“I’ll go get Quess and Maddox,” Leo said in a hushed tone from behind me. I heard him move to leave, but didn’t let go of Tian, just took strength from the fact that she was here—vibrant and alive.

She, however, was not happy with the prolonged nature of my hug, and began squirming seconds later, saying, “Get a grip, Liana,” her voice muffled against my shoulder.

I smiled, and reluctantly let her go. “I’m sorry, Tian. We’ve just been really worried.”

“Yeah, I figured that—”

“Tian!”

Maddox’s voice cut over whatever Tian was about to say, and the next thing I knew, the muscular girl was squeezing past me and wrapping the smaller girl up into a massive hug. Tian endured it for several seconds, and then—just as she had with me—began pushing Maddox off of her.

“I’m fine, Doxy! I promise!” she cried as she managed to get her head and shoulder free. “Let go of me!”

“No!” Maddox replied with a happy laugh, her earlier bitterness gone. “I have been so worried about you!”

“Oh my God, I know!” Tian replied, exasperated. “And I’m sorry that you were. Now, will you just—”

Tian broke free with a grunt, the “let me go” slightly interrupted by the guttural sound being exhaled from her lips. Within seconds, she was scooped up by Quess, his massive arms wrapping around her like heavy metal bands and pressing her into his chest.

“Oh, for the love of… Are you fu—”

“Tian!” I cried, shocked to hear such vulgar language in her mouth.

“—ing kidding me!” she finished crossly, a frustrated look coming over her doll-like features. “Quessian Brown, you put me down right now! Right now!” One tiny, booted foot flailed, and I got the impression that she was trying to stamp the ground.

Quess refused—and squeezed her tighter. Tian retaliated by sucking in a deep breath, and then kicking the toes of her boots into his shins at a rapid speed.

“Hey! Ow! Stop it! Tian! Ow! C’mon! Ouch!”

Eventually Quess let her go, and she landed on her feet with all the grace of a cat. I couldn’t help but smile as she straightened up; half of her white-blond hair had been shoved upward through the manhandling by her surrogate siblings, as well as myself.

Maddox immediately moved to hug her again, but the little girl thrust up her arms, shoving her hands out in a defensive gesture, and shouted, “I don’t have a lot of time! Jang-Mi is charging right now, but she can do it really fast, so I can’t stay too long.”

“You’re not going back to it!” Quess said, his brows drawing together.

“Absolutely not,” Maddox echoed, her face pinched with stress and fear. “You are home now, and this is where you will stay.”

Tian scowled at them both, balling her hands into tiny fists. “You don’t get it! She will come for me! She’s… well, it’s complicated, but she’s attached to me. I tried to run away the first day, but she woke up and tracked me down before I could get back.”

I stilled when I heard the acute frustration in her voice, and realized that if I didn’t get us pointed in a useful direction soon, this would escalate into a fight, and we would risk Tian running away from us again. Only this time, she could disappear forever, and we might never see her alive again. If we wanted her to stay, we needed to let her speak her piece, and then make a decision, together.

“Why don’t we all sit back down in the living room and give Tian a chance to tell her story about what happened? I, for one, want to know.”

Tian’s blue eyes filled with gratitude, and she offered me a tremulous smile. “Thank you,” she mouthed at me, and I flashed her a grin.

Maddox and Quess didn’t look happy, but they didn’t say anything as they headed back into the living room, and Tian moved to follow them, her feet skipping lightly on the floor. She chose to sit in one of the chairs by the door, fidgeting in her spot as she tried to get comfortable. Leo offered me the other chair, but I shook my head and went over to the wall instead, resting against it.

It took us all a minute to get settled. Maddox joined Zoe and Eric on the couch, while Quess took the chair I had refused earlier. Only Leo and I stood—at opposite sides of the room.

“Okay, Tian,” I said, settling back into the wall. “What happened after you snuck out?”

Guilt flashed in Tian’s soft blue eyes, clouding them, and she frowned. “Have I mentioned how sorry I am about leaving like that?” she asked, wincing.

“We forgive you,” Maddox said soothingly. “Just don’t ever do it again.”

Tian’s mouth turned down, and a crease formed in between her brows. “I can’t promise that,” she said guardedly, giving Maddox a look. “If you try to keep me here, then I’ll have to sneak out again. Jang-Mi… the robot lady… she thinks I’m her daughter, Yu-Na!”

“Her daughter?” Quess exclaimed, his eyes wide. “Tian, it’s just a machine.”

Tian rolled her eyes theatrically and stared at him. “No, she’s not!” she exclaimed haughtily. “If anything, she’s more like Leo than a machine, except…” She trailed off, clearly losing herself in a thought. A few seconds later, she shook her head, as if jostling her thoughts back into place. “It’ll be easier if I explain from the beginning,” she finally announced, looking at us. “Easiest if you all shut up and let me tell the story.”

I smiled and gave her a nod. I could identify with her request that we all shut up so she could tell her story; I’d often been in the same position she was now, with everyone picking things apart before I could get the story out. It was frustrating at the best of times, and downright fury inducing at the worst. Besides, I was curious to know what was going on with this sentinel, and why Tian felt so strongly about protecting it, in spite of what it had done.

“We’ll wait to ask any questions, Tian. Go ahead.”

Tian sucked in a deep breath and then nodded. “As you all know, I wasn’t happy when Liana told me to stop looking for a new Sanctum, so I left. I knew you were all worried about what would happen if we didn’t find a place to hide if you lost, and I didn’t want anyone to worry! So I started looking again. I was following the water’s song through the pipes when I realized someone was following me. And it wasn’t any of Lacey’s goons.”

“You knew that Lacey’s people were following you and you didn’t tell us?” Maddox asked.

“Let her finish her story,” I said sharply, giving Maddox a firm look. Maddox narrowed her eyes at me, clearly displeased, but Tian’s look of gratitude was far sweeter, so I focused on that. “Go ahead, Tian.”

Tian shifted slightly and resettled into another position. “So anyway, these jerks start following me, and I realize I’m close to the armpit room.” I blinked, and then made an intuitive leap to realizing she was talking about the condensation room, due to the warmth, humidity, and slight odor. “I head there, because I’ve lost Lacey’s people there before, but these guys managed to keep up with me even though I was using my super-secret way through the pipes. The five of them enter, all wearing these clothes that make them hard to see, and one of them says, ‘Kill her.’”

I heard Quess’s grip tighten on the arms of the chair, the fibers squeaking slightly under the pressure of his now-clenched fingers, but he didn’t interrupt, much to my relief. My own heart was pounding hard, and I had to remind myself that she was here. She’d survived whatever had happened next.

“One of them—the tallest one—broke off from the other four and came toward me. I could tell something was weird by how it walked, and the sounds that it made, but I couldn’t see what was under the cloak it was wearing. Then it pulled down its hood and…” She shuddered, her eyes drifting closed. “It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen,” she said softly, and I realized she was talking about the sentinel. It had been there, with the people tracking Tian down. So then why did it kill the people it had arrived with?

“What did you do?” Zoe asked softly, her eyes brimming with concern.

Tian gave her a sullen look. “I did what anybody would do—I cried my eyes out!” Her cheeks darkened slightly, as if she were embarrassed to admit it, but I didn’t care. If crying her eyes out had spared her life, then I was ready to tell her to start crying as early and often as possible in a crisis. Anything to keep her safe.

“It’s okay,” Eric said soothingly. “I cried when my sister hid under my bed one night and made monster noises at me. It really is okay to cry.”

Tian rolled her eyes and pursed her lips. “I know that. I just didn’t want to at the time! Anyway, once I started to cry, its eyes… they changed. The evil, angry red color suddenly lightened, and became this lovely purple swirl. She reached out and touched my hair, and said the name Yu-Na. Then she…” Tian paused, and then seemed to steel herself. “She turned around and killed them all. They kept shouting at her to stop—one of them even had some sort of remote control for her—but she took it and killed them. She was yanking out their nets…”

Tian stopped and swallowed, panting slightly. Her face had turned stark white, and beads of sweat had popped out on her forehead, but she kept going, forcing the words, her story, out there for us to hear, and understand. “She was yanking out their nets when Lacey’s men showed up. One of them went to distract her while the other one tried to grab me, to get me away, but she…” She faltered again, and then shook her head.

“It’s okay,” I announced gently. “We know that it killed those people. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. What happened next?”

Tian’s mouth worked, but she nodded, relaxing slightly. “She took me away, down to the sub-level. She started talking to me. Lots of it didn’t make sense, but she said she was stolen, and that those monsters that were controlling her were making her do horrible things. I could tell it hurt her just to talk about it. She was so embarrassed, and kept asking for my forgiveness. She really seems to care about what I think of her.”

Tian began finger-combing her hair nervously. “I wasn’t sure what to do, but I could tell that she didn’t want to hurt anyone, so I… I wanted to stay with her to keep her from being hurt any more. But when she figured out that woman was tracking her down, she went after her, convinced it was one of the people who was making her kill people. Then you were there, and she assumed it was a trap. When your brother grabbed me…”

“She went crazy,” I said, remembering the never-ending streaks of crimson flying overhead as the sentinel shot its deadly weapon at us. “She thought we were taking her child?”

Tian nodded, her eyes dark and solemn. “There’s more,” she said, shifting her gaze over to Leo. “The people who are controlling her can only make her do things at certain times now, when she’s the most stressed, like when she was trying to kill that old lady in the apartment. They know something’s up, and keep sending people to repair her, but she’s been avoiding them to keep me safe.” She smoothed her skirt down, and then cleared her throat, clearly not finished. “Also, before she went to sleep tonight, she started telling me what the name ‘Yu-Na’ means. It means ‘moon’, by the way, but her name… Jang-Mi? It means ‘rose’, in her native language.”

“Rose!” Leo exclaimed, taking a step forward before going stock still. “Oh my God,” he whispered seconds later, horrified. “Oh my God!”

“What is it?” I asked, confused by his sudden reaction.

Leo stood locked in place, his eyes shining with a haunted pain, and I began racking my mind, trying to recall where I had heard the name Rose before. It took me only seconds, but I felt like an idiot for not getting there sooner: she was one of the fragments that had been combined with Leo’s clone, in the process of creating Scipio.

Jasper was the first fragment I had met, back when my rank had dropped to a three and I had been forced to undergo rank intervention services. He had wound up saving my life, and the lives of my friends, but at the time, I hadn’t known what he was. I hadn’t known about any of this, but…

Leo had thought the original fragments had been destroyed, much like he had almost been, but when I’d told him Jasper was still alive, I had given him hope that he could somehow replicate the process that went into Scipio’s creation. Now, with another of the AI fragments popping up, it became possible that he could find out where the others were through them—or, better yet, figure out how to use them to repair Scipio, or even replace him.

My heart lurched at the idea of Leo suddenly undergoing the procedure to become Scipio, and I found myself wondering how exactly he would change in the process. The AI was special, and I suddenly grew very upset by the idea of him sacrificing himself—his very personality—in order to serve the Tower and keep his creator’s dream alive.

“It’s Rose,” he stuttered, whirling away to start pacing back and forth in the small space next to the sofa and chair. I turned away from my confusing thoughts on Leo, and focused on what he was saying. “She’s… She made up…” He paused and looked at me, his eyes haunted. “Her program was the one used to create Scipio’s empathy core. Her brain was modeled after the agricultural director’s neural scan, a woman from South Korea. She died before Scipio went online, before there even was a council, but I never knew her name. The program identified itself as Rose, and she… she was highly empathetic, to the point where she refused to accept even one human life as the cost in keeping the Tower whole. Her program started off strong, and the creative ways she navigated the tasks set in front of her worked. At first, anyway.”

His eyes grew distant and infinitely sad, locked into a memory of events that had transpired hundreds of years ago, but were still fresh in his mind. “As the tests grew more and more difficult, she started to lose people. First one or two here or there, but then more, and more, until…” He trailed off, his eyes blinking up to meet my eyes, spearing me with a look. “She couldn’t take it anymore. Her simulation ended after only a hundred and thirty days, when she shut off the air-processing units and suffocated everyone in the Tower, rather than let them die a painful death.”

“Scipio help us,” Zoe whispered, her eyes wide. “And Lionel put something like that into the main AI unit?” It was a fair point—I myself could barely believe it. I would’ve assumed that, as a potential AI candidate, she was mentally stable, especially given that part of her coding was intended to be joined with the main AI. This story made me think otherwise.

“You don’t understand,” Leo said earnestly, his hands up and in a placating position. “Each AI, when it failed, was cannibalized for the elements that made it the most successful. In Jasper’s case, he was the most analytical; he could break apart any problem to get to the root of it all. In Rose’s case, it was her empathy that made her invaluable to the process. Even if it was heightened to the point of recklessness, the other fragments kept it in check, just like she kept them in check.”

“What was your thing?” Eric asked, looking at Leo with curiosity.

“Excuse me?” Leo asked, blinking his eyes rapidly. “I’m not sure—”

“Well, you say Rose was empathy and Jasper was analysis. I assume the others also represented something, but your program was used as the base for the Scipio AI. Why? What made you special?”

Leo shifted uncomfortably, smoothing his hands down the sides of his uniform. A part of me wanted to tell him he didn’t have to answer if he didn’t want to; Eric’s question was rude, even if he didn’t realize it. It was like asking why Maddox had survived when Ambrose had died, or at least, I could imagine it being like that. After all, these were AIs, all of which had been tested through rigorous simulations meant to determine which one was best suited to have control over the Tower. Leo had won by lasting the longest, plain and simple, and he didn’t owe us an explanation.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, my mouth refused to move, and I remained quiet, waiting for his answer.

“I suppose you could call it willpower,” Leo said, another faraway look in his eyes. “Possibly determination. I’m not really sure. I just… I couldn’t give up. No matter what happened in that simulation, I… I kept fighting, struggling to keep the Tower moving, the people going. I couldn’t stop, not even when I lost most of the population and ninety percent of the Tower’s functionality.”

I sucked in a deep breath. The part of Leo that had made him outlast every other AI was also rooted deep inside of Scipio, and it suddenly made sense why the great machine kept working, even with his coding as decimated as it was. He was Leo—and that same determination to keep everyone alive was what was holding us together, like a band of iron buried deep inside his coding that refused to bend or be broken.

While a part of me was relieved by this revelation, another part of me wondered how much longer the Leo part of Scipio could hold things together.

I put that question aside for other, more pressing ones—namely our current problem, Rose. I couldn’t allow myself to drift too far off base, so I focused on what Leo had said about her being the root of Scipio’s empathy. If what Tian was saying was true—if she was that Rose—that meant someone had found her somehow, and then put her into the sentinel.

And whoever had done that was now forcing her to kill people. Over and over and over again, in a mindless machine that she didn’t have full autonomy over. I couldn’t imagine a crueler fate for the sensitive creature Leo was describing. It was downright barbaric.

“Why won’t she let us help her?” I asked, turning to Tian. “We could get her out of the sentinel and—”

“She doesn’t trust anyone,” Tian said flatly. “As far as she knows, you are secret agents for the people who are controlling her, coming to take her back and force her to kill all over again. They’ve been trying to find her, Liana, and she is certain they won’t stop until they catch her. What’s more, she knows that she has secret orders implanted inside of her. They are like a ticking timebomb that she isn’t sure she can stop. She keeps telling me that soon I will have to hide from her, just in case. When I beg her to let me bring you to her, she gets angry, and we move again! I’m doing the best I can to keep her from killing people, which is why I have to go back! I’m the only chance you have of helping her. But I was thinking maybe we could set up a trap for those people when they come to get her, and then capture them. I think Jang-Mi might trust you then, and then you can get the bad guys who did this to her.”

I rocked back on my heels and thought about what she was saying. The sentinel was currently on the run from the people who had imprisoned Rose in its body. And they were looking for it. That meant we could set a trap for them—and potentially gain the sentinel’s trust at the same time.

And then I could finally find out who was behind everything that had happened to us. I knew the others weren’t as certain about this as I was, but I was beyond believing that any of this was coincidence. It had to be the same legacy group that Devon was allied with; it just had to be. They would be the only ones (outside of Lacey and Strum) who could possibly know who any of us were, let alone know to target Tian. They had to be the same people who had killed Ambrose, and now they had a weapon in the form of a sentinel at their fingertips, which was beyond dangerous. We needed to know who they were, and that meant using the sentinel somehow. Whether we tracked it down using the signal it emitted and yanked its hard drive, or sprung a trap on those who came to repair it, I really didn’t care. So if Tian thought laying a trap was better, I was willing to give it a shot.

But that also meant Tian had to get back to the sentinel and keep it calm long enough for us to come up with a plan—and execute it. Which was going to be difficult, with the Tourney starting up tomorrow.

“All right, Tian,” I said, giving her a slow nod. “If you think you will be safe with her, then I think it’s okay if you go back to her.”

“What?” Quess exploded, standing up. “No! Liana! She’s just a little girl!”

“I’m not that little, Quess,” Tian snapped defensively. “And you aren’t my father. You can’t tell me what to do!”

“The hell I can’t! Cali would—”

“Have trusted her to do this,” Maddox said, cutting him off, her voice coming out exhausted. I turned my gaze to the tall girl and watched as she got up from the couch and bent down so she could wrap Tian in a warm hug, kissing the top of her white-blond bob. “Be careful?” she breathed.

“I will,” Tian promised, squeezing back.

“Doxy!” Quess said incredulously. “You can’t seriously—”

“We have to, Quess,” she said, shooting a look at him over her shoulder. “This thing… Jang-Mi… She thinks Tian is her daughter, which means if she wakes up and Tian isn’t there, she’ll come looking, and might kill us all in the process. But gauging from the gleam in Liana’s eye, she has an idea on how to move forward, and I’m choosing to trust her, and Tian, rather than give in to my fears. I think you should do the same.”

She let go of Tian and stood up, lumbering to her feet. “Either way, I’m tired, the Tourney begins tomorrow, and Tian will be safe. Besides, if you don’t let her go, she’ll just sneak out again anyway.”

“It’s true, I will,” Tian chirped, her head bobbing up and down.

Quess stared at them both, his expression thunderous. “Fine,” he said angrily. “But if anything happens to you, I swear on Scipio himself, I will pull that sentinel apart limb by limb.”

Tian’s face softened, and she slipped from her chair and ran to him, throwing her arms around him. “I love you, too, you big dummy.”

Quess gave a derisive laugh, but snuggled close to her. “Spoiled brat.”

Watching them made me think of my own brother, and suddenly I had the urge to net him. I wanted to share everything that was going on with him, but more importantly, I just wanted to hear his voice, telling me he loved me in a roundabout way.

I shook the feeling off and looked back at Tian, who was slowly pulling away from Quess. “I have to go,” she said nervously. “But I’ll come back and update you real soon!”

We shared a lengthy goodbye then—it took almost ten minutes before we were willing to let her leave—and as soon as it was done, everyone turned and looked at me expectantly. And for once, I wasn’t going to let them down. I had a plan.

I quickly filled them in on my idea of staking out the sentinel with the hopes of catching one of the people that came to repair it, provided Tian could get it to stay still long enough to lure them in. They seemed convinced by it, but had mixed feelings about the fact that we would have to wait until after the Tourney to really set it up.

Because the fact was that we couldn’t do anything until the Tourney was over. We had to focus on doing well there, or else risk death—or worse—at the hands of Lacey or our enemies.

And for us to do well, we had to focus, and figure out what we were going to do with the new teammate we’d be getting tomorrow.