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

“Excellent. So now, about these expulsion chambers. What seems to be the problem?”

“No problem, sir, just wanted to see if I could pick your brain about them more. But unfortunately our time is already up. I’m so sorry to come and go, but I’ve got a debriefing scheduled in about ten minutes.”

“Of course, my dear,” he replied, waving his hand in the air. “By all means, do not let me get in the way of your duties. I’m just sorry that we didn’t get to talk about what you came to talk about. Next time, though, eh?”

“Next time,” I agreed. “Are you finished with your drink? I can take your cup if you are.”

It was risky asking for the cup directly, but given that they weren’t disposable, wanting it back wasn’t an unreasonable request. I just hoped he didn’t do anything crazy, like decide to wash it for me right then and there.

He peered into his mug, eyeing the contents inside, and then lifted it to his lips and took several strong pulls until the cup was empty. “Exceptional,” he said, holding the cup out to me. “And thank you for your kindness. You spared me from doing any dishes—my most hated of all chores.”

I forced a chuckle of agreement that I did not feel. I actually liked doing the dishes, but he didn’t need to know that. Besides, letting him think that I hated the chore as well went a long way to show how generous I was being doing it for him. It would tell him that I wanted his approval and put him more at ease.

He held the cup out to me, and I took it, trying not to look too excited that he was handing me DNA that would prove or disprove his role in the legacies—or at least the undoc army—once and for all. It was hard not to flee from him afterward, propelled by a desire to start processing the test as quickly as possible, but I managed, giving him a polite farewell before heading back the way I had come.

And with that, we had everything we needed to hopefully figure out who had been kidnapping women from the Tower and forcing them to have children to populate their army. Whoever he was, this patriarch of the family, he was controlling things in some way. I was sure of it.

All we needed now was to do this DNA testing without him realizing it, figure out where the undocs were hiding now, and round them up—along with all of Sadie’s spies—without drawing Sadie’s attention, and then present them to the council.

Easy peasy.





35





The next meeting I had was with yet another department head, and though I wasn’t quite as nervous as I had been with Sage, I was still slightly apprehensive. Because Sage was an unknown, but the danger from Lacey Green was very real.

Lacey was a legacy from a different family, one working to protect Scipio. And our relationship was rocky at best. She had blackmailed me and my friends into protecting her cousin Ambrose, and we had failed. She wanted us to find the men responsible, and every day that passed without us taking anything tangible to her was another day that she lost her patience. She still had evidence that proved we had tampered with Scipio’s code to get away with murder, and she was going to use it if I didn’t come through for her.

But now I was going to give her what she wanted; it was half the reason I had requested the meeting in person. It just required her to give me something as well—not only by adding her forces to my own so we could arrest every legacy as quickly as possible, but also information about Kurt, the fragment AI her family had stolen in an attempt to save him from the other legacies.

It was risky to confront her on this—she would no doubt kill to keep Kurt’s existence a secret—but we didn’t have a choice. Bringing a case against not one, but two council members, along with over a hundred people, meant exposing what they had done to both the council and Scipio, and the fragments were essential if we wanted to prove that they were guilty. I hoped that once they started testifying, Scipio would finally be forced to acknowledge the damage to his own code. At which point we could start making progress toward putting the Tower back on track.

I glanced around at the four men and women surrounding Maddox and me—Lacey’s escort—and then back at the hall ahead of me, trying to guess at what Lacey’s reaction to all this would be. The halls were largely deserted, as Lacey had invited us during the middle of a work shift in this section, and that made the entire sub-level feel oddly imposing. Like it was threatening to engulf us.

I tried to shake the feeling away, reminding myself that we had good news for Lacey. We could finally give her the people who had killed her cousin. We had uncovered, in one of Sadie’s files, the identities of the six individuals who had attacked him, as well as several others who had caused us problems during the Tourney. A few of them were now safely entrenched in different departments, their faces modified by plastic surgery, but the bulk of them were still with the undoc forces, awaiting plastic surgery before they could be reassigned.

While we didn’t have the location for the undocs yet, I was still hopeful that I could get it from Liam. He didn’t seem to like the people he was related to any more than we did, and I was praying that I could somehow exploit that to get him to tell us where we could find his family. I didn’t want to have to resort to other measures to extract the information from him, like uploading Leo into his brain to find out what he knew.

Maybe we’d catch a break, and Dylan or Eric would find something out while they were following Plancett or Dreyfuss.

Either way, I was going to find the information I needed before I could make this plan a reality, and I was going to need Lacey’s and Praetor Strum’s help executing it. Which was why I had requested a meeting with Lacey right after my meeting with Sage.

We turned left down one of the side passages and were faced with rows and rows of doors that I knew led to apartments. The halls here were poorly lit compared to the lights of the rest of the Tower, the UV lights flickering periodically, and I frowned when I saw that, wondering why the problem hadn’t been fixed yet. Cogstown prided itself on having everything functioning in their department, so it seemed odd and out of place that they would have ignored this.

The lead man stopped at an apartment about halfway down and turned around to face us. “In here,” he said with a brusque nod.

“Thanks,” I replied dryly. I knew from a previous meeting with Lacey that this wouldn’t be her apartment, but one of her workers’, borrowed at random so she could host clandestine exchanges such as these. I hit the button on the door, and it opened automatically, skipping the normal security scan.

I stepped through the door into a small hallway, which deposited me into a living area that clearly didn’t belong to a family unit. The entire living area was antiseptic, devoid of the small touches that made a place a home. So this was dormitory housing, where young Cogs were placed until they started families of their own.

Lacey was sitting at a table, leafing through an orange Mechanic manual, but she wasn’t alone. To my surprise, Strum was here as well, leaning over her shoulder and staring down at the manual she was flipping through.

“It’s about time you got here,” the woman said, putting the manual down with a loud slap. “I thought we were going to have to wait forever.”

I stared at her, trying not to roll my eyes at the thinly veiled hostility in her voice. Instead, I made a show of pulling back the sleeve of my uniform to reveal the flat black disk of my indicator and swiped it over to the clock function. “Three minutes early,” I reported tightly.