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

“We’re not entirely sure,” Maddox said grimly, crossing her arms. “She has mountains and mountains of information from a contact named ‘P,’ and from the looks of it, they are definitely working together. It’s not clear who’s in control—it seems like they have their own separate duties. But, um… yeah.”

I swallowed. Sadie wasn’t running things alone? That was… not the best news. “Any idea who ‘P’ might be?” I was hoping it was Plain-Face, the man who’d been with Baldy in the Medica, or one of the other legacies we had run into. I wasn’t super keen on yet another unknown individual gunning for us.

“It’s impossible to tell,” Quess said, dashing all my hopes. “Every message is supposed to come with transmission information that we can use to track it back to the pad that sent it. Yet these messages have none. All of it’s been erased.”

That wasn’t surprising, given how good they were at covering their tracks. “What are the messages like?”

“Well, from what we can gather, P definitely runs the undoc side of things,” Quess replied. “There’s messages between him and Sadie about using his people to infiltrate the Tourney. P asked Sadie for the code the legacies used to get past the Citadel’s sensors and give them access to Ambrose’s room, but the attack was his idea, from start to finish. Apparently, they had been secretly sampling the genetic codes of the contestants, and Ambrose’s matched a sample that Sparks took when he was in power—from Lacey’s sister when they assassinated her as an enemy legacy. All the relevant files were transmitted in the messages, as well as a message from Sadie sent a minute before the attack, telling him that the alert systems were offline in the hall. They are definitely working together, but it’s impossible to tell who he is.”

My stomach clenched as I realized that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I had hoped. Still, I wasn’t about to let this deter me. We weren’t finished going through the files yet. No use in panicking until we had picked apart everything. “Then keep looking for something that will tell us who it is,” I told him, and he nodded.

Zoe, however, wasn’t finished. “Look, the reason I brought up the thing between Sparks and Sadie was because we also found communiqués between her and Plancett, which seem to indicate that he started working for or with Sparks, proving his loyalty by giving Sparks the information on where the Hand councilor’s quarters were located so they could take out Raevyn Hart, the head of the Hands at the time of Violet’s visit.”

I frowned. Plancett’s involvement and place in the totem pole meant that he probably wasn’t a legacy. Otherwise, he would’ve been in charge after Sparks died, and not swearing his allegiance to Sadie. But how much did he know? Had they recruited him into their ideology, or was it just a business move on his part? What if they had cultivated a group of dogmatic followers who would die for them? That made things more difficult, but I couldn’t go looking for fire when there wasn’t even any smoke yet.

“It’s why no investigation into her death was raised,” Zoe continued, jerking me from my grim thoughts. “She died in her quarters, and her assistant didn’t report anything unusual. He’s been working with the legacies ever since, his loyalty transferring over to Sadie when Sparks died, in exchange for them keeping the bulk of his people out of the expulsion chambers. He’s been giving them ration cards and doing whatever else they needed him to do for them.” Zoe pressed her lips together, then added, “I think he might have also killed Eric’s father.”

“Eric’s father?” I exclaimed. “How do you figure that?”

In response, she took the graphic novel from the table next to her and slid it to me. I slapped my hand over the cover before it could fall off the table, and then held it up, giving her a questioning look.

“Page 343,” she said. “Knight Elite Dreyfuss and Knight Elite Macgillus encounter Violet Croft after she lands on one of the greeneries in her flying ship. Eric’s dad was a Knight before he joined the farming department. He was there. There’s a message from Plancett to Sparks from a few days after Eric’s father passed away, and it basically says he took care of it.”

My eyes widened, and I quickly flipped the book open to the page in question. Sure enough, there were two men—both wearing the crimson colors of the Knights— introducing themselves to Violet. I hadn’t met Eric’s father, who had died when Eric was five, but I had seen pictures of him in Eric’s old home, and the likeness was there. But the other man—Dreyfuss?—wasn’t someone I thought I’d seen before. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t place it.

“What about Dreyfuss?” I asked. “Is he still alive?”

I assumed he was dead, like Selka and Raevyn, and possibly even Eric’s father. If so, that would confirm that Sparks had been wiping away the people who knew about the outsiders. But it stood to reason that whoever was still alive from that time was involved in some way. Maybe one of them was the mysterious P.

“He’s retired and lives with his daughter in Greenery 13,” Maddox replied before Zoe could, surprising me. “He works a food stall in the market. In fact, you might recognize him as the vendor who was attacked that day the food cart was pushed at you guys in the Lion’s Den.” She tapped something and the table lit up, beams of light being projected from the surface to form a face that I vaguely remembered from the market. Several people, probably legacies, had pushed him and used their pulse shields to move the massive stall from which he had been serving food. I had originally dismissed him as a random victim. Now I was beginning to suspect differently. If he was working with them, then he could’ve been letting them hide behind his stall to get into position before they attacked us, and then stuck around to play the wounded vendor to see if we had died. “And again, as one of the volunteers in the Tourney.” She swiped her finger across the screen, bringing up a new image of him working as one of the extra security guards for the event. He would’ve had access to everything, could’ve easily let his people come and go without any interference!

“Then he’s got to be this P fellow.” But was he a part of Sadie’s family, or a different one? Maybe Devon’s? I hoped it was Devon’s; he’d been keen on getting Maddox back so he could teach her the truth of her legacy family, acting like there weren’t many of his family members left. But maybe he had a secret brother.

“Hold on,” Zoe said. “I’m with you, and I finally get why you were going on and on about the visitors coming twenty-five years ago—you figure that whoever interacted with the outsiders and is still alive has to be part of the conspiracy to keep it from the Tower. But there are two small problems with that. One, the council knew about the visitors. They had to, in order to authorize using the defense lasers on the Tower. And that means the legacies would have had to kill off the entire council around that time, too. Second, there are gaps between the deaths that did occur. Years, in some cases.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” I replied. “They couldn’t have killed everyone at the same time, or they would’ve tipped their hand about what they were covering up—especially if they were killing the people involved in that specific incident. It wouldn’t have taken long for someone to figure it out if they started killing people back to back. They probably killed each one as they became a threat, or once enough time had passed. But the fact that Dreyfuss is alive tells us that—”