The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)(6)

“Leo?” I said, straightening up and switching the gun to my other hand so I could draw my baton.

I wasn’t surprised to find him right there next to me, brown eyes brimming with concern. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, suddenly remembering the way the man’s head had exploded when I shot him but managing to hold it together despite my churning stomach. “Yeah, but we have to hurry. I need you to remove Baldy’s net so they can’t track him, and he can’t net anyone. I’m going to fry the other ones before the system can register they are dead. How long until Jasper and Rose are downloaded?”

He turned and looked at the monitor, and I saw a flashing blue status bar on the screen, two-thirds of the way full. “Four minutes,” he replied. “I’ll get to work on this guy. You get the others. We’ll move the bodies to the emergency exit and hide them there.”

I nodded, recognizing the wisdom in his words. Each department lead’s apartment had an emergency escape route in case the Tower fell, maximizing the opportunity for some humans to survive, and utilizing Sadie’s was the only way for us to get out undetected, as there were no sensors inside them. I knew from the reset of my own quarters that Sadie’s personal items would be sorted out—which was why I was planning to destroy the desk, to cover the fact that I had stolen her files—so it stood to reason the bodies would remain as well. We had to remove them, or Sadie would find them when she got back and know something had gone down. Hiding them upstairs, in the escape tunnel, was the best thing we could do until we could deal with them. Not to mention, we could probably leave them there indefinitely. I doubted Sadie used her escape tunnel, so she wouldn’t think to look inside it for some time.

As long as we took care of the nets first. I slid the bag over my shoulder and handed it to Leo. Then I moved to the first body—the woman in the corner—flipped her over, charged my baton, placed the tip at the back of her neck, and expended the electrical charge. Her body flopped like a fish for several seconds as I held it there, and I cringed against the horrific feeling it produced.

I relaxed slightly when it was over, but the feeling was brief. I turned to the next one.

One down, I thought as I approached it with grim purpose. Three more to go.





3





It only took Jasper and Rose four minutes to download, but it took Leo and me seven to neutralize the nets and carry the bodies to the escape tunnel. Luckily, it wasn’t far from the office. Unluckily, that extra three minutes ate into the precious time Jasper and Rose had on the slaved hard drives. Jasper’s program was mindlessly attacking Rose’s, and it was using up a lot of power to do it—which was why we had the hard drives slaved together, for more power, and why we had only half an hour to get them to a more secure place, like a terminal. Transporting them was risky, because if the hard drive battery units gave out, we could lose Rose and Jasper forever.

But staying definitely wasn’t an option.

We raced through the rest of what we needed to do after we deposited Baldy’s unconscious form up in the escape tunnel, giving him an extra zap with the baton to make sure he stayed unconscious. Leo handled cleaning up the blood, using a few of Sadie’s sheets, while I swept everything I had taken from Sadie’s desk into the bag, my motions jerky and quick. Each second that dragged by felt like a second too long. As soon as I was done, I left Leo and fled to the emergency exit, while he set off the virus that would convince Sadie’s assistant that she was dead, and that it needed to initiate the reset of her apartment and files.

And though I was alone for several seconds in the hall, I had no time to worry about Leo’s safety. I quickly stripped out of the IT uniform that Dinah, our ally inside of IT, had given me, and donned my own uniform, complete with lashes. Leo showed up a moment later and helped me, and a few precious minutes later we were running down the hall and into a shaft that led upward, Baldy strapped to my back. We didn’t have time for Leo to change as well, as his gear was still in the bag, so it was up to me and my harness to carry him. I utilized my lashes to climb, the gears in the gyros better equipped to handle the double weight, while Leo used a rung ladder.

“Did it work?” I asked him as I began my ascent, keeping my voice low.

“It did. I almost got clocked by a piece of furniture making my way back to you.”

I couldn’t find any humor in his statement. My nerves were already fraying from the sudden dip in adrenaline, so I focused instead on the climb, relieved that at the very least we had covered our tracks.

The shaft led to a hatch nearly a hundred feet up, and I let Leo go through first so he could help me out. Once we were on the roof, we paused to spray our faces—and Baldy’s—with Quess’s invention, which would obscure our features from the facial recognition software, and I gave Leo a minute to put on his uniform, and then we were moving again, opening up the large door to the hall. Once we were in the hall, I started using my lashes, throwing the thin lines out rhythmically, one right after the other. This was the only way I could carry Baldy such a distance without collapsing halfway there from the weight—and it was much faster than running.

We’d already taken too long as it was. Even now, the legacies could’ve noticed that Baldy was missing. He was supposed to meet someone, so there was a finite amount of time before they started looking for him. I wanted him back in my quarters before they noticed. Before they came looking. If they weren’t already doing so.