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

“C’mon, Quess,” I panted, pushing off the wall and planting a heavy boot on another step. “We got this.”

“No, I’ve got it,” Alex said, coming up a few steps from where he had been trailing behind us. There were dark smudges under his eyes now, and I could see exhaustion lining his face, but he took the bag from me and resumed the climb.

“Also, shut up, Quess,” Leo added as he took a step back to let us by.

Quess snorted but fell silent, and the sound of our steps on the stairs resumed. It took ten more steps—each of which I felt all the way from the soles of my feet into my hips—before we were on the landing. Maddox was already twisting the pressure handle open, and a moment later a gust of pressurized air from the Tower burst through with a hiss, swinging the door open.

Revealing another set of stairs that led to a star-laden, inky black sky. I sucked in a breath of the air—air that was free from the regular tinny smell always present inside the Tower—and sighed.

My hair tugged in the cross breeze, and I took the promise of there being fresher, cleaner air in just ten short steps, and used the motivation to hobble up the remaining steps.

The stairs stopped at the surface of the roof with a transition from concrete to solar panel at the end of the last step. There were no lights up here, but the moon was out, shining brightly just over the horizon to the east and coating the world in a myriad of blue shadows that made everything look like a quilted blanket. Everything from the Tower seemed so far away standing here, peering out at a world that I only ever got to see when I was outside.

But there was no time to appreciate the beauty or splendor of it, and I turned to help Alex and Quess up the stairs, grabbing the bag and hauling it up and over the edge to set it down on a solar panel.

“Take a break,” I told everyone, wiping a hand over my forehead. The frigid night air was already beginning to cool my flushed cheeks and heated skin, but soon it would be biting, and the moisture on my skin would only make it worse. It was rare, but the wind chill could cause frostbite, if there was enough moisture on the skin. We’d have to be mindful of the cold and finish up quickly, before it could take effect.

Everyone stood around to catch their breaths and stretch, and I followed suit, trying to relieve some of the lactic acid that had built up in my muscles. I knew we couldn’t linger for long, but given how easily we had managed to make it up without being spotted or intercepted, I felt confident that we could spare a minute or two.

I was walking in a slow circle around the gap where the stairs came up, not wanting to stay still for too long lest my muscles stiffen, when Quess suddenly jerked up from where he was bending over to touch his toes, his eyes going wide and looking into the sky. The abrupt movement caught my eyes, and I immediately started looking around, trying to figure out what he was looking for.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Leo, are you getting this?” Quess asked, ignoring me completely.

I turned to where Leo had been standing a few feet behind me, doing some side stretches. He didn’t seem as shocked as Quess, but his expression was pinched, eyes hard. “I am,” he replied.

“Getting what?” I asked, looking between the two men. Then I glanced at Maddox, who shrugged, clearly as baffled as I was at their strange behavior.

Quess turned to me, his eyes glistening brightly. “Liana, things just took a turn from bad to weird,” he told me.

I frowned at him and sucked in a deep breath, wondering if he said crap like that just to drive me crazy. I was too physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted for these games, and after everything I’d been through today, the last thing I wanted was for my life to get weird. “What. The hell. Is going. On?”

“Do you remember the monitoring station that Leo was talking about a few weeks ago? The one meant for watching for outside transmissions that showed human life?”

I closed my eyes and tried to summon up the conversation. It took me a minute—I was tired, after all—but I did. We’d been talking about trying to find out if there was even life outside the Tower, and Leo had mentioned the monitoring station. I’d made a mental note to check it out later, to see if there were any incoming transmissions that were somehow being blocked, but had never gotten around to it.

“Yes,” I bit out. “Why?”

He licked his lips. “Well, after the Tourney… during those days when you…” Trailing off, he looked away guiltily, as if he realized that he was treading into dangerous lands.

He wasn’t, though, because I didn’t deny what had happened those three days after my mother’s death. Didn’t deny that I had been untethered from reality for most of it, or that it had been full of misdirected hatred toward the AI fragment who had been controlling the sentinel that killed her. “When I wasn’t doing my best,” I told him, motioning somewhat impatiently for him to proceed.

“Well, I had a lot of free time on my hands. I made the spray, tinkered around with a few designs… but on day two I was stir crazy. So Leo and I went out, found the monitoring station, and hacked into it. I meant to tell you about it, but everything’s been so—”

“Crazy,” I finished for him with a nod. “That should be our motto.” I took a deep breath and considered what he was saying, and the brief exchange between him and Leo, and then realized the only way he’d be bringing it up was if something had changed. And there was only one thing that could’ve changed. “Are you telling me that someone from out there is transmitting? And that you can somehow hear them?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Not just transmitting blindly, either. They’re transmitting to us. To the Tower. Asking for us by name, really.”

I blinked several times, trying to wrap my head around what he was saying. It didn’t make any sense. Why would they be transmitting to the Tower? How did they even know we were here? Was it to someone specific, or—

“What do they want?” Maddox asked, cutting off my questions with perhaps the most important one of all.

“Hold on a second,” Quess said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his pad. “I set the feed up to come here, and Leo and I have been monitoring it using some auditory receivers that I whipped up.” Auditory receivers were the implants in our ear canals that translated net transmission into a human voice. He must’ve synced it up with his pad and not his net, which would have explained why he was receiving the signal. “I’ll put it on speaker. I’ll mute the mic, though, so they won’t hear us.”

I held still while he started tapping things on his pad, but inside, my mind was ablaze with the implications. Because if they were contacting the Tower, it meant they knew the Tower was here. And that might mean they had been here before. Could it be? Was it possible that these were the people Roark’s wife had encountered? The ones that had filled them with dreams of escape, and had ultimately led to her death, twenty-five years ago?

I tucked my questions away, knowing that the call would start soon. I wanted to be focused, and that was hard given how tired I was. The rush of adrenaline and excitement had helped, but not for long, and I needed my wits about me.

“… Receiving me? This is Melissa Croft transmitting in the blind, trying to make contact with the Tower. We are in need of medical assistance. We—”