The Girl Who Dared to Endure

by Bella Forrest

  My fingers tightened around the boxes I was still holding, and I stopped in the hall just before the kitchen. That wasn’t the same at all. If those people had caught Leo and me, everyone would’ve paid the price—including Alex. I’d had to kill them. Yes, taking Baldy had been a spur-of-the-moment decision that I regretted, but killing him now would be a lot different from killing those other people. We were different from that.

  “It’s not right, Alex,” I told him finally.

  “Liana, please,” he pleaded, coming around to take one of the boxes off my stack. “Can’t you see how dangerous he is? He almost killed you. Do you want him anywhere near the people you care about?”

  His words were reasonable, his tone sincere, but I wasn’t swayed. If anything, the fact that my brother was pleading with me to kill a helpless man I had locked up in one of the bedrooms made him a stranger to me. I hated that.

  “Listen to yourself,” I begged. “You want to kill a defenseless man. This isn’t you.”

  His pupils dilated, his mouth pulling into a line hard enough it could’ve broken diamonds. “Maybe it isn’t, but at least I am looking to the future. You barely have a plan! I can’t believe that you’re being so blind about all of this.”

  His condescension rankled me, and my doubts and concerns evaporated under a glowing heat that began to burn from the pit of my stomach. “Blind or not, Big Brother,” I spat, spearing him with an angry look, “you need to understand that I am the Champion, not you. I make the decisions; you do not. If you cannot get behind that, then there is no place for you here, comprende?”

  I turned away and resumed walking, leaving Alex to decide whether he could abide by my rules or not. Clearly, he wasn’t willing to see reason, and if he kept fighting me, I would make him leave.

  I had to. I couldn’t afford the consequences if I didn’t. If he didn’t.

  Unless this is just a ploy to get rid of him because you don’t want to deal with this new, scary version of your brother, a spiteful voice whispered. I ignored it, but it was hard. It also had a point. I was so used to running things that it was possible I wasn’t prepared to accept the fact that someone might have a better idea than me. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t harbored secret jealousies of Alex in the past. He had always been the “good” child. But I never held onto it long, especially when he made sure that I felt loved by him no matter what my rank was. I owed him so much; he’d always tried to take care of me.

  But he had changed. He was changing. And that terrified me.

  When I got to the war room, the first thing I did, after setting my boxes down on the conference table, was go up and see what was going on with Leo. He was sitting behind the desk on the dais overlooking the entrance and conference table, but to my surprise, he wasn’t looking at the screen on the terminal and typing relentlessly. Instead, he was flipping through the files we’d recovered from Lionel Scipio’s office.

  “Hey,” I said, coming around the desk. On the screen, I saw multiple windows and progress bars, and realized Leo was running some sort of diagnostic. “How are—”

  “Incoming transmission from Lord Scipio,” Cornelius, my virtual assistant, announced. “CEO Monroe has requested an emergency council meeting.”

  8

  I looked at Leo and realized that this was it—we were going to find out if Sadie believed that her room resetting was a coincidence, or if she had somehow figured out what we had done and planned to accuse us. My stomach clenched with nervousness, but I forced my breathing to remain deep and even. There was no room for nerves, only calm, and what I hoped would be one amazing theatrical performance.

  “Put him on speakers,” I told Cornelius.

  There was a soft pop, and then: “Champion Castell.” Scipio spoke evenly, but with the ever-present curl of arrogance in his voice. “You are required for an emergency council session.”

  “By Sadie, yes. But whatever for?” I asked, putting just the right amount of curiosity in my voice.

  “Please hold all questions until the other council members are online.”

  I shut my mouth and continued to focus on my breathing. Inside my head, I was imagining my reactions to certain things. If she accused me, it would have to be shock and righteous outrage. Maybe make a few comments about her inappropriate behavior with Quess while she was here, just to muddy up the waters. If she reported the reset, I needed to be concerned, but not overly so. Maybe I could be the first to suggest that someone had tampered with it—with both of ours—so it would continue to create confusion. But only if I felt the conversation slipping that way. I had to do this perfectly. One little slipup could have our entire house of lies crashing down on us.

  Fingers crossed.

  “An emergency council meeting was requested by CEO Monroe, who has reported a malfunction with her virtual assistant. CEO Monroe, is this problem related to the one that Champion Castell reported earlier today?”

  For some reason, Scipio’s words went a long way to soothe me. He didn’t jump right to “secret plan to break in,” which made me hope that the others wouldn’t, either.

  “It would appear to be,” Sadie said, an undercurrent of anger in her voice. “I arrived back at my quarters to find the entire floor reset. I’ve run a diagnostic and found the same errors in my assistant’s code that I found in Champion Castell’s terminal.”

  Relief. Quess had done a good job covering the virus’s tracks when he wrote Sadie’s report for her. I looked over and gave him a grateful smile, earning me one of my own.

  “Is this a problem that could affect any of our quarters?” Lacey asked, drawing me back to the matter at hand. We hadn’t informed Lacey what we were up to, but her reaction told me that she was buying the story without me having to prep her at all. That was good.

  “That is unclear at this time,” Sadie replied unhappily. “When I first saw the error, I assumed it was a random glitch. It still seems like it should be, except that it happened in my rooms as well. It’s downright odd—almost as if it was engineered to hit multiple areas.”

  Alarm skittered through me as she spoke, and I realized that she already had her suspicions. How I handled what happened next was everything. “What are you saying?” I asked, keeping my voice even. “Could this have been… malicious programming?”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Marcus Sage, the head of the Medica, interjected with a wry twist in his words. “Nothing has breached these particular security systems since the Tower’s conception.”

  These security systems have never met a “nothing” like me before, I thought to myself. It was a stupid joke, but it made me smile, inwardly at least, which helped relieve some of the tension. Outwardly, I said, “But you cannot deny that something odd is going on. First my quarters, then Sadie’s?”

  “CEO Monroe, you will conduct an investigation into the other virtual assistants,” Scipio commanded. “Determine whether this is just a coincidence, or there is a problem with the assistant programs, and update your report accordingly. We will be waiting to see if there is anything the council should be concerned about.”

  “I want to add that something odd happened to the desk I was using,” Sadie cut in. “The materials I had inside of it didn’t show up with the rest of my personal belongings, and I have no idea what happened to them.”

  Ice washed down my spine, but I kept my mouth shut and waited to see what Scipio would say.

  “If the item was damaged during the reset process, protocols dictate that it be recycled after personal property is removed. If the damage was extensive, the system might not have been able to discern between the furniture in question and the personal items inside, thereby destroying everything. You may access the storage room where the items are being kept, but if the desk is no longer in the inventory and your belongings are missing, they were most likely destroyed. I am sorry, CEO Monroe.”

  I blew out a thin stream of breath, trying not to vocalize any of the relief I was feeling. It was a stroke of
luck that the system had destroyed damaged objects, as I’d hoped. We’d had no way of knowing that for sure until now, but I was so glad we had gambled correctly.

  “Thank you, Lord Scipio,” Sadie said. “I will inform the council of my findings as soon as possible.”

  “Any objections?” Scipio waited for a span of five or six seconds, and when no one spoke, he finished with, “Thus concludes the emergency meeting of the council. Until next time.”

  The hum of the speakers died suddenly, prompting Cornelius to announce, “Lord Scipio has ended the call.”

  I leaned on the desk with both hands and tried not to show how shaky my knees were. “So that went well,” I announced into the empty silence of the room. “Good job, everyone.”

  9

  If anyone thought my quip was funny, they didn’t show it. Alex crossed his arms over his chest and leaned a hip against the conference table while Maddox sucked in a deep breath, her fists clenched. Even Leo looked tense, and I realized that they didn’t believe what I’d said any more than I did.

  After all, Scipio had just given Sadie permission to look into the other virtual assistants to determine whether there was a problem. When she found none, she might suspect that it was something other than a glitch. But I was pretty confident I had a way around it. I just had to convince Lacey and Strum to let us upload the virus into their terminals as well, so that there appeared to be a defect in the assistants. I’d have to admit to Lacey what I’d done, but if I brought her information on who had killed her nephew, then she would probably be okay covering for me.

  But the others weren’t there yet. They were still focused on the fact that this hadn’t ended like we expected it to and were still adapting. “Guys, I know Sadie launching an investigation into the virtual assistants seems like a big hurdle, and normally it would be, but you forget that we have Lacey and Strum on our side. We can use that, replicate the same problem at one of their places, and then Sadie and the council will be convinced it’s a problem in the code, create some sort of update to ‘fix’ it, and move on. We’re just going to need to have something for Lacey—namely the people who attacked Ambrose. We have Sadie’s files, and the answers have to be there. We just need to go through them and—”

  Leo cleared his throat, and I broke off to look at him, surprised to see his face reflecting a deep nervousness. “Actually, I rushed the download,” he said carefully. “So, we have all of Sadie’s files. Over a million terabytes of data. And there are encryptions on a lot of the files. It’s going to take some time.”

  I absorbed this information as more of a speed bump than a wall. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll net Lacey, explain what we did, and ask her to cover for us. If she understands that it could lead to finding the entire legacy group, she will help us. But I’ll worry about that. Is there anything you guys can do to sift through the data faster? You, Quess, and…” I cast a quick glance at my brother and decided to at least try to extend an olive branch, “Alex?”

  Leo was already nodding. “Quess is working on it now. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to continue focusing on Rose and Jasper.”

  “Has there been any change?” I asked, instantly concerned. “Are they still offline?”

  His brown eyes grew dark with worry. “Yes and no. Jang-Mi woke up.”

  It was funny how three little words could arouse so much fear. Jang-Mi was all that was left of the core memory that had made Rose what she was, but the wall between the two had been destroyed by the legacies as a way of controlling Rose. The remnant personality had taken over most of Rose’s code and was unstable to the nth degree.

  “What happened?” I asked, fearing that Jang-Mi had somehow gotten to Jasper in spite of the firewall separating them. Or was taking over Cornelius’s systems and about to turn them on each other.

  “She woke up confused and angry,” he said, his mouth flat. “I attempted to calm her down, but it was like she forgot that Yu-Na was dead and started looking for her again. She grew more and more desperate when she couldn’t find her. When she started to attack herself, I put her in the self-diagnostic protocol to try to get Rose back, but I think the fight was too much for her. She’s not responding.”

  A half-dozen questions sat on the tip of my tongue, all of them centered around three major points: Why wasn’t she back? Had sending her to Sadie’s computer sapped the last of her strength? Was her personality finished, and if so, what did that mean? She was Scipio’s heart; if she died, then what hope did the rest of the Tower have? How could we ever fix Scipio without her? But as I looked at Leo’s worried brown eyes, I realized that if he knew, he would’ve told us already.

  So instead, I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder, trying to comfort him. His hand came up to cover mine, and even though we were exhausted, sweaty, and had just performed the crime of the millennium, a spark jolted through me as his fingers stroked over mine.

  For several moments, everyone and everything in the room dropped away, and I had a powerful urge to just sit in his lap and hold him. I knew I shouldn’t—he was an AI in the body of the man I had been falling for before he was injured—but that didn’t stop my heart from wanting it.

  Then my brother cleared his throat loudly, jerking me out of the moment. I looked down to find him watching us both, his face an angry mask. “You still haven’t told us what you’re going to do with that legacy in the other room,” he said. “And that’s our biggest problem right now, not broken fragments and Sadie’s information. Sadie and the others will have noticed that he’s missing by now. We need to get rid of him.”

  Maddox gave him a sideways look, her mouth already moving before mine. “Your sister has already told you that this discussion is over and done with. We’re not killing him.”

  “And you agree with that?” he railed, looking at Leo, Maddox, and Quess. “You really are backing that move? These guys broke into Ambrose’s room and beat him without getting caught on the sensors! That’s what they do! So what makes you think that this situation is going to be any different? Any minute now they are going to figure out a way to track him, find him here, and then we’re all in trouble.”

  Once again there were some good points in there, helping his case, but it still didn’t change the fact that we were talking about killing an unarmed man. Did his words fill me with fear? Absolutely. Thanks to what he’d said, I now couldn’t seem to get rid of the image of Baldy creeping into Maddox and Quess’s room and killing them while they slept. Of Leo with a knife in his chest, or Tian with her throat cut. I knew Baldy was capable of it, and more than dangerous.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a use, too. I just needed to figure out what it was. Alex wasn’t interested in hearing that, however, so I did the next best thing. “Maddox is right, Alex. Bring this up again, and I’m going to carry through on my promise and make you leave. Don’t make me do it.”

  His eyes widened, his anger melting some to reveal a surprised pain. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

  I nodded, meeting his gaze head on. “I am,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, but I have to be. You’re starting to scare me, Alex. This isn’t like you at all. You’re patient and calm. Mom’s death changed you.”

  There was a moment, a fraction of one, really, where the wounded confusion was stronger than the rage, and I felt certain that I had reached him. But when he looked up at me, the shutters in his eyes had dropped down again, hiding the vulnerability behind plates of anger that hardened his face.

  “It’s on your head if he kills you all,” he said, seething. “I’ll be with Quess, handling Sadie’s files. Quess?”

  My brother didn’t even wait for the taller man to respond. He just snapped a turn on one heel, faster than I could blink, and was striding out of the room with a determined set to his shoulders.

  Quess stared after him, rubbing the back of his neck. “He does realize that I work for you, right?”

  “With me,” I corrected absentmindedly. “And�
�� just go with him. Please.” The last part I said in the breath of a sigh, grateful that I had at least gotten him to shift his focus somewhat. We would need all the help we could get with Sadie’s data, and if there was one thing my brother was good at, it was figuring out computer stuff. Between him and Quess (and possibly Leo), they would crack it.

  “Fun,” Quess said wryly, tucking his pad into his pocket and starting after Alex. “If he gives me any lip, do I get to yell at him?”

  “Nope,” I told him, shaking my head. It wouldn’t do Quess any good, anyway. Alex wasn’t going to take kindly to anyone putting him down. “Let me know, and I’ll handle it.”

  If you have never been the focus of a three-way look of disbelief before, then you have been missing out on something special. The looks Leo, Maddox, and Quess had on their faces ranged from polite to cynical, and I squirmed under their scrutiny.

  “I can,” I told them insistently, feeling the need to defend myself.

  “I’m not so sure. Your brother needs some help, Liana,” Maddox replied. “He’s going off the rails.”

  Even though she was right, there wasn’t much I could do officially, and she should know that. “Yes, but you and I both know that grief services in the Medica are crap,” I replied. “Besides, imagine how he feels. He’s isolated in IT, and even though Dinah is trying to keep him shielded from Sadie, he knows she’s watching. Then I went and ignored him after my mother’s funeral, when all he wanted was to be included. He found out I almost died, and even then, I asked him to stay away from all of this. He’s angry, yes, but part of that is my fault. I just… We’ve got to let him cool off, and then I will talk to him, okay? Until then, just give him a little bit of space.”

  That did nothing to assuage the doubt in her eyes, but she nodded anyway. “He’s your brother,” she said by way of letting it go, and I accepted it.