The Girl Who Dared to Think by Bella Forrest (best novels of all time TXT) 📗

“It’s murder,” I spat, and once again I was rewarded with the fiery brand of a hand across my cheek. And she didn’t hold back.

“I am ashamed of you,” my mother declared. “You don’t even know all the tragedies this Tower has suffered because of a one’s plot to destroy it. Black lung, a virus created in the first fifty years of the Tower, cost us half the population, most of them children. A one created it. You think when Scipio finally made the decision to start doing this we weren’t all shocked by it? That I wasn’t appalled? But this is the bottom line. This is who we are. We serve this Tower, and we keep it safe, by any means necessary.”

I stared at her for a long moment, and then looked away. She must’ve interpreted it as a sign of me backing down, but in reality, I just couldn’t look at her anymore without feeling like I was looking at a monster.

“I’m sorry I hit you, Liana,” my mother said after a pause, her breath coming out as a tired sigh. “I know this isn’t easy for you, but this is what you must do to join the Knights and fulfill your duty to Scipio. He clearly has faith you can do it, so take the time you need, and then do your job. If you cannot, then there will be no home for you in the Citadel, and we will be powerless to help you once you leave for another department. Do you understand?”

I met her gaze long enough to nod once, and then my hand reached out and slapped the button, shutting the door between us. I heard a muffled exchange of their voices, followed by the sound of them walking away, and flicked on the magnetic lock.

I walked back over to my bed. Sat on it. Crossed my legs and started to think about what I could do. With Alex unavailable, I had to figure out a way to break Grey out by myself.

The only way to get them to spare him was to get his number up. I looked over at the bottle of pills he had given me. If I could get one inside, then maybe...

I dismissed the thought immediately. His ranking would never naturally go up that high under those conditions. It wouldn’t be believable, and they could kill him anyway.

That meant another trip to Cogstown to talk to Roark. I doubted the old man wanted to see me again, but I was fairly certain I was going to need his help. Which meant I needed to involve Zoe.

Which meant I needed to tell her everything.

I sighed and turned toward the window, looking at the view outside, but only seeing the woman’s eyes waiting for me. I put my hand against the window, and as I did so the nine there flickered, blurring... and then cracked. A one appeared on my wrist, bright and red and angry. It took me a moment to realize what was about to happen, and then I was fumbling for the bottle, opening it and spilling several pills into my hands. I got one in my mouth and dry swallowed, then held up my wrist and stared at it.

“Come on,” I muttered. “Before the alert shows up—come on, come on!”

The one flickered back to a nine. Good—apparently once it was in your system, it worked faster.

I heaved a sigh of relief. For the time being, I was safe. But Grey had these pills too, and he had been caught. If I was going to get him out of that place, I needed Roark’s help in more ways than one.

I stood, well aware that it was late, and got dressed. Tonight was not a night for feeling sorry for myself; it was a night for doing something about it.

15

I decided halfway down to Zoe’s that I wasn’t going to involve her after all. The closer I got to her, the more difficult it became to breathe, and I suddenly imagined her on the other side of that glass, painting pictures in blood and humming a song that no one could hear. And I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk her.

So I turned away from her quarters and did something a little more dangerous—I took the plunge. As a general rule, no area of the plunge was ever safe. Yet the parts leading into Cogstown were especially perilous. Most Knights never bothered to try, opting to take the elevators to the main halls outside of Cogstown.

Taking the plunge here required quick thinking, ingenuity, and near-perfect timing. One wrong move and they’d find my body torn apart by industrial cables, or worse. The reason it was so dangerous was that it changed as repairs were made, the internal structure modified, restored, modified again. It was constantly changing, and had been for hundreds of years. As a result, the place was littered with obstacles. Knights over the years had updated the painted signs inside the plunge, adding new ones or removing obsolete ones as they were discovered, but every time a Knight stepped into the Cogstown plunge, they knew there was a chance something had changed since the last time a Knight was in there. And that meant I had to proceed with utmost caution.

I stepped up to the edge and looked down, already noting the places where light shone, marking the safer path.

Playing it safe, I lashed over to the adjacent wall and slowly began to lower myself, letting my eyes grow used to the dark. I adjusted my position slightly as I descended, keeping a careful eye out for unknown obstacles as I navigated the metallic jungle that seemed to have grown in all sorts of directions.

It took a while before I began to grow more confident, allowing myself to pick up speed as I learned to trust the marks. I kept a careful eye on the marks for the landings that led back