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

“Thank you,” Melissa said, and I shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. Because they deserved to know that we weren’t even meeting under legitimate terms. I was a representative of the Tower, but I wasn’t here as one, and we only had a limited amount of time before they had to leave—or risked being discovered.

“Don’t thank me yet,” I said grimly. “You need to know that we aren’t exactly… meeting with you on behalf of the council. We knocked out the sensors and hijacked your signal to keep you off the Tower’s radar. But that won’t last long. If the council finds out you are here, they’ll pull up the protocols from what happened last time and follow precedent.”

“You mean use those laser things on us?” Thomas asked, and I nodded. The two exchanged a long, considering look. “Then we should talk inside,” Thomas said brusquely. I watched as he pulled the gun out of the holster, ejected the clip and a round from the chamber with a practiced move, and then set the weapon on the ground. Melissa followed, her hands a blur as she repeated his action with her own gun, before placing it next to his.

I stared at both of them and realized that if we had gotten into a shooting match with them, they probably would’ve won. I had only used the thing once, with the help of some weird ability in the legacy net that hadn’t even been mine. Still, I did know how to remove the clip and clear the chamber, so I followed their lead.

Only I didn’t bother to move fast, because I knew I wasn’t confident enough with it yet. Instead, I opted for a lazier motion, hoping that they wouldn’t pick up on the fact that I wasn’t as good as them, while also showing them that I didn’t feel the need to compete with them.

Leo followed my action and unloaded his gun, and then the five of us were walking up the metal ramp toward the rectangular light coming from the opening. When we reached the top, I immediately zeroed in on Quess kneeling next to someone on the floor, Maddox squatting close by with his medical bag to hand him items as he needed them. I couldn’t see who they were working on, but a young woman, probably eighteen or nineteen years old, was standing over them both, her arms folded tight across her chest. Her hair was a deep auburn and hung in tight corkscrews around her heart-shaped face.

She glanced over at us as we entered, and I got a flash of blue eyes that were so vibrant, they glistened like the crystal components in our computers. “What are you doing?” she asked warily, taking half a step toward us. “You know that we’re not supposed to let anyone on the ship. Your dad—”

“Is already going to be pissed that we came here in the first place,” Thomas said on an exhale, two parts annoyed, one part indifferent. “We’re already in for a penny, Hela. Might as well get something out of it. Besides…” He trailed off and gave me another appraising look. “They’re keeping us secret from the rest of their council to help us.”

Helena—Hela—blinked her eyes several times, and then looked at the three of us, studying Leo first, then Alex, and finally me. “Her?” she asked, and Thomas nodded.

The redhead sucked in a breath, and then shook her head. “Mom is going to tear us all a new one when she wakes up.”

“Be grateful for it,” I told her in a raw, hoarse voice, before I could stop myself. The pain I felt regarding my mother’s death was only rivaled by my curiosity and interest in what she was saying—that they were breaking the rules about being here, as well. They weren’t alone—they had experienced supervision—but had gone against the orders of their government in an effort to save her. In a lot of ways, they were in the same boat that we were.

She gave me another considering look, her facial features tightening. “Guys, did you notice her eyes?”

“Of course we did,” Melissa said impatiently, flipping some of her deep brown hair over her shoulder. “It’s why we let them on board.” She paused and shifted her weight as her gaze drifted over to where Maddox and Quess were working. “How is she doing?”

“How she is doing is a very complicated question,” Quess grunted, his body moving back and forth with the motions of his hand. “The very simple answer is not bad, all things considered.”

“All things considered?” I repeated stupidly. On impulse, I moved over to where he was only a few inches away from falling face-first onto his patient. But as more of her came into view, I realized what Quess had meant.

The woman on the bed was in her early forties and had an assortment of slight wrinkles on her slack face, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. It was the lines of blackened and cracked flesh that radiated from her side up and across her chest, a slash of pink through the middle of it, where the flesh had ripped open to reveal the muscles and tendons inside. I immediately recognized the damage as severe electrical burns. It was clear they had been doing their best to take care of them with their own medicine, but some of the larger ones were leaking sickly yellow lines of pus.

“What did that?” I asked, horrified at the damage I was seeing. Quess was doing his damnedest to help her, and with what he had in his medical kit, I was certain he could save her, but she would be severely scarred for the rest of her life. Bio-foam was amazing with all sorts of lacerations, but on burnt flesh, we had to resort to other methods—namely a transplant of a gelatinous material we produced in the Tower, along with some secret components that sped up the healing process. It would scar, but she would be alive.

“We got caught up in a war going on in the south,” Thomas said tiredly. “We were down there trying to establish a diplomatic relationship with the regime of one of the settlements under attack, when there was a coup at his palace. We managed to make it back to our ship, but Amber was caught in a blast from one of their weapons. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

A war? Down south? Between people? It took me a moment—probably because I had been raised my entire life to believe that we were the only humans who had survived the End—but it finally clicked that there were more people. Living out there and surviving, just like we were. Well, maybe not exactly like us, but still. Dozens of questions hovered on my tongue, just begging for me to open my mouth and let them flood out, but I held them in place.

“I thought she was dead,” Hela whispered, blood draining from her face. “Will she make it?”

I wanted to reassure her, but once again, Quess beat me to it.

“Listen, you don’t know me yet,” he said, emphasizing the yet with the sound of tape tearing from a leech patch, designed to draw out infection in wounds like this. “But I am friggin’ awesome at everything I do. So believe me when I say that your mother is going to be just fine.”

Beside him, Maddox chuckled and looked up at Hela. “He is really good at what he does.”

Hela scowled at them, her eyes almost crossing with the force of her annoyance. “I won’t believe it until I see it,” she declared imperiously.

Quess only laughed at that and continued to work. I watched for a few more seconds, and then moved back to Melissa and Thomas, the questions dancing a merry jig around my head. I wanted to ask all of them at once, but I didn’t want to overwhelm them, or tip my hand about just how ignorant we were regarding the outside world. So I settled on the one that had been bugging me since the start of this.

“Why do you all keep fixating on my eyes?”

Thomas gave me a small and sad smile. “Sorry if we’re weird about that. You can tell a lot about a person from their eyes, and yours are very special.”

“Why?” I demanded, still woefully confused and unhappy about it. Was it the color? Admittedly, amber-colored eyes were super rare, but what did that have to do with anything?

“Your eyes remind us of our parents,” Melissa said. I looked over at her, and her own eyes were full of shadows. “They have the same look. They have ever since the war.”