?”

“Okay,” I replied, swallowing back some of the resentment that she was still following that ridiculous rule. I knew it wouldn’t matter what order we were in if the sentinels found us—they’d kill us all the same way. But I pushed the thought aside and focused on a more relevant question. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“We just need to get to the Citadel, right?” she asked, and then went on without waiting to hear my response. “The closest hatch to the Attic should be maybe three hundred yards from here.”

I hesitated, unsure whether accessing the Citadel was the best idea. We had no idea what the internal situation was like, and since Scipio had used my position as Champion and my bogus crimes against him to declare the department irrevocably contaminated, we could be walking into a civil war—between those trying to win back Scipio’s favor, and those who still believed in me.

And I wasn’t betting there were too many of the latter. I was too new as Champion and hadn’t had time to cultivate relationships with the Knight Commanders under me. My father was likely already organizing extermination squads against me, and Salvatore, now out of the cells, was going to recruit any of the Knight Commanders left over from Devon Alexander’s days. As the former Champion’s second in command, he knew most of them. Had spent nearly two decades developing relationships with them.

And he had been let out with the rest of the legacies, courtesy of Sage.

“I don’t think accessing the Citadel just anywhere is the best idea,” I hedged. “We should try to get to the emergency exit that feeds directly into my quarters. That’s where the others will be.”

Dylan frowned, a deep line forming between her eyebrows. “But we’d have to navigate nearly nine hundred yards of halls just to get there! It would be faster my way and get us to the others sooner! We should make for the closest entrance. If the power’s still on once we’re inside, we can take the elevators right to your quarters. If not, we can still get to the elevator shaft and go down. It’ll be faster than trying to navigate the Attic itself.”

I frowned. Her plan sounded reasonable, but she still wasn’t accounting for human nature. I could see in her eyes that she couldn’t imagine a world where Knight turned on Knight. It just wasn’t in her. Her sense of loyalty to the Citadel was too high.

It was actually a little odd to realize that for all her sardonic and earthy ways, Dylan was still an optimist at heart, and had turned a blind eye to the faults of her fellow Knights. In fact, it made me a little jealous of her; I wished I could believe as easily.

But I couldn’t.

“Sorry, Dylan, but we can’t go through the Citadel,” I said, adjusting the strap of the plasma rifle across my chest. “Scipio broadcast to every department that the Knights were deemed psychologically contaminated because of me, and I’m betting that anti-Liana hit squads have already formed, fully intent on presenting my corpse to Scipio in the hopes they can get a pass. We can’t rely on anyone we encounter in the hall. We’ll be stepping into a civil war.”

Her frown deepened. “You can’t honestly believe that’s true. The Knights voted you in! The younger ones love you, and the older ones see you and think of your mom! They aren’t going to turn on you!”

I pressed my lips together, meeting her words only with disbelief. I honestly couldn’t see it. There was no way every Knight was going to come down on my side. There were too many factors that made it unrealistic.

“They can, will, and probably have,” I said, suddenly tired all over again. Whatever boost of energy I had gotten from my most recent adventures was fading fast, and I was already too emotionally drained to explain to Dylan that no matter how she felt the Knights should be in this situation, no matter how she would be, she couldn’t expect the same behavior out of everyone. “Look, let’s just get inside the Attic and see what that situation is like first. Then we can argue about the best way in, okay?”

Dylan pursed her lips, but then nodded once, tightly. I suppressed a sigh and remained perfectly still as she turned and moved toward the door, past where Rose was standing off to one side, waiting for both of us. Dylan ignored the sentinel entirely as she stepped through the dripping portal, keeping one hand up to prevent the water from drenching her outright, and then turned to one side of the staircase inside and then the other, checking to make sure it was clear.

“We’re good,” she called a second later, her back to the door. “Gonna need that code to open the door, though. Forgot the doors to the inner shell didn’t have hand wheels.”