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

“They hate outsiders,” she needlessly explained as we raced away from an older woman who had given an extremely detailed report of exactly where ‘the suspicious-looking man with brown eyes’ had gone. “We’ll have his location inside of an hour—I’m sure of it.”

She hopped onto a pipe, then grabbed onto the rung overhead to swing out and over a wide gap that ran several floors deep. Reaching out with her other hand, she grabbed another handhold. I watched her overhand progress as she practically flew over the gap, and then used my lashes to follow, more confident in my abilities with them. I landed on one knee next to Zoe, who was stretching out her arms, and stood up. We shared an exuberant grin.

“Oy, Knight!” came a voice.

I turned to see an old man’s head peeping up from a narrow gap between the floor and a large pipe, bushy eyebrows furrowed in concern. I trotted over and knelt down, instinctively hiding my number behind my back.

“I’m a Squire,” I informed him. “Can I help you?”

“Bah,” said the old man, craning his neck to try to get a look at my wrist, then giving up. “I heard you two were looking for someone.”

I blinked in surprise and then furrowed my brow. “How’d you hear that?”

“The pipes, girl!”

“We tap out messages on the pipes,” Zoe said, stepping on the tail end of the man’s statement. “We have the fastest gossips in the Tower,” she added.

“It’s not gossip—information is critical down in the pipes, girl,” the old man admonished, pulling himself out from the narrow gap with two skinny arms. “And you shouldn’t peer down your nose at the ways of your people, especially when those ways save lives.”

Zoe flushed, her cheeks bronzing over, and I recognized the frustrated look, having worn it myself a time or two.

“Sir, did you see someone?” I asked, trying to put the conversation back on track. The old man pulled a cloth out of his pocket and opened a sliding hatch over one of the pipes. He dipped the cloth in the water racing by and then began washing off some of the grime and soot that had collected on his face.

When he spoke, his voice was muffled by his ministrations, making it difficult to hear. “Saw a young man, dark blond. Had a suspicious look to him. Too expressive, if you know what I mean.”

I did. That description matched Grey to a T. Still, I needed a bit more to go on—after all, how could I be sure it hadn’t been some other dark blond man who looked super happy after getting kissed sometime earlier?

“Was he a one?” I asked, and the man turned and gave me a look, water dripping from his eyebrows.

“A nine. That’s what was so odd about him. I told myself, that right there is a suspicious thing.”

I grinned, glad I wasn’t the only one who saw the oddness of Grey carrying a nine. After all, nines never exhibited much in the way of emotions. “Which way did he go?”

The old man jabbed a finger toward a beam of grayish light filtering upward. “I asked him, and he said he was going to Cogstown, which meant he took the elevator,” he said, a note of disdain in his voice. “Can’t say I’m surprised. Cogs always been trouble, since day one. And this one had damned beady eyes, you know?”

I didn’t know, and I didn’t agree, but I kept my opinion to myself. “Thank you, Diver,” I said, and he waved a dismissive hand over his head.

“Give me a ride,” Zoe ordered as soon as I turned around, and I groaned, but bent over while she climbed up on a pipe behind me. She gently settled onto my back, and I took a moment to adjust and shift her weight around until she felt balanced. I switched the settings on my suit so that the leads came out of my waist. I needed them lower to help center our collective balance. If I was going for speed or accuracy, I used the wrists. Her arms wrapped around my neck, and within moments I was lashing us both up and toward the beam of light the man had pointed out.

I landed on a platform about midway up, the yellow markings next to it telling me the elevator was ahead. Zoe slid off my back and looked down the narrow hall.

“This area always gives me the creeps,” she said softly, flicking on her flashlight to provide more illumination than the dim red bulbs provided.

“Me too,” I replied, eyeing the gloomy shadows that threatened to swallow the hall in the flash of one bulb blowing. It was a simple, primitive fear—the fear of the unknown that could be lurking there—but it was fear all the same. “So… do you have a way to get us into Cogstown proper, and not the reception hall the elevators dump all non-Cogs into? Because I don’t have the ranking to override the elevator protocols.”

“I’m going to hack the elevator,” Zoe replied with a grin. Her hands dipped into her bag, and I gaped as she pulled out a small black pad, modified, like the ones the Eyes always carried. Upon closer inspection, I could see that it wasn’t exactly the same; in fact, it looked like she had pieced it together out of odds and ends from around the Tower.

“How’d you get that?” I asked, warning bells going off.

“This thing was five months in the making,” Zoe said excitedly. “I’ve actually hacked two elevators with it already—nothing too exciting; I just wanted to see if I could do it.”

“Zoe!” I said, wide-eyed as I watched her drop to her knees in front of the shaft. She rummaged around in her bag, pulled out a screwdriver, and began unscrewing something from the back of the black metal control panel that sat just outside of the elevator, a long metal rod holding it up in the air.

“What?” she said. “I had a manual on how to fabricate your own pads—in case of emergency—and it was too fascinating to pass up. I had to learn how to code, and it took me ages to find something that taught me how to do that. The Eyes really don’t like their manuals floating around.”

“Zoe, if you get caught—”

“I’m not doing anything that could hurt the Tower,” she insisted. “I’m not touching the security protocols, or any of the base functions. I’m just overriding the controls to make them think we’re Cogs, okay?”

“Yes, but this is pretty serious. I just want to make sure you’re sure you want to do this.”

Zoe gave me a withering look as she lowered the now freed panel to the floor. “You asked me to be here. Besides, do you want to find this guy or not?”