The Girl Who Dared to Think 2: The Girl Who Dared to Stand (The Girl Who Dared #2)(3)

It was microthread, with a texture that matched only one thing: a Tower-issued uniform. It was hard to tell which departments the uniforms belonged to—only the color and design would denote that. Then a smell, sour and pungent, invaded my nose. My hands felt further around as I stretched my legs out, touching the rough woven and plastic walls for any sort of opening. And then it hit me: we were in a laundry bin.

“Liana, what’s happening?” Leo asked, a thread of fear and anger in his voice.

“It’s okay,” I whispered soothingly. “I know the people who grabbed us. They’re using a laundry bin to move us and keep us hidden.”

I was suddenly sad that Zoe, my best friend, wasn’t there. She was missing one of her favorite tropes in any fiction: laundry bins being used to smuggle the heroes to safety.

Of course, I didn’t want Zoe anywhere near this. It was bad enough that Grey was—I hadn’t told him or anyone else about the meeting I’d had with our abductors. We’d been so preoccupied with our attempt to save Maddox that I hadn’t wanted to distract from it. That, and Lacey and Strum had made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want any of my friends to know. Now I realized it was a mistake. I had kept them blind, and even if they were still free, they wouldn’t even begin to know where to look for us or how to find us.

Even if they had been grabbed, I still should have told them. So, at the very least, they could have some idea of what was happening to them. I prayed Lacey and Strum had ignored them. They wanted their identities secret, didn’t they? They wouldn’t touch my friends, not unless they were willing to jeopardize their identities.

I tried to take solace in that. Tried to believe that Zoe and Eric had made it back to Sanctum after having broken Maddox’s leg to get her sent to the Medica—where we could save her. That they were hidden, safe behind the paint Quess had created, with Tian, and hopefully Maddox and Quess as well.

And that they were trying to come up with some way of tracking us down and rescuing us. I hoped we didn’t need to be rescued, but it would be nice to have a backup plan nonetheless.

We started to move, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until the sound of the wheels on the corrugated floor became overwhelmingly loud, even through the layers of soiled uniforms over both of us. The hard surface beneath us began to rattle and shake, and my shoulder and hip began to ache where they rested against it, absorbing every impact.

“Where are they taking us?” Grey… Leo asked, pitching his voice high enough to be heard over the clatter and clank of the bin.

I shook my head on impulse, and then remembered he couldn’t see me. “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. Somewhere safe, I hoped, but I couldn’t be certain. In Lacey’s eyes, I had completed the task she had set before me. Now we were going to find out if she was going to honor it, or get rid of any witnesses to her crime.

“Why did they grab us?”

I sighed. He was in this with me. He deserved an explanation. “The people who grabbed us contacted me the other day with a job—to kill Devon Alexander. I hadn’t told anyone about it, because they had given me a week to decide, but they said they would take his death as an acceptance of their deal as well.”

Leo was silent for a long second, and I wriggled around on the floor, trying to shift some of my weight off my hip and shoulder and onto my back.

“So when I killed him…”

“You apparently set off whatever contingency plans they had to find us and grab us. Which… I’m still wondering how they could’ve done, by the way.”

“It is a mystery,” he said a handful of seconds later. “Do you trust them?”

I hesitated, debating between telling him the truth or not, and then opted for honesty. We’d come this far already. “I’m not sure.”

“Shh,” the voice from above said urgently, and the two of us grew very quiet, the conversation dying under the prospect of danger.

The cart rattled along, and soon I could hear the sound of voices carrying past me, too difficult to discern until someone drew close. Whenever I could hear a voice clearly, I stopped breathing, my heart pounding hard against my ribs as my mind conjured images of a Knight marching up and demanding to inspect the bin.

All they would have to do was slide a few uniforms aside, and bam—Tower enemy number one, and the girl who they assumed had just killed their leader. I wondered if they’d even let me make it to a trial, or if they would beat me to death in the halls. After thinking about it, I decided both options sucked.

If they came, I’d fight them, and hopefully Lacey’s men would back me up.

It felt like forever slid by as I bounced along, the cart jolting and jerking against the grooves in the floor, and after a while, I realized I was hearing the noise of not one, but two carts. They were using more than one to add to the disguise. It made sense—most of the laundry was delivered in more than one batch. One traveling by itself might draw an eye, but a whole bunch of them? No one would think twice about it.

The thought reminded me of how alone we really were, and I began thinking of ways the others could find us. If Quess got a hold of Mercury, they could ping my new net and find my location easily enough, but it could be hours before they realized that we weren’t staying away intentionally. A day, even, before they really got upset.

The sharp clatter of the cart jolted me out of my head space, and I realized we were picking up speed through… whatever common area in the Tower we were slipping past.