The Girl Who Dared to Think by Bella Forrest (e reader for manga TXT) 📕

things run loose in my room. Unless they touched me, in which case the truce was ended. It was a shame fiction books were contraband—the stories held in their pages were nothing short of magic in our glum existence.

“Yup,” she said after thumbing through a few pages of her romance novel, a smile on her lips. “Guys tricking girls and stealing kisses? Classic romance trope. I wonder if he had this book before I did.”

I gaped at her. “Seriously? What, are you predicting our marriage?”

Zoe gave me an incredulous look. “What? No! Life isn’t like a story, Liana. So, what information were you trying to get from him?”

“I can’t really talk about it,” I lied. It took me a moment to figure out why I was so determined to hold this back from Zoe. I had to remember Grey’s behavior during our conversation, confirming my suspicion that there was something illegal about the pills. I didn’t want her to have any knowledge about it, just as a precaution, until I knew more. “Not until I have something more concrete. I know he knows something. I just can’t get him to tell me. I practically begged him, Zo. It was humiliating, and I’m so embarrassed. Especially after that stupid kiss.”

“You went through all that and he still didn’t tell you anything?” she asked, incredulous.

“Not a thing.”

“What an ass.”

I smiled. “My words exactly.”

“So what do you want to do about him?” she asked, and I smiled. This was what I loved about Zoe the most: she was a woman of action. You came to her with a problem, and she immediately focused on the solution. It was what made us the best of friends.

“I’ve got to do something if I want to keep my number from dropping. I’m just not sure what I can do as long as he’s a nine.”

“Well, all you want to do is get him to answer some questions, right?”

“Right—but I have no idea how to figure out where his assigned quarters are. I could’ve when I was a six, but now that I’m a five…”

“Oh, leave that to me,” Zoe said with a wide grin. “I’m interested in meeting this guy, and giving him a piece of my mind for bamboozling a kiss out of my best friend. And possibly giving him a boot to the rear, as well.”

“Oh, Zo, I missed you,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and giving her a hug. She squeezed me back, and I could feel her smile.

“I missed you, too,” she said into my hair, and for a moment, I felt like everything was going to be all right.

9

Zoe’s method of tracking Grey, it turned out, was to rely on the natural paranoia of the citizens of Water Treatment.

“They hate outsiders,” she needlessly explained as we raced away from an older woman who had given an extremely detailed report of exactly where ‘the suspicious-looking man with brown eyes’ had gone. “We’ll have his location inside of an hour—I’m sure of it.”

She hopped onto a pipe, then grabbed onto the rung overhead to swing out and over a wide gap that ran several floors deep. Reaching out with her other hand, she grabbed another handhold. I watched her overhand progress as she practically flew over the gap, and then used my lashes to follow, more confident in my abilities with them. I landed on one knee next to Zoe, who was stretching out her arms, and stood up. We shared an exuberant grin.

“Oy, Knight!” came a voice.

I turned to see an old man’s head peeping up from a narrow gap between the floor and a large pipe, bushy eyebrows furrowed in concern. I trotted over and knelt down, instinctively hiding my number behind my back.

“I’m a Squire,” I informed him. “Can I help you?”

“Bah,” said the old man, craning his neck to try to get a look at my wrist, then giving up. “I heard you two were looking for someone.”

I blinked in surprise and then furrowed my brow. “How’d you hear that?”

“The pipes, girl!”

“We tap out messages on the pipes,” Zoe said, stepping on the tail end of the man’s statement. “We have the fastest gossips in the Tower,” she added.

“It’s not gossip—information is critical down in the pipes, girl,” the old man admonished, pulling himself out from the narrow gap with two skinny arms. “And you shouldn’t peer down your nose at the ways of your people, especially when those ways save lives.”

Zoe flushed, her cheeks bronzing over, and I recognized the frustrated look, having worn it myself a time or two.

“Sir, did you see someone?” I asked, trying to put the conversation back on track. The old man pulled a cloth out of his pocket and opened a sliding hatch over one of the pipes. He dipped the cloth in the water racing by and then began washing off some of the grime and soot that had collected on his face.

When he spoke, his voice was muffled by his ministrations, making it difficult to hear. “Saw a young man, dark blond. Had a suspicious look to him. Too expressive, if you know what I mean.”

I did. That description matched Grey to a T. Still, I needed a bit more to go on—after all, how could I be sure it hadn’t been some other dark blond man who looked super happy after getting kissed sometime earlier?

“Was he a one?” I asked, and the man turned and gave me a look, water dripping from his eyebrows.

“A nine. That’s what was so odd about him. I told myself, that right there is a suspicious thing.”

I grinned, glad I wasn’t the only one who saw the oddness of Grey carrying a nine. After all, nines never exhibited much in the way of emotions. “Which way did he go?”

The old man jabbed a finger toward a beam of grayish light filtering upward. “I asked him, and he said he was going to Cogstown, which meant he took the elevator,” he said,