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

“But Dreyfuss wasn’t the only one alive at the time who’s still left. You’re right that the other councilors from that timeframe are dead, but there’s one who isn’t. You’re forgetting about Sage. Dreyfuss might be involved with them, yes—and Sage might be as well, using your very own logic.”

I rocked back on my heels. That was a very good point. The fact that Sage was one of two people who had interacted with or knew about the visitors to the Tower—and was still alive—meant that he could be involved in some way. But it felt wrong. My initial gut reaction to Sage had been liking him. He was continuously upbeat, unafraid to discuss things, and strangely pragmatic, yet had a certain flexibility for some rules and regulations that made him almost endearing. I had met with him once, to ask him questions about plastic surgery, and he had been extremely forthcoming with what he knew, even going so far as to share my suspicions that someone could use it to fool the Tower’s sensors. If he was a legacy, he would’ve played completely dumb or outright refused to help me, wouldn’t he? I supposed it was possible he had played me. But that didn’t change the fact that he felt… grandfatherly. Stern, but strangely affectionate.

Not to mention, he was fascinated with pre-Enders. He even went so far as to collect medical journals in order to understand their primitive practices. If he’d had a chance to encounter another civilization with potentially more information than we had about the world before, only to turn around and vote to have them shot down… It just didn’t seem like something he would have done.

Still, I couldn’t rule it out, either.

“Jasper, have you uncovered any evidence of Sage and Sadie being in collusion?”

“Define ‘collusion,’” he replied wryly. “They’ve exchanged enough messages on certain subjects for it to be considered mildly inappropriate in regard to standard council protocols. But that’s more about back channeling on issues they are trying to resolve in council meetings.”

“But what about you?” I asked. “Did Sage know what you were when Sadie put you in the Medica?”

“Yes and no. According to the messages between them, Sage was looking for a mentorship program to assist in teaching, and Sadie told him I was an experimental program. ‘A step closer to artificial intelligence than the normal dummy programs,’ to quote her. He thought I was just better than previous programs and had the ability to learn. Sadie’s restrictions on my programming handled the rest. I was unable to tell anyone who or what I was, or why I was there. So her secret was safe.”

“Wait, why were you there?” Leo asked.

I glanced over at him and frowned. He was standing up, but looked a bit wobbly, like his legs weren’t working quite right. He’d managed to get himself up without too much fuss, but still, it was a little odd. I had noticed his state of exhaustion earlier and knew that he had been pushing hard yesterday. I also wouldn’t have put it past him to stay up and work all night, trying to help Jasper and Rose. But one night wouldn’t be able to cause that much reaction.

“Why did Sadie want you there?” he expanded. That was a really good question, and one that could reveal what exactly they were planning to do. Maybe Sadie had put him in there to spy, or worse, planned to use him to assassinate people who got in her way or became a threat. No one would have gone to the Medica expecting to die—and no one would suspect the doctors of anything untoward if they didn’t get out alive, either.

“It probably had something to do with this,” Maddox announced, dragging my attention back to her. She tapped her pad a few times, and the image of Dreyfuss’s face on the table morphed into a sub-file labeled ‘Project Prometheus,’ with hundreds and thousands of files inside of it. “This is Project Prometheus, I assume named after the original group. I’m not sure how it all fits together, but these files go back years. It’s pretty incomplete—I’m guessing she keeps all active and important documents on a hard drive that’s with her at all times, rather than any place that someone might steal it—but it has hundreds of schematics from the other departments, many of them focused on both critical and redundancy systems.”

Critical and redundancy systems? That meant water, air, locks on the doors, sensors, elevators, and any of the machines crucial to the survival of the Tower. Was she planning to tamper with them in some way? Shut them off in order to ensure departmental compliance when she and her group seized full control over Scipio, maybe? I wasn’t certain, but it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility.

“It certainly does have something to do with that,” Jasper replied, his voice grim, confirming my suspicions. “I was in the Medica in order to bring it down if they needed me to. Seal it up, suck out the air, overload their power cells. The works.”

“But you were able to resist them,” I said, confused. “You helped me.”

“She didn’t tell me I couldn’t help you. Your problems were outside of the parameters she set me up with, which gave me a little wiggle room. It wasn’t until the two intersected that she became aware I was helping you. But I digress. My part in Prometheus was to hold the Medica captive should Sadie and her people need me to. I don’t know much about the specifics, but I do know that the goal is to replicate Requiem Day, so that they can kill Scipio once and for all.”

I sat down. I had to. All of the air had disappeared from the room, and my legs had turned watery with fear. They wanted to replicate Requiem Day? The three-day period when Scipio had gone offline, when all essential Tower functions had shut down and the entire population had dissolved into chaos? Departments were looted, people were killed, and the entire Tower had almost come crashing down. I had studied it avidly when I was at the Academy. It had been a source of fascination and horror for me.

Why would they even want to do that? What would it accomplish? I supposed they had some plan that would put Scipio fully under their control, and needed him offline to do it, but without more information, I didn’t want to speculate.

“When are they going to try to do all this?” I asked no one in particular. I knew they probably wouldn’t have an answer. If Sadie had kept some files separate, then the timeline was probably missing from what we’d stolen.

“We don’t know,” Zoe replied. “We also don’t know where the legacies are staying. We do know that this whole thing is probably happening soon, given some messages exchanged between Salvatore Zale and Sadie. She’s been telling him to get ready for their next move, but it’s all vague.”

“Salvatore?” Anger, as white hot as it was ice cold, bloomed under my skin, making me harden. Jasper had mentioned him being involved yesterday, but it seemed that Zoe had found evidence of what, exactly, he had been involved with. I searched Zoe’s face for confirmation that he had a hand in killing my mother, and her eyes were full of sorrow for me as she nodded.

“He was the one meant to win the Tourney,” she said hoarsely. “It was a deal set up between him and Sadie after Devon died. Having him in charge of the department is apparently instrumental in their plans—I’m guessing because the Knights are the only department given access codes to manually open doors in case of a power loss. She’d need them to free her and her people from IT once they shut Scipio down. I’m not sure why, yet, but that’s the gist of the messages. And you know the Knights. They’d follow their Champion’s orders to hell and back without questioning them, so it makes sense that Sadie would want it under her control in some way.”