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

So I put it away, and applied a little effort to forming a small smile for my friend. “He’s going to be okay, I think. What’s up?”

“Oh, Dylan called Maddox to request a meeting with you both. Maddox had her come up here, and they’re waiting for you in the front room. She asked me to tell you, so…” She pushed off the wall and spread her arms. “Mission accomplished. You’re welcome.”

A surprised laugh escaped me, and I shook my head at her. “Thanks. Did they say what it was about?”

I had a suspicion, though I asked the question anyway. Dylan Chase had also been in the Tourney, and had technically won the fourth and final challenge, but ultimately lost when the Knights voted me in as Champion instead of her, breaking with tradition. I hadn’t been sure what to make of her during the Tourney—she was highly competitive and outspoken—but had suspected her and two others of being legacies.

But Dylan had surprised me, first by coming to my aid when Baldy attacked Leo and me, then by insisting that she look into the situation personally. I had paired her with Tian, knowing that the youngest member of our group could keep a careful eye on her, as well as help her root out the legacies who were living as undocs. I was still unclear about her true loyalty.

It seemed today would reveal another part of the puzzle, as she undoubtedly had new evidence to share. If it was in line with what we were seeing from Sadie’s computer, and she was telling me the truth, then I had to start entertaining the possibility that her intentions were honorable. There was a chance she was feeding us good information to try to gain our trust, to set us up in some way, but I didn’t see that as being her style.

And I really wanted to trust her. I couldn’t explain exactly why, but I liked the woman. Yes, she was obnoxiously blunt, and asked for what she wanted in a way that made it seem like a demand, but she cared about the department and the people inside of it. Her views on the Tower were interesting, in that she saw it as more of a mission, an experiment, the integrity of which needed to be protected. If it was an act, it was convincing.

“She’s got the DNA results from the house we found in the Attic,” Zoe replied. “As well as the blood taken from the catwalk. Maddox said she seemed pretty excited, so maybe it’ll be something that’ll blow the lid off this thing.”

I laughed. “We should be so lucky. But unless she’s got detailed information about a hideout for the legacies, I’m not sure the results will yield very much.”

“You never know,” Zoe replied with a little shrug. “Anyway, I’m getting back to the files in a moment. Just going to check on Eric.”

“Okay.” I watched her go for a second, my heart a few ounces lighter for all of her bright happiness. It was such a dramatic difference from this morning, and I was glad that Eric’s prognosis was looking good. We’d come too close to it going the other way, and I hated to think of what Zoe would’ve been like had she lost him. I couldn’t bear to let anyone know that pain, especially not her.

I turned away from Zoe and started toward the kitchen, quickly following the spiraling hallway past the bedroom and bathroom doors and into the kitchen, where I stopped long enough to grab a glass of water. I drank it quickly, placed the cup in the sink, and then resumed my trek, following the hall to where it would eventually spill into the largest room of my quarters.

I heard their voices long before I entered the room. They were speaking in low tones, and the acoustics of the room didn’t help give the sounds any form. I emerged from the hall and went down the handful of steps into the wide conference room, angling for where the two women were standing in front of the large wall screen, opposite the theater-style seating. I had designed this room specifically for conferences with my Knight Commanders, so that when I finally got around to having them, it would make the large-scale debriefings easier.

Of course, right now I was only going to be meeting with one Knight Commander. But it was important.

“There she is,” Maddox said, nodding her head in my direction.

Dylan turned around, an excited smile growing on her lips that served to make her look even prettier. “Oh good,” she exclaimed. “You are never going to believe what I found.”

I raised an eyebrow and looked over the blond woman’s shoulder to Maddox, meeting her green eyes with a questioning glance of my own.

“She wouldn’t tell me until you were here,” Maddox replied with a shrug. “Now that you are…”

“I just didn’t want to have to explain it twice,” Dylan said wryly, giving me a look. “Don’t you hate when you have to do that?”

I nodded. I really did. “Go ahead,” I told her. “What did you uncover?”

“Only that the DNA from the bridge and collected from the blankets and plates at the scene of that weird structure thing you found in the Attic shows that these people are all biologically related. Siblings, in fact.”

“Siblings?” I repeated dumbly. “How is that possible?” Residents in the Tower were only permitted two children per couple. There had been at least thirty people in the house we discovered. Someone had over thirty children?

Dylan pulled a data stick out of her pocket and plugged it in to the port at the base of the screen. A second later the screen came on, revealing several different files. “Well, ‘siblings’ isn’t exactly right. Some of them are siblings, sharing both mother and father, but others are half-siblings, sharing only the father. In fact, sharing only the father is common; the mothers look like they’ve had a minimum of three children each, but I have evidence to support that one had seven children with the same man.”

“So one man is the father of… thirty people or so?” Maddox asked, beating me to the much-needed clarification question. I was shocked. How could one man have so many children without the Tower knowing about it? Both genders had birth control shots that kept us from procreating without the Medica’s involvement. Accidents happened, but for the most part, it should’ve been impossible for someone to have that many children after a birth-control shot. Not without the Medica’s intervention, anyway. Or waiting for the five years it took for the shot to expire.

“Yes,” Dylan said grimly. “Not only that, but I was able to use parts of the DNA to track back to the mothers, and…” She pressed on one of the files, and pictures and information for at least a dozen different women filled the screen. Everything about them was different, from their hair color to their department, but there were two things they had in common: half of them were dead, while the other half were labeled ‘missing.’ “The DNA matches all of these women. They’ve all been reported missing at some point within the last fifty years, but now I think they were kidnapped. It seems I’m the only one who put that together, however. The ones who are labeled dead were discovered years after their disappearances, in various states of decomposition, and all the autopsy reports read the same thing: died in childbirth. The Knight reports that accompany the autopsies say that the girls were probably dissidents who became undocs and then died having an illegal child, which was never recovered. Nobody ever looked any deeper than that. Nobody ever saw the pattern.”

I felt sick. Someone—a man—had evidently been taking women, forcing them to have his children, and then discarding them when their bodies gave out because they didn’t receive the medical treatment they had needed to survive. And no one had put it together as anything more than a girl being dissatisfied with Tower life, making an attempt at being an undoc, and dying for her folly.