It felt like forever slid by as I bounced along, the cart jolting and jerking against the grooves in the floor, and after a while, I realized I was hearing the noise of not one, but two carts. They were using more than one to add to the disguise. It made sense—most of the laundry was delivered in more than one batch. One traveling by itself might draw an eye, but a whole bunch of them? No one would think twice about it.
The thought reminded me of how alone we really were, and I began thinking of ways the others could find us. If Quess got a hold of Mercury, they could ping my new net and find my location easily enough, but it could be hours before they realized that we weren’t staying away intentionally. A day, even, before they really got upset.
The sharp clatter of the cart jolted me out of my head space, and I realized we were picking up speed through… whatever common area in the Tower we were slipping past.
Odds were it was a market set up in front of one of the greeneries, judging by the occasional whiff of something delicious that got through the odor of dirty clothes enshrouding me, and the sheer volume of noise. They often sold pre-made food in exchange for ration credits in markets like that, and those who didn’t have time to cook could always count on the food stalls. Which one it was, I couldn’t tell—although from the smell, I guessed we were close to the Menagerie.
A chill went through my spine at the thought of them passing so close to our hideout, and suddenly I wondered again how Lacey had found us.
It didn’t make any sense that she’d had her people follow us. I thought I had been so careful after my meeting with them. I’d waited until they’d left, even waited their required time of sixty seconds. Surely they wouldn’t have stuck around just to follow me. And even if they had, I would’ve noticed, especially since Eric and I took the long way back.
So, then… how had they found us? Where had I screwed up?
It was far too late for it to be of any use at the moment, but still, the question refused to leave my mind. The bin continued to rattle and shake around me, bouncing me and Grey around and forcing me to slide heavily to one side as the person pushing it took a corner too fast, shoving Grey’s body into mine for a few uncomfortable seconds. I then returned my thoughts to how we had been found. If Lacey had some other way of tracking us, I wanted to know about it—so I could avoid it in the future. I had learned to change clothes before returning home thanks to a lesson delivered by Devon and his radioactive material-coated lash ends. He had used the radiation signature to follow me back to Sanctum, and killed both Roark and Cali as a result.
I prayed that this time, my mistake didn’t get anyone I cared about killed.
I tried to reassure myself that Lacey was doing this to honor our deal. Maybe she had grabbed Grey—Leo—and me in order to enact whatever cockamamie plan they had to hide us from the wrath of the Tower. Which was going to be severe, now that Devon was dead.
Considering they had wanted him dead in the first place, I could only hope that whatever plan they had in place was good. Damned good. As in, here’s a secret room that no one knows about, kind of good. Because otherwise, it was going to take a miracle from on high to help us out of this situation.
Grey shifted slightly next to me, and then let out an irritated noise. “I have the most uncomfortable sensation on my nose, Liana. It’s getting worse, and I have the urge to rub it, but can’t with my hands bound.”
For a second, his words filled me with a mild state of confusion, and then I remembered that it wasn’t Grey, it was Leo. And he had never had an itchy nose before. For a second, I struggled with how to explain something as simple as scratching one’s nose, the sheer oddity of it all. But he didn’t know—how could he? He had never had a body of his own.
“Use your shoulder and the fabric of the bag. It’s scratchy enough; it will help.”
I waited patiently.
“Much better,” Grey said after a few muffled movements.
I grated my teeth together and shook my head, reminding myself yet again that he was now Leo. I forced my brain to pair that name with his face, while coldly ignoring the way my heart cried out forlornly against such a treacherous act. It wasn’t logical, but purely emotional—and useless to me right in that moment.
The bounce and jolt of the ride came to a sudden and unexpected stop, and I tensed at the silence that replaced it. The fabric on top of me began to shift and move, and I stiffened when a hand suddenly grabbed my upper arm, pulling me up.
“C’mon, you two,” the voice said gruffly, as more hands grabbed me. “It’s the end of the line.”
2
I was hauled out before I could even begin to process the statement, and placed on my feet, my uniform bunched from where several hands had grasped it. I settled my nerves, understanding immediately what they wanted, and was then propelled gently forward, my captors giving me some time to regain my balance. I came to the conclusion that they weren’t about to push me off the edge and into the plunge.
Then something creaked, and I was shoved forward more forcefully. I staggered and came to a stop, then stumbled forward again when something slammed into me from behind. I immediately stiffened, my head swiveling back and forth as I tried to identify the location of my attacker.
For several heartbeats, I could hear nothing except a grating sound that I immediately recognized as a handwheel being turned. The metallic grating stopped after a few seconds, and then someone in the darkness said, “Hello?”
My heart in my throat, I turned toward the sound, moving slowly. “Zoe?” I asked, immediately recognizing her voice in spite of the bag over my head.
There was a click and a hum, and then someone said, “Liana!”
What happened next was a sequence of events that were both noises and sensations: boots on a metallic floor, coming toward me, hands fiddling with ties on my wrists, other hands coming around my neck. I jerked away from the last, Devon’s recent attack still a vivid memory in my mind—and then suddenly my hands were free.
I snatched off the hood and stood, staring at Zoe, who had her own hands outstretched, concern etched into the soft lines of her face. “Liana?” she asked, her blue eyes tracing over me and pausing at my neck. “What happened?”
My fingers found my neck, skimming over the raw and angry flesh there, and I snatched them back. “Devon,” I said gravely. I immediately began looking around, and saw Eric, Quess, and Maddox. Leo had been shoved in as well, and Eric was helping him out of his ties.
I looked past all of it, intent on studying the room.
It was small—tighter than anything we’d ever been in—with barely enough room for us to sit down and stretch our legs out. Pipes made up the walls, barely an inch of space between them as they snaked in and out of the room. Our prison was well chosen: even the ceiling was a dense network of pipes, impossible to penetrate.
“We’re in a water closet,” Zoe informed me, a tad impatiently. “I’m guessing somewhere in Cogstown.”
It made sense, considering Cogstown was under Lacey’s jurisdiction. But how had the four of them wound up here? And where was Tian? We had left the youngest member of our group alone and undefended in Sanctum; if she wasn’t here, did that mean they hadn’t figured out where we lived?
“Liana, what happened with Devon?” Quess asked, and I looked over at where he was kneeling next to Maddox. The young man’s face was lined with worry as he stood up and looked at Leo and me. “Where’s Leo? Did he manage to find the formula for Paragon?”
I looked over at Leo, and the AI stared back, somehow keeping any expression from reaching Grey’s face. I opened my mouth, prepared to tell them everything that had happened, when Maddox interrupted.
“To hell with all that,” she growled, struggling to get up out of the seated position she was in. Her leg was wrapped in a thick plastic sheet filled with hexagonal shapes that provided supplements meant to accelerate the healing process, meaning it would be fixed in a day or so. Provided we were still alive at that point.<
br />
She heaved herself upright after a few seconds and stood, staring at me, one hand on her hip. “Liana, do you know where we are, and what’s going on?”
Everyone looked at me, and my answers to Quess’s questions flew apart under their solemn gazes. I gazed back at the four of them, and then ran a hand over my face.
Lacey had told me not to tell them anything, but if she had wanted me to keep her identity a secret, she should’ve let my friends go without bothering them. She hadn’t, and in my mind, that meant she had forfeited the right to secrecy.
“I do,” I told them. “The people who grabbed you are working for Lacey Green.”
“Engineer Lacey Green?” Quess asked, his eyes rounding in shock. Then his brows drew together, and he frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why did she grab us? We didn’t do anything to Cogstown. The Medica is well outside her jurisdiction.”
“Shut up and let Liana finish,” Eric said sharply. I shot him a concerned look, alarmed by the anger in his voice, and saw that my other best friend was not all right. Sweat dotted his forehead, and he kept looking up and around, as if he expected something to fall on him at any moment.
“Eric?” I asked, taking a step closer to him, one hand outstretched. He took a hurried step back, his eyes huge in alarm, and I froze.
“He’ll be all right,” Zoe said as she slid around me and over to him. He reached for her, like a man terrified that the world was falling out from under his feet, and I realized he was in the grip of a panic attack.
All of us were, in one way or another, but this was worse. Eric was actively beginning to exhibit signs.
“What’s his problem?” Maddox asked as Zoe began to guide him down to the ground, one arm wrapped around his shoulder with the other over his chest. She pressed against one enlarged pectoral muscle and cupped it protectively, as if the action were shielding his very heart from harm.
“He’s a Hand,” Zoe reminded her. She kept her voice soft and gentle as she settled him on the floor, before sitting down next to him. “He was raised in a greenery. Tight spaces are not good for him, especially like this. Liana, explain things and see if that can’t help him calm down.”
“Right,” I said, licking my lips. Zoe was now guiding Eric’s head into her lap, her fingers already sliding through his brown hair and stroking the side of his face. Eric had one arm over Zoe’s legs, hugging her close. His breathing came in sharp, tight gasps.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, nodding his head forcefully, but in a way that was so emphasized that I wondered whether he was trying to reassure himself more than us.
“Shush,” Zoe said gently, her fingers drifting over his lips. “Let Liana talk, and just try to breathe, okay?”
He continued to nod, and a few seconds later, all attention was on me.
I exhaled and began. “Lacey Green and Praetor Strum are part of some sort of shadow group that is… I don’t know… at war with other shadow groups over control of the master Scipio AI. They wanted me to assassinate Devon Alexander, which… I sort of did before we escaped the Medica.”
“You killed the Champion?” Quess exclaimed.
“Bigger picture, Quess,” Maddox said curtly. Her green eyes remained on me as she spoke, and she took a jerky step forward. “Liana, did you agree to this?”
I hesitated. “Not exactly. And I certainly didn’t plan to do it today. They gave me a week to do it, and it was my intention to talk to everyone about it after we rescued you. As you’ll all recall.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just say no in the first place,” Quess protested. “I mean, we are talking about two members of the council who are trying to institute a regime change in another department. And having the leaders of other departments assassinated for good measure. We should not be involved.”
“I know that,” I replied, with more patience than I felt. I glanced at Eric, but he was in no shape to back me up and confirm that I had been pretty upset after the meeting. “I did give this whole mess a lot of thought, even before it became a mess. Getting us involved in some sort of shadow war that seems to have been raging since the beginning—”
“The beginning?” Maddox asked, cocking one dark eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”
“You missed a lot, Maddox.” It was Grey’s voice, but I knew it was Leo speaking. “Apparently Devon is part of a family that has been working to subvert Scipio and take control of the Tower. He was allied with someone in the IT department—”
“We don’t know that,” I interjected softly, and he looked at me, brown eyes widening in surprise. “Just because those other two Inquisitors were part of IT doesn’t mean that whoever they are working for is. If these are family units, starting from the beginning, it makes sense that they would plant future generations in other departments, as they needed to.”
Silence met my statement, and I felt the weight of the truth I had been carrying for the past twenty-four hours settle in on them.
“Liana, what was the deal you made with them?” Zoe asked carefully.
“Supposedly, they’d be able to exonerate Le—” I caught myself, remembering that they weren’t ready for that particular truth bomb yet, and continued on quickly, glossing over my mistake. “Grey and me, and integrate all of you back into the Tower.”
“All of us?” Quess asked. “Back in the Tower? And what if we don’t want to go?”
I looked at him and shook my head. “Again, I didn’t plan to kill Devon today. I meant to ask you guys about everything first. It just—” I glanced at Leo and back at Quess, my fingers itching to touch my neck again, if only to confirm that Devon’s fingers weren’t still there. “—happened,” I finished lamely. “They said they’d take his death as acceptance of their proposal, so I’m hoping all of this means that they’re putting their plan in motion. Although, what concerns me more is how they knew to grab all of us. And whether Tian is okay…”
And whether Grey was okay, but that was a question I would ask Leo personally. And one that I was sure the AI would get sick of.
“We never made it back to Sanctum,” Zoe said, indicating herself and Eric. “After we hurt Maddox, we were heading back, but were jumped from behind.”
“I got one of them,” Eric said quietly, and Zoe smiled down at where he was still lying, his head in her lap. He’d grown less panicked and calmer under her care, but I could tell he was still feeling the tight confines of the space, and empathized with him. “Not dead, but I definitely cleaned his clock.”
“Good for you,” I replied. “Quess? What happened with you and Maddox?”
“Well, Leo led me to a room, and I administered the counter drug to the sedative they had given Doxy. We made it out, and were just over the bridge and into the shell when they grabbed us. How did they know how to find us?”
“Or who we even were?” Maddox asked on the tail of Quess’s question.
“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. I tried to recall whether they had touched me at all during that first meeting—perhaps they had slipped a locator on me without my knowing, or used some sort of radioactive isotope like Devon had. But there was nothing that stood out. “I suppose they could’ve followed us, but Eric and I were so careful…”
“What about Mercury?” Zoe asked, looking around. “He brokered the whole deal, after all. He certainly could’ve told them our new net IDs. If they knew who we were pretending to be, it would be a lot easier to track us.”
I frowned. We’d only just gotten new nets—stolen directly from the IT department. Mercury, along with my brother, Alex, had been responsible for the plan to get us in. It seemed counterproductive of him to go to such great lengths, only to turn around and sell our net information to Lacey, but it was a theory. He had wanted me to make a deal with them, after all. He knew, better than we all did, that being integrated back into the Tower gave us a better chance of replicating Paragon—the only chance he had of hiding his failing rank and escaping the eye of the Tower. Ther
e was a very real chance he would’ve sold us out, if only to force my hand.
And if he had, they knew where Tian was, too.
An icy wash of fear and anger raced down my spine, and I balled my fists. If they harmed one hair on her head, I wouldn’t wait for them to exonerate me. I’d be adding their murders on top of Devon’s, and combining it with the laundry list of charges the Tower had likely stacked against me. Even though Lacey had told me in the hall she was upholding her end of the deal, I didn’t like the idea of anyone going after Tian when she was alone and defenseless.
I realized I was being overprotective and emotional, but I didn’t care; Tian was perhaps the brightest part of my life, next to Grey, and even though I had known her for only a short time, I’d come to care for her deeply. Couple that with the fact that she was a young girl, incredibly child-like and naïve, and add my protective instincts, and, well… it didn’t matter how much I’d liked Lacey before.
“It’s possible it was Mercury,” I finally admitted, breaking out of my tangled web of thoughts and returning to the moment. “I hope not, but it is possible.”
“Liana.” I turned and looked at Leo, and found him standing closer to me. “What happened right there? You seemed to experience several emotions at once.”
Leo’s question was based purely on curiosity, which was just like him, but I couldn’t help but flinch and then massage my temples, knowing that everyone was going to pick up on that oddity.
“Grey, why are you acting so weird? Are you okay?” Quess’s question was riddled with concern.
“Well, that’s complicated,” Leo began, and I put a hand on his arm, forestalling him. He glanced down at my hand, his face inquisitive at first, though that quickly morphed into delight, and I realized that he was still adjusting to what it was like to be inside a human body.
“Grey was injured in the altercation,” I announced.
“I’ll say. Why is he looking at you like a man who’s never been touched before?” Eric asked, sitting up. “Is he going to be okay?”