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

The Tower’s width was approximately half a mile, which meant that making our way across the roof, even at the light jog I pushed us to, and with no walls to slow our path, would still take us eight to ten minutes.

I searched the sky whenever I could, trying to find some glimpse of the machine they were using to carry them through the air. How big was it? How many people could it hold? I tried to imagine what their machines looked like and kept conjuring up images of mechanical bees and dragonflies. The bee one was kind of ridiculous, but the dragonfly one, that would be a sight. I wondered if they would have mechanical wings that moved, or wings that were stationary, attached to some sort of propulsion device. I hoped for the moving ones, wanting them to be clear enough to see through to the stars above. What would it be like to fly in the air? To touch the clouds and marvel at the world below? The closest I had ever come to flying was with my lashes, but the real thing had to be so much more exhilarating. To feel nothing above and below you, suspended only by science and human engineering, free to roam in whichever direction the wind could take you…

On and on I looked, stealing glances toward the sky, but the inky night revealed nothing, not even under the bright blue light of the moon.

My ribs were aching by the time we approached the edge of the roof, and my legs were beyond shaky. Actually, they felt like bundles of spasming nerves that were about to shut down in protest. But I didn’t stop as we shifted our position and angled ourselves into a spot where we could heave him sideways over the edge. We slowed to a stop a few feet from the very edge, and I turned to Alex.

“On three?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the bag between us. His face was an indiscernible mask, but I knew what he was feeling. I was feeling it too, to a lesser degree. Inside the bag was somebody’s son. Somebody’s brother. Maybe even somebody’s father. He’d attacked me, yes, and played a part in the deaths of other people, but he still had a family. He still had people who would wonder after him and miss him.

But I couldn’t feel guilty. Not after everything he had put us through. I reminded myself that if things had played out differently, it could’ve been him where we were standing, and any one of us in the bag. Or worse, it could’ve been Leo and Baldy in the bag.

Still, the situation didn’t sit right with me. It wasn’t guilt exactly, but something more speculative, and I found myself wondering whether Baldy and I were more alike than I cared to admit. I did what I did to protect my adopted family, and I had to imagine that in some dark way, he did what he did for his. He’d been willing to kill himself to prevent Leo from learning his secrets; wouldn’t I do the same thing in his shoes?

Yes, but it wasn’t the same, I told myself firmly. I wasn’t like him. We weren’t like him.

We didn’t kill to try to control things, but to defend ourselves.

And it occurred to me that my brother and I were both culpable in shooting Baldy. Because Alex may have caused me to pull the trigger, but it had been my finger on the gun, tightened to the point that a fraction of a centimeter had set it off. I felt I should tell him that, to let him know that we were both in this together, but I had no idea whether it would even reach him.

I wasn’t even sure where he was right now.

“One,” I breathed, drawing the bag back and then forward with the others. The material of the bag rustled, and I tried to block out the fact that we were dumping a man’s body off the side of the Tower.

“Two.” The weight was awkward, shifting back and forth in a way that made me picture his arms and legs rag-dolling inside, his head lolling on a neck with a bullet hole in it.

“Three.” I let go, the fabric slipping from my fingers as the bag flew up and over the edge, into open air. It hung for a second, and then gravity took hold, gently tugging it down and away.

I flicked my wrist and threw a lash line down against the glass pane behind me, creating a safety line, and then sidled toward the edge and looked down. The bag had already fallen at least a hundred feet and continued to plummet. The trajectory angled to the right slightly, a crosswind clearly pushing the bag and corpse over, but it wasn’t by much.

All too soon, the bag became indiscernible from the velvet darkness below, and I closed my eyes… and truly owned up to my part in Baldy’s death. I had left Leo alone, and hadn’t been there when Baldy had taken control. I had been pointing a gun at him when Alex hit my hand. I had been ready to pull the trigger if he made even the slightest move to hurt me or my friends.

He hadn’t been a good man, and I hadn’t wanted him to die without facing a trial for his crimes first. Still, what was done was done, and we had company coming. The outsiders were going to be here any second, and we needed to be on the other side of the roof before they arrived.

“C’mon,” I whispered to the others, turning my back to the edge. “Let’s go.”

We made our way over to where Leo and Quess were working to disrupt the sensors. If they couldn’t disable them before the aliens arrived in their flying machine, then the entire council would be alerted to their presence, and I wasn’t sure I could keep the other councilors from attacking them.

I continued to scan the skies as we moved, trying to find some shape or shadow to tell me where they were, but as the minutes ticked by, I grew more and more concerned. Had something happened to them? Had they changed their minds and turned back? Was this a ruse just to see if anyone was still inside the Tower, or even a prelude to an attack?

“What’s taking so long?” Maddox breathed explosively, and I realized she was feeling exactly the same way.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying not to let my nervousness show. “It really has been a long time. I think—”

My words were cut off as a sudden gust of wind exploded out of nowhere, strong enough to make my hair whip like tiny lashes against the skin of my face. I threw up an arm to cover my eyes at the stinging dust the wind kicked up, the force of it strong enough to make it difficult to breathe.

I reached out for Maddox and Alex, terrified the wind would somehow push us back or off the edge, but then the wind just died down, softening to a gentle breeze. I straightened slowly and frowned, bewildered by the rapid shift in weather. Looking around to make sure Quess and Leo were okay, I was surprised to see them still hunched over, their own arms held over their heads. Dust swirled around them, their hair still whipping in the chaos. Something about it was off, however, and it took me several seconds to figure out what.

It was the direction of the wind. It had come up so quickly that I hadn’t noticed it—I’d just been concerned about our safety. But now that I was paying attention, I realized that the wind was being generated from above. My eyes looked up, searching the area just over Quess and Leo, and after a handful of heartbeats, I could see it: a dim, dark outline that blocked a patch of the night sky, moving slowly away from the two men to hover over the area we had designated, just beyond where Quess and Leo were cowering under the torrential wind. And I realized that I was looking at a flying machine.