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

“You’re no fun.” She pouted as she put the book back in its rightful place, treating it gently. “Basically, we develop a tolerance to the medication eventually, and some people are just… naturally immune.”

“Of course I am one of those people,” I breathed, and she gave me a sympathetic look. I placed my face into my hands and exhaled. “Why can’t I just catch a break?” I mumbled, my voice coming out muffled from behind my hands.

“I didn’t catch that, but if you’re whining about why life isn’t being fair to you, I suggest you take a look outside this Tower and think about whether history has been fair to humanity.”

I sat up, her words like hot lead being poured into a lethal mold. “That’s great for humanity, Zoe, but I’m having a bit of a selfish moment over here, and would appreciate some sympathy. I mean, how can I be expected to succeed if my body or mind or whatever won’t even get with the program? I really don’t want to find out the hard way what restructuring is.”

She blinked at me, her angry face withdrawing some, and sighed. I knew why she was angry—she didn’t like pity parties or people feeling sorry for themselves. It was her biggest pet peeve.

“Do you think you can maintain your number for a while at least? Maybe I can do some research or something.”

By way of response, I held up my wrist. The orange five held firm.

“Apparently not,” Zoe said gravely. “That didn’t take long.”

“What do you mean?”

She frowned. “You were a six yesterday,” she said.

“What am I going to do?” I asked, my eyes still on the pipe overhead.

Zoe lay down beside me and wrapped an arm around my waist, hugging me. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But the drugs have got to go. That’s first and foremost.”

My mind flashed to the pill in my pocket and the kiss Grey and I had shared, and I flushed with embarrassment and shame, grabbing one of her pillows and shoving it over my face.

“Oh, God, Zoe, I made a complete idiot of myself today, on top of everything else.”

“What? How is that possible? It’s only ten in the morning!”

“I know,” I groaned as I removed the pillow and rolled onto my side so I could face her. My fingers traced the outline of an elephant on the bedspread before me, gold in a sea of royal blue, and I sighed. “Do you remember that one I told you about? The one that suddenly became a nine?”

“Yeah. That happened on the day you became a three.”

I smiled, pleased that she remembered. It might seem like a small thing, but it made me feel important, knowing that she actually listened and cared about what I told her.

“Well, anyway, I ran into him, and…” I flushed, the blush growing hotter as I forced out the words. “…I wound up kissing him.”

Silence met my confession, and when I looked up into my best friend’s face, I could see the incredulity there. “You kissed a potential criminal,” she said flatly, her brows furrowing. “Now I know you’re off the drugs for sure. Princess Prim would never do that.”

“He’s a nine,” I said defensively. “So technically, Princess Prim wouldn’t have a problem with kissing him.”

The thought backfired as I realized the implications of what I had just said: as long as I took those pills, I would never really know who I was kissing—or why. Kissing Grey didn’t seem so bad, under that light. Sure, it had happened under false pretenses, but at least I got to make the decision—even if it was the wrong one. It was my bad decision to make. Not hers.

Zoe stared at me, then gave me a small smile. “So how was it?” she asked.

“Zoe!” I chided, grabbing a pillow and whapping her in the face with it. But my mind flashed to that hungry kiss, and I felt another blush coming on. This time, however, I managed to push it back, needing to take this seriously so she would too. “Look, I think this guy has some information on a case I’m working on. He told me he’d give me the information if I kissed him, and I—”

“Say no more,” she said with a smile, sitting up and pressing on a panel on the wall over her bed. “This is a classic romance story arc,” she said, pulling a battered book from the now exposed compartment. I alone was privy to this little cache of illegal books, and it had never once occurred to me to turn her or them in. Besides, she let me borrow Charlotte’s Web regularly; it made me see spiders in a whole new light, and now I let the little things run loose in my room. Unless they touched me, in which case the truce was ended. It was a shame fiction books were contraband—the stories held in their pages were nothing short of magic in our glum existence.

“Yup,” she said after thumbing through a few pages of her romance novel, a smile on her lips. “Guys tricking girls and stealing kisses? Classic romance trope. I wonder if he had this book before I did.”

I gaped at her. “Seriously? What, are you predicting our marriage?”

Zoe gave me an incredulous look. “What? No! Life isn’t like a story, Liana. So, what information were you trying to get from him?”

“I can’t really talk about it,” I lied. It took me a moment to figure out why I was so determined to hold this back from Zoe. I had to remember Grey’s behavior during our conversation, confirming my suspicion that there was something illegal about the pills. I didn’t want her to have any knowledge about it, just as a precaution, until I knew more. “Not until I have something more concrete. I know he knows something. I just can’t get him to tell me. I practically begged him, Zo. It was humiliating, and I’m so embarrassed. Especially after that stupid kiss.”

“You went through all that and he still didn’t tell you anything?” she asked, incredulous.

“Not a thing.”

“What an ass.”

I smiled. “My words exactly.”

“So what do you want to do about him?” she asked, and I smiled. This was what I loved about Zoe the most: she was a woman of action. You came to her with a problem, and she immediately focused on the solution. It was what made us the best of friends.

“I’ve got to do something if I want to keep my number from dropping. I’m just not sure what I can do as long as he’s a nine.”

“Well, all you want to do is get him to answer some questions, right?”

“Right—but I have no idea how to figure out where his assigned quarters are. I could’ve when I was a six, but now that I’m a five…”

“Oh, leave that to me,” Zoe said with a wide grin. “I’m interested in meeting this guy, and giving him a piece of my mind for bamboozling a kiss out of my best friend. And possibly giving him a boot to the rear, as well.”

“Oh, Zo, I missed you,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and giving her a hug. She squeezed me back, and I could feel her smile.

“I missed you, too,” she said into my hair, and for a moment, I felt like everything was going to be all right.





9





Zoe’s method of tracking Grey, it turned out, was to rely on the natural paranoia of the citizens of Water Treatment.