The Girl Who Dared to Think 7: The Girl Who Dared to Fight

“Target reacquired. Exterminate with extreme prejudice.”

Then it was sprinting toward me, exploding into motion faster than I thought could be possible. I backpedaled, my finger tensing on the trigger, my sights dead set on its eye. I squeezed the trigger, but the bullet ricocheted off the left side of its head.

I fired again, and this time it streaked along its cheek, creating a trail of sparks.

The sentinel raced toward me, drawing close enough that I could see my death reflected in its silver hide, and I clenched my finger around the trigger and squeezed again, trying to hit its eye.

Miss.

Another miss, sparks flying across the silver dome of the sentinel’s head.

Stumbling on something behind me—a burning piece of debris—I fell on my butt just as the sentinel stepped through the door. I scrambled back, checking over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t about to crabwalk through any plasma, but was forced to stop when the fire coming from the walls became too intense.

I looked up toward the guns, and then back at the sentinel. “Anytime, Rose!” I shouted, my voice muffled behind the mask.

The sentinel began to run, taking great, bounding leaps across the floor, and I brought up the gun, and remembered how to pray.

The plasma shot caught it in the side just ten feet before it reached me, making me leap back in surprise. The machine slid a few feet and then dropped to its knees, the purple plasma clinging to its body. I stared at it, waiting for the metal underneath to melt away, but to my surprise, the metal only grew red.

“Is it dead?” I asked, slowly getting to my feet.

“I modified the plasma charge intensity so that I didn’t do too much damage to the sentinel. But Alice’s control over it was fried by the EMP that a plasma burst generates. It was a gamble, but I didn’t want to destroy it if I didn’t have to. I need a way out of here.”

That made sense. But it also filled me with unmitigated fear. “Rose, the last time you were in a sentinel…” I said, trying to keep the pain out of my voice as I spoke. I intended to say more, but that was as far as I got.

“I realize that, but Jasper and Leo have been working tirelessly to restore me to what I once was. I’m not going to hurt you, Liana. I intend to protect you. But I need your help. You have to hook the sentinel up to the terminal. And quickly. I’d prefer not to burn to death.”

Suddenly I remembered that the entire Council Room was burning down, and realized she was right. This wasn’t a time to argue. I needed to move—to start her download, and then go check on Dylan and Lacey. Get them all out, and then head up to the Citadel to help the others.

“Tell me what to do,” I said, putting my gun in my pocket and stepping toward the terminal.





5





I fumbled around with the bundle of wires I had just ripped from the back of the terminal, trying to ignore the fact that the room was burning down around me. Hot pieces of debris fell from the ceiling, and I expected one to hit me at any moment, while I fiddled around with the sentinel. And though I was wearing a filtration mask, the heat was consuming too much of the oxygen in the room. The smoke wasn’t the problem; lack of oxygen was. I was starting to get dizzy, my mouth dry, but I had to focus.

“Green-and-blue wires,” I muttered to myself, reminding myself of Rose’s instructions instead of the worry that Dylan could be unconscious in the next room, and slowly suffocating to death in the smoke. Or worse—that the fire was spreading to her. A minute or two had already elapsed since I started following Rose’s instructions on how to download her to the sentinel, and at the rate the fire was spreading, I didn’t think we had more than three left before the entire structure began to collapse.

I flattened the bundle of wires I had yanked out of the back of the terminal in my hand, fanning the slim things out, and squinted through my watering eyes. There—the blue one, right between the purple and the red. I grabbed it, separating it with a finger, and spotted the green one a second later and separated it, too.

“I’ve got them!” I gasped.

“Good,” Rose replied. “Now hook them into the circuits and get out of here. I’ll join you as soon as I’m downloaded.”

I nodded and turned to the prone form of the sentinel, and the exposed circuitry on its back. Prying the panel off had been the first step in Rose’s instructions, and frankly, it had been the easiest. The rest had been comprised of searching out the right wires and hooking them into the right port. And there were a lot of little wires, and a lot of little ports. Luckily, I now felt familiar enough with it (and driven enough) to navigate through the forest of previously connected wires to find the correct port, while twisting the metal ends of the wires in my hand into smooth lines. I slipped them in, smooth as butter, and slid down the small plastic tab over them, locking it in place against the node inside.

Then I got up from where I had been kneeling and began staggering toward the door, one hand up to try to block the intense waves of heat. I was sweating, but the flames were so strong that it was evaporating almost instantly, leaving me feeling like my skin was baking in the heat. As much as I wanted to take my uniform off to try to get some relief, I knew I couldn’t. It was the only thing shielding my skin and body from the flames. As it was, the skin on my hands and face felt ready to combust at any second.

I made it to the door and threw myself through the hole, which was barely visible through the flames shooting up around it, the tips of them reaching toward the ceiling above. The fire had spread into this room, too, through the walls of the chamber room, but I was relieved to see that Dylan was slowly dragging herself toward the door leading out.

I moved to her, knelt down behind her, and put a hand on her back, intent on helping her up. The girl gave a hoarse shout of surprise and flipped onto her side, one hand balling up in a fist.

“It’s me!” I gasped through the mask, holding my hand up. “C’mon!”

She blinked and then nodded and threw one arm over my shoulders so that I could pull her up. I grunted under her weight—she wasn’t fat, by any definition of the word, but she was muscular compared to me—and began moving to the door that led to the outside world.

Smoke was pouring through a gap in the door, and as I shoved Dylan through, I realized it had been torn open. The locking mechanisms had been shattered by something pushing against it. This must have been how the sentinel and Sadie escaped the room, then—and that put me immediately on guard as we stepped out. I worried that they were still lurking outside in wait. Or worse, that Sage had managed to send more sentinels. But there wasn’t anywhere else for us to go, and I still had to find Lacey to see how she was doing. So we had to risk it.

Even though it had been morning when I entered, the world outside was now in shadow. All the lights were off, leaving the entire Tower dark except for the angry red-orange of the fire behind us, and the eerie blue glow of the Core, telling me power was still going there. It cast dancing shadows against the columns in front of us and flashed bright crimson on the streams that surrounded the Council Room, even lighting up the edges of the forest that comprised the grounds. My heart pounded as I realized this was it. I was looking at one of my darkest fears realized—it was Requiem Day. Only now I understood the true purpose of it, and what was at stake.

I searched the shadows for several seconds, finding the abundance of them overwhelming, and then decided to take us around the building to use the columns for cover, just in case Sadie and Alice were lurking up there. I pulled Dylan forward, ignoring her grunts and gasps of pain, and moved quickly, scanning the gaps ahead of us and then behind us for any sign of movement.