The Girl Who Dared to Rise

by Bella Forrest

  They’d die if I threw it.

  I carefully separated my hands and placed them on the floor. Leo gave me a grateful look and then turned back to the sentinel.

  “Put them down.”

  The sentinel shifted, regarding him. Five seconds went by, then ten, and I swallowed, wondering what it could possibly want.

  Then, inexplicably, it dropped both girls. They landed with a tumble, Zoe giving out a little scream, and then she was hauled back up by her hair, the sentinel grasping the top braid and pulling her to her feet.

  “Don’t hurt her!” I shouted, managing to make it to my feet. “Leo!”

  The sentinel pointed directly at Tian, and then nodded its head in a wordless order to let her go.

  Leo shook his head. “Not until you release our friend.”

  This time the machine shook its head and then pointed at Tian again, its movements more punctuated and insistent. Leo glanced at me, and after a moment, I realized he wanted me to weigh in on the decision.

  I nodded. Tian seemed to know what she was doing, and it was clear that we couldn’t take the sentinel as we were right now. It had beaten us, and if we kept fighting, one of us, possibly all of us, would die. It was just too strong.

  Slowly, Leo lowered Tian to the ground and let the girl go, not making any sudden movements. Tian took a step forward, and another, and then raced over to the sentinel, laying her small hands on its huge thigh.

  “Let her go,” she said gently, and to my surprise, the sentinel did just that, dropping Zoe like she was a ragdoll.

  She groaned, gripping her scalp, but Maddox helped break her fall somewhat. They both appeared to be otherwise unharmed.

  “Go,” Tian said, pointing down the hall. The sentinel immediately began to leave, but then turned when it realized Tian hadn’t moved, its now-lilac eyes questioning. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said reassuringly. “If I am not, then you have my permission to come back and kill them all.”

  I blinked and gave the little girl a sideways look, but she couldn’t see it. Her face was turned away from me.

  The sentinel seemed to hesitate, but then nodded once before moving down one of the side halls leading away from the space. Tian watched it go, and then turned back, a big, lopsided grin on her face.

  “Hi, guys!” she chirped. “First of all, can I just say that I’m so happy that you love me enough to risk your lives for me? I’m really glad you found me and all that, but I have to tell you that right now really isn’t a good time for me to be rescued! I’m in the middle of something super important, and I have to go after Jang-Mi now so that she doesn’t murder any more people. She really doesn’t like doing it. Anyway, I’m sure you’re all super worried about me, and I promise, I will come home and tell you all about it really soon, but I have to go. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  And then she was gone, skipping down the hall like a wraith child toward the sentinel that was waiting at the end of it. She stopped next to the sentinel, which was holding its hand out, looked at it and then up at the sentinel, and then stuck her nose in the air and kept walking, clearly now in a huff.

  And then they were gone, Tian stomping around the corner and the sentinel following like a dog that knew it had behaved badly.

  And the only thing I could think to say was, “Wait…what just happened?”

  20

  “Hold still,” Quess snapped as I edged away from his fingers, which were probing my ribs.

  I shot him a mulish look and then forced myself to be still, fighting the instincts that urged me to stop the pressure he was placing against my aching ribs, lest they finally snap.

  Pain bloomed as he carefully felt each rib, checking to make sure they weren’t broken, and I held my breath, gritting my teeth against the agony. I jerked again when he hit a particularly painful spot—but this time he didn’t say anything, just continued his probing.

  I exhaled sharply when he finally removed his fingers, and then flinched when he placed them on my breastbone. I slapped his hand away. “Don’t,” I said.

  I didn’t want to endure any more pokes and prods; my entire body felt like one livid bruise. But it was more than that. I was particularly sensitive there, given that it was where the sentinel had been trying to crush me. I didn’t want anyone touching that area.

  Quess’s dark blue eyes grew a shade darker. “You’re being a baby,” he said flatly. “You won’t let us go to the Medica, but that doesn’t mean you can’t let me check you out.”

  “You’re not a Medic, remember?” I shot back, still stubbornly clinging to my desperate need not to be touched right then. Okay, yes, I was being childish. But I had been almost crushed under the weight of a four-hundred-and-fifty-pound death machine—which had almost killed my friends. I was allowed to be childish.

  Quess scowled at me, and then put his hands right back on my breastbone, ignoring my wishes. I fought the urge to punch him off, and instead clenched my teeth and tried not to cringe as he probed the bruised bone. His hands moved steadily upward, checking my clavicles, and then were finally, thankfully, removed. I closed my eyes and took a second or two to relax my clenched muscles, and then opened them again and looked around the living room.

  It wasn’t hard to see our defeat as my gaze paused on each member of my group. It clung to all of us, as did the hefty knowledge that we had barely escaped with our lives. That we probably would’ve died, if the fighting had gone on just a few moments longer.

  Maddox was lying on the floor, a pillow wedged under her head and a gelatin ice pack wrapped in a microfiber cloth pressed over her jaw. One leg was elevated over a chair, another ice pack wrapped around her ankle. Her mouth was pinched, her eyes dark and haunted.

  Zoe had her own ice packs wrapped around her ribs, with one of our emergency broken bone packs pressed against her left side. She had likely suffered a fracture there when the sentinel kicked her, and even though we couldn’t be certain, Quess had insisted on treating her for it anyway. She and Eric were both lying on the couch, where he had propped himself up with several pillows from our bedrooms so she could recline against his chest. She was dozing, and I nodded to Eric, letting him know he’d have to wake her again.

  She was at risk for concussion. Sleeping wasn’t a good idea, and I’d be damned if I was going to lose my friend just because she couldn’t stay awake.

  A microfiber cloth suddenly appeared in my vision, inches from my face, and I looked up and over it to see Leo standing there, his hands filled with cloth and ice packs, as well as an ointment jar with cream for treating bruises. I grabbed the ice pack, immediately placed it against my jaw, trying to ease the throbbing pain there, and gave him a grateful look. He alone had escaped with only some minor bruising, but the defeated look was there on his face, too, along with a guilt that I couldn’t quite understand. He hadn’t done anything wrong. If anything, he’d saved us. Him and Tian both.

  Leo averted his eyes, neatly shifted his load around, and offered me the tincture of ointment. I stared at it, not wanting to let anyone, even myself, touch my ribs and chest, but he shook it at me insistently, still not quite meeting my eyes.

  “It’ll be less painful if you do it yourself,” he finally said, when I stubbornly refused to take the jar. “You’re the only one who can gauge your own pain, so you’ll know exactly how gentle to be.”

  He had a point, so I gingerly reached out and took the jar, my ribs screaming a chorus of agony the entire time, and then leaned back into the chair with a soft grunt of relief. I carefully unscrewed the lid and began spreading the ointment, skimming over my sides with the lightest of touches. Almost immediately, some of the pain faded, and I breathed a little easier.

  Scipio help me, while the sweet relief from the pain was great, the entire mood of the room was awful. We’d taken a beating before, but at least we’d had a small measure of success and achieved our goals. Never had we been beaten this badly, and our morale had reached an all-time low. I wasn’t
even sure what to say, because I wasn’t quite sure what I could’ve done differently.

  Quess returned from where he had disappeared into the kitchen and set a glass of water down, then deposited a few white pills next to it. “Take those when you’re ready for bed,” he said. “They’ll help ease the pain so you can get some sleep.”

  I nodded and continued to smear the ointment, watching as Quess reached over Leo’s shoulder to pluck an ice pack from the pile in his arms. He pressed it against his own chest with a deep sigh, and dropped into the vacant chair next to me.

  “How’s your chest?” I asked, concerned for his wellbeing. He’d been amazing about taking care of us after the sentinel and Tian left, and I hated the thought of him putting his own injuries aside in order to tend to ours—especially if his were worse.

  He was resting his head on the back of the chair, his eyes half closed, and instead of sitting up to look at me, he merely rolled his head toward me. “You mean where Leo zapped me with the baton? Oh, fine.”

  I huffed a laugh at his sarcastic tone, but Leo immediately looked guilty and remorseful. “I am so sorry, Quessian,” he said for the umpteenth time. “I swear, if it weren’t for the limited capabilities of the human body, I would’ve been able to move it out of the way in time.”

  “Who cares who did what to whom?” Maddox cut in with a groan. “Let’s face it, we all got our asses kicked. That sentinel would’ve killed us if Leo hadn’t thought fast and pretended to take Tian hostage.”

  “Actually…” Leo trailed off, a blush forming on his cheeks. “It was Tian’s idea. She had the idea that it would stop the sentinel, and I was desperate to prevent it from killing you. And she was right. I suggest we listen to whatever she has to say when she gets here.”

  “If she gets here,” Quess grumbled.

  I sighed and leaned back in the chair, finally finished with applying the ointment. I was worried about Tian, and felt weird about not pursuing her after she left. I knew it had been the right call, but it still felt wrong. But now, hearing that she had come up with the idea that had saved us, I felt somewhat better. She obviously had some level of insight into the sentinel’s behavior.

  I might not know what was going on, but she did, and I had to believe that she knew what she was doing.

  Or else I’d be responsible for her dying at the hands of that monster.

  I screwed the cap on while I regarded Quess—and the slow, silent recrimination in his eyes. He didn’t like that we had left Tian, and I couldn’t blame him. But it was more than that. His design had failed, and he held himself personally responsible for not being able to stop the sentinel. Not that it was his fault, entirely. The shocker had worked, it just hadn’t worked for long enough. But Quess didn’t want to hear that. Right now, he was at war with the two powerful emotions raging inside him—anger at leaving and guilt at failing—and I wasn’t sure which one was going to win out. If it was the latter, he’d take it out on himself. If it was the former, well, he’d take it out on me, and I wasn’t sure I would stop him.

  But I needed Quess to get over it. We had bigger fish to fry. “What’s done is done,” I said flatly, accepting another ice pack from Leo and spreading it over my ribs. “What I want to know now is: what is the deal between Tian and that sentinel?”

  “I know, right?” Zoe exclaimed. I slid my gaze over to my friend and saw her gingerly probing the edges of her hairline, as if confirming that her scalp was still there and attached. Poor Zoe. I could only imagine how tender the area was, since she’d been grabbed and yanked around by the sentinel. “It’s like she is friends with it, but did anyone see anything that would give her a reason why?”

  I shook my head, a move echoed by almost everyone except Maddox, who instead flashed a thumbs-down as her answer.

  “No, but she kept calling it ‘Jang-Mi’,” Quess said.

  “And I heard the same female voice that I heard in Dinah’s apartment,” I said. “Once again, there was no one there, but Tian was definitely having a conversation with someone. Maybe whoever Tian’s communicating with is making her believe that she is the sentinel, and manipulating Tian into helping her?”

  “I suppose it’s possible; she kept shouting for Quess to be careful with ‘her beautiful mind’ after he jumped on the thing’s back,” Zoe said, sitting up slightly and then wincing. “Why did you do that, by the way?”

  “Tian pointed it out, and I realized that somebody had attached an external hard drive to it,” Quess replied, tiredly running a hand through his hair. “I’m guessing it’s how the sentinel is being controlled. It’s great news for us: we don’t have to bust through its hull. We just need access to the back of its neck. I was trying to get to it before it threw me off, and it looks like there’s an additional hard drive, there, but much bigger. It’s under a modified cage, however—I’m guessing to prevent anyone from tampering with it. Tian didn’t realize that it’s held in place by a cage that makes it impossible to yank off. If she had, I don’t think she would’ve encouraged me to grab the hard drive. I think I can cut through the cage much faster than that thing’s skin, so that’s something.”

  “Yeah, but unless we have something to knock it out—”

  Quess cut me off with a derisive laugh. “I was wondering how long it would take you to bring that up,” he said bitterly. “Look, I couldn’t have known that the shockers wouldn’t work! I told you I was guesstimating!”

  I frowned. “Quess, I never said—”

  “No, but I know that you’re thinking it! You all are! Stupid Quess didn’t get the math right. But I didn’t miss the darn thing! Nor did I let it get away!”

  I opened my mouth, shut it, and then smiled—though it was a smile born out of an angry and bitter humor, one that couldn’t believe he was trying to flip everything around on me. I knew my flaws. I knew that I had bungled things by not getting a better plan in place first—but for him to flip blame onto me was a little petty.

  “Hey, don’t do that, Quess,” Zoe snapped, rising to her feet. Gratitude blossomed inside of me. But she started to sway almost immediately, and Eric rose behind her, his hands already up to keep her from falling. She shrugged him off. “Own up to your crap, but don’t blame Liana for things not working out the way we wanted them to!”

  “There you go, jumping to Liana’s defense,” Maddox drawled, pushing herself up from her recumbent position on the floor. “Let me go ahead and recite the litany of excuses for her: ‘She’s doing her best’; ‘We can’t anticipate the enemy’; ‘It’s nobody’s fault’. Spare us.”

  More resentment burned at Maddox’s scathing tone and words, but underneath it all came a deep, stabbing pain. Maddox was right. They were excuses. Defenses even, used to justify keeping me in the position of leader.

  But they were also defenses that Maddox herself had used, and it wasn’t fair for her to throw it back in Zoe and Eric’s faces, like they were the only ones guilty of it. I understood that everyone was running hot and tempers were high, but that didn’t mean that they needed to take it out on each other.

  “Hey, Zoe’s right,” Eric said loudly, his brows drawing together. “It’s nobody’s fault!”

  “HA!” Maddox sneered. “Our plan was stupid to begin with, and whose fault is that?”

  This was beginning to spiral out of control. I needed to keep us from playing the blame game, because we needed to move on to more productive things—like preparing for the Tourney, which was resuming tomorrow.

  “Guys, this isn’t the time for recriminations,” I said, slowly scraping away my resentment, anger, and pain as I rubbed a hand over my face. “I made the decision about not pursuing the sentinel further, and I stand by it. It more than proved it could hold its own against us, and I couldn’t risk us getting injured or killed. Not just because I’m somewhat attached to you, but because the Tourney is starting again tomorrow, and I need my team ready to go.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Quess bellowed. “Who cares about the st
upid Tourney? Why are we even still doing it?! I honestly don’t get it—how can you just carry on and pretend that Tian isn’t in danger? We should get back out there to look for her!”

  “Liana just said we can’t confront the sentinel again,” Zoe said. She clearly had more to say, but Quess didn’t let her continue.

  “So we don’t confront it!” he shouted, raking a hand through his hair. “We use the lashes and lift her out from under its nose, or blow the lights and sneak her out using the goggles I developed. I don’t know, and I don’t care—Tian doesn’t understand how much danger she’s in, and by allowing her to take off with that thing, we’re putting her in even more danger!”

  “I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” Leo said slowly. “Tian seemed quite intuitive when she suggested that I use her as a hostage, and her insight paid off. We managed to make the sentinel stop. If she knew that it would work, then it stands to reason that she also knows what she is doing now. We should trust her.”

  Quess scowled at Leo. “No offense, but what does an AI even know about raising kids? You have no idea what it’s like to even be one of them, so don’t stand there and lecture me on what we should and should not do with a girl who is my responsibility!”

  “Quess!” I gasped, surprised and appalled by what he had just said to Leo. It wasn’t Leo’s fault that he hadn’t had a conventional upbringing, and he did have some insight into what he was talking about. Leo wasn’t judging Tian’s actions based on her age; he was taking her seriously, and had evidence to support his belief in her. He was an AI, yeah, but if anything, that gave him a more objective perspective—one that wasn’t limited by societal expectations.

  Not that it mattered. I never even got to voice any of that out loud. I was ignored, both by Quess and by the next speaker.

  “Our responsibility, Quess,” Zoe declared, glaring at him. “Don’t act like the rest of us don’t care about that little girl! When we all banded together, when you took me and Eric in, we became your friends and allies, and you became our responsibility, just like we’re yours. Or have you forgotten that we’re supposed to be a team?”