I was halfway to the war room when Grey appeared at the other end. I stopped in my tracks, blinking at him and wondering who I was looking at. “Grey?” He shook his head, and relief poured through me. Still, I wanted confirmation. “Leo?”

He nodded, and I shot off like a bullet toward him, needing the feel of his arms around me. I barely even gave him time to open his arms before I was in them, wrapping my own around his waist and pulling him tight to me. “Are you okay?”

He hesitated a second before returning the hug, and then slowly smoothed his arms over my shoulders and back. “I’m okay,” he told me. “Your brother didn’t hurt me.”

Something inside me started to break, and I gave a little cry. “What about Eric? Is he?”

“Grey gave him all the blood he could,” Leo said. “Quess recovered the bullet, but it punctured a lung, ricocheted off a rib, and nicked his liver. He stopped the bleeding internally, but he lost a lot of blood, and what Grey was able to give him wasn’t a lot. He’s stable, but it’s now a waiting game.”

“But what about Grey?” I asked. “Is he okay? He was so scared and confused before, and—”

I stopped as my shoulders started to shake, a sob catching me unawares, the terror of the last five—ten?—minutes finally starting to hit me. Leo’s hands pressed me closer, one going up to stroke my hair lightly. “Grey’s… fine,” he hedged. I started to question his hesitation, but he cut me off. “I know you are upset, and I understand why, but we’ll have to talk about Grey later. There’s something more important that needs our attention first.”

His words gave me pause, and I looked up at him, blinking back my tears. “What is it?”

Leo’s mouth turned down into a frown. “We have to get rid of Baldy’s body. Cornelius’s sensors were shut off in regard to undoc alerts, but not in regard to death, and I can’t access Cornelius with Jasper and Rose’s programs in the state they are in—they might interpret it as an attack and try to take control of his systems. We have only a few minutes to get it out of here before he automatically syncs with the council server and informs them that there’s a corpse in your quarters. As long as the body isn’t here when he syncs, he won’t be able to inform them.”

I blinked, not comprehending. I truly didn’t understand. “Won’t he be able to tell them we moved the body?”

He pulled away from me. I had expected him to take my hand, as he always had after something traumatic happened. But he didn’t, and a wave of disappointment crashed into me. Instead, he turned away and began walking back to the war room, talking to me from over his shoulder. I had little choice but to follow, or stand there looking like an idiot over the fact that he hadn’t taken my hand.

“No. He’s a computer program and can only follow the protocols set up for him as they are laid out. No body equals no report. It’s an oversight in his programming, but one we plan to exploit. But it only works if we get Baldy out of here as soon as possible. I just can’t figure out where to put him. The escape hatch would work, except ours leads straight up to the roof, so there’s no place for us to leave him in there that wouldn’t have him falling back down on top of us.”

I heard the dangerous undercurrent of his words and realized that him not taking my hand was definitely the least of our worries. We had to remove the body, but to where? It had to be a place no one could find it; we had left forensic evidence all over him, and if his remains were discovered, the trail would lead back to us—and mostly right back to Alex. Even if it wasn’t the legacies that found him, the consequences would be the same. Imprisonment and death.

If the escape exit hatch was out, then almost everything else was as well. Nothing ever remained hidden inside the Tower: there were dozens of places to hide a body inside of it, but they would be discovered eventually, and the jig would be up. Alex’s DNA was all over Baldy’s face, from hitting him over and over again. His rank had dropped and risen in a matter of minutes, and even if no one had seen it when it happened, a quick check of his performance log would show them the truth. They’d know we had found a way to mask our ranks, and they would immediately try to figure out what it was, so they could put a stop to it. I’d be immediately implicated, because it had happened under my watch.

I’d be arrested and executed as a dissident and enemy of the Tower.

We entered the war room and saw Quess and Maddox already lifting Baldy’s body and setting it inside a black body bag. I had no idea where they had gotten that from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Cornelius had procured it from one of the nearby supply rooms. The request would be recorded, but I was betting Leo could go back in and delete it later, once everything calmed down. Eric was still on the floor, using Zoe’s lap as a pillow, his eyes closed and his lashes dark against his pale face.

She looked up at me, her blue eyes bleeding with hopelessness. “Quess won’t let me move him,” she whispered. She reached down and tugged at his bloody uniform where Quess had unzipped it, trying to cover him up. “He needs to be under a blanket.”

I moved over to my best friend and wrapped my arms around her, while Quess grunted out, “I’m sorry, Zo, but I can’t be sure that moving him won’t kill him yet. I told you, go get a blanket from the room, and I promise, we will clean everything up as soon we figure out what to do with this.”

I heard a rattling thump that told me they had dropped Baldy’s body into the bag, and I gently pulled away from Zoe. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her in a soft whisper.

Her face broke, and her shoulders shook as she took a breath. “He’s the light of my life, Liana. How did this happen? You said we were coming here to be safe!”

Her last sentence was an accusation, and my heart plummeted into the pit of my stomach. I looked over at Leo and saw horror and guilt written all over his face.

“Everything was fine,” he said, his voice twisted with raw emotion. “Everything was fine. I was learning about him and who his people were, what they had done, what they were planning. But then he just… woke up, and somehow jerked control from me. I’ve never felt anything like it. And I couldn’t do anything to stop him. He shouldn’t have been able to keep me from reacting, from putting his body out of commission, but… he did.”

My face paled at his description, and I swallowed convulsively. Either Leo was arrogant about his skills, or Baldy had a much stronger mind than either of us had given him credit for. Either way, it scared me, and I worried about whether Grey could do that, now that we had woken him up before putting Leo back inside him. I wondered suddenly how Maddox had managed to handle Grey, but there wasn’t time for that now.

I had to help the others move a body and figure out where to put it.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I instructed everyone. “Zoe, go get Eric a blanket. We’ll move him together when we get back.” I stood up and turned to the others. “Where can we put the body?”

“Down an elevator shaft in the shell,” Maddox suggested. “Or one of the plunges.”

“That’s the first place the legacies will check for him,” I replied. Both were common dumping grounds for bodies, whenever there were any. The plunges were a better choice, but only if you could be certain to hit the bottom, which you never really could be. If his body landed on a bit of twisted-up rebar or a crossbeam, they’d find him. That meant that disposing of the body in a place they could never find him was the only solution.

But there wasn’t any place in the Tower like that! The entire thing was a self-contained system. Bodies could be hidden, for a while, but eventually they would be recovered. And forensic evidence could be harvested and tested years after the victim had died. I had no idea how long this legacy war was going to last, so I had to plan for the future.

Which left only one place. “We need to throw him off the Tower,” I said, walking quickly toward them.

Maddox’s brows drew together, forming a deep crease that jutted down the bridge of her nose like a dagger, while Quess’s mouth simply dropped open, wide enough to catch flies if he wanted to. Leo was the only one whose eyebrows rose—but almost a second later, he was nodding.

“She’s right,” he said. “The sensors on the outside of the Tower aren’t designed to pick up and report a dead body.”

“Yeah, but that’s still…” Maddox did some quick calculations and frowned. “Almost eighty floors up from here. The security in the Attic is not the best, but there are still cameras everywhere. Someone is eventually going to notice four people hauling a full body bag to the roof.”

“Then we do everything we can to make it look like something else,” I told her. “It’s the only thing we can do. As soon as we get him out into the main part of the Tower, the sensors won’t register that he’s dead, and as long as we keep him in the bag, no one watching can be sure of what’s inside. We’ll spray our faces with Quess’s spray so the cameras can’t identify us. As for it being eighty floors up…” I pointed up the stairs at the column that controlled my quarters. “I’ll lift the room up to the topmost level, and then we’ll only have forty floors to go.”

“Forty floors of stairs,” Quess griped, and I empathized. I wasn’t looking forward to it either, especially since we would have to wear neural scramblers to mask our net IDs, which meant we couldn’t use the elevators. At least Quess had managed to extend the time we could use the scramblers without risking our nets frying our brains, but I wasn’t particularly looking forward to putting the scrambler back on. It was annoying and started to give headaches after a while, and I had already been wearing one earlier. Yet they gave us time and anonymity to do the deed, and between the four of us, I was certain we could handle it. We didn’t have any choice.

“Zoe, you stay here to take care of Eric and keep an eye on Tian and Liam. We won’t be able to net you, so don’t panic if we’re gone for a little while. Leo, start moving the platform. Quess, find out if there’s a way we can get into the Attic from here without going into the Citadel itself. How much time do we have, Maddox?”

She checked her indicator while the others scrambled to follow my orders, her finger tapping on the face to change it from her rank to the time, and her features pinched. “Six minutes until Cornelius syncs with the council server. It’s going to be close.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said reassuringly.

I wasn’t sure if it was a lie or not, but it was the best thing I could offer.

The platform began to rumble at the same time as I heard my brother’s voice announce, “I’m coming with you,” from the hallway. I turned and saw him standing there, his uniform back on and a bleak look in his eyes. “I have to clean up my own mess.” It dawned on me that he probably hadn’t even tried to sleep before getting up and dressing again, which meant he had heard the tail end of the conversation and knew what was going on.

I stared at him, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to go back to bed and let me handle it. But then I remembered his words, how broken he had looked, and how much he wanted to be useful, and I found I couldn’t deny him, especially given that we needed the help. Not to mention, I couldn’t cut him out again. It was partially what had gotten us into this mess.

“The help would be appreciated.”