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

looking at me expectantly. I wished he weren’t so handsome when he did that—so free and so casual, as if things in this Tower weren’t messed up and everything was fine. I guessed having a nine on your wrist meant a certain peace of mind. I wanted that. Desperately.

“You have something that could help me,” I said.

He looked away. “Roark said—”

“If I wanted to talk to Roark, I’d have stayed and done that,” I said.

He looked back at me, and some of the haughtiness fell away. “I’m sorry,” he said, “about earlier. You were just pushing me around, and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to hurt you. It was the first thing I thought of that might get you to back off. It worked… I just didn’t expect you to take me seriously.”

I sighed, lashed myself up to a beam overhead, and perched on it, needing to sit down. Grey shot me a curious expression, and I tapped the spot next to me, an open invitation. He sucked in a deep breath and began climbing up one of the vertical beams supporting the one I was on, using the tips of his fingers and boots, and doing it with some ease. He walked out to me, confident, even though the beam was only a foot wide, and then paused, giving me a questioning look.

“Don’t make a girl feel awkward,” I said. “Sit.”

He did so, looking at me uncertainly, as if I were a poison he wasn’t certain he had the antidote to, and we sat there together for a moment, watching the machines churn and hiss.

“I’m not stupid,” I said after a long moment. “I know you took that medicine and it made you a nine. I also know that you aren’t acting like a nine—you’ve got far too much personality for it to be believable. Which means that either the meds he’s working on are a genuine cure for negative thoughts, or he’s created something to cheat the system.”

Grey said nothing.

“And I get that you can’t tell me why,” I added. “I live in the Citadel, and am training to be a full Knight. My parents are both Knight Commanders, both ranked ten. I’m the last person you’d want to admit anything to, and I get it. But… I’m not joking when I say I need this. I don’t want to be thrown out of my department, but I don’t want to be a zombie anymore, either. I promise, if you tell me, I won’t tell anyone.”

He looked at me. “If I am a nine,” he said carefully, “then you just asked an upstanding citizen for a way to undermine Scipio. Aren’t you afraid of the consequences of that?”

I let my head fall into my hands. My fingers felt cold against my forehead, every strand of hair like a nerve ending as I tried to hold my anxiety inside my body and stop it from bursting out. Saying it felt wrong—like I was committing sacrilege. It took every ounce of courage I had to answer his questions.

“Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still want to do it,” I admitted. “Because I can’t keep being the version of me that they want. I won’t survive another day on this stuff, Grey. I can’t. The last week is a blank slate for me—I remember nothing, but everyone treats me as if I was walking on water, instead of drowning in it.” I sniffled and scrubbed my cheeks, trying to keep back the tears that were threatening to spill over. “If I have to cheat to get my number and keep my sanity, then it’s worth the risk.”

He looked at me for a long time while I sniffled and snuffled, still fighting back an overwhelming sense of despair. Finally, he sighed heavily and, from out of nowhere, produced a clean handkerchief.

“My parents were eights,” he said. “I was a seven.”

I dabbed my eyes with his handkerchief and looked at him, baffled by his sudden change of topic. “But what does that have to do with—”

“Shut up a minute,” he growled, and I stiffened reflexively, but relaxed when I realized he wasn’t angry or irritated. Whatever he had to say was painful. “My parents, they were eights, but they wanted to be more. They wanted me to be more, and when I wasn’t… well. They started piling on responsibilities. Duties. They forced me to keep a ‘positive thoughts’ journal, and to list three things every day about the Tower that made my life better. You know what happened?”

“Your number went down,” I replied. The story was almost too familiar. In fact, it was similar to mine: my parents had demanded more and more of me after Alex left, but my ranking only ever went down. It was exceptionally demotivating and incredibly depressing. I guessed Scipio never considered that some of us were far too sensitive for the ranking system. All I knew was that it was beginning to feel rigged.

Silence.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “It went down. Way down. So far down that they dropped me.”

He grimaced and shook his head. I knew most of that from his dossier, but I still hurt for him. He had been abandoned because they’d demanded more—and then shamed him when he couldn’t perform to their expectations. It was unjust, and it had ripped him away from the only home he had ever known, and thrown him into the Tower all alone, to fend for himself. He was lucky another department had picked him up. If they hadn’t, he would’ve been rounded up with the other underage kids, who, when they turned eighteen, were shuffled down into the dungeons of the Citadel if they couldn’t get into a department of their own, slated for restructuring.

My parents had been oppressive, controlling, downright mean at times, but they had never even mentioned dropping me. It had been unconscionable for them. Maybe Sybil’s death had changed them in that regard. I couldn’t really be sure.