The Girl Who Dared to Think 5: The Girl Who Dared to Lead

by Forrest, Bella

  “Do you think that will get her to back off the investigation so we can vote on the expulsion chambers?” I asked.

  Okay, it hadn’t been anywhere on my list of topics to talk to him about, but I couldn’t help it. If sucking up to Sadie got her to back off a bit and let the vote move on, then I was willing to try. I didn’t have that much pride when it came to saving lives.

  He chuckled and leaned back. “You really don’t like the expulsion chambers, do you?”

  I hesitated, torn between giving him the truth and being afraid of how he would perceive it. “I don’t like that Scipio was somehow forced into recommending the practice in the first place,” I hedged, adding some defensiveness, which I hoped he would perceive as righteous.

  I kind of liked letting him believe I was a zealous defender of Scipio and the ideals of the Tower. Maybe it was paranoid of me, but I didn’t want anyone really knowing who I was. Keeping that a secret kept my enemies guessing about my next moves, and made me unpredictable—especially if they were constantly underestimating me.

  “And if people on the council want to keep the expulsion chambers active after learning that Devon Alexander corrupted Scipio’s decision to make them happen, then I would argue that they are just as culpable as he was.”

  Sage’s eyebrows lifted high onto his forehead, wrinkling the skin all the way up to his bald scalp. His eyes bulged in shock, and then a moment later he opened his mouth and laughed, a sharp bark of sound that quickly dissolved into desperate wheezing and coughing. My heart skipped a beat when he doubled over, making an awful hacking sound. I was suddenly certain he was going to die, and that somehow I’d be blamed.

  I calmed some when his coughs and wheezes slowed, punctuated by slow chuckles as the old man continued to laugh. “You’ve got some spunk to you, kid, I’ll give you that,” he said once he’d caught his breath.

  An assistant appeared from nowhere with a glass of water in one hand and a small gold canister in another. Sage opened his mouth as she approached, and I watched, fascinated, as she sprayed some sort of mist into it, which he immediately inhaled. They did this two more times in rapid succession, and by the third one, his breathing had vastly improved. She handed him the glass and then walked away while he guzzled the contents of the cup.

  “Sorry,” he said abashedly once his glass was empty. “Do yourself a favor, kid, and never get old. It sucks.”

  I laughed at his dry tone. “I’ll do my best. Any tips on how to do that?”

  He grinned and tapped his head. “The trick is to remain young here,” he informed me. “If you can do that, then you’ll slow the aging process. It’s how I’ve lived so long, although it’s getting harder and harder to feel young.”

  He flexed his back, and I heard a series of cracks as his ancient bones slipped around in place—awful, in spite of his soft sound of relief.

  “Now, to answer your question, no, Sadie isn’t going to back down on doing that investigation, because I can tell you for certain that she doesn’t want the expulsion chambers gone. Neither do I, for that matter, and neither does Plancett. I know Lacey and Strum want to get rid of them, but that’s understandable, since half the rank ones collected come from their departments. But that’s the breaks of living so far away from the sunlight emulators of the atrium and the farms. The citizens in both departments are prone to depression due to the lack of vitamin D in their systems. We give supplements, but nothing, it seems, can compare to the real thing. Suicide rates in their departments are also astoundingly high, but I digress.”

  He paused to catch his breath, and I took a moment to process what he had just said. Lacey had said something similar in our conversation last night, only she had mentioned a third. I did some quick math, and realized that if what they were saying was true, for every one person each other department sent to the expulsion chambers, Lacey and Strum were sending almost three apiece.

  That was ridiculously high, but what was worse, Sage and Plancett didn’t want the law changed, and he thought that Lacey and Strum only did because they were trying to protect their people. What did he think about me wanting them gone? I decided to keep my mouth shut and see what he would say next. Maybe he’d answer that question for me.

  “I can see you’re not happy with that news,” Sage said with a smile. “Want to tell me why?”

  Damn it. I hesitated for a second, and somehow managed to pull a believable lie from nowhere. “Not unhappy,” I replied. “I guess I just don’t understand what was so wrong with the system before. Why is killing people our only option?”

  His grin deepened. “That is a very philosophical question, but I am assuming you just want my reasoning for it. I hope you know I can’t speak for the others?” I nodded, and he continued. “To answer your question, we had what we called a loaner program set up for anyone who dropped to the rank of three or below. Those people were allowed to make communities around the shell, and served as basic work crews for various departments, to take care of the less-than-desirable tasks. They worked in exchange for ration cards, but there were never enough tasks for them, so many of them wound up starving, which resulted in them stealing, and almost launching a rebellion a few times. Once the expulsion chambers went into effect, criminal activity plummeted, as did communicable diseases and rank degradation. Even keeping them a secret has helped ensure order because the rumors are so believable. It sucks, but it is necessary.”

  I blew out a breath, trying not to show the complete rejection of his ideas on my face. Maybe the loaner program hadn’t been effective, but from what he had just said, it didn’t seem like it had been designed to be that way in the first place. Otherwise they would’ve found enough jobs to support that aspect of the population. Instead, only a few were provided, and the Tower had let the rest of those people go hungry rather than giving them a viable way to feed themselves. They created the situation, and then used the crisis it caused to justify the expulsion chambers.

  As much as I wanted to point that out to Sage, I refrained. Arguing with him wasn’t going to get me what I really wanted. So instead, I decided to change course, and get to why I was really here.

  “I see. I’ll consider what you’ve said.” He gave me a pleased smile. “And I really want to thank you for your advice, but that’s not actually why I’m here.”

  “Oh?” He cocked his head. If he was curious, he didn’t show it; he just smiled and waited expectantly.

  “I heard from a friend that you collect a few pre-End objects.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You’re not going to be one of those Champions who nitpicks over everything, are you? Because if you are, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t collect pre-End artifacts.”

  I chuckled and shook my head. “No, no, nothing like that,” I assured him. “Actually, my friend said you’d be interested in something that I recovered recently. It’s a medical journal?”

  His eyes lit up with excitement, and he leaned forward. “You found one?” I nodded, and his enthusiasm and joy grew as he began to rifle around in his pockets, searching for something. “Each time I find a new one, I think it’s the last! Oh, this is exciting. Is it with you?”

  I nodded and withdrew it from the same pocket I used to hold my pad, gently easing the fragile thing out so as not to tear any of the precious pages. He looked up, and his pupils dilated in alarm.

  “You put it in your pocket?” he exclaimed, horrified. “And you’re touching it with your bare hands! Hurry and get it out of there before you ruin it any further!”

  His voice was suddenly very serious, and I hastened to obey him, worried that I had turned him against me by handling the magazine so callously. I placed it on the table in front of him and noticed that he had stopped his search upon finding a pair of white microfiber gloves, which he had already donned.

  He cackled gleefully as he ran his hands over the front of the magazine, and opened it up. “Oh, wow,” he breathed, sounding almost childlike with wonder as he absorb
ed the pictures inside. “Look at this.”

  He turned it toward me, revealing another flayed-open face, and I quickly waved my hand to indicate he should turn it away. “I’ll be honest, I already looked at it,” I told him, playing up my queasiness. “Were pre-Enders that barbaric? Why are there pictures of faces being cut open in there?”

  He snorted and turned the magazine back toward him, flipping a page. “You could say it’s barbaric, my dear,” he huffed. “This medical journal is about a practice called plastic surgery. Unlike other surgical fields, this one focused on changing one’s appearance.”

  Changing one’s appearance? I frowned, and thought of the blood recovered on the catwalk and how it had matched blood found at the scene of Devon’s murder. I had assumed before that the reason I hadn’t recognized any of my attackers was because the man I would have recognized had a twin or was wearing a disguise. But was it possible that someone had done this… plastic surgery to his face?

  I needed to know how much it could affect someone’s looks, but realized I needed to ease into that, so asked a far more innocent question first. “Why would they do that?”

  Sage sighed and leaned back. “Sometimes people got into accidents that caused large amounts of scarring, and plastic surgery was used to help reconstruct their faces. However, most people used it to ‘improve’ their looks—make themselves seem more like society’s standard of beauty so they could feel more attractive. Utter nonsense.” He leaned forward and flipped another page.

  I remembered the flash of the fashion magazine, and how insecure I had felt looking at the glamorous pictures in there, and nodded, unable to disagree. So I went a little deeper this time. “Fascinating nonsense, though. Could they really change a person’s face so much?”

  He nodded, not looking up from the picture. “Oh, yeah. I imagine criminals used it as well, to try to avoid capture by the authorities. There were a few articles that talked about the ethics of the phenomenon, so apparently it was a thing.” He shrugged, turning yet another page.

  “Did it work? Were they able to avoid facial recognition software?”

  Sage gave a delighted laugh and looked up from the magazine. “I don’t think they had facial recognition software everywhere at the time, to be honest, but I’m not sure of that. I have to say, though… looking at the few journals I have on this sort of work, I have to imagine that, yes, it would hide them from facial recognition. They could do all sorts of things to change the shape of the face and size of the eyes… Thank Scipio we don’t participate in such barbaric processes anymore.”

  I bit my lip and looked down at the magazine, and then back up to him. This was it—the missing link that explained why we hadn’t been able to find the people who had attacked Ambrose after they escaped. It was why I couldn’t place the face with the voice. It had to be. It was the only explanation!

  A question—a dangerous one—hovered on my lips, and I hesitated to ask it. Still, I couldn’t seem to hold it back, and as I opened my mouth, it came spilling out. “Do you think it’s possible for someone to recreate these procedures in the Tower?”

  I already knew the answer. Yes. I was certain of it down to my bones, but wanted to see what Sage thought about it.

  Sage blinked at that and then leaned back, a thoughtful look on his face. “I doubt it,” he replied after a moment. “Although it is an interesting idea and would certainly explain why we weren’t able to locate that Knight’s attackers once they left the Citadel, I don’t think it’s possible.”

  “Why not?” I replied, hiding my relief that he wasn’t taking my line of inquiry as anything more than curiosity on my part. He had brushed dangerously close to my thoughts on how the legacies who killed Ambrose might be hiding, and I still wasn’t sure if I could trust him. I studied him closely, hoping he’d reveal something. His answer sounded genuine, but he could be lying.

  “Well, for one thing, this is only the fourth article I’ve discovered on the topic, and I’m fairly confident when I say I have the largest collection of journals in the Tower. A whopping forty-three—forty-four if you’re letting me have this one.”

  He only had forty-four? There were definitely more than forty-four magazines in the house we’d found, and all of them were about plastic surgery. It seemed odd that such a treasure trove existed, especially while Sage was offering rations in exchange for the journals. I supposed it was possible that all of those magazines were actually a part of Sage’s secret collection, the legacies up there working for him… but the way he poured over the pages like a delighted kid didn’t make that feel right. His eagerness had appeared authentic; his responses felt genuine.

  And those people were subsisting on those strange food cubes from the MREs, which meant they weren’t trading the journals for food or favors. And that meant they had to be using them—and what for, if not to change their faces to evade detection? Was it actually possible that someone had figured out how to perform these types of surgeries, and was performing them on their soldiers to keep them active and moving around in secret?

  “For another,” Sage continued, oblivious to my growing excitement. “The tools of the Medica are not designed to cause harm. Most of our healing procedures are noninvasive. Someone would have to create tools that could cut human skin precisely, and find resources to create massive amounts of silicone for implants. Their patients would have to be sedated for hours, and could die of shock long before the procedure was finished. The only thing they’d have that’s better than what the pre-Enders did would be access to bio-foam for the scars, and antibiotics to prevent infection, but the rest of it would be painful and traumatizing.”

  And yet, that was what the legacies were doing. It had to be. It was a long-forgotten practice, and would allow them to navigate the Tower with a complete measure of freedom. Any time their enemies saw their faces, they could just change them and keep on going with no one being any the wiser. It was brilliant and terrifying—and meant I couldn’t trust any strange face in a crowd.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I told him, not letting any of my thoughts show. “It sounds awful when you describe it like that. But then again, those pictures were pretty awful as well.”

  He smiled knowingly. “It took me a few years to get over the sight of blood and human flesh, so I understand. Still, it’s good to look back and see how far we’ve come.” He held up the magazine with one hand and raised an eyebrow. “You still haven’t told me if you’re going to let me add this little treasure to my collection. I assume your friend also told you there was a prize for these things, right?”

  I smiled at the sly tone in his voice. He knew we were brokering an illegal deal—trading rations for contraband was a double whammy in the eyes of the system—but he was willing to perform it anyway. And as the head of the Medica, and the ultimate authority on ration cards, he could abuse that power as he pleased. Maybe it was a test. I certainly wasn’t going to report him, but then again, rations weren’t what I wanted.

  “Actually, you can keep the ration cards,” I said. “Instead, I’d like to ask for a favor.”

  He raised an eyebrow and gave me a speculative look. “Go on.”

  I sucked in a deep breath, and then stated what I wanted as clearly as I could. “I want the vid file of my fight with Devon, starting when he entered the room and ending when his body was removed from it.”

  Sage squinted at me a second, his eyes reflecting nothing of what he was thinking, and I held my breath and waited. “Didn’t we send that already?” he asked, sounding confused. “I’m sure I included it in the evidence for your trial.”

  I scrutinized the words, looking for any whisper of a lie, but found nothing. I was positive he was telling the truth. In which case… Was it truly an accident, or had someone close to Sage somehow managed to keep it off the final report before he sent it? That was possible; if the legacy groups were performing pre-End surgeries, they’d likely need a Medic working with them to perform the operation—someone trai
ned in the Medica would be the only one with the skills to even attempt such a thing. Maybe Sage had a legacy somewhere high up in his department? I made a mental note to follow up on it, but let it go for now, not wanting to start casting aspersions on anyone. I made my face apologetic and shook my head.

  “No, I’m sorry. It wasn’t there.”

  “I see.” A pause. “Perhaps I overlooked it. I’m quite embarrassed. I’ll have it sent over immediately.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, confused by the suddenly downcast tone his words had taken. He sounded… dismayed. “Are you all right?”

  His lips curled up in a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Thank you for your concern, my dear. I just… hate it when I make mistakes like that. It lends fuel to the fire of my fear that I’m a doddering old fool who’s on his last legs. And who knows, maybe they’re right. Maybe I should retire.”

  Whoa. Now he sounded positively defeated. Of all the reactions I could’ve anticipated from Sage, the last one I had expected was vulnerability and fear, but there it was, staring me in the face. I felt a sudden urge to comfort him, and I gave in to it.

  “Sir, no,” I said, reaching out and resting my hand on his gnarled one. He looked up at me, his eyes windows to his sorrow, and I felt my heart break a little for him. “Everyone makes mistakes from time to time.” Or, someone is trying to make you look inept so they can justify calling for your retirement, I thought to myself. It could be that the legacies were in the process of infiltrating another department, after they had failed to do so in mine. I’d need to keep a close eye on Sage in the future, just in case I was right. “I’m sure it was just an oversight. Besides, no one needs to know. Once I have it, I’ll add it to the file, and that will be that.”

  His lips tilted up, hope blooming in his eyes. “That’s very kind of you, my dear, but you don’t have to cover for me like that. I have my integrity to think of, certain hobbies not included.” He patted the magazine as he said it, and I couldn’t help but feel impressed. “Besides, when my staff decide that it’s time, they’ll let me know. I’m just doing the job as best I can until I die or they find someone better.”