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

“Fun,” Quess said wryly, tucking his pad into his pocket and starting after Alex. “If he gives me any lip, do I get to yell at him?”

“Nope,” I told him, shaking my head. It wouldn’t do Quess any good, anyway. Alex wasn’t going to take kindly to anyone putting him down. “Let me know, and I’ll handle it.”

If you have never been the focus of a three-way look of disbelief before, then you have been missing out on something special. The looks Leo, Maddox, and Quess had on their faces ranged from polite to cynical, and I squirmed under their scrutiny.

“I can,” I told them insistently, feeling the need to defend myself.

“I’m not so sure. Your brother needs some help, Liana,” Maddox replied. “He’s going off the rails.”

Even though she was right, there wasn’t much I could do officially, and she should know that. “Yes, but you and I both know that grief services in the Medica are crap,” I replied. “Besides, imagine how he feels. He’s isolated in IT, and even though Dinah is trying to keep him shielded from Sadie, he knows she’s watching. Then I went and ignored him after my mother’s funeral, when all he wanted was to be included. He found out I almost died, and even then, I asked him to stay away from all of this. He’s angry, yes, but part of that is my fault. I just… We’ve got to let him cool off, and then I will talk to him, okay? Until then, just give him a little bit of space.”

That did nothing to assuage the doubt in her eyes, but she nodded anyway. “He’s your brother,” she said by way of letting it go, and I accepted it.

Looking over at Leo, I saw him reading one of the files from Lionel Scipio’s office—the ones I had been trying to make sense of earlier. “Any clues in there to help us? With Jasper or Rose?”

He pursed his lips and sighed. “Not yet, but there’s a lot to go through. The psychology profiles help somewhat, but they don’t really matter if I can’t figure out what Lionel did to create the barrier around the core memory. I’m hoping the answers are here, somewhere, but…” He trailed off, and finally looked up at me over the top of the file, his eyes bleeding with unspoken fears.

“The answers are in there,” I told him. “They have to be. Have you managed to make any contact with Jasper? Or seen anything from him?”

Leo shook his head, his face grim. “His program is locked up in a tight shell to protect his coding, to the point where he won’t accept even the friendliest of pings. I’m guessing it’s a defensive measure he’s been taking against Sadie, and we’re collateral damage. I’m not entirely sure what to do about it. Maybe he’ll come out of it eventually to check things out, but right now, he’s not even listening.”

I considered the problem. “Can you let him hear my voice? If he recognizes that it’s me, maybe he’ll know it’s safe.”

The look on Leo’s face told me he didn’t think it would work, but he turned to the computer and started to type something. After a few seconds, he gave me a nod. “Go ahead.”

“Jasper?” I called. It was tempting to yell, because working with noncorporeal AIs always felt like I was trying to shout a message across a chasm. But in reality, they could hear me no matter how loudly I spoke, thanks to the microphones in the rooms. “Jasper, it’s me, Liana Castell. You helped me out a few times in the Medica, remember? You saved my life, actually.”

I looked at the wall of screens that hung from the ceiling, hoping for some sign of acknowledgment, but nothing changed. “We rescued you from Sadie’s quarters,” I added. “You’re safe. And I actually have someone I think you’d like to meet. We call him Leo, but at one point he was the original basis for Scipio. We also have Rose, and we’re working on finding the other fragments. We want to help you all go home.”

Silence. Disappointed, I looked at Leo and nodded that he should shut it off. “I was hoping it would work,” I muttered. Maybe it had been wrong of me, but I had been wanting to find Jasper for so long that I had built it up in my head that it would go smoother than this. It wasn’t just because we needed him. That was true in many ways, but I had always pictured his rescue ending with him being exactly as he had been.

But his reticence to even accept communications from us told me that he had probably suffered greatly at Sadie’s hand. My heart ached for him, and I wished there were some way of communicating with him.

“I’m going to get him back to us somehow,” Leo said softly. “I’m going to get them both back, as they were. It just might take more time than we wanted.”

“I know you will,” I told him. If anyone could, it was Leo.

And if we couldn’t spring into action right away with our AI fragments, we had to do something else. Give Leo time to work while focusing on our other objective: finding the legacies. We had to wait for Quess and Alex to break into Sadie’s files to really know what we were dealing with, but we did have other leads. Dylan Chase was helping me track down the undoc side of the legacies we were after, and since Tian had also secured Liam, we had different avenues of moving forward.

But it would be difficult. We were going to have to make sure we got everyone, or it wouldn’t matter at all.

Leo smiled kindly at me, his features growing soft as his misery slowly dissolved. “Thank you,” he said, and his voice was intimate and… inviting. I found myself wanting to go to him, but I somehow managed to fight it off. Then he started speaking again. “Actually, there’s something else in the files you should be aware of.”

“Oh?” I asked, curiosity returning. I had thought Leo’s report had been the end of it, but if he was bringing something else up, then chances were I’d interrupted to go off on a tangent before he could finish. “What is it?”

“It’s about the nets Lionel designed. The legacy ones. As you already know, they were designed to capture memories, but along with that, they recorded muscle memories, to help later generations of workers remember how to repair something even if they didn’t have an exact understanding of how it worked.”

That explained what had happened in Sadie’s apartment, with the net hijacking my body. I’d been in control, but I’d also felt out of control, as if a ghost from the past was prodding at my autonomic systems from the outside. It was weird, but also followed what I knew about Lionel, who had made the nets to try to make life easier inside the Tower. Unfortunately, the legacies had twisted that design in their quest to subvert Scipio, leading to the Tower itself distrusting the tech. So now, the legacy nets were only in the hands of those who had ignored the law and kept theirs.

“What’s more,” Leo continued, leaning back in the chair, “an early report from Samantha Reed, the founder of the Medica, revealed that AIs implanted in the nets could repair most types of neurological diseases, including the onset of Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and bipolar disorder, and also cure most types of cancer. She proposed that copies of the AIs be inserted into each net, for that reason. It was overruled by a vote.”

“But we knew that,” I replied. “You said the net had special healing properties. That’s why you went into Grey’s head.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “But that’s not the point. The point is that after the suggestion was shut down, Ezekial Pine ran an experiment, using his neural clone, Karl. In the process, he realized that an AI can also extract information from a criminal. With complete accuracy.” He looked up from the file and grimaced. “I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of your brother, but it means we have a way of getting all the information we need out of Baldy, without having to ask.”





10





I did not like the sound of that one bit and could already tell where this was going by the determined look on Leo’s face.