Before the Tower, humanity was free in the only way that truly mattered—humans had an implicit understanding that they could express their emotions however they pleased. Some people were quiet and even stoic, yet shared their love through patience and action. Others were scared, terrorized by past horrors over which they couldn’t quite seem to gain control. Even more were driven by greed, lust, jealousy, hope, pride, pleasure, love, compassion, justice… The list was endless, yet filled with a myriad of emotional states that could twist a person’s heart and affect their life. But all of these feelings were understood, and could be met with compassion.

Now, however, humanity couldn’t be bothered to waste time dealing with such trifles. Things like happiness were a luxury, and grief an anathema. Dwelling on any emotions only distracted from the mission of keeping us all alive. It served no purpose other than to satisfy a selfish and petty urge to feel connected. Want to feel connected? Work harder and dedicate yourself to the Tower and to Scipio, our benevolent—and broken—AI overlord. Want to feel emotions? Don’t. The Medica will make sure that you don’t have to anymore.

Before the Tower, humanity was free to laugh, sing, play, and cry. Now, we weren’t expected to do any of that anymore. Instead, we were expected to bury our emotions like we buried our dead, and forget everything.

Except I couldn’t seem to stop feeling. I felt everything like it was a raw, festering wound buried deep inside, right next to the names of those I had lost: Cali Kerrin, former Lieutenant to Devon Alexander, both of whom I had killed in one way or another. Roark, the man who had saved me from a fate worse than death, and Ambrose Klein, a man whom I’d failed to protect.

And now my mother. My mother. Holly Castell. Gone.

I was pretty sure no one had been as surprised as I was at the depth of my grief. It didn’t make sense—we hadn’t been close for the past twenty years of my life—but I couldn’t seem to control the aching pain in my chest that only got worse as time dragged on.

My eyelids slid open, and for a moment I just stared, waiting to see if the tears would come or not. They hadn’t during the last two nights, but I couldn’t always predict when they would. Nor could I predict what sort of tears they would be. Would it be the kind of crying where I curled up into a ball and wheezed out my tears in the grip of panic, or would it be the one where tears slid down my face in silence?

Yet another thing I couldn’t control. Sometimes I hated the tears when they came, but they often came nonetheless when my thoughts drifted toward her.

No tears. None ever seemed to come in the cover of darkness. Maybe it was because there was no one awake to witness them, or maybe it was because on this night, just like the past two, I had a sort of grim purpose that seemed to supersede everything else, including my own grief. Either way, I found myself only with dry eyes that ached in the minimal lighting of the room.

For several long seconds I lay there, listening to the sounds of soft breathing filling the small compartment that was my room. I didn’t remember going to bed—when I hadn’t been a crying mess, I’d been left with a strangely disconnected sensation that made it difficult to remember parts of the day—but I was unsurprised by the company. My friends had been holding a weird sort of vigil by my side. And that included slumber parties, apparently.

I was grateful to them. I knew they were doing everything in their power to be here for me. I just wished I could give them what they wanted: for me to talk.

But how could I talk when I couldn’t make sense of the feelings inside of me? Why was I so torn up about a woman who had treated me like crap? Yes, we had been on a path to working out our problems. My mother had begun to look past the veil the Tower had placed over her eyes. She’d chosen to believe me.

She’d told me she’d loved me.

Then she was gone.

And I couldn’t seem to stop hurting.

And I couldn’t understand why.

It was why I kept getting up when I should be sleeping and slipping past my friends like some sort of thief in the night. But it was the only way I could be alone, and I desperately needed it.

I’d made the journey twice before, on the two previous nights, but my thoughts were still jumbled and chaotic. And I had to clear them. Today was too important for me to be anything but clearheaded.

As rational as that reason was, there was another, darker purpose behind my midnight escapades, which was currently in the living area of my apartment.

Getting to it, however, was slightly tricky.

I stared at the back of my best friend Zoe’s head, studying her body. Her shoulder and side moved up and down with slow, even breaths, telling me she was asleep. And why wouldn’t she be, at three in the morning? She wasn’t plagued by the memories of falling, or the nightmares peopled with what-ifs. She wasn’t dreaming of getting my mother to the Medics in time and saving her… only to wake up and find that she was still gone and nothing had changed.

Scipio help me, I hated how much that realization hurt, almost as much as I hated my mind for playing tricks on me in the first place.

I sat up slowly, careful not to make any noise or pull too much on the blanket Zoe and I were sharing, for fear it would wake her. At the foot of the bed, I heard a soft snort and froze, lifting my head slightly to peer along the edge of the blanket to where a small girl was sleeping, her legs propped up against the wall. Her eyes remained closed, her breathing soft and even, and I quickly seized the opportunity to wriggle my feet out from under her and carefully ease my way out of bed. Tian, the youngest member of our group, didn’t move as I did so, and I felt confident I hadn’t woken her.

My feet hit the cold floor, and I curled my toes in tight as I stared at my final obstacle: the tall, muscular girl spread out like a starfish on the floor. Maddox. Her blanket was twisted up around her, and her pillow was being used to cushion her knee, creating an obstacle course that I would have to navigate quickly and carefully, lest I wake her up.

I reached out, grabbed my robe from where I had hung it next to the bed last night, and slipped it on, sliding my hair out from under the edge of it. I held my breath for a second, and then stood up, crossing the floor with a light step. I didn’t stop until I hit the button next to the door, causing it to slide open with a pneumonic hiss that seemed unnaturally loud in my mind. I stepped through quickly, and then took a look back over my shoulder.

Nobody had moved. Three sets of lungs inhaled and exhaled softly, Maddox’s breath ending in a slight snore. They were still asleep.

I pressed the button on the outside and closed the door, feeling a hollow pang of regret as I did so. I knew what I was doing wasn’t what they wanted. They were all waiting for me to speak to them, to let them in. And I desperately wanted to, but how could I even begin to describe it, when I didn’t understand it? It was frustrating because I just wanted this to stop, to go away, but I couldn’t seem to make it. It was like there were two Lianas inside me, fighting for control. Or maybe not control, but just the right to… feel… something?

I didn’t know. Nothing made any sense.

I supposed I could just try to talk to my friends again. I knew exactly where I’d start. My mother died three days ago. She was murdered three days ago. I feel…

There were so many words to choose from. So many different flavors of grief. Too many, if you really thought about it. Regret, shame, rage, loss, absence, melancholy, depression… And not a single one quite nuanced enough to encapsulate the myriad of emotions that I couldn’t seem to control. They made me afraid of what I would say and to whom I would say it if I opened my mouth. Afraid of what would happen when I did speak. Afraid to even admit she was gone, for fear that I would start crying again. So I stayed quiet instead. It was better that way, anyway; the last three days had passed in a haze of grief, and it had helped me cope when all the questions and investigations started.

Not that those resulted in much, either. Nothing had changed since the end of the Tourney. I had been named Champion—the leader of the Department of Knights, meant to protect the Citadel—but it was being held up, pending the investigation by the council and Scipio into what had caused the situation with the sentinel that had killed my mother and her friend, Min-Ha Kim, during the final challenge. Oh, and a further investigation into why I had just happened to have a sentinel-defeating (and completely illegal) weapon on me during an official challenge.

The official story was that the sentinel had been authorized as an additional obstacle for the last challenge, but that something had, of course, gone terribly wrong. The designers had no clue what; hence the three-day-long investigation that had stalled everything.

But it was just that—a story—whereas the truth was a touch darker: someone had put a rogue AI fragment named Jang-Mi into that sentinel and ordered her to kill off the competition so that one specific candidate would win.

Speaking of which…

I padded down the hall, cinching my robe tighter around myself as I entered the shared living area. The three males in our group were sharing Maddox’s room across the hall from my own, but made sure someone was always in the front room in case our enemies tried to attack us. They’d broken the night into shifts and hadn’t bothered to change the order since.

What they hadn’t thought about was that Eric, Zoe’s boyfriend and one of my oldest friends, couldn’t stay awake past midnight—a byproduct of being raised as a Hand in the farming department. His internal clock was set to rise early, hours before the rest of the Tower, and fall asleep not too long after sundown. The others hadn’t caught on yet because he woke up an hour before everyone else did. I wasn’t sure why he hadn’t mentioned it to the others. Maybe he thought he’d only dozed off for a few minutes or something. Either way, it was a flaw, and a big one that needed to be addressed—but it didn’t stop me from taking advantage of it now.

Sure enough, it was Eric’s turn in the front room, and there he was, splayed out on the couch, using the arm as a pillow. His own arm was resting across his head, keeping the light from reaching his closed eyelids, and he had thrown one leg over the back of the couch. His breathing was deep and even, the large expanse of his chest rising and falling rhythmically.

I stood in the center of the room watching him for a second, and then lowered my gaze to the table in front of the couch, where a clear plastic box with glowing purple and green lights sat, the lights pulsating with life. An intense stab of hatred hit me as I gazed at it, but I stoically pushed it away and scooped the box up, carrying it over to the entryway.

I pulled out the spare set of clothes I had stashed in the closet next to the front door—black, and with no insignia to show what department I was from—and quickly got dressed, not bothering to mask my sounds. Doing so would only create irregular noises, something we were trained to identify when we were sleeping, as a matter of survival and self-preservation. Trying to hide what I was doing would only give Eric’s sleeping mind a greater chance of noticing and waking up to investigate, and I didn’t want that. It would defeat the purpose.

Once dressed, I slid the box of light into a bag that I had also stored in the closet and draped the bag over my shoulder, resting it against my hip. One last thing—a hat—completed the ensemble, and I quickly hit the button for the door and stepped out into the wide hall. I waited for the door to close, and then left, not even bothering to make sure my escape was clean.

My walk was robotic, my eyes fixed on the ground. It was stupid to be out alone, but I didn’t care; I had been taking this walk for the last three nights, and no one had tried anything. In truth, I kind of hoped that they would—it would give me an outlet for some of the deep-seated rage that boiled just under my skin. If they would just strike, I could finally have a target, something I could wrap my hands around and punish for everything they’d done to me, to my mother, to Ambrose, to the Tower. Maybe I’d even keep one of them alive, and make him talk, tell me who my enemy was. A name was all I wanted. The name of who was in charge.

But no one bothered me. The hat did its job in disguising my most noticeable attribute—my amber eyes—and it was early, which meant that only the grave shift was on duty. But the hat was only to prevent me from being recognized in the halls, keeping me hidden from people who might try to make me do the one thing I didn’t want to do: talk. It would do nothing to stop my enemies from tracking me. All they needed to do was have access to the sensors and the Citadel, and they could find me easily enough.

But I wasn’t exactly trying to hide from them. Just everyone else.

And though the halls were more heavily patrolled, if you knew the way around the patrols, you could find clear paths easily enough. Plus the stairs were always free. As they had been for the past three nights.

I made my way down them until I reached the floor I was looking for, and slipped back into the halls. I was stopped only once—at the exit leading to the bridge that connected to the outer shell of the Tower.

“Down here again, girl?” Lewis asked gruffly, sliding into place next to me as I walked toward the dark archway that served as the exit. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

I gave him a look from the corner of my eye, noting the dark bags under his own blue eyes, and the white scruff that was now forming on his cheeks and chin. Only his mustache seemed in order, if heavily tugged upon. I arched an eyebrow and tilted my chin up enough to meet his gaze for a second.

“You’re one to talk,” I said softly.

Talking was hard—my vocal cords seemed resistant to use—but I forced the words out anyway, barely managing a volume above a throaty rasp. Still, Lewis heard me, which wasn’t particularly hard in the relative emptiness of the reception area, and sighed heavily.

“Scipio help you, Liana, where are you going each night? Why are you even going out? You know Astrid wouldn’t like the idea of you leaving the safety of the Citadel and exposing yourself like this! You can’t keep doing this. You need to talk to someone.”

Even though his observation was perfectly reasonable, and a part of me wanted to do just that, I got frustrated instead, my mouth drawing into a thin, flat line. Frustrated and downright angry. I was still in the process of trying to figure it out, and everyone just wanted me to be able to explain every little thing. I wasn’t ready—if I were, then I could figure out why the heck this kept eating at me as intensely as it did, deal with it, and move on.

But no, I had to be ready to go on their timetable, to just open my mouth and talk about her, about the complicated mess of our relationship, and about how I felt now that she was gone.

Tears bit into my eyes as the hollow ache of simply missing her hit me like a sledgehammer, coupled with the knowledge that I would never see her again. Wetness spread to my lashes, and I could tell that if I left it, it would turn into tears that would slowly roll down my cheeks. It was so strange to have cried so much for a person I had spent most of my life resenting, but I couldn’t seem to gain any control over it.

And that only made me feel even worse.

My vision grew blurred, signaling that my tears were about to spill over, and I dragged my thoughts back from the edge. I didn’t want Lewis to see me cry—didn’t want to be vulnerable like that in front of him—and quickly lowered my head and wiped my eyes, doing my best to disguise my actions while pushing the pain back.

I managed to keep my breathing even, trying for some semblance of calm (although who knew what that felt like anymore), and repeated the argument that had gotten him to leave me alone for the past three nights. “Lewis, you and I both know that you voted for me to be the Champion. And you yourself told me that in your mind, that made me the Champion. So as your Champion, I’m asking you to get out of my way.”

We had come to a stop just under the archway, and I turned to face him directly, letting him look fully into my eyes and inviting him to see the bleak darkness within them. I knew what they looked like: hollow and dead, devoid of any emotion save a deep, vacant emptiness that made me feel like I was nothing but muscle and skin, carved out and gutted like a pumpkin.

He sucked in a deep breath, his pupils dilating slightly. “Liana…” He trailed off, his brows drawing close as pity flooded his eyes. I looked away, not needing to see it. I didn’t want his pity; I just wanted to be alone so I could think.

Lewis reached out and touched my shoulder. My eye twitched, but I didn’t jerk away from him, even though I wanted to. My mother had touched me there, too, once. My mother had squeezed me there, just as Lewis was doing now. My mother had told me she loved me, that she was proud of me.

God, what was wrong with me? She’d told me she loved me—once—and she’d never told me she was proud of me. Why was my brain inventing crap like that? Why was it trying to revise our history into one that justified all of this pain?

Why was it making me hold my breath, imagining that her voice would be the next one I heard? Imagining what it would be like to be pulled into her arms one more time, to hear her telling me that it was all a mistake, that she was safe and sound.

And why did it make me want to cry when all Lewis did was give me a gentle and gruff “Be careful” before letting me go?

Like she had let me go.

More tears came, but I angrily fought them back, moving forward instead, stalking onto the bridge, guided only by what I could make out through my blurred vision, and the grim determination that I had to fix myself.

Because I couldn’t keep going on like this.