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

“Shut up a minute,” he growled, and I stiffened reflexively, but relaxed when I realized he wasn’t angry or irritated. Whatever he had to say was painful. “My parents, they were eights, but they wanted to be more. They wanted me to be more, and when I wasn’t… well. They started piling on responsibilities. Duties. They forced me to keep a ‘positive thoughts’ journal, and to list three things every day about the Tower that made my life better. You know what happened?”

“Your number went down,” I replied. The story was almost too familiar. In fact, it was similar to mine: my parents had demanded more and more of me after Alex left, but my ranking only ever went down. It was exceptionally demotivating and incredibly depressing. I guessed Scipio never considered that some of us were far too sensitive for the ranking system. All I knew was that it was beginning to feel rigged.

Silence.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “It went down. Way down. So far down that they dropped me.”

He grimaced and shook his head. I knew most of that from his dossier, but I still hurt for him. He had been abandoned because they’d demanded more—and then shamed him when he couldn’t perform to their expectations. It was unjust, and it had ripped him away from the only home he had ever known, and thrown him into the Tower all alone, to fend for himself. He was lucky another department had picked him up. If they hadn’t, he would’ve been rounded up with the other underage kids, who, when they turned eighteen, were shuffled down into the dungeons of the Citadel if they couldn’t get into a department of their own, slated for restructuring.

My parents had been oppressive, controlling, downright mean at times, but they had never even mentioned dropping me. It had been unconscionable for them. Maybe Sybil’s death had changed them in that regard. I couldn’t really be sure. It was a marked improvement over wanting to have me killed at birth, so…

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I could think to say in that moment.

“Roark took me in,” he said with a shrug. “And things have been fine. Good, even. I feel like I have a purpose here, and my number is high enough now that nobody even bats an eye at me. It’s funny—I don’t do anything different, but nobody cares. All anyone ever cares about is the number.”

That, too, rang true. I found myself leaning in a bit, drinking in his words. After hearing about positivity for so long, and moving forward with your chin held high, no matter how much you were hurting, it was refreshing to see someone so down to earth. So real.

He looked at me, and I felt my heart skip a beat. I snapped my eyes away.

Don’t be stupid, I thought. You don’t even know him.

“Roark and I,” he said, seeming not to notice my embarrassment, “we want to help people, like he helped me. But he has a grudge against Knights, and honestly it’s hard to argue the point with him.”

I scowled. “Why? What did we do?”

Grey’s voice was soft as sunlight, and cold as wind. “The Knights killed his wife,” he said simply.

I sat there, my head already shaking in outright denial of his words. Knights didn’t kill. We just didn’t. We captured, guarded, and protected. To kill a person was to break one of Scipio’s cardinal rules. It was to instantly reduce yourself to a one, and be tagged for arrest and exile.

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“Tell that to Roark.”

“I will. Right after I call him a liar.”

“Wait—are you mad?” he asked, leaning back onto the palms of his hands and eyeing me. “Why are you mad?”

“Because that was a lie,” I said, still upset. “The Knights don’t kill. If he says they killed his wife, then he is a liar.”

“Whoa! Roark might be a bit touchy, but he’s not a liar. Besides, if they were killing people, do you think they’d let a Squire know that?”

“My parents are Knight Commanders,” I said. “They could never have killed anyone. They couldn’t.” Except for me, that was.

“You also said they were tens,” he fired back. “You think they’d clue you in to something that’s probably a secret?”

I glared at him, my jaw clenched so tight that it ached. “I want to go. I want to go right now.”

I began pulling my lash out, intent on swinging out of Cogstown if I had to, but he reached out and laid a hand on my wrist. “Wait.”

Looking over at him, still seething that someone was going around accusing Knights of murder, I was surprised to see a contrite expression on his face.

“I’m sorry. This is clearly a sensitive topic for you, and I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

I pursed my lips at him, considering him for a long moment, and then sighed. “Why did you come after Zoe and me? Was it really just to walk us out?”

He sighed too and pulled something out of his pocket, cradling it between his hands. It rattled, and I realized he was holding a bottle. Our gazes met, and there was a stillness between us, so intense that I was afraid to breathe—or maybe the air was too thick.

“These are for you,” he said hoarsely, offering them to me. I hesitantly held out my own hand, and he dropped a bottle into it. Pills: small, white, and unmarked.

“Take these,” he said. “You might find them a more palatable alternative to the Medica drugs.”

I looked between the bottle and him, something warm curling up in my throat.

“But Roark said he—”

“Roark’s not here,” he said, rising to his feet. “And one benefit of being dropped is you develop sticky fingers.” He held his fingers up and wagged them back and forth, then stepped out into the air. I reached for him, but somehow he twisted and caught the edge of the beam with his fingertips before dropping the remaining three feet to the ground below. He moved over to the elevator and inserted his chip, and I used my lash to lower myself gently to the floor, the pills clenched between numb fingers.

“This is you,” he said, guiding me onto the waiting platform. “See you later, Squire Castell.” He gave me a sweet smile as the elevator began to rise. “Oh, and only one a day!”

“Goodbye,” I said, still stunned by the change of events. I looked down at the bottle in my hands and felt the weight on my shoulders lighten significantly. “And thank you!” I shouted as an afterthought.

Belatedly, I wondered if he had, by filching these pills, gotten himself into trouble with Roark… but then decided that if he had, I would do something to help him out of it. Even if it meant going down and talking to Roark again—although I wasn’t sure I could do that and let his insidious rumors about the Knights slide. But I was willing to give it a try.

Especially if it meant having access to more of this medication in the future.

I looked at my wrist, and was unsurprised to see a four gleaming there. Only this time, I smiled at it. But it was more like a baring of teeth, really.





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