The Girl Who Dared to Stand

by Bella Forrest

  It struck me then how different this all was since merely a couple of weeks ago. If I had admitted my inability to perform a task that everyone in the Tower was supposed to be good at before, I would’ve been met with disgust, revulsion, and fear—seen as a deviant who couldn’t even serve the Tower in the simplest of ways.

  But here there was laughter. And, Scipio help me, it was all I had ever wanted.

  “That’s fair,” Quess said with a nod, looking at the map. I drew back some of my elation, determined to focus. “And these aren’t your ordinary blueprints. These are encrypted. Only someone who was in IT can read them.”

  “Let me guess, you can read them?” Grey asked.

  Quess nodded. “I can read them. And I already did that, and familiarized myself with the plan. It’s actually not a bad plan, all in all. The nets are put together in one of the workrooms on an upper level, right below the mineral farms.”

  “Mineral farms?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Not a lot of people know this, but IT has to grow certain precious gemstones and minerals to create or maintain most of the circuitry that keeps Scipio alive, and the Tower functioning.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, filing that away for later use. I had never thought about where the components for our technology came from, and once again, it wasn’t something that was mentioned, let alone taught. And given how tight-lipped the Eyes were about their department in general, I knew I shouldn’t be surprised that I was ignorant. As curious as I was, I had to accept the fact that we just did not have time for a lecture. “What about internal security in that area? Won’t it be high?”

  “Well, there are stations everywhere, and probably some patrol units, but it won’t matter. They won’t be able to recognize you or Grey thanks to the melanin packet and makeup applicator your brother brought. And your brother wrote a program that will basically make our net IDs invisible to the scanners for one hour. It’ll read like a scrambled net, and mark your face for facial recognition. But your brother wrote another code that basically distorts the results, listing you as another person instead. They would have to be watching every picture on every failed net when yours came across to even notice that your picture wasn’t an exact match, and we used to get thousands of those a day. He only programmed it to work in this section, on this floor, so we cannot use the stairs or any elevator to escape to another floor in an emergency. As soon as you set foot out of this area, you’re caught.” As he spoke, he slid his finger along the thicker white lines that I was pretty certain represented walls, and circled a wide swatch of space on the map, indicating our so-called safe zone where my brother’s virus would be in effect.

  “How do we get in?” I asked.

  “Drop through the central cooling tube that runs down the inside of the Tower. There’s a laser cutter defense grid, but Alex and Mercury—”

  “Wrote some sort of program to defeat it,” I finished for him with a nod. “That’s my brother.” I studied the blueprints for a second and then shook my head, uneasy in spite of the clear way that Quess was explaining it. It took me a minute to identify the source. “This really feels too easy,” I said. “What about the room where the nets are being held?”

  “According to Mercury and Alex, empty by ‘close of business,’ which is Eye slang for five o’clock.” Quess grinned and looked around. “This really is a good plan, guys. Drop down, get to the net room, steal enough for everyone and maybe a few extra, and then get out. It honestly wouldn’t work normally, but because we have Mercury and Alex, it will this time.”

  I licked my lips and nodded. I had to trust them. I had to believe this would work. “Unless anyone objects, I say we go for it.” I waited, and no one objected, so I filed the decision under “unanimous” and moved on. “So who’s going?” I asked, looking around. “Obviously me, but…”

  “Me,” Grey replied automatically, and we shared a smile.

  “Me too,” Maddox said, and I looked over to see her listening, my smile growing uncertain.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  She nodded, her lips pursing. “Being here is just as bad in some ways. Besides, you’ll need the help.”

  I couldn’t argue with that logic. “Anyone else?”

  “You guys are going to need me, as loathe as I am to say it,” Quess said, fiddling with a few tools. “I mean… I know this handsome exterior shouts ‘athletic,’ but I really just have a good metabolism. So you can’t count on me for fighting, but you can for hacking stuff.”

  “Eric and I should stay here then,” Zoe said, approaching us. “Keep an eye on Tian, hold down the fort…”

  I had to admit I was disappointed that Zoe and Eric were hanging back, but it was smart to leave people behind—especially with Tian. “Then we’ve got a plan, guys,” I said, smiling encouragingly at everyone. “And I don’t think there’s any point in delaying the inevitable. We’ll go tomorrow.”

  Once again, silence meant yes. Tomorrow night it was.

  “Do we need to talk about anything else?” Zoe asked, already walking back to her workbench, and I hesitated. I still hadn’t forgotten about talking about our future plans, but bringing it up with a mission set for tomorrow wasn’t a good idea.

  “Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s get back to work.”

  14

  I eyed the corridor ahead, one arm extended with my fist in the Callivaxian symbol for halt. Ahead, the narrow metal hall was clear, and I motioned us forward and around the corner. Suddenly my net buzzed, eliciting a slight head turn from me, but the feel of it had become familiar now. The modified neural scrambler was far easier to handle than the original one, as it only caused my net to intermittently buzz every few seconds or so, instead of continuously.

  However, it had done nothing to reassure me as we made our way through the shell of the Tower, heading up. And now we were here, on the two hundredth floor, at the topmost level, about to attempt a heist in one of the most secretive and isolated sections of the Tower. Without getting caught.

  Hopefully.

  Quess brushed by me as we continued down the hall, a pad gripped gently between both of his hands. I saw a flash of the blueprint image on the screen as he passed, but it was too complex for me to decipher with just a glance.

  “Here,” he said, pointing at a sliding metal door, and after a moment’s pause, I reached around him to pull it open. I was opening my mouth to add that he, too, could open doors, when he stepped inside the dark room, completely absorbed in his pad.

  I watched him go for a second, alarmed by the fact that he’d just marched in without checking to see if anyone was inside, and then shook my head as Grey and Maddox stepped in after him.

  “He’s always like this on missions,” Maddox whispered as I came through the door and began pushing it closed. “He just gets so absorbed in getting there that he forgets to actually pay attention or be alert.”

  “Right. Why did we bring him again?” Grey asked—and not softly, either. I rolled my eyes as I twisted the latch and secured the door, then ran my hands over the lines of my stolen IT uniform that happened to be a very good fit. I pulled a hand light out of my pocket, slipping my fingers through the rings of fabric attached to its side that allowed me to use it without having to hold it. The hand light rested against my knuckles as I switched it on, illuminating the room.

  Inside, wooden crates were stacked in neat, tidy rows under clear plastic sheeting. Each crate was easily as tall as I was, and had writing emblazoned on the side.

  “MRE.” I spelled the strange three-letter word out loud. “Pine Industries.”

  “As in Ezekial Pine?” Grey asked, and I looked over at him to see him watching me.

  “No idea, but maybe?” I was just as baffled. Why would the founder of the security department leave stacks and stacks of boxes in here, sealed behind plastic to preserve them? These rooms were supposedly designated for additional living space, or potentially to be converted to an additional farming floor, in case
we needed it, but the need had never arisen—which meant they had never really been touched. They were like an attic, which was something I remembered reading about when I was younger.

  Why were they being used for storage? What was someone hiding here? And had the crates been up here for three hundred years, sitting alone and unnoticed for all that time? Maybe no one even knew they were here—there wasn’t much up here that needed to be repaired or even maintained. It was possible that these crates had been forgotten about, but there were so many...

  “Okay, but what is a mre?” Quess pronounced it phonetically, dragging the M sound before transitioning into the R and elongating the E.

  “It can’t be said like that,” Maddox declared, her own light shining around the dark room. “That sounds like something said in Wetmouth.” I laughed. Wetmouth was how people outside of Water Treatment referred to the Divers’ tongue.

  “Maybe the Pines created Divers’ tongue,” Quess suggested. That one seemed a bit far-fetched, but given what we knew, which was not much, it was as good a guess as any.

  “It’s an acronym,” Grey announced, his tone amused. “Apparently, like sixty or seventy years ago, there was a big push from the council to improve ‘efficiency.’ So they implemented this way of talking using letters, specifically reducing places and titles into letters to make communication speeds even faster. So, like, M for Medic, and CS for Chief Surgeon. Roark used to sometimes fall back into it, and I would have no clue what he was talking about. Which I think was why they got rid of the policy a few decades ago.”

  “Really?” I said, following Quess as he moved down an aisle created by two stacks of crates. “That’s interesting. I never heard my parents do it.”

  “Oh yeah,” Grey said with a laugh. “That’s because the Knights hated it, and with good reason. It was like every department had carte blanche on what got an acronym, and the titles that had worked for years before suddenly got complicated and obnoxious. And the Knights were having to deal with every department’s unique language. At one point, they even had to carry a little dictionary to try to keep up with acronyms. They finally got sick of it after… thirty or so years.”

  “They went against Scipio?” I asked, surprised.

  “I remember this,” Quess exclaimed. “The Knights actually challenged the council’s decision about using acronyms in the first place, and won. And now it’s a law. Besides, I’m pretty sure that decision was one of a few that Scipio didn’t participate in, which he can do if he feels it is, quote, ‘a human matter,’ unquote. As far as he was concerned, the efficiency was just fine.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” I asked, giving him a look. “I had no idea that Scipio wasn’t involved in every decision. Everyone acts like he is.”

  “I was an Eye,” he said with a grin as he rounded a corner, and I rolled my eyes. I had walked into that one.

  It bothered me how much he took that information for granted, and it made me start thinking about the Knight-specific history classes we’d received at the academy. It felt as if each department that made up the Tower acted as a small time capsule—each with a different version of history inside—and I wondered which one would survive when it was all said and done. I also wondered how things had gotten to such a point where we hoarded knowledge for ourselves, to ourselves, and didn’t trust anyone outside the department with it.

  “Aha,” Quess said, his hand running over the wall. A second later a seam emerged, revealing itself like a gear that had just had the sand blown out of it, and we saw a rectangle and a glowing numeric pad on the door.

  “So this little virus is one of my creations,” he announced with a grin as he pulled something from a satchel swinging by his side and set it against the metallic wall with a click. A moment later, a small screen with rolling numbers began to whiz by over the numeric pad, some sort of ticker at the top, with six digits that were yet to be selected.

  The first field filled with a 2, then a 5, followed by a 6, 3, 7, 1. Quess dismissed the top screen with a swipe of his fingers, then quickly keyed in the numbers. The holographic overlay disappeared, and the wall sank back half an inch with a loud grating sound, and then swung out.

  The light suddenly revealed within the opening was blinding, and the heat radiating from it immediately made sweat start to form on my forehead.

  “This beam is what powers the Core,” Quess said over the roaring inferno.

  On impulse, I pulled out the goggles that we used to navigate under the greeneries and put them on. When I opened my eyes, I breathed a sigh of relief; the intense light was lessened somewhat by the lenses. How, I did not know.

  “Put your goggles on,” I told everyone, and moved around Quess to look into the shaft. A wide beam of white light shot down the center of the shaft, from a point not three feet overhead. The heat being emitted by it immediately vaporized the sweat off my body, and dried out my mouth and nose. I looked down the shaft, and studied the proportions of it.

  “We’re going to have to be very careful lashing down,” I called over my shoulder. “Lashes are going to have to be on tight corners.” Tight corners referred to setting our lashes to come out over our hips, and giving them no more room than five feet to swing. The limited length would keep us closer to the wall, slowing us down, but giving us far more precision. “We don’t want to find out what happens when you touch that beam!”

  “I’ll have to carry Quess,” Maddox called as she began tugging on the straps of her own gray uniform, cinching her harness tighter. “He’s too sloppy for this.”

  “I am not!” Quess sputtered, and I turned in time to see Maddox giving him a look that would wither all of the corn and wheat in Smallsville. And he did wither under that look, petulantly looking away while shoving the pad back into his satchel.

  “Don’t worry, Quess,” Grey said, moving to stand behind me. “This doesn’t reflect on our masculinity at all.”

  “Oh, it absolutely does,” Maddox said, bending her knees for Quess. He awkwardly climbed onto her back, looking at his wrist. On impulse, I checked mine, and saw that the purple seven was holding strong. I hadn’t wanted to use the more powerful version of Paragon that Roark had created, but we needed to have a high enough rank that it wouldn’t draw the attention of IT. Honestly, now that I was looking into the belly of the beast, so to speak, I was kind of regretting not using the tens, but we needed to preserve our stash.

  I stared at the seven a moment or two longer, then pulled a tiny mirror out of my pocket. Normally, I wouldn’t have one within a mile of me—in fact, this one was Tian’s—but I was worried about my disguise, and wanted to make sure it was holding strong. The melanin wash my brother had sent had altered my hair color to a pale, white blond, while the makeup applicator had lightened my face until it was almost sickly, and my eyes were lined with a dark shadow eyeliner smudged all around the edges. Maddox had procured lenses, giving me deep dark brown eyes that hid the natural amber color perfectly.

  The disguise was excellent, though I could still detect myself beneath the layers. I just had to hope nobody else would. Breathing in, I put the mirror away and began tightening my harness.

  “How long until the laser cutters are offline?” I asked Quess, and he checked his watch again.

  “Thirty seconds. After that, our deadline starts. We’ll have one hour before the program stops running and the lasers come back on.”

  “Just a trip to the store,” Grey said cheerfully as he hooked a carabiner through his own harness, getting it ready to attach to the built-in hook in the back of my suit, designed just for situations like this. “In and out—no sightseeing, window shopping, or getting caught.”

  I chuckled and switched my lashes over to the appropriate setting, resisting the ticklish feel of them sliding inside the built-in pockets that ran through the seams of my suit. We were lucky that all uniforms came with lash seams built-in. The three central departments—Medica, Knights, and IT—shared the same design and features
to make mass production easier.

  I heard the click as Grey hooked onto my back, standing so close I could feel the heat radiating from him. The beads settled over my hips, the microfiber hole expanding and retracting for the bead. I grabbed one and slid it out, giving myself six inches of slack for swinging the bead around in a circle and gaining momentum. Then I cast it to one side of the tunnel in front of us. It hit, the line tense over my hand, and I held my breath and swung out and around gently, catching us with the balls of my feet braced against the side and holding us there while I tossed the next line.

  Grey shifted, his hands grabbing at my uniform, as I let us down slowly, the winch housed in the metal case on my built-in harness whirring soundlessly as I let out the line.

  Overhead, I heard Maddox grunt, and looked up to see her rappelling down, heading in a straight line. That way was not my favorite style, as I preferred more fluid movements, but it was clearly what she was comfortable with.

  “You okay?” I asked Grey as I descended farther, moving us down in a zigzag pattern, and keeping a nice, slow pace. I tried to keep us away from the energy beam, which seemed frozen in place—a column of white, unadulterated light that occasionally flashed purple or a soft blue. But no matter where we were, it always felt too close, given the heat coming off it in waves. I could only imagine that Grey was dying, being even closer to the beam than me.

  He merely grunted in response.

  “How far down?” I called up, my voice coming out in a dry wheeze.

  “Twenty-three floors,” Quess called back.

  Great.

  I continued to lash, focused completely on getting us down safely. My eyes tracked the numbers etched into the sides of the wall, marking the floors. As we descended, I noticed the lack of any other sort of marks, which was odd. Marks were everywhere in the Tower, helping to show workers where they needed to go. In the plunge, Knightmarks were left for other Knights, to tell them how to navigate the dangerous terrain within. But here, there was nothing, only numbers and hatches on every level.