I woke up the next morning and experienced several disorienting seconds in which I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. The sensation was so strong that I shot out of the bed, almost afraid I had slept so deeply that the legacies had snuck in and taken us. It wasn’t until I noticed Zoe jerking straight up from where she had been sleeping next to Eric, her eyes wide in alarm, that everything came rushing back. The talk with Leo. Crying on Zoe’s shoulder. Zoe crying on mine. Eric sleeping through it all.

“What is it?” she asked, and I pressed a hand to my heart, trying to still the erratic pounding my fear had caused. I took several deep breaths, and then gave her an apologetic look as she added, “Liana, what’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “I just… I was confused as to where I was, that’s all,” I explained, shaking some of the excess adrenaline from my limbs. “How’s Eric?”

She shifted up to one arm and leaned over him, her thick brown hair swinging forward to hide her face. Her hand reached up to check his pulse, and then cupped his cheek as she studied him. “Eric,” she said lightly. “Baby?”

His chest lifted up and fell, but his eyelashes were still. There was no sign that he was waking up, but that didn’t mean much this soon after being shot. Zoe sighed and scooted up on the bed, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes and taking a shaky breath.

I moved instantly to her side and reached over Eric to pull her into a hug. “It’s okay,” I said, stroking a soothing hand over her hair. I glanced down at Eric’s still form, noting that his skin color was much better than it had been last night, and that his breathing was steady and sure. The blanket over him had been pulled down enough to reveal the bullet wound on his chest, just below his pectoral muscle on the left, the flesh bright pink and shiny after the rapid regeneration, thanks to the bio-foam. There was no bruising on his stomach to indicate internal bleeding. All very excellent signs.

Besides, him not waking up yet wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm. He had lost a lot of blood, and two of his internal organs had been punctured by the bullet. What he needed was rest, and time for his body to recover from the shock.

“He looks much better this morning, Zo. I really think he’s going to be all right. He just needs to sleep right now.”

She nodded against my shoulder, taking a shaky breath. “I know. I just… I can’t imagine him not in my life, and when Quess said there was no hope… Oh Scipio, I never thanked you, Liana. You didn’t give up on him. You brought him back to me.”

Tears sprang into my eyes as she clutched me tighter. “I’m not letting anyone else I love die,” I told her.

She sniffed and gently pulled away from me, a tremulous smile on her lips. “But now we don’t have to,” she pointed out. “We just have to hold on long enough for Alex to negotiate a place for us in this Patrus place. If we can just keep our heads down—”

My spirits, which were already low, plummeted the moment she brought up the Patrians. I had managed to put them out of my head, though I had spent half of last night idly thumbing through the graphic novel Thomas had given us, reading about Violet and Viggo’s story. Now that she had brought it up again, it was all I could think about. All of my friends—my entire support network—were going to disappear, and soon I would be on my own for the rest of this battle.

Yesterday, my entire focus had been on damage control and figuring out our next step in this fight. Today, I wasn’t even sure I could ask the others to help me go through Sadie’s files to see if we could figure out what she was up to and who she was working with. I wasn’t sure they would want to, now that they had hope of getting out of the Tower. If I were them, and was hoping for escape, I would want to put my head down and wait for rescue, not go borrowing more trouble by helping me figure out what we were dealing with.

“Hey,” Zoe said, giving my shoulder a little shake. I blinked up at her and realized I had missed everything she had been saying. “Why do you look so sad? Isn’t this good news?”

I tried to force a smile onto my face. “Yeah. It’s great.”

My best friend knew me better than that, and she cocked her head and squinted at me. “Liana, you are an excellent liar when you want to be, but that was a really crappy effort. Are you worried about Alex? Dinah said she would make ghost net data into his file so no one noticed he was missing, so I don’t think you have to worry about that. Besides, I read that graphic novel thing after you fell asleep last night, and these people seem pretty great, despite everything they went through. They’re kind of like us, in a way. They found out that people were trying to take power and did everything they could to stop them. I mean, they even tried to keep the queen responsible for everything alive, so they could put her on trial! That’s saying something about a civilization.”

I smiled, in spite of my own sadness. It was good to see her so excited about something. There was a light in her eyes that hadn’t been there in the past few months, and I hadn’t realized how much I had missed seeing her hopeful and looking forward to the future. But her words only made me realize how selfish I was being. I knew what most of them had signed up for: to get out of the Tower. Their goal had been put off time and time again, partially because the situations we found ourselves in called for survival first and escape later—but also because I didn’t want to accept the idea that we would escape before we stopped the legacies and fixed Scipio. Not to mention the fact that we physically didn’t have a way to go. The radiation outside would kill us, and we didn’t have flying machines.

Now the possibility of them achieving their ultimate goal was here, and all I could think about was how it was going to affect me.

“That is great,” I agreed, forcing a little more effort into the lie. “I’m excited.”

She narrowed her dark blue eyes at me, her mouth tightening. “Spill.”

Crap. I was clearly too close to this emotionally, and that was affecting my ability to lie. I screwed on a “seriously, everything is fine” face and opened my mouth to begin reassuring her. “Zoe, I—”

“Cut the crap, Castell,” she barked in a no-nonsense voice. “What. The hell. Is up with you?”

I pressed my lips together and looked away. I hadn’t been planning to tell anyone about my decision to stay and help Leo fix Scipio, and I wasn’t sure now was the time to do it. But Zoe, who was the dearest person in the world to me, was also like a dog with a bone when she sensed I was keeping a secret from her. There was no getting out of it, not without causing a fight.

Besides, in the deepest, darkest part of my heart, I wanted to talk to someone about it. “Zoe, I’m not leaving with you and the others, even if Alex gets us refugee status. I promised Leo that I would stay and help him fix Scipio, and I still intend to do that.”

She stared at me, her face an impassive mask. “But Leo essentially broke your heart last night,” she finally said.

Pain blossomed, but I fought it back, trying not to cry. “No,” I said. “He didn’t.” I wasn’t sure if it was a lie or not, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It was what I had to say to keep from breaking down, so I said it, and tried not to pay any attention to how my heart ached, or how a voice in my mind was screaming at me to go find him, and then… hit him or scream at him not to do this. The voices were conflicted on that front.

Which was why it was better to ignore them both. I couldn’t afford to break down, not like I had after my mom had died. As much as I wanted to just break down and cry, I couldn’t; there were bigger problems to worry about than some jerk of an AI who had just hurt me worse than any of our enemies ever could.

Zoe’s mouth worked. “Okay, he didn’t,” she agreed in a tone of voice that told me she didn’t agree with me. “But he still hurt you. He lied to you and toyed with your emotions. Why stick around and help him?”

I gave her an incredulous look. “Because the people in the Tower shouldn’t have to suffer because I got my feelings hurt. They deserve better than that.”

“Then they should be the ones doing something about it,” she retorted angrily. “Why does this whole legacy war, saving Scipio thing have to fall to us? Give Lacey Sadie’s files, and the fragments. You said she had one already—Kurt, right? Her family has been keeping him safe for however many years, so have her handle it. It’s her damn war, after all!”

I considered her idea, taking in a deep breath of air in an attempt to not reject the idea outright. Lacey had been a representative of her department for years, and had a veritable army working for her. She had also been fighting in this legacy war her entire life and would jump at the chance to finally put an end to it.

But could I trust her to actually restore Scipio, given the pieces and the chance? What if she got to that point and then decided not to, so she could try to control everything instead? What did I know about her, really? We weren’t exactly close enough for her to let me in on her vision of the Tower, so how could I trust that it was any different from Sadie’s?

More importantly, could I let go and walk away? Leave the job unfinished, the Tower unsaved, and just… go? Start a new life somewhere, free from all of the danger and strife we had been through… I was tired—that much was a constant—and had no clue what to do next. The struggles we had been through had been nonstop, and every time we came close to the enemy, someone wound up hurt or dead. I didn’t want to see my friends hurt or killed. I didn’t want them to die over this.

But me? I had already started down this path, committed to it fully. It didn’t matter that Leo and the others were focusing on separate goals; the thought of leaving everything behind without fixing it ate at me. There were good people in the Tower who didn’t deserve to fall victim to whatever the legacies had in store for them. I knew right then that I wouldn’t be able to just leave them. So why lie about it?

“I don’t have a good reason not to give it all over to Lacey,” I said carefully. “But that doesn’t mean I will. I hear what you’re saying, Zo, but I’m not going. Not until I know the Tower is free from the legacies, and Scipio is restored.”

“What if Scipio can’t be restored?” she erupted angrily. “Liana, you don’t owe anyone in this Tower a damn thing!”

I stared at her for a second, and then looked down at the graphic novel sitting partially under her pillow. She had just been talking about their struggles a moment ago, and how they solved their problems. From the sounds of it, they hadn’t given up. So why were we?

I pointed at it and met her eyes. “They didn’t owe anything to the people they saved, and yet they still did it. It can’t be both ways, Zoe. We can’t admire the things that they’ve done and the world they’ve created while turning our backs on our own. I understand wanting to leave, but I can’t until I know everyone inside is going to be safe.” I paused, and then added a bitter, “Not that anyone is going to want to help with that now.”

Zoe’s eyes widened, and for a second, I thought she was going to continue arguing with me. She expelled a slow breath, puffing out her cheeks. “Crap. That’s a really good point.” I wasn’t expecting that, and her sudden reversal left me a bit speechless. My silence gave her a few more seconds to think about it, and I had a sudden hope that maybe she would find the answer for me. Instead, she finally said, “I don’t see the others really getting on board with it, however.”

She was right. Their hopes were high, and I wasn’t sure the argument would hold weight with them. It was more moral than anything, whereas everything we’d done up to this point had been necessary to our continued survival. This was purely altruistic; I wasn’t doing this because it was what I had to do, but because it was what needed to be done. It was impossible to expect the others to be willing to gamble their lives on something like that.

“I know.” I sighed.

Her face was thoughtful for several long seconds. “How long until the outsiders come back?”

“Maybe a week,” I replied tiredly. “Possibly longer, depending on how fast their government works. I’ll get more information from Alex when I call him on that thing.” She bit her lip, her eyebrows twitching. “What?”

She shrugged. “Ask everyone to keep helping you until the time comes. There’s no guarantee that the Patrians will be able to secure a place for us anyway, and I think everyone will agree that the Paragon-dependent population will have to go first, if we can even go at all. That way you can keep moving forward with us, and maybe even inspire everyone to stay.”

Zoe’s suggestion sounded so easy, but it didn’t change the fact that we didn’t even have a way forward until we had more information. “But there’s no plan, Zo.” It was hard to admit that, but there it was. “We can hope that Sadie was stupid enough to leave the list of every legacy she worked with on her computer, but to what end? We don’t have enough people to go after them all at once, and we can’t completely trust every single one of my Knights, as any one of them could be working for her. If Sadie’s people even hear a whisper that we’re mobilizing against them before we get everything in place, they will figure out that their covers are blown, and disappear! And even if we do manage to grab them all at once, what would we do with them? Dump their bodies off the side of the Tower and keep going as if nothing happened? Do I do that with Sadie? What if there’s another council member helping her? Do I become responsible for the execution of not one, not two, but three council members? What sort of mission is that?”

Zoe considered this, and then shrugged. “Going after the legacies makes the most sense. And you’re right, going after them all at once is the best way to get them. But why execute them when we can take a page from our neighbors, and put them on trial? We’ve never once stopped to think about how this ends without causing a civil war. But what if there’s another way to do it?”

She picked up the graphic novel as she spoke and held it out to me. I accepted it slowly, the weight of it feeling heavier in my hands then yesterday. But it wasn’t the book that felt heavy. It was me. Was Zoe right? Could I somehow grab all the legacies and then pass the situation over to the council? If we managed to get them all, and presented a strong enough case against them, then the council would have to step in and handle it legally. I had no doubt that they’d want to implement the expulsion chambers, but in this case I felt that would be warranted. And then they’d be obligated to fix Scipio, and with Leo and me watching them to make sure they did what they were supposed to… Could there finally be an end in sight?

I wasn’t sure, but it was at least the start of a plan. One that required Sadie’s files to pay off for us, yes. But at least it was something. And maybe Zoe was right; maybe I could get the others to keep working on it with me, on the off chance that leaving wasn’t an option. Either way, maybe we’d make some progress on catching the legacies before they left. Maybe even give my friends a victory strong enough that made them want to stay.

It wasn’t much—but it was something to hold on to.

Really the only thing I had, at this point.