The next meeting I had was with yet another department head, and though I wasn’t quite as nervous as I had been with Sage, I was still slightly apprehensive. Because Sage was an unknown, but the danger from Lacey Green was very real.

Lacey was a legacy from a different family, one working to protect Scipio. And our relationship was rocky at best. She had blackmailed me and my friends into protecting her cousin Ambrose, and we had failed. She wanted us to find the men responsible, and every day that passed without us taking anything tangible to her was another day that she lost her patience. She still had evidence that proved we had tampered with Scipio’s code to get away with murder, and she was going to use it if I didn’t come through for her.

But now I was going to give her what she wanted; it was half the reason I had requested the meeting in person. It just required her to give me something as well—not only by adding her forces to my own so we could arrest every legacy as quickly as possible, but also information about Kurt, the fragment AI her family had stolen in an attempt to save him from the other legacies.

It was risky to confront her on this—she would no doubt kill to keep Kurt’s existence a secret—but we didn’t have a choice. Bringing a case against not one, but two council members, along with over a hundred people, meant exposing what they had done to both the council and Scipio, and the fragments were essential if we wanted to prove that they were guilty. I hoped that once they started testifying, Scipio would finally be forced to acknowledge the damage to his own code. At which point we could start making progress toward putting the Tower back on track.

I glanced around at the four men and women surrounding Maddox and me—Lacey’s escort—and then back at the hall ahead of me, trying to guess at what Lacey’s reaction to all this would be. The halls were largely deserted, as Lacey had invited us during the middle of a work shift in this section, and that made the entire sub-level feel oddly imposing. Like it was threatening to engulf us.

I tried to shake the feeling away, reminding myself that we had good news for Lacey. We could finally give her the people who had killed her cousin. We had uncovered, in one of Sadie’s files, the identities of the six individuals who had attacked him, as well as several others who had caused us problems during the Tourney. A few of them were now safely entrenched in different departments, their faces modified by plastic surgery, but the bulk of them were still with the undoc forces, awaiting plastic surgery before they could be reassigned.

While we didn’t have the location for the undocs yet, I was still hopeful that I could get it from Liam. He didn’t seem to like the people he was related to any more than we did, and I was praying that I could somehow exploit that to get him to tell us where we could find his family. I didn’t want to have to resort to other measures to extract the information from him, like uploading Leo into his brain to find out what he knew.

Maybe we’d catch a break, and Dylan or Eric would find something out while they were following Plancett or Dreyfuss.

Either way, I was going to find the information I needed before I could make this plan a reality, and I was going to need Lacey’s and Praetor Strum’s help executing it. Which was why I had requested a meeting with Lacey right after my meeting with Sage.

We turned left down one of the side passages and were faced with rows and rows of doors that I knew led to apartments. The halls here were poorly lit compared to the lights of the rest of the Tower, the UV lights flickering periodically, and I frowned when I saw that, wondering why the problem hadn’t been fixed yet. Cogstown prided itself on having everything functioning in their department, so it seemed odd and out of place that they would have ignored this.

The lead man stopped at an apartment about halfway down and turned around to face us. “In here,” he said with a brusque nod.

“Thanks,” I replied dryly. I knew from a previous meeting with Lacey that this wouldn’t be her apartment, but one of her workers’, borrowed at random so she could host clandestine exchanges such as these. I hit the button on the door, and it opened automatically, skipping the normal security scan.

I stepped through the door into a small hallway, which deposited me into a living area that clearly didn’t belong to a family unit. The entire living area was antiseptic, devoid of the small touches that made a place a home. So this was dormitory housing, where young Cogs were placed until they started families of their own.

Lacey was sitting at a table, leafing through an orange Mechanic manual, but she wasn’t alone. To my surprise, Strum was here as well, leaning over her shoulder and staring down at the manual she was flipping through.

“It’s about time you got here,” the woman said, putting the manual down with a loud slap. “I thought we were going to have to wait forever.”

I stared at her, trying not to roll my eyes at the thinly veiled hostility in her voice. Instead, I made a show of pulling back the sleeve of my uniform to reveal the flat black disk of my indicator and swiped it over to the clock function. “Three minutes early,” I reported tightly.

Lacey’s mouth tightened, but she didn’t reply other than to cross her arms and lean back in the chair. “Call me a little suspicious, then. I thought I told you I didn’t want any more face-to-face meetings until you caught Ambrose’s killers.” Her brown eyes widened theatrically as she craned her neck around, searching for people she knew for a fact weren’t there. “I don’t see them. Are they invisible?”

“Do you want to know why we requested a meeting or not?” Maddox retorted, losing her temper in the face of Lacey’s bitterness. “Because we can go and—”

“It’s fine, Maddox,” I said, interrupting her. I gave her a look that told her there was no point in getting upset, and then turned back to Lacey. “We found them.”

“Who?” Lacey asked, her eyebrows coming together. “Ambrose’s killers?”

I nodded, and a slow, predatory smile developed on her face. “Where?”

“It’s not so simple,” I told her, sitting down in a chair across from them. “It’s not just Ambrose’s killers, but the entire legacy group that you’ve been after.”

Lacey blinked at me several times, her expression wavering between disbelief and eagerness, and it was Strum who took over for her. “How do you know?” he asked.

“Because we broke into Sadie’s quarters,” I replied. “Speaking of which, I’m going to need both of you to reset your quarters using the virus on this.” I reached into a pocket on my sleeve and pulled out a data stick as I spoke, setting it on the table and sliding it toward Lacey. Strum reached out and caught it, his long fingers snapping it up.

“You reset your own quarters?” Lacey asked, and I was amused at the dumbfounded look on her face. “Wait. You broke into Sadie’s?” The alarm in her voice and eyes was only rivaled by the impressed look Strum was giving us. “Are you insane? Sadie’s assistant—”

“Was knocked offline,” I said, cutting her off. I didn’t want her to start nitpicking over the details of my plan. We didn’t have time. “The virus reset it, covering all the records of our coming and going. So you can relax; she won’t know it was me. However, it would be helpful if at least one of you would reset your own quarters, to make sure Sadie buys that the rooms resetting themselves is just an unfortunate glitch.”

“Why did you do this?” Strum asked, finally breaking his silence. “What was in Sadie’s quarters, and how does doing this relate to Ambrose’s killers?”

I took a deep breath and prepared to drop my first truth bomb. “Sadie is a legacy. I’m not sure if she’s at the top or if there is someone above her, but we uncovered evidence in her terminal that proves it. She also has a legacy net.” Lacey gave me a look that read, ‘How do you know that,’ and I shrugged and said, “I had to wear it to get access to her quarters.”

Lacey’s jaw dropped, and then quickly snapped shut. A moment later, she was up and moving, pacing back and forth across a small stretch of floor. “So Sadie’s another legacy. I thought we’d weeded them all out of the council with Devon, but… argh!” She stopped suddenly and kicked out a nearby chair, sending it flying into the next room. The violence of it surprised me, and I leaned back, studying her.

“Calm down, Lace,” Strum said. “We couldn’t have known.”

“No, you’re right, we couldn’t have known! That’s the point, Strum. We never know! We are fighting in absolute darkness! For every one of them we kill, another three move around and get their fingers into something else! When is this ever going to be over? When are we ever going to be done?”

“Soon,” I said, giving her an answer that I knew the Praetor couldn’t. That brought their attention back to me, and I rolled with it, knowing we had a lot more ground to cover. “I have a list of her entire network, including spies stationed inside the other departments. There are a few details I need to collect before I can act, but once I have them figured out, I’m going to make a move on every single one of them. But I need your help to do it.”

“Our help?” Lacey folded her arms across her chest and looked at Strum, seeming to communicate something to him nonverbally. For all I knew, they were communicating using their neural transmitters to have a private conversation while we were here. But honestly, I didn’t care. If it helped them come to some sort of consensus sooner, I was all for it. “I suppose we can assist you in executing them,” she said.

I blinked. That wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting, and it definitely wasn’t a good sign. If their first response to the problem was to kill everyone, without even considering a legal option, it meant that they weren’t going to take too kindly to the idea when I presented it. If anything, they could deny us the manpower outright, and then we’d be in a little bit of trouble.

But they were just going to have to get over it. My information, my rules. “We’re not going to execute them,” I informed them. “We’re going to arrest them, all of them, and then we’re going to hold a special council meeting to try to convict them.”

For several long seconds, no one said anything. Then Lacey said, “You’re serious?” I nodded, and she suddenly sat down, as if her knees weren’t capable of holding her up. “But… can you prove what she’s done to Scipio?”

I inhaled and exhaled slowly, and then seized upon the entrance her words had given me. “Not in the way you think, but definitely, yes. We both can.”

“We both can?” she repeated, looking confused. “What do you mean?”

“It’s simple. I let the fragment AIs I’ve managed to rescue from Sadie’s legacy group testify, and you let Kurt do the same.” I watched her closely, worried that I was pressing her too far with the demands today.

Lacey’s face paled, her eyes growing wide. “How do you know about that?” she demanded. “How could you possibly—”

I reached up and tapped the back of my neck. “You gave me the net,” I told her. “You didn’t think I would wonder why I couldn’t retain certain memories after they happened?”

“You tampered with the security lock we put on there.” Lacey exhaled with a groan. “Of course you did. I knew giving you a net was a mistake.”

“Mistake or not, it doesn’t change the fact that I know about Kurt, nor that I have Jasper and Rose. With them giving testimony about what happened to them, we can—”

“I don’t have Kurt,” she cut in abruptly, and now it was my turn to frown.

“But the memory…”

“Lacey’s great-grandfather, three generations removed, and his sister,” Strum said, his face grim. “My family was allied to Lacey’s even then, and my ancestors found their bodies thirty-three minutes after they downloaded Kurt—in that same room, where they were murdered. Kurt was never recovered. Presumably he was stolen by the murderers.”

I leaned back in my chair, my heart pounding. Lacey didn’t have Kurt? Then who did? He wasn’t on Sadie’s computer—Leo would’ve found him if he had been. But if he wasn’t there, was it possible she was keeping him somewhere else? And if so, how could we find him? If she didn’t have him… then who did?

And how were we ever going to learn what happened to him?

I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t change our course of action. Just having Rose and Jasper should be more than enough to convince Scipio that he had been tampered with, and force Sage—if he wasn’t our enemy—to support the arrest of the two council members who were.

“That’s disappointing,” I said in a gross understatement. “But it changes nothing. I still have two fragment AIs—”

“I didn’t say I didn’t have one,” Lacey interrupted coolly. “I do. It’s just not Kurt. It’s Tony.”

“Tony?” I asked, blinking. “Wait, how did you get Tony? Did you manage to steal him before someone else got him?”

Lacey shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “Tony found me. And I do mean me. When I was twenty years old, before I ever became Lead Engineer. He somehow managed to break free from Scipio’s code in the Core and transferred himself into the Cogs’ mainframe, trying to escape the legacies before they took him, too. We started developing all of these glitches, and I was dispatched to figure out what was causing it. To my surprise, it was both a who and a what. But I’m not sure how much his testimony is going to help you. He’s… practically a child in his mannerisms.”

It took me a moment to respond to her comment, mostly because I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Tony had just shown up in the Cog mainframe. I supposed it was possible that had he feared for himself and figured out a way to disconnect from Scipio to keep the people who were stealing the other fragments from getting him, too.

The fact that he was a child in his mannerisms was a little surprising to me, given what I had read in the report on him. From all accounts, he was Scipio’s creativity, but they never mentioned him being childlike. Still, I doubted Scipio would care about that when it came to testimony. Besides, he needed to know what had been done to him. And if Tony only came into Sadie’s life twenty years ago, then it stood to reason that he had witnessed every other fragment being taken. He might be the best possible witness.

“He will need to testify,” I told her. “His story is just as important as the others.”

Lacey gave me a look. “I don’t want to risk his safety.”

I smiled with what I hoped was more reassurance than dark, bitter humor. “If we manage to grab every single legacy in one night, then we won’t be risking anything. They won’t be able to control Scipio’s response, and we’ll have all the evidence.”

“Not to mention one of the councilors in handcuffs,” Strum said.

“Two,” I retorted, earning me a shocked look. “Plancett has been working with Sadie to keep his people out of the expulsion chambers.”

“He might’ve also fathered an undoc army,” Maddox added. “Him, Sage, or this old Knight named Jathem Dreyfuss. Someone has been kidnapping women from around the Tower and forcing them to have their children, and we’ve narrowed it down to three men.”

“Based on what parameters?” Lacey asked. “Who is Jathem Dreyfuss?”

I hesitated, and then dismissed the question with a simple “It’s not important. What is important is that we need a way of running another blood comparison outside of the Medica, so as not to tip Sage off. I have the DNA from each of those men, but I need a comparison made to the files we have, to figure out who is fathering those undocs.” I produced a second data stick from a different pocket and handed it to Strum, while Maddox placed the plastic-wrapped cup, handkerchief, and hair we had taken from the three men on the table. “Can you do it?”

“I can,” Strum said. “Which is which?”

“I’m not telling you that,” I told him, standing up. “I don’t want either of you running off and killing him before I have a chance to arrest him and bring him up on charges. As soon as I have the information I need, and everything’s confirmed, I will tell you—but I want him taken alive, along with the rest of them. Is that acceptable to both of you?”

The two were silent for a long time. “It is,” Strum said. “If it finally ends all of this once and for all… then it is.”

“Good,” I said. “Send me the results as soon as you get them. I’ll keep you updated as things occur.”

“Good,” Lacey said. “It’s about time you started improving in that area.”

I shot her a death glare as I left, but to my surprise, she smiled—and it looked genuine.

I just wished it didn’t look quite so bloodthirsty. But I let it go. I had my support, and soon would know which of the three men was responsible for fathering over thirty people. Then I would just need to figure out where the undocs were now.