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

I hurried to the door just under the carving of my department, opened it, and climbed up the tight stairwell to the seating area above. Dropping into my chair, I tapped the screen on the terminal, and then gave Scipio a pleasant smile. “Ready when you are.”

There were thirteen items on the list, and since my request was the last one in, we wound up going through the other twelve first, most of which were departmental jurisdiction issues. There were only two that I cared about, but just like in the previous session, Sadie requested an extension on the vote to dissolve the expulsion chambers. I voted yes, only this time, there was a savage pleasure in doing it. Sadie’s insistence on delaying the vote only meant those chambers would still be in use when she was arrested. If the trial went quickly, Sadie would be executed for her crimes in one of them.

And it would be all her fault.

The second to last issue was Sadie’s report on the malfunctioning assistants. Lacey had triggered her quarters to reset the night before last—when I had given her the virus—and Sadie was reporting her findings to the council. With any luck, it would be the last report she gave.

“It’s my opinion that the glitch in the assistants is due to a software update that proved to be faulty. We have corrected the problem with Scipio’s assistance, and will be sending a new update to the council server within a few hours.”

I sat up a little straighter as I realized my security briefing was next and tried to prepare myself mentally.

“Will the update damage or change our assistants in any way?” Sage asked.

“No,” Sadie replied with a soft shake of her head. “The patch will just keep the program from ever reading that their council member has died before they actually have. That’s all.”

“We thank you for your thoroughness,” Scipio intoned formally. “I trust this issue is now resolved?”

“Yes,” she said. “I yield the floor to the next item of business.”

“Which is Champion Castell’s security briefing,” Scipio said, turning his glowing blue gaze toward me.

I smiled and stood up from my chair, surreptitiously wiping my suddenly sweaty palms on the sides of my hips. “Thank you, Lord Scipio,” I said, while simultaneously transmitting, Enter the room in five seconds, to Dylan. “Let me begin by ordering the arrests of CEO Sadie Monroe and Head Farmer Emmanuel Plancett.”





41





I could’ve dropped a pin in the silence that followed my statement, and the sound would’ve been louder than any bell or klaxon. I watched Sadie’s face as her jaw dropped, her eyes widening in shock, and felt that savage pleasure again. We’ve caught her unaware. Quess was right: she had no idea we were coming. We’ve got her. I shifted my gaze to Plancett to confirm, and sure enough, his eyes were practically bulging out of his skull, and I feared one good slap to the back of his head would pop them right out. We got you too, you rat bastard.

Suddenly the doors pushed open, and Dylan strode in with the contingent of Knights, jerking Sadie’s gaze toward them. Any blood that remained in her face drained completely out, but I could see her already looking around, her eyes calculating. “This is preposterous,” she sputtered. “I am a loyal—”

“Yes, but loyal to whom?” I interrupted, unable to keep the smugness out of my voice. “Because I have evidence that proves that it hasn’t been to the Tower. And it certainly hasn’t been to Scipio. In fact, you and your family come from a long line of dissidents who have been slowly subverting Scipio’s coding for the last two hundred years.”

“That’s insane,” Sadie said, standing up and taking a step back as Dylan threw open her door, hard enough to make the wood reverberate. “Lord Scipio, I’m innocent. This is clearly an attempt to—do not touch me!” She recoiled from Dylan as if she were a rust hawk and thrust her wrist up. “Scipio knows the truth! He blesses me with a ten because of my service!”

“Actually, he grants you a ten because your predecessor some two or three generations ago ripped out his emotional core and replaced it with a program that ensured that those in the upper echelons of power would remain there—no matter what—while those who weren’t privileged enough to earn those positions would fall faster and faster in rank. But we’ll get to that.” I looked over at where Dylan and Sadie were eyeing each other warily. “Dylan, restrain CEO Monroe. Gag her if she can’t remain quiet. I have quite a lot to go through, and it’ll go faster without interruptions.”

“I stand with Sadie in that this is preposterous!” Plancett declared, finally breaking out of his shock. I glanced at him to see that another Knight was already placing the cuffs on his wrists.

“Can’t you see what’s happening?” Sadie shouted, and I looked over to see that Dylan had grabbed her and pressed her over the desk, holding her still so she could restrain the struggling woman. “This is nothing short of a coup! The new Champion is trying to institute a regime change in our departments so that she can—”

Her shouting quickly became muted as Dylan pressed a metal muffler over her jaw, molding the pliable material against her mouth and cutting off the cries.

“That’s better,” I said, pressing a finger in my ear. “Now—”

“Champion Castell, explain yourself,” Scipio interrupted, his voice an ice-cold vice that promised death should my answers not satisfy him. “CEO Monroe has my endorsement as—”

“You’ll forgive me, Lord Scipio, if your endorsement can’t possibly hold much weight in this issue,” I interjected softly. “CEO Monroe’s family is part of a centuries-old terrorist cell, bent on controlling you for their own purposes. And they have been succeeding, sir. Your opinion is suspect, because you are lacking the important elements of your code that you need to make your own determination.”

Scipio froze for several long seconds, his face locked in an impassive mask. “I show no degradation of my systems,” he said, sneering. “And you are not qualified to make such determinations on my coding.”

“And yet I have evidence, taken from Sadie Monroe’s terminal,” I said, trying to maintain my calm. “As well as several parts of your missing code. Parts that Sadie and her family stole.”

“And Plancett?” Sage asked, finally breaking his silence. “What is his role in this little melodrama?”

“Conspiracy. Sadie was purchasing Plancett’s loyalty and voting power on the council, in exchange for making it more difficult for his workers’ ranks to drop and supplying him with ration cards.” I paused and tapped on my screen. Sure enough, the file containing all of the pertinent evidence was sitting there waiting for me, sent by Cornelius right after I started speaking. “On the council server, you will each find a message with files recovered from Sadie’s terminal. Included among them are messages between her and Plancett, discussing issues like this. The messages were encrypted, but thanks to the bits of Scipio’s code we recovered, we were able to decrypt them.”

I watched Sage lean forward and tap on the screen, his eyes scanning through his messages. “There are hundreds of files in this,” he said. “Thousands. How did you recover them?”

“I broke into her quarters,” I admitted. “We knew that she had parts of Scipio’s code stored in there and had reason to believe she was planning to use those parts against him.”

Sage cocked his head at me for a second, and then his eyes narrowed. “Your quarters resetting. You did that?”