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

“It just keeps going up and up and up,” she breathed. “Does it go to the very top? I’ve always wanted to go to the very top.”

I frowned, my brows furrowing. “You’ve never been to the top?”

Tian shook her head, her features melting into sadness. “My parents fell asleep one day... and they wouldn’t wake up. When the bad people came for me, I ran away, and Cali found me. I’ve lived with her ever since.”

Cali. It was the second time she’d mentioned her. “Tian, who is Cali?”

She shrugged. “Someone who takes care of me. And people like me. She keeps us safe from the Knights. She created Sanctum.”

“Sanctum?” I asked sharply, and she nodded.

“Sanctum,” she said simply.

Grey barked a laugh. “Sanctum isn’t real,” he announced. “It’s a myth, made up by the Knights to try to justify the need for so many Knights—more, even—in spite of the fact that there’s no proof of an undoc civilization living in the Depths. It would be impossible.”

“That’s not exactly true.”

We both turned toward Roark, who stood, wearily holding the bag of medication in his hands.

“Sanctum is real,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked, my mind racing. If there were people living down there, maybe we didn’t have to wait to leave. Depending on what skills they had, maybe we could start working on figuring out how to get out of here as a group, instead of trying to recruit. Maybe we could start planning to leave now.

“My contact told me about it,” he said, giving me a guarded look. “Told me that we would be approached eventually, and that Cali was a good person.”

Tian smiled. “And the walls have eyes, but so do we, because without our eyes we couldn’t see,” she sang off-key, trailing off into a happy little hum. The elevator came to a stop, and we quickly got off. Tian led us through the complex network of hallways in the shell, taking us around until I started noticing the signs for Greenery 1—the Menagerie, where animals were kept—on the doorways, showing we were close to the bulkhead. A few seconds later, the hall abruptly ended, and Tian bent over to pull on the grated floor. It lifted up easily, but it was still heavy, and the little girl staggered a little as she slid it to one side. She leaned into the hole, and I heard a beep, followed by the pneumatic hiss of a door opening. I realized she had opened a hatch, just as a blast of hot, dry air shot out past her, immediately invading my lungs and making me cough.

“Dry heat is the best heat,” Tian exclaimed as she shook out her arms. “C’mon!” The little girl immediately began climbing down into the hole. A moment later, she stuck her head out, her mop of white-blonde hair standing on end. “Lots of lights in here, but don’t touch. And close the door behind you.”

She dropped back down and out of sight, and I sighed, hefting the bag on my shoulder around to my front to make pushing it easier.

“Are we sure we’re making the right choice?” I asked as I squatted to peer down the hole. A hatch beneath the floor plates stood open, revealing a short drop of maybe three feet below. From one side, blue-and-purple light glowed brightly, filling the short drop with neon rays.

“We gave Gerome the pill,” Roark said gruffly, gingerly lowering his bag into the hole. “But it only erases the last hour or so. That means that whatever he saw before is still going to be there. He’s going to know he went to my dwelling for a reason, and while the head trauma is a good explanation for him forgetting, he’s going to figure out or be reminded about Silvan Wash. And put it all together. Which means we aren’t safe up there anymore.”

He was right, although I hated to admit it. Then again, I wanted to see where Tian was leading us. If there were people living down there, I wanted to know about it. There was security with people who were like you—and I was hoping these people were like me.

I helped Roark down the hole and watched as he slid out of view through the tunnel that seemed to run beneath our feet. A moment later his voice carried back up to us. “Plasma relays. Definitely do not touch.”

Grey looked at me, and I realized he’d been uncharacteristically quiet since Tian had arrived. “Are you okay?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

He shook his head. “If Tian were any less zany, I’d suspect that this was more than coincidence. It seems too neat. I mean, what are the chances of not one but two people busting in and knowing something was going on with the pills?”

I bit my lip. The thought had nagged at me as well, but there hadn’t been enough time to dwell on it. “Do you think it’s a trap?” If it was a trap, it didn’t seem like it had been initiated by Devon. But who did that leave? No one, really. And I doubted Devon was here, since Gerome had been the one following me (no doubt upon Devon’s orders).

He hesitated, and then shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. It could be that they were watching us and Tian felt like she needed to intercede on our behalf, but... What if they aren’t good people? What if they are actual dissidents?”

“You mean like, ‘take down the Tower’ kind of dissidents?”

He nodded. I thought about it for a long moment, and then dropped my bag into the hole. “There’s only one way to find out. Just keep that baton close, okay?”

“Yeah,” he grunted as he helped me into the hole.

26

The crawl space was narrow, the sides crammed with plasma beams, the purple-and-blue light writhing between connection points as they hummed along. I tried not to sweat from the massive heat they were generating in the small space, but of