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

Silence met my remark. I said I heard you, Liana. I’ll do my best to explain it to him when he wakes up. What do you need from me?

I paused and recalibrated. It took me a moment to get my bearings, because I was still reeling with the sudden feeling that I was losing everyone. Zoe, Quess, and Maddox all wanted to go, and I was betting that if Grey was himself again, he would choose to leave as well. And their decision was out of my hands—had never been in my hands in the first place. My friends had already made up their minds. It didn’t matter what I thought.

But I could dwell on that later. For now, we needed to choose an emissary to plead our case to the Patrians. “So who’s going to go?” I asked.

“You mean, who can go,” Quess said dejectedly. “Obviously it can’t be Maddox or me, as we’re both a part of your staff and will be missed. And clearly not Leo, since he won’t want to.”

“I am perfectly content in the home my father built,” Leo agreed. “But there is a chance that Grey would like to go. He’ll certainly be able to tell us soon.” He met my gaze and then looked away, and a massive lump formed in my throat. He couldn’t be saying what I thought he was saying, could he? “I predict he’ll be awake by the end of next week, his memory fully restored.”

Scipio help me, I did not need that news right at this moment. Everyone was looking to me, seeing how I would respond, and it took far longer than it should have. “It’ll be good to have him back,” I said, forcing a fake smile to my lips. Don’t think about Leo leaving you, too, I thought to myself. I cleared my throat, trying to dislodge the rock that had formed there, and then sighed. “So Quess, Maddox, and Leo are all out. What about Zoe?”

No way, she replied automatically. I’m not leaving Eric’s side until he’s on his own two feet and coming with me wherever I go.

Of course she wouldn’t leave him behind for this. Not to mention, Lacey would notice her disappearance and think that maybe we were making a run for it. That wouldn’t be great, as she had damning evidence that seemed to prove I had tampered with Scipio during my trial against Devon Alexander (even though I hadn’t).

Alex sighed heavily and shifted in his seat. “I should be the one to go.”

My spine straightened, and I immediately began to shake my head. “Alex, no. You need to stay here, with me, so I can help you—”

“What, figure out how to keep surviving day-to-day Tower life? Or continue to be paranoid that everyone in my department is spying on me, waiting for me to mess up so they can report it to Sadie? I hate what my life has become. I hate this stupid Tower, and I just want… I want to get out. I want to do something productive for once, rather than staring at lines of code, watching Scipio degrade. Besides…” He met my gaze, his eyes filled with infinite sadness. “I’m going to drain your Paragon supply, now that I’m on it. Let me do this. Arrange a transfer for me to move into the Knights, and have Dinah push it through. No one will even notice I’m gone.”

There was a rap on the doorframe, and before I could even begin to form a counterargument to my brother’s statement, Thomas was there. “So, not to rush you guys, but we really should be going. We gave you as much time as we dared, but we know the destructive force of those lasers, and we don’t want to get caught. Have you made a decision?”

I looked pleadingly at my brother, but his eyes remained fixed on his lap. “Yes,” he told the Patrian man. “I’ll be going with you. I’m Liana’s brother, Alex Castell.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, the whole world dropping away from under my feet. My brother was leaving—had decided to leave. What if he never came back? What if their flying machine failed and they crashed? What if they killed him once they took him away? What if the council turned the Tower’s defenses against them while they were leaving, and blew them out of the sky? Or worse, he got there and decided he didn’t want to come back to us? To me?

“Here,” Thomas said, close to my ear, startling me out of my despair. There was a black box cradled in the palm of his outstretched hand. “This is a communicator that will allow you to have conversations with your brother, even from this far away. Although, you might have to be outside for it to really work. But yeah, you’ll be able to talk to him whenever you want. I promise we will be back within a week, even if the council hasn’t made its determination. I’m sure they’ll side in your favor, in which case we’ll be bringing more… flying machines for an evacuation.”

I stared at it blankly. He was taking my brother and leaving me with this box. This was moving way too fast. Still, my hand reached up to numbly pluck it out of his, with a hollow “Thank you.”

He gave me a warm look, and I slowly stood up, my bones leaden. I looked at my brother, and he managed a tentative smile. “Alex, I…”

“I love you, too,” he said. And as if to prove it, he came around the table to throw his arms around me in a massive hug. “Don’t worry. I’ll figure out what kind of people they really are and make a deal for us to get out of here. Imagine it, Lily; we can be free of this awful place for good. Won’t it be great?”

“Yeah,” I lied, not wanting to destroy his sudden optimism with the truth. “I’m looking forward to it.”





22





And just like that, my brother was leaving. We said our goodbyes and took out his net so Quess could modify it to prevent the Tower from registering him leaving or dying, and Hela thanked Quess and then gave him something called a blood patch. I overheard enough of their conversation to understand that it was something that caused bones to increase production of red blood cells and was evidently an advanced piece of medical technology that surpassed our own. Apparently Quess had told her about Eric, and the fact that he had lost a lot of blood, and she was gifting him the patch in return for saving her mother’s life. Seemed like a fair exchange, but I trusted Quess to know.

Instead of feeling relieved, though, I simply felt empty and adrift. And the feeling persisted, even as they disappeared onto the ship, the ramp drawing back up behind them, and long after they disappeared into the blue light.

It wasn’t until we turned to leave that it hit me. My brother was gone. And Quess, Maddox, Zoe, and Eric were going to leave soon, too. Grey was going to be fully restored in a week’s time, and then Leo was going to leave me too, in a way.

If ever there was a time to fall to pieces, this was it. Something that I had first seen as a blessing had actually been a knife blow to the heart of my little group. We were unraveling, falling apart, and soon we would be going our own separate ways.

How was I ever going to do this alone?

It was a wonder I made it back to our quarters, so dark and bleak were my thoughts. If I hadn’t been following Leo the entire way, I would’ve wound up wandering around the Attic for hours. Instead, I stopped when he did, and started when he did, letting him guide our every move back down to the Citadel.

Once we were home, Quess went to check on Eric and give him the blood patch, and Maddox went to tell Tian the news and get ready for bed. That left Leo and me alone.

For several heartbeats, I could only stare at him, my heart breaking. I was going to be losing him soon. I mean, I wasn’t… but… what kind of relationship could we have once he was back in a computer?

I didn’t realize how much I had been dreading that day until now, when it was nearly here. Suddenly I needed his arms around me. Or maybe not suddenly—I had been thinking about it off and on—but now it was visceral. We had broken into Sadie Monroe’s quarters. Killed four people. Cut Leo out of Grey to put him into Baldy, only to have Baldy himself break free and shoot Eric. We’d shot Baldy in return, and then thrown him off the side of the Tower. Met aliens—and then lost my brother.