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

“Down an elevator shaft in the shell,” Maddox suggested. “Or one of the plunges.”

“That’s the first place the legacies will check for him,” I replied. Both were common dumping grounds for bodies, whenever there were any. The plunges were a better choice, but only if you could be certain to hit the bottom, which you never really could be. If his body landed on a bit of twisted-up rebar or a crossbeam, they’d find him. That meant that disposing of the body in a place they could never find him was the only solution.

But there wasn’t any place in the Tower like that! The entire thing was a self-contained system. Bodies could be hidden, for a while, but eventually they would be recovered. And forensic evidence could be harvested and tested years after the victim had died. I had no idea how long this legacy war was going to last, so I had to plan for the future.

Which left only one place. “We need to throw him off the Tower,” I said, walking quickly toward them.

Maddox’s brows drew together, forming a deep crease that jutted down the bridge of her nose like a dagger, while Quess’s mouth simply dropped open, wide enough to catch flies if he wanted to. Leo was the only one whose eyebrows rose—but almost a second later, he was nodding.

“She’s right,” he said. “The sensors on the outside of the Tower aren’t designed to pick up and report a dead body.”

“Yeah, but that’s still…” Maddox did some quick calculations and frowned. “Almost eighty floors up from here. The security in the Attic is not the best, but there are still cameras everywhere. Someone is eventually going to notice four people hauling a full body bag to the roof.”

“Then we do everything we can to make it look like something else,” I told her. “It’s the only thing we can do. As soon as we get him out into the main part of the Tower, the sensors won’t register that he’s dead, and as long as we keep him in the bag, no one watching can be sure of what’s inside. We’ll spray our faces with Quess’s spray so the cameras can’t identify us. As for it being eighty floors up…” I pointed up the stairs at the column that controlled my quarters. “I’ll lift the room up to the topmost level, and then we’ll only have forty floors to go.”

“Forty floors of stairs,” Quess griped, and I empathized. I wasn’t looking forward to it either, especially since we would have to wear neural scramblers to mask our net IDs, which meant we couldn’t use the elevators. At least Quess had managed to extend the time we could use the scramblers without risking our nets frying our brains, but I wasn’t particularly looking forward to putting the scrambler back on. It was annoying and started to give headaches after a while, and I had already been wearing one earlier. Yet they gave us time and anonymity to do the deed, and between the four of us, I was certain we could handle it. We didn’t have any choice.

“Zoe, you stay here to take care of Eric and keep an eye on Tian and Liam. We won’t be able to net you, so don’t panic if we’re gone for a little while. Leo, start moving the platform. Quess, find out if there’s a way we can get into the Attic from here without going into the Citadel itself. How much time do we have, Maddox?”

She checked her indicator while the others scrambled to follow my orders, her finger tapping on the face to change it from her rank to the time, and her features pinched. “Six minutes until Cornelius syncs with the council server. It’s going to be close.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said reassuringly.

I wasn’t sure if it was a lie or not, but it was the best thing I could offer.

The platform began to rumble at the same time as I heard my brother’s voice announce, “I’m coming with you,” from the hallway. I turned and saw him standing there, his uniform back on and a bleak look in his eyes. “I have to clean up my own mess.” It dawned on me that he probably hadn’t even tried to sleep before getting up and dressing again, which meant he had heard the tail end of the conversation and knew what was going on.

I stared at him, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to go back to bed and let me handle it. But then I remembered his words, how broken he had looked, and how much he wanted to be useful, and I found I couldn’t deny him, especially given that we needed the help. Not to mention, I couldn’t cut him out again. It was partially what had gotten us into this mess.

“The help would be appreciated.”





16





For the second time in twenty-four hours, I was carrying Baldy through the labyrinth of corridors in the Attic. This time, however, I had help, and we took turns carrying him down the hall, the bag swinging heavily between the two people whose turn it was. My arms and legs felt leaden from all the exertion today, and I was certain that if I let my eyes close for too long, I would pass out. The fear was enough to keep them wide open, and only added to the press of my nerves as we made our way down the hallway.

Getting here had been simpler than I had thought it would be, but getting up had been more difficult than I had anticipated. I had assumed there were staircases between the levels spread out through the floor, but the forty topmost levels of storage space could only be accessed through the elevators. We couldn’t use those, as they were heavily monitored by live techs, to make sure no one was using them to transport illegal materials. That meant we had to use the stairs in the shell.

It took us forty-five minutes to get from where my apartment elevator dropped us off to the thick wall that led out into the shell and our designated staircases. It took another hour to carry him up them. At any given point, I would’ve loved to just open up a hatch and shove him out, but there was too much risk of a crosswind carrying his body onto one of the farming floors that extended out from the sides of the Tower. The safest place to drop him was from the corner of the roof. Even if there was a breeze, it wouldn’t carry him far enough in either direction that he’d hit one of the farming floors, and he likely wouldn’t be seen on the way down.

So together we climbed, silently, moving as quickly as we could go without sapping all of our strength. Even still, Leo and I had to take more breaks than Alex, Quess, and Maddox, though they were understanding enough. By the time we reached the last level and trudged another forty-five minutes to get to the center of the 215th floor, where the only staircase with access to the roof existed, it was my turn to carry again, along with Quess. And Quess was complaining. Again.

“I just don’t see why we didn’t call Lacey and ask her to throw him in the forges,” he said for the umpteenth time.

I gritted my teeth, focusing on the steps leading up and trying to ignore the trembling of my legs. My palms were sweating, and the microfiber body bag felt like it was slipping from my grasp.

“We could’ve sent him out with the laundry, like she transported you and Leo, and just dumped him into an oven at the smelting factory. No evidence, no muss, and definitely—” He grunted, and the bag jerked slightly in my grip as he tripped on a step. The bag smacked into me, and I lost my balance and slammed into a wall with my shoulder, a sharp cry of pain escaping my throat before I could stop it.

It didn’t hurt past the surprise of the impact, and embarrassment flooded through me that I had made such a big spectacle about nothing. I started to tell everyone that I was fine, but Leo had moved down the handful of steps between us, brushing by Quess a little rudely to do so.

“Are you okay?” he asked, cupping my cheek.

I nodded, trying to flex the shoulder in question, even with Baldy just swinging between Quess and me. “Yeah,” I said tiredly. “We almost there, Maddox?”

I looked up at where she was climbing the last few steps to the next landing in the square staircase. “The door is here,” she announced. “Just a few more steps.”