The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)

The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)

Bella Forrest




1





Before the Tower, humanity took chances.

They plunged into the unknown with both feet, some bearing the brunt of failure, while others snagged the fruit of success. Both paths were taught so that others could learn, grow, and build. They had the courage to explore, the intelligence to question, the spark to create, and the daring to risk it all for the simple opportunity to try. Their bravery paved the way for those behind them, inspiring the following generations to build upon what they’d created, expand even farther out, so that the unknown could become known.

Once, humanity had been filled with pioneers. Now, humanity seemed content to put its head down and survive.

But not me. Not anymore. Not after I had discovered the truth: the AI designed to keep the Tower safe, Scipio, was actually being manipulated by a group of people called legacies. They had been trying to dismantle and control him since the beginning of the Tower. And right now, I was in the quarters of one of their leaders—possibly even the leader of their organization—in the process of recovering Jasper and Rose, two AI fragments that had once been part of Scipio but had been stolen by the legacies as part of their plan to control him.

We had recovered Rose from a sentinel the legacies had stolen and used to attack innocent people, and had found the program damaged as a result of the torture the legacies had put her through. But Leo, the AI modeled after Lionel Scipio and currently inhabiting the body of my boyfriend, Grey, had managed to stabilize her, and we had sent her after Jasper, who was trapped in the head of the IT Department’s personal terminal, panicked by the thought that she was torturing him like she had Rose.

But something had gone wrong, and we’d ended up having to physically break into her private quarters in order to recover both programs. We couldn’t afford to leave them in our enemy’s hands—not just because they were sentient beings being tortured, but also because if we wanted to fix the damage the legacies had done to Scipio, we would need them. They were a part of his code, and without them, he was degrading.

So I had lied to the council, telling them that my quarters had suffered a computer glitch that reset my entire apartment. I’d used it to lure Sadie Monroe, the head of IT—and possible leader of a legacy family—there. Then my friends and I attacked her, stole her net (and the ID credentials attached to it) to access her room, and broke in. As far as capital offenses went, it was pretty bad. If we were caught by the council, I’d be kicked off, and every last one of us would be put into the expulsion chambers.

But that was nothing compared to what would happen if the legacies found out what we were doing, which was why we had gone to extreme lengths to cover our trail.

The first step was using a medication called Spero to erase Sadie’s memory of the attack, and then a mild sedative to adjust her perception of the amount of time she spent in the apartment. But since we had a limited number of pills, and she was the head of her own department, we couldn’t keep her for too long, or people would notice. Which meant moving fast.

Then, there was the fun bonus hurdle that everything in a councilor’s quarters was recorded, and we didn’t have time to get rid of the recordings of our comings and goings. Instead, we planned to replicate the same tactic we had used to lure Sadie from her department, and reset her quarters. It would erase all of the data on her terminal, and hopefully she would believe it was another glitch related to the one in my quarters. If we were successful in stealing Jasper, we hoped that she would further believe that he’d been somehow erased in the process.

But we had to be careful. Because if the legacies found out that we stole Jasper, they would realize that we knew about the fragment AIs. And that we had one of them. In which case they would come after us with everything they had.

And I couldn’t defend us all from an enemy whose face I didn’t even know.

Which was what made this mission all the more integral. Sadie was clearly one of them—the legacy net in the back of her neck had proved that—and we were banking on her files containing information about who she was working with. That, along with recovering Jasper and Rose, was of paramount importance to me, because with that, I could finally begin to root out the corruption of the legacies.

And even though we had slapped together an insane plan and leapt through all of these impossible hoops, things had been going great. I had been stealing files from Sadie’s desk while Leo had been working on Jasper and Rose. For some reason, Jasper was the one who had attacked Rose when she entered his system—and was still attacking her—and given our limited timeframe, Leo had started downloading both of them onto some hard drives, rather than trying to separate them immediately. He’d also been grabbing all of Sadie’s computer files. Everything had been just freaking perfect.

Until it had stopped being so.

I exchanged a nervous look with Leo and then looked back to the shut bedroom door: a thin and weak barrier against anyone who wanted in. “How did he know we were here?” I asked, my voice barely a level above a breath. It had to be; my throat already felt tight, the memory of drowning in blood causing a visceral reaction in me.

The sensation was understandable, though. Somewhere on the other side of the door, walking in a strong and confident manner down the curved hall of Sadie’s apartment, was the man who had cut my throat only yesterday, and five of his friends. He and I had crossed paths several times, and each time, he had only grown more dangerous. The last time I’d seen him, I’d been looking into his eyes as he stabbed the knife into my carotid artery.

He was a legacy who had tried to kill me—and now he was here. It only confirmed in my mind that he and Sadie were working together, but in what way? Was he in charge? Was it her? Or someone else?

And why was he here? Did he happen to notice Sadie’s net transmission in the brief moment when I had removed the neural blocker to gain access to her apartment? I knew the legacies had a way of monitoring the system, so it wasn’t that far outside of our belief that they could have. But it had only been active for a few seconds, while we gained access to the room. Did he actually know we were there, or was he there for something else? Fear crept along my skin, and my stomach quivered with uncertainty.

“I don’t know,” Leo replied in answer to my question, his voice also as soft as possible. “But Jasper and Rose are still downloading,” he said, tightening his grip on his gun. “Even if they aren’t here for us, they are going to notice that something is off as soon as they go in her office. We left the desk a mess.”