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

It only took Jasper and Rose four minutes to download, but it took Leo and me seven to neutralize the nets and carry the bodies to the escape tunnel. Luckily, it wasn’t far from the office. Unluckily, that extra three minutes ate into the precious time Jasper and Rose had on the slaved hard drives. Jasper’s program was mindlessly attacking Rose’s, and it was using up a lot of power to do it—which was why we had the hard drives slaved together, for more power, and why we had only half an hour to get them to a more secure place, like a terminal. Transporting them was risky, because if the hard drive battery units gave out, we could lose Rose and Jasper forever.

But staying definitely wasn’t an option.

We raced through the rest of what we needed to do after we deposited Baldy’s unconscious form up in the escape tunnel, giving him an extra zap with the baton to make sure he stayed unconscious. Leo handled cleaning up the blood, using a few of Sadie’s sheets, while I swept everything I had taken from Sadie’s desk into the bag, my motions jerky and quick. Each second that dragged by felt like a second too long. As soon as I was done, I left Leo and fled to the emergency exit, while he set off the virus that would convince Sadie’s assistant that she was dead, and that it needed to initiate the reset of her apartment and files.

And though I was alone for several seconds in the hall, I had no time to worry about Leo’s safety. I quickly stripped out of the IT uniform that Dinah, our ally inside of IT, had given me, and donned my own uniform, complete with lashes. Leo showed up a moment later and helped me, and a few precious minutes later we were running down the hall and into a shaft that led upward, Baldy strapped to my back. We didn’t have time for Leo to change as well, as his gear was still in the bag, so it was up to me and my harness to carry him. I utilized my lashes to climb, the gears in the gyros better equipped to handle the double weight, while Leo used a rung ladder.

“Did it work?” I asked him as I began my ascent, keeping my voice low.

“It did. I almost got clocked by a piece of furniture making my way back to you.”

I couldn’t find any humor in his statement. My nerves were already fraying from the sudden dip in adrenaline, so I focused instead on the climb, relieved that at the very least we had covered our tracks.

The shaft led to a hatch nearly a hundred feet up, and I let Leo go through first so he could help me out. Once we were on the roof, we paused to spray our faces—and Baldy’s—with Quess’s invention, which would obscure our features from the facial recognition software, and I gave Leo a minute to put on his uniform, and then we were moving again, opening up the large door to the hall. Once we were in the hall, I started using my lashes, throwing the thin lines out rhythmically, one right after the other. This was the only way I could carry Baldy such a distance without collapsing halfway there from the weight—and it was much faster than running.

We’d already taken too long as it was. Even now, the legacies could’ve noticed that Baldy was missing. He was supposed to meet someone, so there was a finite amount of time before they started looking for him. I wanted him back in my quarters before they noticed. Before they came looking. If they weren’t already doing so.

My eyes scanned the corridors as we flew through them, searching for any sign of movement, but the Attic was, as always, devoid of human life. It didn’t make me feel any better, however, and when we finally reached the storage room that would lead back to the Citadel, I almost quivered with relief.

It was too soon to feel it, though. I still had to get Sadie out of my quarters, and Jasper and Rose had to be downloaded before the hard drives ran out of power. AIs needed an energy source at all times, or they would die. It was why Scipio had backup source upon backup source, powered both by the hydro-turbines and the energy harvested from the sun.

When we got to the end of the hall, I slowly lowered myself to the ground just as Leo went for the door. My boots hit the floor, and in my impatience to get this whole mess over and done with, I disconnected the line prematurely—and my knees immediately buckled under Baldy’s weight. Leo moved to help, but I waved him off as I took two staggering steps, trying to catch my balance. I smiled triumphantly at him a second later, managing to center myself, and then toppled right over onto my side, Baldy’s extra weight too much to handle after moving all of those bodies.

We hit the ground with a thud, and I heard Leo tsk and move over. There was a jerking against my back as he disconnected Baldy from where we had hooked him onto my uniform, and I took a moment, feeling weak and sweaty, my muscles aching and burning from the exertion.

Then Leo’s hand filled my vision, and I took it, gingerly allowing him to pull me up. “I netted Maddox, and she’s on her way,” he reported softly, his hands going to the back of his neck. I realized he had pulled the neural scrambler off to do so and was in the process of putting it back on. I prayed that the activity hadn’t been enough for anyone to triangulate his position. If they did, and saw two Knights randomly lashing through the halls of the Attic in the vid files, one with an unconscious man on her back, the legacies might piece together that Baldy’s disappearance and Sadie’s quarters simultaneously being reset was not a coincidence.

And that we were responsible.

“Good,” I replied softly. “Help me get Baldy over to the hatch.”

Leo shook his head and took off the bag he had carried. “I’ll stay here with him,” he replied as he knelt down and opened up the bag. I watched him pull out the slaved hard drives, which were bound together with wires and tape. “You have to get these to Quess as quickly as possible,” he informed me. “As soon as you get Sadie out, start downloading them. Too much time has already passed.”

I glanced at my wrist and saw that he was right: it had already been seventeen minutes since we’d downloaded Jasper and Rose. Which meant we only had thirteen minutes left before the hard drives failed.

But still I hesitated. Sadie Monroe was in my quarters. Drugged, and slightly out of it. I had to get her out of there quickly, but we still had to knock her out again, put her net back in her head, give her a small bit of Spero, and then get her out.

Right. There wasn’t any time to waste.

I squared my shoulders and took the hard drives in my hand, glancing at Baldy’s still form. “Better shock him again, just to be sure,” I said.

Leo gifted me with a lopsided smile and reached out to smooth a bit of the hair that had escaped my braid away from my eyes. My heart skipped a beat as the simple gesture sucked my breath out of my lungs, and I quickly took a step back, my cheeks flaming at the intensity of my reaction. Now wasn’t the time, and feeling things for Leo while he was inside Grey was the very definition of a complication I did not need right now.

“I’ll be fine,” he told me firmly, ignoring my discomfort. “Hurry up. Maddox is on her way.”