The Girl Who Dared to Think

by Bella Forrest

  The Girl Who Dared to Think

  Bella Forrest

  Copyright © 2017 by Bella Forrest

  Nightlight Press

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Read More by Bella Forrest

  1

  Before the Tower, humanity dreamed of flying.

  We made great machines to lift us away from the earth, roaring on engines that growled with noxious fuels, then rockets that shot us into space. But once we were there, we realized it wasn’t enough. We grew restless. We waged war. We won, and we lost, and we brought the earth to its flaming knees. The sun tore open our irradiated, weakened atmosphere, and life dwindled to ash.

  And now, nearly three hundred years after the end, we survived. Hidden behind the thick outer walls of the Tower, we served the monstrous structure that was both our salvation and our prison.

  Once, we had dreamed of flying. Now, we didn’t seem to dream at all.

  “Squire Castell.” Gerome, my commanding officer, snapped me out of my musings, and I cringed. I’d been daydreaming again, and not about productive things. That was not in service to the Tower.

  I turned away from the window I had been gazing through and, forcing an apologetic look onto my face, met my mentor’s mildly disapproving gaze. Gerome’s dark eyes reflected nothing, but his face reset to its normal stoic expression. After a moment he gave a barely perceptible nod and turned to the man next to him, the thick fabric of his crimson Knight’s uniform creaking slightly, the sound magnified by the narrow concrete walls of the service hall we were standing in. “As I was saying, this is Squire Castell. She will be accompanying us, Mechanic Dalton.”

  Dalton, a ‘seven’ from the Mechanic Department (or Cog, as we referred to them), glanced pointedly at Gerome, and even out of the corner of my eye I could see the look of disgust he was shooting me. No doubt he had seen the number on my wrist and condemned me—which meant today was not going to be the brand-new day I had promised myself it would be.

  No—it seemed both of us were destined for mutually assured sniping. Dammit.

  It wasn’t either of our faults; whenever any department needed to use a Knight’s equipment, our protocol was to provide them with an escort—and these occasions were typically used as training for Squires like me, so we could learn our future duties when we became full Knights. This time—like most times—we needed to go outside to repair a few of the solar panels on one of the Tower’s outside branches.

  Dalton shot me another irate glance and I realized he’d said something and I had missed it. Strike two, I thought to myself. Gerome was turning and moving down the passage away from us both, heading toward the elevator just a few feet down the hall so I realized Dalton must have told him the level we had to get to. I moved to follow, but Dalton held out a disdainful arm, blocking my path.

  “You’ll come up after us,” he said with a sniff. “I don’t want to risk the psychological contamination.”

  A twinge of anger ran up my spine, but I looked away, biting my tongue.

  As always, the narrow passageways in the shell were practically deserted. We were in its depths so there wasn’t much to look at—just pipes and concrete and steel walls.

  “I can’t believe they sent a four,” Dalton muttered as he turned toward the elevator. I couldn’t control myself this time. I opened my mouth to say something when Gerome shot me a look over his shoulder, his message clear. Stay back—do not act.

  Yeah, okay. Fine.

  The two men stepped forward onto the elevator’s exposed steel-gray platform. Several beams of blue lights shot out from the platform and I heard the computer begin chirping out their names, identification codes and rankings as they began to rise. I watched as they were quickly lifted up toward the next floor, disappearing from view. I wondered if the system ever failed. Gerome was okay but I felt Dalton could benefit from a long fall to a cement floor.

  You’re part of his detail for today, I scolded myself. Gerome would have been disappointed; my thought had been dishonorable for a Squire—or anyone, really. Besides, Dalton’s dislike of me was for a reason. A stupid reason, but one I was not helping with my negativity right now.

  Level 173, Squire, Gerome’s voice buzzed in my ear.

  Sighing, I pressed the button, watching as a new platform slid out of the wall and covered up the exposed shaft the elevator ran through. Taking a deep breath to mentally prepare myself for the scan, I stepped inside and waited. Almost immediately the lights came on, and I felt a dull pain in the back of my head as the neural net surrounding my cerebral cortex buzzed with activity and the computer ran its scan of my credentials.

  “Identity verified: Squire Liana Castell, designation 25K-05; you are cleared for elevator use.”

  I fruitlessly prayed for that to be the end of it, eager to get moving. The computer, however, was not done with me.

  “Your number is currently four,” its artificially rendered feminine voice chirped. I scowled, and once again felt a throb in the back of my head. It was bad enough that Dalton disliked me because of my number; for a stupid computer to remind me of it was just downright depressing. I leaned against the wall of the shaft and waited for it to finish the worst pep talk in history. “For a Squire of the Citadel as well as a citizen of the Tower, it is recommended that you—”

  “Seek Medica treatment,” I recited along with the machine, the speech ingrained. It lectured anyone ranked five or lower—but the lower you were, the more the computer had to say. “Yeah. Got it.”

  “Your well-being is for the well-being of the Tower,” the computer said. “Remember that, as a Squire, it is your duty to—”

  I knew the rest of its speech by heart. The damn thing regurgitated it every time I so much as breathed too close to a high-security area. Your number is too low. Have you considered Medica treatment? Maybe it’s time to find new friends! I made a face and then uncrossed my arms, pushing up off of the wall as the platform began to move, my eyes watching the painted numbers on the walls glide by.

  A four. I was a lousy four, and the end of my Knights training was drawing near. If I didn’t raise my number before then, I’d fail to meet the ranking requirements to be a Knight. Consequently, I’d be dropped from my department, and essentially become homeless, doomed to try to find another department to take me in before my number fell to a one and I got arrested. All before I turned twenty-one. My parents would make a case for me and get me extensions, I was certain, but they could only buy me so much time. Not very much at all.

  My eyes cau
ght the number 150 as it slid past and I turned, a trill of excitement interrupting my bleak thoughts. I waited patiently until, like dawn breaking, I was greeted with a section of glass paneling. Here, the elevator shaft was now exposed to the inside of the Tower behind a glass tube that ran up and along the walls.

  The walls of the Tower were actually a shell—one that was, by design, for defensive purposes. It contained two layers—the outermost layer holding the hatches into and out of the Tower, with a grand set of stairs inside, wrapping around the Tower, and seemingly endless. The innermost layer contained hundreds of floors that held a collection of things—service tunnels and quarters mostly—but the floors of its lowest section housed the machines that kept us alive. The lowest floors were also the densest floors, as they bore the weight of the entire structure.

  As a result, not all of the elevators connected with the floors at the top; they typically stopped at the highest available level, meaning the citizen inside would have to walk to the next elevator if they needed to go any higher. The lift I was in, however, and a few just like it, ran all the way up the interior walls.

  My eyes soaked up one of the more beautiful sights in our Tower (beautiful sights were few and far between, after all): the artificial light emitting from the walls was set to ‘morning’ and rays of bright light were beginning to cut into the shadows of the dim nighttime lighting, revealing three structures dangling from the ceiling. Their bases were massive at this height, and from this angle I had a full view of all three of them, gleaming in the artificial morning light. The glowing white walls of the Medica’s smooth-sided cylindrical structure were closest on this side, the white almost too bright to look at directly. Circular walkways girdled the giant cylinder—one for each of its sixty floors. The walkways were thin and white, interrupted only by steps that ran up and down between floors, and the bridges that connected the structure to the rest of the Tower. Opposite the Medica was the Citadel, with its black-and-crimson-lit arches, dark steel edifices, and stylized walls, borrowing heavily from Gothic architecture to distinguish its cylindrical shape. Between them dangled the luminescent blue-and-black cone-shaped structure of the Core. Its circular levels were stacked, the widest level connected to the roof. Each level below was slightly smaller than the one above it, making the whole thing appear like coins of different values stacked together from largest to smallest. The Core was the heart of the Tower and the heart of Scipio… Our benevolent computer overlord.

  The net in my head buzzed, warning me that it was detecting a strong spike of negativity, and I quickly broke the thought apart and shut it away. “Stupid,” I muttered, catching a flash of my scornful amber eyes in the glass as I spun away from the view to face the wall. I glanced down at my wrist.

  The band wrapped around my bronze skin was made of black microthread, a smooth material that was thin but practically unbreakable. Mounted atop it, the digital display that showed my number was glowing a soft, irritated orange—our overlord’s little reminder that I wasn’t good enough. Scipio, the great computer that monitored the nets in our heads and used the readings to determine our worth, had never liked me. Supposedly he didn’t have emotions, but I had long suspected that he took some perverse pleasure in my failings. He’d never had any faith in me. Then again, neither did my parents. Or my teachers. Or anyone really, except for my friends and my brother Alex.

  Alex had explained that the number was a representation of the concentration of positive versus negative thoughts in your brain. The net couldn’t exactly read direct thoughts but it read the feelings associated with them and, through some sort of complex algorithm, could perform an ongoing risk assessment on the citizen in question, to determine the likelihood of dissidents. The thing was, I didn’t consider myself dissident. In fact, the most aggravating thing about my existence was the number itself, which seemed self-defeating.

  The elevator slowed as it approached Level 173, where Gerome and Dalton were waiting. It halted at a cut-out section of wall, and I stepped out quickly. The elevator hovered for a moment behind me, awaiting new orders, and then sank back into a slot in the wall to await its next rider. I was halfway down the ramp connecting the elevator to the floor when the tip of my boot caught on something—my other foot, of course!—and I pitched forward, starting to fall. Gerome moved quickly to steady me. Being a confident man, he used his right hand, which meant I caught sight of the number there: a cool blue-colored ‘ten’ shimmered against his pale skin as he grabbed my upper arm. A perfect citizen. Gerome was a prime example of how being perfect could make a person boring.

  I straightened and shot a glance at Dalton. He was standing a few feet behind Gerome; he tilted his chin away from me, refusing to meet my eyes.

  I clenched my jaw. It was beyond unfair. Dalton’s ranking of seven was so average that the typical citizen of the Tower wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Since we had met, however, he had looked down on me. The way he was acting, you’d think we were here on a secret mission sent straight from Scipio, not to fix malfunctioning solar panels, and that I (the lowly four) was his lone obstacle, rather than his escort. The worst thing was, he could get away with it; he obviously knew from experience that the odd spike of righteous superiority on his decent track record wouldn’t lower his number. It made my blood boil.

  “Peace, Squire,” Gerome said, clapping a massive hand on my shoulder. “Cogs have never been the most social of our departments.”

  I grunted in response.

  Gerome looked at me. His face resembled the holographs we had of the ancient Greeks: chiseled, each feature designed as if by an artist. His thin, distinct eyebrows rose up under hair that had just begun to go silver at the temples, and his cleft chin jutted toward me like an accusation.

  “We don’t want you slipping any lower,” he said, his voice devoid of empathy. “Your number is low as it is. Have you considered—”

  “Medica treatment?” I muttered, looking at the metal flooring so Gerome wouldn’t see me rolling my eyes. Dalton moved down the service hall ahead of us, and I moved quickly to follow, hoping that walking would keep Gerome’s lecture brief. “Yes. My parents have been talking about it quite a bit.”

  Gerome caught up to me with one swift step. Up ahead, Dalton had begun climbing a steep set of narrow stairs toward a rectangular access hatch. As he pushed it open, I saw the black outer walls of the shell waiting beyond.

  “Your parents are good citizens,” Gerome said. “Strong. Capable. Champion Devon made them Knight Commanders for a reason.”

  I grimaced, looking away. “They’re very perfect."

  They had wanted me to be, too. They’d been disappointed.

  Gerome stopped at the foot of the stairs, and the way he snapped his heel against the floor made it clear that I was meant to halt as well. I did so, wondering if I had gone too far. Gerome hated sarcasm like a cat hated water.

  “Lord Scipio spared you,” he needlessly reminded me in that soft patronizing tone I got from nearly everyone. “You were a second-born twin, illicit and undeserving. Your parents yielded your life to his judgment, and he deemed that you would live. Must you continue to throw these… tantrums?”

  My face grew hot and I curled my hands into fists, feeling my nails biting into my palm. In a way, he was right. Each family was allowed two children by law, but my parents had given birth to my older sister Sybil before I was born, and even though it was by seconds, I was younger than my twin brother. My mother, overflowing with maternal instinct, had been willing to kill me right then and there. Excise the excess, so to speak. Scipio, however, ordained that I would live. For a time, my parents had thought that made me special. A chosen child, destined to lead the Knights into a glorious new era.

  When Sybil died unexpectedly when I was five, grief only inflated their opinion of me. As I grew a little older, I began asking questions about Sybil’s death, trying to make sense of it. It came to a head when, at the age of seven, I made the mistake of asking why Scipio hadn’t prevented
Sybil’s death, and my mother had responded by slapping me across the face and hissing words I would never forget.

  “He chose you over her,” she had spat, her eyes glittering with tears. “You have a destiny—but when you ask questions like that, it makes me wonder if he made a mistake.” Her number had dropped to a nine that day—the first and only time I ever saw it happen. Of course Scipio didn’t choose me over Sybil; the computer couldn’t prevent death and Sybil’s demise had nothing to do with Scipio having allowed me to live. But that was the day I learned to never question Scipio’s decisions out loud.

  Eventually my parents’ grief faded, and they turned their attention fully on me and Alex, trying to make us into carbon copies of them, essentially. They wanted so badly for us to carry on the family tradition. Which was why they were astounded when Alex, upon turning fifteen, defected from the family profession—he was recruited from school into the Eyes, Scipio’s private order of engineers and residents of the Core. After that, all expectations fell firmly on me.

  As for the destiny my parents had hoped for? Well, I found out a year after Alex defected that it wasn’t even true. The only reason I was alive was because another child had been stillborn. I wasn’t special. Scipio hadn’t cared about me; he had been correcting a population imbalance.

  “I can’t help how I feel,” I muttered.

  Up at the access hatch, Dalton had turned and was shooting fiery looks in my direction. I found myself suppressing the urge to throttle the man.