The Girl Who Dared to Stand (The Girl Who Dared #2)(4)

Roark had once told me that the Tower had taught us all not to trust in anything, and that it wasn’t natural. But it felt wrong not to try. I could only hope I was doing the right thing, and not putting us in further danger.

“Can you tell me what to do?” I asked, already moving over to the wall the sparks had shot out of and trying to spot the problem on my own. Which was laughable, because I had no clue what I was looking for. “And speak slowly. Bad enough I’m risking my life and the lives of my friends on some machine that has pretty much ordered us all dead.”

“I-I-I have?”

“Keep on task, you oblivious program. What am I looking for?”

“Und-d-d-er the –sk, there is-is-is-is pan—”

I turned and moved over to the desk, getting down on my hands and knees and peering into the dark, cavern-like space beneath. I still had the light that I had been using to see in the ventilation duct I had been crawling through, and I pulled it out and began shining it around. The dust was thick here. I began running my hands over the carpet, searching. There were often small panels in the floors of rooms like this in the Tower, to help distribute the power load, and I figured I was looking for something like that.

Eventually, my fingers felt a gap toward the back of the desk, and I managed to pinch the carpet fibers between two fingers and lift the carpet up, revealing a small compartment. I had time to see some sort of purple-and-pink light radiating from the hole before I began sneezing—thanks to the dust I had just kicked into the air.

The first sneeze caught me off guard, and the back of my skull smashed into the underside of the desk, followed by a burst of pain. I backed up and sneezed again, barely covering my nose with my arm. And then I kept sneezing.

“C-C-Can —ou… Beep —at?”

His voice was getting worse, and I bit back a snappish retort and pinched my nostrils closed in an attempt to stop the sneezing. There was no time for it.

“Tell me what to do,” I managed, my voice coming out nasal thanks to my blocked sinus passages.

“Crys-Crys-Crystal… —maged. Bypass… —cuit and beep the —stal. S-S-Spa— one… —esk. Sec— d-d-drawer.” He broke off with a sputtering sound of tonal sequences playing in the wrong order.

I blinked back the tears the dust was forcing into my eyes and peered at the front of the desk. There were six drawers in total—three on each side and one in the middle. “Are you joking with me?” I said in frustration. “Second drawer from what?”

More tonal sequences—none of them discernable—greeted me, and I huffed.

I jerked the one in the center open first, as it was second from the right, but found nothing but pens and file folders inside. The middle one on the right had several paper files hanging from folders hooked over a rail, and I closed it and reached for the middle drawer on the left. Immediately I was greeted by the feel of objects sliding heavily around, but I ignored them, spotting a long crystal amidst the other odds and ends. I snatched it up, the weight cool and heavy in my hand, and then crawled back under the desk, replaying his garbled transmission in my head in an attempt to unscramble his meaning.

“Did you say bypass the circuit?” I called, peering into the small rectangular hole I had opened in the carpet. The inside was lit with pink-and-purple glowing lights, and as I leaned farther over it, I could make out intricate lines of power moving around each other in some unknown pattern, all of them leading to a groove in the floor—where a long length of crystal jutted out.

The flashes of bright white light emanating from the crystal were blinding, and cut into the soft blue and purple of the power lines. As I inspected it, though, I realized it was damaged, a deep crack running down its side. The whole thing was barely holding together. It looked like it was on the verge of exploding, with sparks of electricity forming around and over the crack. It was definitely time to get it out of there.

I sniffed and inched closer, just as Scipio’s broken voice began to give more directions.

“—low the bea… Beep. Beep. —lip the swi—… —place… —stal… Beep.”

“Not. Helpful.”

I puzzled over what he was saying, wincing every time the crystal in the floor flashed and flared violently. Follow the secondary line of power—that part was easy, and I followed it back to where it was diverted from the main line.

“Lip the swi… lip the swi…” I repeated under my breath, trying to understand.

I bit my lip, studying the area underneath the beam of energy. It took me a moment, but finally I noticed a switch right next to the beam, partially hidden under the overhang created by the floor. That must have been what he was talking about. I flipped it carefully, taking pains not to interrupt the stream in any way, and immediately the crystal stopped glowing. But the slot it was inserted into kept glowing, showing that the circuit was still holding a charge and not interrupting the power flow. It wouldn’t work for long—only a minute or two—before the main circuit overloaded. So I had to move quickly.

Reaching in, I grabbed the fractured crystal and yanked it out. I knew it was going to be hot, thanks to some pretty boring apprenticeship classes I had taken with Zoe, but it was like putting my hand on the surface of boiling water. I dropped it almost immediately, and luckily had been yanking it with enough force that it cleared the hole and tumbled end over end before rolling to a stop on the carpet, little wisps of smoke coming off of it.