The Girl Who Dared to Endure

by Bella Forrest

  After I gave them a few minutes alone.

  27

  I had every intention of giving Zoe and Eric some time alone before I sent Quess back to check on them, but still made my way quickly to the war room, eager to see if they had discovered anything in the files that Jasper was decrypting.

  Everyone else was there, sitting around the conference table where the items from Sadie’s office were scattered about. Maddox was currently sifting through the papers I had found in Sadie’s desk, while Quess and Leo practically had their noses pressed against their pads, scanning through things. Another pile of objects taken from Sadie’s desk sat in front of another chair, including all of the nets I had recovered, as well as the hard drives. One hard drive was connected to a pad, and I realized that Zoe must’ve been using her pad to go through the information on it when she was called away. I wasn’t sure why, but I was guessing it was to make sure that none of Sadie’s files contained viruses that would harm our systems. Everyone was so focused on the work in front of them that they didn’t even register my entry.

  I felt a wave of appreciation toward them as I realized they were attacking this with everything they had. True, I had convinced them that working on this was in our continued best interest, but I hadn’t expected them to be quite so enthusiastic about it, what with the promise of escape dangling so tantalizingly close.

  That thought was immediately followed by pleasure and relief. I knew they still wanted to leave, but they were also invested in helping until rescue came, and that meant something to me.

  “How’s it going?” I asked as I started to descend the steps. “Any progress?”

  “Are you kidding? Jasper here is a godsend! We would’ve been at this for days without him!” Zoe’s voice, coming from behind me, was so unexpected that I about leapt out of my skin before I turned around to look at her. She gave me a knowing smirk. “You didn’t think I was going to let him manhandle me and reinjure himself, did you?” she asked in a low voice, and I laughed. Yes, I had thought that, but I could also see her point.

  Zoe smiled and slipped her arm around mine. “Besides, I know you, and I knew you weren’t going to send Quess back to us because you didn’t want anyone intruding on our private moment. Well, Eric doesn’t get any private moments until he’s fully healed, do you get me?” I snorted, trying not to blush at the innuendo coloring her words. “And,” Zoe continued, slowly pulling me down the stairs, “I wanted to tell you about what we found. Jasper has been scouring the files, pulling everything he can in relation to the legacies, their plans, the things they’ve affected… everything.”

  I paused on the step and looked at the screens on the wall behind my desk. Most of them were filled with camera images from around the Citadel, which were sent to me from central command, but two in particular caught my eye. One was glowing with orange coding that seemed to flex and move in anything but a straight line; the other was different only in that it was pink, and its motions seemed to loop and swirl more than those of the orange.

  “Jasper?” I asked, taking a few steps toward the two screens to get a better view. “Rose?”

  “Hello, Liana,” Jasper said, and a moment later his face filled the orange screen. I smiled as his features began to form, the most prominent one being the heavy white mustache on his lip, straight and bristly like a broom. His eyes were a deep orange color that seemed only a few shades darker than my own amber ones, and sparkled with a mischievous light. I’d never seen him in the flesh before, but all of his features seemed to suit him to a T. Still, that didn’t stop me from suddenly wishing he had a human body, just so I could throw my arms around him in a hug. “How was your meeting with the boy?”

  “It was… something,” I told him. “It’ll take him a while to come around, but I understand him a little better now. I think it’ll be good for all of us to interact with him and show him that he’s not in any danger from us. And don’t mention Mathias to him. He thinks that if his people find out he’s been taken, they might throw him off the Tower.”

  “Do you think we can trust him not to try to attack us and run away?” Maddox asked. I considered it and then shook my head, uncertain. Liam had seemed nervous, angry, and adamant about not talking, but he hadn’t tried to attack me. Still, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t if he thought escaping was his only option for gaining some leniency from his people. I wasn’t sure if he was there logically yet, or if he would ever get there, but if I were in his shoes, I’d be looking for any way out.

  I had presented him with one earlier, and I was hoping he took it. But until he did, I couldn’t be 100 percent certain what he would do.

  “I don’t know. Quess? Can you do a check to make sure he doesn’t have any tracking devices on him, please? He seemed pretty confident his people could find him.”

  Quess set down his pad and stood up. “Sure,” he replied. “But I already checked him out last night. He wasn’t emitting any frequencies, and we took his net out.”

  I nodded. It was probably fine, but better to be paranoid and overcautious then to slip up now. “I really appreciate it,” I told him, and he gave me a tight smile as he grabbed his medic bag and started up the stairs.

  “And don’t forget Eric,” Zoe reminded him as he passed us.

  “And risk pissing you off? I wouldn’t dream of it.” He grinned as he spoke and offered her a wink before slipping through the door.

  I rolled my eyes and then turned back to the others. “So what has Jasper dug up for us?”

  “Well, the first thing you should know is that it seems like Sadie inherited not only her position from CEO Sparks, but also his legacy duties. Apparently, Sparks was another in a long line of CEOs who doubled as legacies, using their position and unrestricted access to Scipio to steal the fragments. I’m not sure how, but Sparks and Sadie are related. Several of the CEOs in the past have been, in some way or another.”

  “Does that mean she’s the head of this entire thing?” I asked, suddenly very interested. The legacy responsibility was passed down through family members, along with the nets that gave them the information on what their predecessors’ accomplishments were, and how to continue where they left off. If Sadie was related to Sparks and then assumed his position in the council, it made sense that she was now bringing his plans to completion.

  Which made it reasonable to assume that we didn’t have to look much further than her. Or at least I hoped it did.

  Zoe, Maddox, and Quess exchanged looks. “Actually…” Zoe said, trailing off.

  “We’re not entirely sure,” Maddox said grimly, crossing her arms. “She has mountains and mountains of information from a contact named ‘P,’ and from the looks of it, they are definitely working together. It’s not clear who’s in control—it seems like they have their own separate duties. But, um… yeah.”

  I swallowed. Sadie wasn’t running things alone? That was… not the best news. “Any idea who ‘P’ might be?” I was hoping it was Plain-Face, the man who’d been with Baldy in the Medica, or one of the other legacies we had run into. I wasn’t super keen on yet another unknown individual gunning for us.

  “It’s impossible to tell,” Quess said, dashing all my hopes. “Every message is supposed to come with transmission information that we can use to track it back to the pad that sent it. Yet these messages have none. All of it’s been erased.”

  That wasn’t surprising, given how good they were at covering their tracks. “What are the messages like?”

  “Well, from what we can gather, P definitely runs the undoc side of things,” Quess replied. “There’s messages between him and Sadie about using his people to infiltrate the Tourney. P asked Sadie for the code the legacies used to get past the Citadel’s sensors and give them access to Ambrose’s room, but the attack was his idea, from start to finish. Apparently, they had been secretly sampling the genetic codes of the contestants, and Ambrose’s matched a sample that Sparks took when he was in power—from Lacey’s sister when they ass
assinated her as an enemy legacy. All the relevant files were transmitted in the messages, as well as a message from Sadie sent a minute before the attack, telling him that the alert systems were offline in the hall. They are definitely working together, but it’s impossible to tell who he is.”

  My stomach clenched as I realized that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I had hoped. Still, I wasn’t about to let this deter me. We weren’t finished going through the files yet. No use in panicking until we had picked apart everything. “Then keep looking for something that will tell us who it is,” I told him, and he nodded.

  Zoe, however, wasn’t finished. “Look, the reason I brought up the thing between Sparks and Sadie was because we also found communiqués between her and Plancett, which seem to indicate that he started working for or with Sparks, proving his loyalty by giving Sparks the information on where the Hand councilor’s quarters were located so they could take out Raevyn Hart, the head of the Hands at the time of Violet’s visit.”

  I frowned. Plancett’s involvement and place in the totem pole meant that he probably wasn’t a legacy. Otherwise, he would’ve been in charge after Sparks died, and not swearing his allegiance to Sadie. But how much did he know? Had they recruited him into their ideology, or was it just a business move on his part? What if they had cultivated a group of dogmatic followers who would die for them? That made things more difficult, but I couldn’t go looking for fire when there wasn’t even any smoke yet.

  “It’s why no investigation into her death was raised,” Zoe continued, jerking me from my grim thoughts. “She died in her quarters, and her assistant didn’t report anything unusual. He’s been working with the legacies ever since, his loyalty transferring over to Sadie when Sparks died, in exchange for them keeping the bulk of his people out of the expulsion chambers. He’s been giving them ration cards and doing whatever else they needed him to do for them.” Zoe pressed her lips together, then added, “I think he might have also killed Eric’s father.”

  “Eric’s father?” I exclaimed. “How do you figure that?”

  In response, she took the graphic novel from the table next to her and slid it to me. I slapped my hand over the cover before it could fall off the table, and then held it up, giving her a questioning look.

  “Page 343,” she said. “Knight Elite Dreyfuss and Knight Elite Macgillus encounter Violet Croft after she lands on one of the greeneries in her flying ship. Eric’s dad was a Knight before he joined the farming department. He was there. There’s a message from Plancett to Sparks from a few days after Eric’s father passed away, and it basically says he took care of it.”

  My eyes widened, and I quickly flipped the book open to the page in question. Sure enough, there were two men—both wearing the crimson colors of the Knights— introducing themselves to Violet. I hadn’t met Eric’s father, who had died when Eric was five, but I had seen pictures of him in Eric’s old home, and the likeness was there. But the other man—Dreyfuss?—wasn’t someone I thought I’d seen before. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t place it.

  “What about Dreyfuss?” I asked. “Is he still alive?”

  I assumed he was dead, like Selka and Raevyn, and possibly even Eric’s father. If so, that would confirm that Sparks had been wiping away the people who knew about the outsiders. But it stood to reason that whoever was still alive from that time was involved in some way. Maybe one of them was the mysterious P.

  “He’s retired and lives with his daughter in Greenery 13,” Maddox replied before Zoe could, surprising me. “He works a food stall in the market. In fact, you might recognize him as the vendor who was attacked that day the food cart was pushed at you guys in the Lion’s Den.” She tapped something and the table lit up, beams of light being projected from the surface to form a face that I vaguely remembered from the market. Several people, probably legacies, had pushed him and used their pulse shields to move the massive stall from which he had been serving food. I had originally dismissed him as a random victim. Now I was beginning to suspect differently. If he was working with them, then he could’ve been letting them hide behind his stall to get into position before they attacked us, and then stuck around to play the wounded vendor to see if we had died. “And again, as one of the volunteers in the Tourney.” She swiped her finger across the screen, bringing up a new image of him working as one of the extra security guards for the event. He would’ve had access to everything, could’ve easily let his people come and go without any interference!

  “Then he’s got to be this P fellow.” But was he a part of Sadie’s family, or a different one? Maybe Devon’s? I hoped it was Devon’s; he’d been keen on getting Maddox back so he could teach her the truth of her legacy family, acting like there weren’t many of his family members left. But maybe he had a secret brother.

  “Hold on,” Zoe said. “I’m with you, and I finally get why you were going on and on about the visitors coming twenty-five years ago—you figure that whoever interacted with the outsiders and is still alive has to be part of the conspiracy to keep it from the Tower. But there are two small problems with that. One, the council knew about the visitors. They had to, in order to authorize using the defense lasers on the Tower. And that means the legacies would have had to kill off the entire council around that time, too. Second, there are gaps between the deaths that did occur. Years, in some cases.”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” I replied. “They couldn’t have killed everyone at the same time, or they would’ve tipped their hand about what they were covering up—especially if they were killing the people involved in that specific incident. It wouldn’t have taken long for someone to figure it out if they started killing people back to back. They probably killed each one as they became a threat, or once enough time had passed. But the fact that Dreyfuss is alive tells us that—”

  “But Dreyfuss wasn’t the only one alive at the time who’s still left. You’re right that the other councilors from that timeframe are dead, but there’s one who isn’t. You’re forgetting about Sage. Dreyfuss might be involved with them, yes—and Sage might be as well, using your very own logic.”

  I rocked back on my heels. That was a very good point. The fact that Sage was one of two people who had interacted with or knew about the visitors to the Tower—and was still alive—meant that he could be involved in some way. But it felt wrong. My initial gut reaction to Sage had been liking him. He was continuously upbeat, unafraid to discuss things, and strangely pragmatic, yet had a certain flexibility for some rules and regulations that made him almost endearing. I had met with him once, to ask him questions about plastic surgery, and he had been extremely forthcoming with what he knew, even going so far as to share my suspicions that someone could use it to fool the Tower’s sensors. If he was a legacy, he would’ve played completely dumb or outright refused to help me, wouldn’t he? I supposed it was possible he had played me. But that didn’t change the fact that he felt… grandfatherly. Stern, but strangely affectionate.

  Not to mention, he was fascinated with pre-Enders. He even went so far as to collect medical journals in order to understand their primitive practices. If he’d had a chance to encounter another civilization with potentially more information than we had about the world before, only to turn around and vote to have them shot down… It just didn’t seem like something he would have done.

  Still, I couldn’t rule it out, either.

  “Jasper, have you uncovered any evidence of Sage and Sadie being in collusion?”

  “Define ‘collusion,’” he replied wryly. “They’ve exchanged enough messages on certain subjects for it to be considered mildly inappropriate in regard to standard council protocols. But that’s more about back channeling on issues they are trying to resolve in council meetings.”

  “But what about you?” I asked. “Did Sage know what you were when Sadie put you in the Medica?”

  “Yes and no. According to the messages between them, Sage was looking for a mentorship program
to assist in teaching, and Sadie told him I was an experimental program. ‘A step closer to artificial intelligence than the normal dummy programs,’ to quote her. He thought I was just better than previous programs and had the ability to learn. Sadie’s restrictions on my programming handled the rest. I was unable to tell anyone who or what I was, or why I was there. So her secret was safe.”

  “Wait, why were you there?” Leo asked.

  I glanced over at him and frowned. He was standing up, but looked a bit wobbly, like his legs weren’t working quite right. He’d managed to get himself up without too much fuss, but still, it was a little odd. I had noticed his state of exhaustion earlier and knew that he had been pushing hard yesterday. I also wouldn’t have put it past him to stay up and work all night, trying to help Jasper and Rose. But one night wouldn’t be able to cause that much reaction.

  “Why did Sadie want you there?” he expanded. That was a really good question, and one that could reveal what exactly they were planning to do. Maybe Sadie had put him in there to spy, or worse, planned to use him to assassinate people who got in her way or became a threat. No one would have gone to the Medica expecting to die—and no one would suspect the doctors of anything untoward if they didn’t get out alive, either.

  “It probably had something to do with this,” Maddox announced, dragging my attention back to her. She tapped her pad a few times, and the image of Dreyfuss’s face on the table morphed into a sub-file labeled ‘Project Prometheus,’ with hundreds and thousands of files inside of it. “This is Project Prometheus, I assume named after the original group. I’m not sure how it all fits together, but these files go back years. It’s pretty incomplete—I’m guessing she keeps all active and important documents on a hard drive that’s with her at all times, rather than any place that someone might steal it—but it has hundreds of schematics from the other departments, many of them focused on both critical and redundancy systems.”