Before the Tower, humanity took chances.

They plunged into the unknown with both feet, some bearing the brunt of failure, while others snagged the fruit of success. Both paths were taught so that others could learn, grow, and build. They had the courage to explore, the intelligence to question, the spark to create, and the daring to risk it all for the simple opportunity to try. Their bravery paved the way for those behind them, inspiring the following generations to build upon what they’d created, expand even farther out, so that the unknown could become known.

Once, humanity had been filled with pioneers. Now, humanity seemed content to put its head down and survive.

But not me. Not anymore. Not after I had discovered the truth: the AI designed to keep the Tower safe, Scipio, was actually being manipulated by a group of people called legacies. They had been trying to dismantle and control him since the beginning of the Tower. And right now, I was in the quarters of one of their leaders—possibly even the leader of their organization—in the process of recovering Jasper and Rose, two AI fragments that had once been part of Scipio but had been stolen by the legacies as part of their plan to control him.

We had recovered Rose from a sentinel the legacies had stolen and used to attack innocent people, and had found the program damaged as a result of the torture the legacies had put her through. But Leo, the AI modeled after Lionel Scipio and currently inhabiting the body of my boyfriend, Grey, had managed to stabilize her, and we had sent her after Jasper, who was trapped in the head of the IT Department’s personal terminal, panicked by the thought that she was torturing him like she had Rose.

But something had gone wrong, and we’d ended up having to physically break into her private quarters in order to recover both programs. We couldn’t afford to leave them in our enemy’s hands—not just because they were sentient beings being tortured, but also because if we wanted to fix the damage the legacies had done to Scipio, we would need them. They were a part of his code, and without them, he was degrading.

So I had lied to the council, telling them that my quarters had suffered a computer glitch that reset my entire apartment. I’d used it to lure Sadie Monroe, the head of IT—and possible leader of a legacy family—there. Then my friends and I attacked her, stole her net (and the ID credentials attached to it) to access her room, and broke in. As far as capital offenses went, it was pretty bad. If we were caught by the council, I’d be kicked off, and every last one of us would be put into the expulsion chambers.

But that was nothing compared to what would happen if the legacies found out what we were doing, which was why we had gone to extreme lengths to cover our trail.

The first step was using a medication called Spero to erase Sadie’s memory of the attack, and then a mild sedative to adjust her perception of the amount of time she spent in the apartment. But since we had a limited number of pills, and she was the head of her own department, we couldn’t keep her for too long, or people would notice. Which meant moving fast.

Then, there was the fun bonus hurdle that everything in a councilor’s quarters was recorded, and we didn’t have time to get rid of the recordings of our comings and goings. Instead, we planned to replicate the same tactic we had used to lure Sadie from her department, and reset her quarters. It would erase all of the data on her terminal, and hopefully she would believe it was another glitch related to the one in my quarters. If we were successful in stealing Jasper, we hoped that she would further believe that he’d been somehow erased in the process.

But we had to be careful. Because if the legacies found out that we stole Jasper, they would realize that we knew about the fragment AIs. And that we had one of them. In which case they would come after us with everything they had.

And I couldn’t defend us all from an enemy whose face I didn’t even know.

Which was what made this mission all the more integral. Sadie was clearly one of them—the legacy net in the back of her neck had proved that—and we were banking on her files containing information about who she was working with. That, along with recovering Jasper and Rose, was of paramount importance to me, because with that, I could finally begin to root out the corruption of the legacies.

And even though we had slapped together an insane plan and leapt through all of these impossible hoops, things had been going great. I had been stealing files from Sadie’s desk while Leo had been working on Jasper and Rose. For some reason, Jasper was the one who had attacked Rose when she entered his system—and was still attacking her—and given our limited timeframe, Leo had started downloading both of them onto some hard drives, rather than trying to separate them immediately. He’d also been grabbing all of Sadie’s computer files. Everything had been just freaking perfect.

Until it had stopped being so.

I exchanged a nervous look with Leo and then looked back to the shut bedroom door: a thin and weak barrier against anyone who wanted in. “How did he know we were here?” I asked, my voice barely a level above a breath. It had to be; my throat already felt tight, the memory of drowning in blood causing a visceral reaction in me.

The sensation was understandable, though. Somewhere on the other side of the door, walking in a strong and confident manner down the curved hall of Sadie’s apartment, was the man who had cut my throat only yesterday, and five of his friends. He and I had crossed paths several times, and each time, he had only grown more dangerous. The last time I’d seen him, I’d been looking into his eyes as he stabbed the knife into my carotid artery.

He was a legacy who had tried to kill me—and now he was here. It only confirmed in my mind that he and Sadie were working together, but in what way? Was he in charge? Was it her? Or someone else?

And why was he here? Did he happen to notice Sadie’s net transmission in the brief moment when I had removed the neural blocker to gain access to her apartment? I knew the legacies had a way of monitoring the system, so it wasn’t that far outside of our belief that they could have. But it had only been active for a few seconds, while we gained access to the room. Did he actually know we were there, or was he there for something else? Fear crept along my skin, and my stomach quivered with uncertainty.

“I don’t know,” Leo replied in answer to my question, his voice also as soft as possible. “But Jasper and Rose are still downloading,” he said, tightening his grip on his gun. “Even if they aren’t here for us, they are going to notice that something is off as soon as they go in her office. We left the desk a mess.”

He was right. Even if they weren’t here for us, they’d soon notice the general state of disarray I’d left the office in when I was searching for anything we could use against Sadie. As soon as they did, they’d investigate, and it wouldn’t take them long to find us. I needed more information on where they were before I could figure out what to do next. Focusing on the door, I considered it for a moment. I couldn’t hear anything going on out there, and now that we weren’t in the office, we had no way of monitoring their location. Running had lost us that advantage, and I felt stupid for having done it in the first place, but it was too late to take that back now. I had to deal with the situation in front of me.

That meant knowing if they were here for us, or if this was an unfortunate coincidence. If it was the latter, then we had the element of surprise and could capitalize on it. If it was the former, then it made things worlds more complicated. They’d be ready with weapons, prepared for a fight, and had us outnumbered two to one. We had guns—instruments of destruction that no one else in the Tower had access to—and Leo could more than hold his own in a fight, but they still had more people than we did, and that could make all the difference.

And if they were prepared for us—or any intruder, really—then that might mean they were being monitored. If any one of them managed to send out a message to Sadie or anyone else about what we were doing or who we were, then all of our planning would result in nothing, and we would be caught and executed. Either by the legacies or by the council.

I couldn’t let that happen. So if they were here for us, or even if they saw us, we would have to stop them immediately. Not a single one could escape, or we risked the legacies learning what we had done, and who we had stolen.

But I didn’t mind that conclusion, because I didn’t want them to escape. Especially not Baldy, their leader. He had information we needed, like who was running everything, who was helping them, and what they were planning to do. Those were answers I craved more than anything, as they would lead to the person responsible for the deaths of too many people, including my mother. It would stop the attack on Scipio and give us time to recover the remaining fragments so we could repair him. It would finally allow us to take the Tower in the direction that the founder, Lionel Scipio, had intended.

“Can you crack the door open just a little bit?” I whispered to Leo, deciding I needed to hear what they were doing. Before I could even come up with a plan, I had to know why they were here, and where they were.

Leo nodded and moved over to the door, and I followed, holding open the bag I had so he could get at the tools inside. He turned and started working, and it took him a few agonizing seconds to pry the cover from the door control that activated the motor. I watched impatiently as he disconnected a few wires from some of the glowing crystals and then dragged the tips of them together, experimenting. On combination number three, something sparked, and the door lifted up a few inches from the floor.

A male voice that I recognized as Baldy’s wafted through, but it was too muddled to discern what he was saying. I hesitated, and then slid down onto the ground. I hated making myself even the slightest bit visible, in case they were just around the bend, but I had to know what was going on. I glanced under the door first, to make sure there were no shoes waiting on the other side or in the vicinity, and then pressed my ear to the gap. Holding my breath to keep from making any noise, I strained to hear what he was saying. Even my heartbeat seemed too loud in my ears, but I closed my eyes and focused.

“—down, I’m here,” he said, his voice growing louder in my ears. “We got slowed at a checkpoint because Sadie couldn’t make it, but it’s fine. All we have to do is grab it, and we’ll be on our way. It’s a little weird though. Alara isn’t responding to me.”

He paused, and I waited for someone to respond while puzzling over what he was talking about. Who was Alara? Why would he be expecting her to respond?

Then I realized that Alara was probably the name of Sadie’s virtual assistant. Rose had knocked it out when we sent her in after Jasper, which was the only thing that had made this mission possible. If Sadie’s assistant had been online, it would’ve killed us before we even got past the first room, with or without Sadie’s net.

But back to the important thing: it was clear that Baldy was transmitting to someone over the net, and from his words, it sounded like he was here by coincidence. And to pick something up. If we were lucky, that something would be in one of the other rooms before the office, and they would get it and go without questioning things too much.

If we weren’t lucky, there was still a chance. If we could make it to the office before they did, grab the hard drives with our AI friends, and start the reset process, then they would be caught in the chaos of the automated systems removing the furniture and bringing the walls down. Having it happen when they were there would certainly lend credence to the idea that it was a glitch. But that was even riskier, because we were planning to leave using an escape hatch, and if we didn’t make it in time, or got injured by the furniture as it rushed by overhead, there was a chance Baldy and the others would see us and know what was happening.

I’d do it—and give up my chance at taking them out—but only if we could do it safely.

I kept listening, and heard: “No, I’m not sure what’s going on. That bitch Champion registered some sort of complaint that Sadie had to attend to.” There was a pause, and I found myself wondering who was at the other end. Accomplice, or someone in charge? “No, I don’t know the details. She authorized me to come up here and get it anyway, so calm down. It’s just a small deviation, not a complete disaster. I’ll get it down to you in a few minutes.”

Oh, this was good—very good. As long as whatever they had to get was in another room and not the office, we would be fine. We could just wait here for them to get what they came for and leave, and then be on our way.

As soon as I thought it, though, I realized I was about thirty-two shades of wrong. Of course they were going into Sadie’s office—the only thing they’d be here for was something computer-related, as she was the head of the IT Department, and the office was the only place where electronics and files were kept. If they noticed the mess on the desk or the three hard drives that had been slaved together and attached to the terminal, they would start to suspect something was wrong and investigate.

Once again, I found myself considering making a run for the office and trying to initiate the reset before they got there. Their voices sounded far enough away, and if Leo and I could just get there, get Jasper and Rose and the stuff we had planned to steal, then start the process…

But if we were spotted while he was still on a net call with someone… If he managed to get word out that the Champion of the Knights was in the head of IT’s quarters illegally… It was so very risky, and I hovered on the edge of the decision. If he ended the call soon, then it might be worth a try.

My hand tightened on my gun, the urge to tell Leo to open the door and get ready to move nearly overpowering as their footsteps thundered closer—still heading toward us, and toward the office, and making me reconsider the plan again. If we made a run for the office, and they caught us in the halls before we could make it there, chances were they could knock us off our feet using a burst of pressurized air from their pulse shields. If that were to happen, we’d lose control over the situation very quickly. Going into the halls to try to reach the office before them was too desperate and too risky. I had to think of something else. Maybe coming up from behind them and shooting them in the back. Maybe—

I opened my eyes as I realized that Baldy hadn’t said anything for a long time. He must’ve ended his conversation with whoever was on the net. On the one hand, that was good for us; now that he wasn’t transmitting, we could do something about him. On the other, it meant I had missed my opportunity to try to make it to the office before them.

“So how mad was he when you told him?” asked a feminine voice. I recognized it, too—as the one Baldy had been talking to right before he’d cut my throat. My fingers immediately itched to touch the spot, to remind myself that my neck was whole and unbroken, but I kept them firmly around the gun, straining to hear.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Claire,” Baldy replied tightly. But then, a heartbeat later, he exploded into, “That stupid order to keep that intrusive little bitch alive is a mistake, and we all know it.”

Claire made a consoling noise. “I know, I know,” she said soothingly. “She chased us from our home, and she’s been getting into stuff left and right. But he wants her alive for some reason, and you have to respect that.”

He went quiet, which only made the sound of stomping feet grow louder. I fought against the fear the noise created, focusing instead on their words. They were clearly talking about me, as I was the one who had accidently stumbled into their home when we were trying to recover some items we needed from the Attic. That was when he had cut my throat, as a cover for their escape. But the fact that they really didn’t want me dead left me feeling two things.

The first being abject fear. They might have orders to keep me alive, but they clearly didn’t like it. If they found us here and got the upper hand, who knew if they would let me live a second time. They might not, if they realized what I was here for—and how much I knew.

The second thing I noticed was that Baldy had mentioned a “he.” That meant there was a leader over Baldy… but was he over Sadie? Or was Sadie over him? Or were they partners?

I waited for them to say more about it, but to my dismay, the next thing I heard was Claire’s voice saying, “What the hell… Why is Sadie’s desk a mess?”