I faced the screen on the wall and waited. A second later, Lacey’s face filled it.

She… did not look great, but that was understandable given that Ambrose had died a little over a week ago. It felt like a lifetime since it had happened, but it was still fresh on Lacey’s face. Her dark skin had an unnatural paleness to it, but the bags under her eyes were black, making them looked bruised. Her eyes were tinged with red, and even the brown and blond curls of her afro seemed to droop.

Still, the look on her face was anything but sad. Because her expression was lined with a hostility that almost matched the one my father had demonstrated earlier, during the funeral. As soon as I registered it, I immediately felt guilty—and then angry in my own right. Lacey might have blamed me for Ambrose’s death, but in my mind, she was to blame for my mother’s death! She’d forced me into the Tourney, made me participate just to help her plans along! It had made me a target, and my mother had gotten caught in the crossfire.

Lacey glared at me for a second or two, resentment simmering delicately in the browns of her eyes. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said suddenly, a slight snap to her words.

More rage poured over me, until my skin felt like it was sizzling. Don’t start a fight, I told myself sternly, trying to rein it in. Remember to be patient, and that she owns you for as long as she has that so-called “evidence” against you. I managed to pull myself back—but just barely.

“Thank you,” I replied tersely.

She nodded, just once. “Congratulations on becoming the new Champion, as well.”

I stared at her, thinking about Astrid’s speech and the knowledge that the council had put her up to it. Lacey was a council member. Had she agreed to that little stunt, or had she had the decency to at least vote no?

“Did you have anything to do with the strategy for delivering the news at my mother’s funeral?” I demanded, unable to help myself. If she had, I’d be livid that she’d stoop that low.

Her eyes widened, and then narrowed slightly. “No, I did not!” she hissed. “I’ve barely weighed in this past week. The only thing I did was keep appraised and pass my votes on through Strum as proxy. Scipio was the one who made the decision on your fate, and for some reason, the enemy chose not to alter it. Or maybe they couldn’t; it seems like sometimes Scipio fights them on things, though I’m not sure.”

I blinked. She had told me more about Scipio’s current state than anyone else had been able to. Scipio’s program was an amalgamation of several different AI fragments, but at his core, he was Leo—whose determination to keep the Tower moving had made him the central program on which Scipio was based.

I wondered if that part of him was rebelling against his controllers—if that was what Lacey had just told me. Still, I was a little suspicious. How could she determine that Scipio sometimes fought them? Did she have a way of monitoring him?

“How do you know he fights them?”

She frowned, instantly displeased. “Me and my big fat mouth,” she muttered, running a hand over her face. “Look… we have a way of monitoring Scipio’s emotional state. Basically, whenever he’s being manipulated, his emotional state shifts to extremes, almost like someone with bipolar disorder. However, there have been times when we start to see it happen, and then the entire thing breaks down before it finishes. It’s hard to explain, but that’s what happened with the decision.”

“I see.” That was a lie. I wasn’t entirely sure what she was talking about, but I made a mental note to ask Leo about it. Maybe it would help him figure out what was wrong with Scipio, which could help him find a way to fix the problem. I also decided to change the topic, as I was certain that if I continued to press Lacey about this, she would shut down and refuse to reveal anything more. I needed her relaxed so she would be more willing to let things slip.

Once she stopped glaring at me like she wanted to see my throat torn out. Or when I managed to stop doing the same.

I sighed and rubbed a hand over my head. “Look, I know why you’re calling, and I’m waiting on the files from the investigation to be sent over to me. But I also need the files from the investigation into the sentinel. The people who stepped forward to assume responsibility are lying, and I want their names so I can hunt them down and ask them questions.”

Ever since Astrid told me about the results, I had been itching to get my hands on them and tear into them to get to the truth of the matter. The people who had taken responsibility were clearly lying about what happened. And I wanted to know why.

“Liana…” Lacey studied me for a second, and then looked to one side. “You can’t do that.”

“The hell I can’t,” I snapped back, incensed that she would try to block any line of inquiry from me. “Those people were told to lie! I will find out who told them to, then track them down to find out who told them to do it, and go up the chain until I am standing face-to-face with the person who is responsible for my mother’s death.”

“And Ambrose,” Lacey hissed sharply. “Don’t you dare forget about him, Liana.”

“Believe me, I haven’t. Now, are you going to send me those files?”

“No, I’m not. You can access them if you want, but let me lay this out for you: those people weren’t lying. Or at least, they didn’t think they were. They checked out a sentinel between the challenges to prepare it for the last one. It disappeared shortly after the final checks were completed, about an hour before the final challenge. Around that time, our monitoring of Scipio showed an extreme mood shift that normally accompanies someone making him do something, and we assumed the other group made him move it. Then a sentinel appeared in the arena and started attacking people with a Class B weapon. Astrid and everyone else on the council assumed it was the same sentinel that those engineers had lost, and by the time the sentinel you disabled in the arena showed up in the investigation rooms, it was the original sentinel—serial numbers and all.”

“Wait, are you telling me there were two sentinels in play, and they switched them?” A second later, I realized that if that was true, that meant one of them was still unaccounted for—and in their hands. They might not have Jang-Mi to pilot it for them anymore, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t work around the problem.

She nodded. “It’s not the first time something like this has happened, but believe me when I say they are good at this. They’ve been setting people up like this for years.”

A chill ran down my spine. I knew my enemies had a significant number of people, but the fact that they had managed to steal not one, but two of the sentinels the Tower had kept because of the Technological Preservation Act, in order to cover their tracks, was impressive. And terrifying.

No wonder I rarely felt safe anymore.

“Fine,” I said, giving it up and focusing on a new question. “Then here’s a question: how secure is my little personal assistant thing? Is it possible Devon had it hacked? Could someone be monitoring us right now?”

Lacey’s eyebrows rose, and a surprised smile flashed across her face… and was gone again in the blink of an eye. “Okay, dial back the paranoia and relax. The program is fine. They are systematically wiped and reinstalled between department heads, so even if he was hacked, that hack is now gone. You’re fine.”

That was a relief, but only a mild one, and quickly it gave way to a different line of questions. “What about recovering Devon Alexander’s vid files from this room? If we could do that, maybe we could figure out who he was working with on the council.”

Lacey rolled her eyes and leaned back in the chair she was sitting in, leaning onto one of the armrests. “It’s not possible. Those files are gone, destroyed in the system wipe. Even if we tried to recover them, they’d be severely degraded and next to useless. Let this go and move on to more productive things.”

“I seriously don’t buy it,” I insisted. “Every system has a redundancy, just in case. There’s got to be a ghost server somewhere, and if we find it, we can just—”

“You are going to waste time on this,” Lacey cut in flatly, her face growing hard. “I want Ambrose’s murderers yesterday, and trying to dig out the old vid files on Devon is only going to slow you down in finding them. Let it go and move on.”

I pressed my lips together and fought the urge to push harder. I was right about this—I knew I was—but Lacey was apparently finished with the subject. Still, something about the exchange was weird, and after a moment’s consideration, I filed it away for later pursuit. “Fine. What now?”

“Now that you’re on the council, you’ll obviously need to know how to vote on certain issues. I’ll get you a cipher key through Zoe. Use it to decrypt messages from us on how we want you to vote, and on points we might want you to bring up during a council meeting.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You’ll give me my own discussion points? Am I at least allowed to add or detract from them so I can best represent my department, or am I just going to be your little vote-generating machine?”

“The last one, definitely,” Lacey deadpanned. It took me a second, but I realized she was serious and rolled my eyes, amazed by the presumption that I would just blindly follow her lead. “Let me make this perfectly clear, Liana. I know you’re only in this for as long as it takes you to get out from under my thumb. I’m a reasonable woman, and I don’t want you for an enemy, so I’ll keep my word as soon as you deliver Ambrose’s killers to me. But I won’t be surprised when you run after that. And why wouldn’t you? You never wanted to do the Tourney in the first place.”

She spoke with a sneer so intense I was certain that if it were weaponized, it would instantly vaporize anything with which it came into contact. Luckily for me, they were just words. But as one of my instructors used to say, “them’s fightin’ words”, and a wash of anger erupted at the tail end of them.

I raised my eyebrows at her. “I stepped in after Ambrose died, knowing what was at stake and in the balance if I didn’t.”

“You stepped in to cut a deal for yourself to keep me from turning you in,” she replied. “Don’t pretend it was for some noble cause.”

“Screw you, Lacey,” I shot back, my temper exploding. “You have no idea how hard this was to do, knowing that losing the Tourney meant losing thousands of people when that other group finally does what it plans to do! I lost my mother getting involved in your little legacy war, so you could accomplish your goals!”

No, what I lost was a chance to have a good relationship with her, I reminded myself firmly. I needed to remember what was behind this fiery response, and pull it back.

“For which I am truly sorry,” she said, sighing. “I knew they were capable of some depraved things, but this one went above and beyond.”

Her apology and admission helped curb some of the anger I hadn’t managed to push back, but only a bit. It was still there, tightly capped but ready to explode. “Yeah, well, once I find the bastard behind all of this, I plan to rip him limb from limb.”

“You’ll get him if there’s anything left to have after I’m through with him,” Lacey replied haughtily. “You promised me Ambrose’s killers, and that means all of them.”

And with that, the anger was back in full force. How dare she try to hog all of them for herself? I had just as much right as she did to exact revenge, and if she tried to take it from me, there’d be hell to pay.

Once again, I considered arguing with her, but put it aside, knowing that if I did, it would only invite her to mistrust me. “Fine,” I spat from between clenched teeth. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” she replied primly, looking away for a second. “There’s a council meeting tomorrow. Cornelius has the agenda for you to peruse, but I wanted to tell you that the expulsion chamber law is up for a vote. It—”

“It is?” I asked, suddenly very interested. The expulsion chambers were disgusting, and the fact that we used them to murder ones—legally—was even worse. It spoke to a dark part of our humanity that we should turn our backs on. Except nobody had. I couldn’t wait to change that law.

“Scipio initiated the process to repeal it right after your trial, but without a full council, it has been waiting on the docket for review and voting,” she replied, and I realized she was trying to answer my vague question.

I hadn’t realized that, but it made sense; you couldn’t make important decisions like that without having each department represented. “Have they at least suspended the expulsions until after the vote is completed?” I asked, knowing that the answer wouldn’t be the one I wanted.

“Of course not,” Lacey said with a shake of her head.

“Then it’s a good thing we’re voting on it tomorrow,” I replied. “’Cause that law has got to go.”

“Yes, well, Strum and I are still coming up with suggestions for what to do with the ones after they are caught, so—”

“Oh, interesting,” I said, interrupting again as I grew even more excited. “I bet I could whip up quite a few ideas between now and then.”

“Yes, but it’s not that simple. You should know the process will take some time once it starts.”

“So what? I’ll give orders to stop using the expulsion chambers in the meantime. We’ll convert the chambers into cells and get some beds and food down there for those people while we wait.”

Lacey shook her head and sighed. “Look, I’m late for an appointment, and I am not in the mood to fight with you. I’ll explain to you why that’s a bad idea later, but for now, just hold off on doing anything rash, okay?”

Oh man, I could tell this was going to get old real fast. Lacey was already treating me like I was a child about to mess everything up, and if that went on for much longer, we’d fight, and it wouldn’t be pretty. I was barely keeping it together as it was.

“All right,” I said guardedly. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow?”

“For the council meeting?” Had she forgotten already? If so, I could understand; grief had a funny way of making you absentminded.

She stared at me for a second and then smiled. “Right. That. Have a good afternoon, Liana.”

“You too,” I mumbled, caught off guard by the weird shifts and ambiguous nature of her response. There was something going on there—something she wasn’t telling me—but I imagined I would find out soon enough, during the meeting.

The screen went dark seconds later, and I rocked back on my heels. All in all, I wouldn’t say the conversation went spectacularly well, but at least I knew what she expected of me. I didn’t like it, but I could play along for a while until I got a handle on things. And in the meantime, I could sit down and talk with my friends to establish some sort of game plan.

Just as soon as I figured out what we were going to do next.