The Girl Who Dared to Think (The Girl Who Dared #1)

Thankfully, I managed to buy myself more time by scheduling my appointment to the Medica for after my bi-weekly apprenticeship lessons. My parents had considered making me skip them, citing my shameful number as a reason, but it seemed I had been on the ball this morning, and had cleverly delayed my sentence by reminding them that the lessons were in service to the Tower. How would it look to Scipio if I put my needs before the Tower’s?

Needless to say, it had worked, so here I was, in one of the communal annexes in the shell—the one closest to the Citadel, which made it the one to which I was assigned.

The apprenticeship program was supposed to be a way of giving each citizen of the Tower a baseline understanding of the other sections. A Knight could come to understand the importance of the greeneries (the farming floors), or an Eye could learn the inner workings of Water Treatment. Twice a week, a group of youths assembled to be taught something new by a member of one of the departments, and we all either pretended to be interested, or, like my friend Zoe, actually were interested.

I entered the small gray room full of chairs with uneven legs and others around my age with a certain amount of trepidation, and was, unsurprisingly, met with stares. My peers took one look at my ranking… and then walked away from me without so much as an excuse. One girl actually turned pale, like my number was a disease that she could contract. For an instant I was tempted to chase the timid thing and tackle her. That, however, was once again probably a good indicator as to why I was being sent out for Medica treatment.

I looked sullenly at my wrist—funny how something as insignificant as a number could make people believe the best or the worst about you. I sucked in a sharp breath and pushed the negative thought out of my head; if I wanted to avoid the Medica, then I had to get my number back up. I had to think happy thoughts.

“Whoa, look at you, you rebel.”

My lips twitched into the closest thing to a smile I’d worn all day, and I turned to find my friend Zoe, her hand on her hip, her long brown hair braided down the center of her skull, the sides of her hair shaved close. It was the custom of the Divers—the workers of Water Treatment—to shave part, if not all, of their hair.

Zoe was twenty, like me, and a Roe, a trainee in Water Treatment. Unlike me, the only reason she hadn’t been accepted into Water Treatment was because she was putting it off until the last possible moment, while she waited for her application to the Mechanics department to be accepted. She might have been a great Diver, but the girl lived and breathed machines.

“As you can clearly tell, yesterday was a stellar day for me,” I said wryly.

“Ah, sarcasm,” Zoe said dramatically, clutching her fist to her breast and gazing wistfully up at the ceiling. “Thy name is Liana, and we have met before.”

I snorted out a laugh, but the levity of the moment faded quickly under the looming weight of my Medica appointment. Zoe gave a long sigh and sashayed over in the hip-based gait that all the Divers seemed to have, as if walking were just swimming vertically. She slid her arm over my shoulder, and I shivered. The arm was both cold and wet; Zoe, like most Divers, preferred to simply dive into the access hatches in the pipes and swim to wherever she needed to go. Even the suit she wore, designed to be water-repellent, never quite seemed to keep her dry.

“Tell Mama Zoe all about it,” she said, her tone maternal. “Zoe is here for you now, you poor child.”

“Oh, God, she’s talking about herself in the third person again,” another voice cut in loudly over my laugh, and I looked up to see Eric pinching the bridge of his nose under his spectacles, shaking his head in mock disapproval.

Eric was an old friend from the nearby greenery, and unlike Zoe and me, he wore simple clothes, his brown hair held off his brow by a sweatband, his strong arms, streaked with dirt, emerging from short sleeves. Eric never seemed to feel the chill of the Tower.

“Zoe knows how to drown people,” Zoe said, giving Eric a salacious wink, and he smiled broadly at her.

“Does Zoe know how to give Eric a hug?” he teased back, and I rolled my eyes.

The two were so into each other, it was actually kind of painful to watch sometimes. They flirted constantly, but when it came to actually admitting their feelings or taking a chance on a relationship, they invariably chickened out, and in the most ridiculous of ways.

Zoe’s arm slipped off my shoulder as she moved toward him, seemingly confident. Eric stood waiting, an inviting smile on his face. There was a moment—I felt like I could almost see it—in which they seemed so hopeful, so optimistic that this was it, this was when it was finally going to happen, and then… Zoe’s hand trembled slightly, and she suddenly whipped around to face me so quickly that the end of her hair slapped wetly (and loudly) off of Eric’s face.

“Wait, do Zoes ever actually hug Erics?” she asked cutely, acting both completely oblivious to the fact that she had just smacked Eric in the face, and like she hadn’t just completely lost her nerve. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning at her; as friend to both of them, it was my duty to tease them about it mercilessly. But only in private—never with the other around.

Eric slowly wiped water off his face, shaking his head. “Smooth,” he muttered as he shook his hand, water dripping on the gray floor. “Can’t wait to return the favor. So, Liana, what’s up with the three?”

“Yeah, what happened?” Zoe asked, taking a step closer to me, her mouth tugging down in a small, concerned frown.

I quickly told them about Dalton’s ungrateful attitude after I saved his life, and the fight that led to my number dropping, before telling them about Grey. And about his one morphing magically into a nine. Luckily, we still had a few minutes before class began, so I was able to get through the tale before we were interrupted by the arrival of the instructor.

“I still don’t understand how he did that,” I finished, staring at the floor. “I tried to make my parents see that there was something more going on, but all they cared about was that my number had dropped.”

“How did you say it?” Eric asked, giving me a knowing look, and I sighed.

“Not very well, but they barely even let me speak! They didn’t care! Their trust in Scipio is unshakable. If there’s a nine on his wrist, then Scipio put it there.”

“They’re not wrong,” Eric said softly, and I gave him a sharp look. He held up his hands, his eyes widening. “No! God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that how it sounded. Well, maybe a little, but—”

“It doesn’t change the fact that no one has ever cheated the system,” Zoe finished for him, meeting my gaze with her own vibrant blue one. “I mean, think about it, Liana. How could his number change like that? Did he hack his own net? Does he have the background for that?”