It only took Jasper and Rose four minutes to download, but it took Leo and me seven to neutralize the nets and carry the bodies to the escape tunnel. Luckily, it wasn’t far from the office. Unluckily, that extra three minutes ate into the precious time Jasper and Rose had on the slaved hard drives. Jasper’s program was mindlessly attacking Rose’s, and it was using up a lot of power to do it—which was why we had the hard drives slaved together, for more power, and why we had only half an hour to get them to a more secure place, like a terminal. Transporting them was risky, because if the hard drive battery units gave out, we could lose Rose and Jasper forever.

But staying definitely wasn’t an option.

We raced through the rest of what we needed to do after we deposited Baldy’s unconscious form up in the escape tunnel, giving him an extra zap with the baton to make sure he stayed unconscious. Leo handled cleaning up the blood, using a few of Sadie’s sheets, while I swept everything I had taken from Sadie’s desk into the bag, my motions jerky and quick. Each second that dragged by felt like a second too long. As soon as I was done, I left Leo and fled to the emergency exit, while he set off the virus that would convince Sadie’s assistant that she was dead, and that it needed to initiate the reset of her apartment and files.

And though I was alone for several seconds in the hall, I had no time to worry about Leo’s safety. I quickly stripped out of the IT uniform that Dinah, our ally inside of IT, had given me, and donned my own uniform, complete with lashes. Leo showed up a moment later and helped me, and a few precious minutes later we were running down the hall and into a shaft that led upward, Baldy strapped to my back. We didn’t have time for Leo to change as well, as his gear was still in the bag, so it was up to me and my harness to carry him. I utilized my lashes to climb, the gears in the gyros better equipped to handle the double weight, while Leo used a rung ladder.

“Did it work?” I asked him as I began my ascent, keeping my voice low.

“It did. I almost got clocked by a piece of furniture making my way back to you.”

I couldn’t find any humor in his statement. My nerves were already fraying from the sudden dip in adrenaline, so I focused instead on the climb, relieved that at the very least we had covered our tracks.

The shaft led to a hatch nearly a hundred feet up, and I let Leo go through first so he could help me out. Once we were on the roof, we paused to spray our faces—and Baldy’s—with Quess’s invention, which would obscure our features from the facial recognition software, and I gave Leo a minute to put on his uniform, and then we were moving again, opening up the large door to the hall. Once we were in the hall, I started using my lashes, throwing the thin lines out rhythmically, one right after the other. This was the only way I could carry Baldy such a distance without collapsing halfway there from the weight—and it was much faster than running.

We’d already taken too long as it was. Even now, the legacies could’ve noticed that Baldy was missing. He was supposed to meet someone, so there was a finite amount of time before they started looking for him. I wanted him back in my quarters before they noticed. Before they came looking. If they weren’t already doing so.

My eyes scanned the corridors as we flew through them, searching for any sign of movement, but the Attic was, as always, devoid of human life. It didn’t make me feel any better, however, and when we finally reached the storage room that would lead back to the Citadel, I almost quivered with relief.

It was too soon to feel it, though. I still had to get Sadie out of my quarters, and Jasper and Rose had to be downloaded before the hard drives ran out of power. AIs needed an energy source at all times, or they would die. It was why Scipio had backup source upon backup source, powered both by the hydro-turbines and the energy harvested from the sun.

When we got to the end of the hall, I slowly lowered myself to the ground just as Leo went for the door. My boots hit the floor, and in my impatience to get this whole mess over and done with, I disconnected the line prematurely—and my knees immediately buckled under Baldy’s weight. Leo moved to help, but I waved him off as I took two staggering steps, trying to catch my balance. I smiled triumphantly at him a second later, managing to center myself, and then toppled right over onto my side, Baldy’s extra weight too much to handle after moving all of those bodies.

We hit the ground with a thud, and I heard Leo tsk and move over. There was a jerking against my back as he disconnected Baldy from where we had hooked him onto my uniform, and I took a moment, feeling weak and sweaty, my muscles aching and burning from the exertion.

Then Leo’s hand filled my vision, and I took it, gingerly allowing him to pull me up. “I netted Maddox, and she’s on her way,” he reported softly, his hands going to the back of his neck. I realized he had pulled the neural scrambler off to do so and was in the process of putting it back on. I prayed that the activity hadn’t been enough for anyone to triangulate his position. If they did, and saw two Knights randomly lashing through the halls of the Attic in the vid files, one with an unconscious man on her back, the legacies might piece together that Baldy’s disappearance and Sadie’s quarters simultaneously being reset was not a coincidence.

And that we were responsible.

“Good,” I replied softly. “Help me get Baldy over to the hatch.”

Leo shook his head and took off the bag he had carried. “I’ll stay here with him,” he replied as he knelt down and opened up the bag. I watched him pull out the slaved hard drives, which were bound together with wires and tape. “You have to get these to Quess as quickly as possible,” he informed me. “As soon as you get Sadie out, start downloading them. Too much time has already passed.”

I glanced at my wrist and saw that he was right: it had already been seventeen minutes since we’d downloaded Jasper and Rose. Which meant we only had thirteen minutes left before the hard drives failed.

But still I hesitated. Sadie Monroe was in my quarters. Drugged, and slightly out of it. I had to get her out of there quickly, but we still had to knock her out again, put her net back in her head, give her a small bit of Spero, and then get her out.

Right. There wasn’t any time to waste.

I squared my shoulders and took the hard drives in my hand, glancing at Baldy’s still form. “Better shock him again, just to be sure,” I said.

Leo gifted me with a lopsided smile and reached out to smooth a bit of the hair that had escaped my braid away from my eyes. My heart skipped a beat as the simple gesture sucked my breath out of my lungs, and I quickly took a step back, my cheeks flaming at the intensity of my reaction. Now wasn’t the time, and feeling things for Leo while he was inside Grey was the very definition of a complication I did not need right now.

“I’ll be fine,” he told me firmly, ignoring my discomfort. “Hurry up. Maddox is on her way.”

I nodded as he brushed past me and moved toward the hatch we had come through earlier, walking down the aisle. I followed him, cradling the hard drives in both hands, and came to a stop as he knelt on the floor twenty feet deeper into the room and pressed on a section of it to reveal a digital keypad. He pulled something out of his pocket and connected it through a wire that he jacked into a port, and the display turned from red to blue, lighting his face with a glow that reminded me of his holographic image when I had first discovered him in Lionel Scipio’s secret office.

The display turned green a few seconds later, and a square piece of the floor slid back, revealing a shaft with a ladder. And though I wanted to move quickly, I carefully tucked the hard drives under one arm and stepped onto the first rung, and then to the next, awkwardly balancing myself with one hand. It took a second to get the rhythm, but once I did, I descended as quickly as possible, barely giving Leo one last glance before he slipped from view.

I heard a grating sound seconds later, signaling that he’d closed the door, but focused on the climb down. It took me longer than I cared to admit before I made it to the bottom of the shaft, and when the door below slid open so the bottom section of the ladder could descend into the hall, I was unsurprised to see Maddox already standing there, waiting for me.

What did surprise me was that my twin brother was standing right next to the raven-haired girl, his eyes narrowed at me in displeasure. I had forgotten that he had been on his way over to force himself into the investigation, but was relieved that Maddox had intercepted him. He, however, looked less than happy.

“Your stupid Lieutenant kept me locked in an elevator for forty minutes,” he bit off angrily, his dark eyes flashing behind the spectacles on his nose.

I arched an eyebrow as I stepped off the ladder, thinking that was good. I knew I shouldn’t be dismissive of him like that—being dismissive of his feelings and wishes was what had landed me in the doghouse in his eyes. And he had a point. I’d had my own difficulties in processing my mother’s death and had allowed myself to cut him out as a result. Part of it was unintentional, but I knew I should’ve given him a better effort.

However, now was, unfortunately, not the time to start. “Good,” I replied, echoing my internal thought. I checked my watch and gritted my teeth. Nine more minutes before we would lose Jasper and Rose. “Now, up the ladder you go,” I told him. “I need to get Sadie out of my quarters, and you being there will only make things more difficult.”

“What did you find in Sadie’s apartment?” he demanded, ignoring my statement completely. Anger welled up in me, and I took a step closer to my twin.

“I will tell you after I get Sadie out of my home,” I hissed, trying not to tear into a rage at the precious seconds this was costing us. “Leo is up in the Attic, alone with the man who cut my throat. Get up there and make sure that the man doesn’t wake up and hurt him while I’m handling Sadie.”

Alex’s eyes gleamed with a dark light that suddenly filled me with doubt about telling him who was up there, but I couldn’t give this any more time, and I had nowhere else to send him. “Maddox, you’re with me. We’ll switch out my net in the elevator. You brought mine with you?”

She nodded and patted her pocket, but her glittering green gaze didn’t drop Alex’s until he began to move toward the ladder. I did my best to ignore the eager motions of his arms, suddenly concerned about what would happen once he got up there, and reminded myself that Leo would be with him. He wouldn’t let Alex do anything to Baldy. Still, the look in his eyes scared me—it had been like I was looking into the eyes of a stranger.

I tried to shake it off as I watched the ladder retract behind him, and then started walking down the hallway, heading for the elevator that would take us to the area between the thirty-first and thirty-second floors, where the entrance to my quarters was. I paused to let Maddox give me access to the elevator, knowing the neural blocker would keep the scanners from reading my net, and therefore keep me from using the elevator. Still, I practically leapt onto the black pad that slid out of the wall as soon as the scan was done.

Maddox followed closely behind, and within seconds I had set the hard drives on the elevator pad and presented her with my back, pulling the collar of my uniform down to give her access to my neck. I heard her rummage around for a second as the floor numbers tracked by, followed by a long silence.

Then her fingers were on my neck, and there was a sharp sting as she cut through the skin at the base of my skull. I endured it easily enough at this point—I had changed nets too many times to count—but still winced as the tendrils of the net began to pull back from my brain. The pressure was intense for several excruciating seconds, but then it passed, the relief palpable in every muscle in my body. I exhaled slowly as I felt her extract the net, now in the form of a square white chip, her fingers disappearing for a moment.

I forced a deep, calming breath, knowing that this was only the halfway mark, and watched as floor forty-five slid past. “Hurry,” I said, trying not to shift my weight from one leg to another.

“Don’t rush me. I’m not as good at this as Quess is,” she replied tersely. Her fingers returned a second later, and the wound on my neck began to sting as she shoved my own net into it. She probed it a few times, seating it in place, and then suddenly the tendrils returned, slithering across my brain like worms wriggling through paths carved out by previous creatures. I withstood it without moving a muscle, and even managed to wait patiently as Maddox dabbed some bio-foam into the wound, letting the pink goo seal up the damaged flesh.

The elevator came to a stop a second later, and I hastily handed Maddox the hard drives. “Move these over to the pile of our stuff that the reset left against the wall, discreetly,” I ordered softly.

She nodded, her face pale and tight with worry. I felt it, too, but had to be careful with my face. Sadie might be sedated and getting regular Spero doses, but I couldn’t afford to let anything show. She might be out of it, but she was no slouch. And if she picked up on the slightest thing out of place, she might figure out that we were behind what had happened in my apartment—and hers. I wasn’t about to let that happen. Not after we had gotten this far. I took one last deep, calming breath, trying to ease away all of my panic, worry, fluster, and anxiety, and then squared my shoulders at the opening doors and stepped through.