The Gender Plan Read online

  “No, I don’t know! I—I—” Finally, he was flustered. “I imagined it going differently than this, okay?”

  “You—”

  This time, Owen didn’t let me finish the angry remark on my tongue. “I needed this all to be over!” he said. “I’m tired of everybody around me getting hurt! I’m tired of this war, I’m tired of everything falling apart and going wrong, and without Ian, I have nothing to look forward to anymore. It’s all so out of control and wrong, and it’s all Desmond’s fault. We can stop it. We can stop it right now. All we need to do is kill her.”

  “Do you really think that is going to solve everything?” I snapped, my voice getting louder. A moment later, I caught myself, my hand fluttering to my mouth, but there was still a loud banging coming from the door.

  Owen sighed. “No,” he said in the smallest breath imaginable. “But it felt so right.”

  I sucked in a deep breath, trying not to let my imagination drift into dark places... scenarios where Desmond kidnapped me… and… I shut my eyes and tried to filter all the thoughts out. Those thoughts would get me nowhere, and neither would this argument. I tried to clear my head.

  The banging stopped for a moment as Desmond’s voice spoke to us again.

  “Owen, I very much hope you are truly injured, because that will make the rest of this much easier for you. Cease this charade. My guards and I are growing impatient—bring her up here, or neither of you will like the result.”

  Owen turned to me, his blue eyes imploring, and whispered desperately, “Okay, new idea. We pretend to surrender, then…”

  My fingers on my right hand twitched in response, trying to form a fist in spite of the cast preventing it. “She shoots us both. First me, then you.”

  Owen glared at me, but he didn’t answer. I pushed on. “I’m not going up those stairs, Owen. It’s too dangerous. I’m going out of Ashabee’s tunnel while they’re distracted. If you try to stop me, I’ll… I’ll… Please don’t try to stop me.”

  I didn’t want to say what I would do, but I didn’t have to. From the barren look on Owen’s face, I knew he understood. His stupid plan was going to fail. He would have to drag me back to Desmond kicking and screaming. My teeth were clenched and my right hand’s fingers dug into the cast. If he tried to persist—if he really did want to sell me out to Desmond—this would be the hardest moment of my life.

  Up above us, the pounding on the door had resumed, and it sounded less like random pounding now and more like deliberate use of force. I winced at the sound of splintering and scraping. The more time we spent here, the less time I had to escape.

  “Come with me,” I pleaded, begging him not to fight me over this. “We’ll find some other way to kill Desmond. We’ll fix things.”

  Instead of trying to fight me, Owen did the only thing that might have been worse: he turned back toward the basement door and pulled out his gun.

  “You were right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this. Get out of here while you still can, Violet.”

  I had already taken a few steps back before the gravity of that statement fully registered. “You don’t really think you can take them all down by yourself—”

  “I have to try! You said yourself that I’ve got to fix things!” Owen wasn’t even trying to whisper anymore. A moment ago, I had been furious enough to leave him behind and escape, but now, my heart rushed into my throat and the dizzy feeling flooded back in. A thousand emotions surged through my brain at once, paralyzing me for a split second.

  It was a split second too long. There was a final crash, accompanied by excited shouts from the guards, and a big slice of pale light flooded down the stairs above us as Desmond’s voice drifted down the stairwell in the flood of debris and settling dust.

  “Time’s up, Owen,” she said, her voice arctic cold.

  Owen whipped his gun up to face the stairs, and I had time to swing my backpack around, fumbling for the gun as I took frantic steps backward, when, instead of the rush of footsteps I was expecting, I heard something clink. A small object made an arc in the air as it sailed down the stairs, hitting the landing with a metallic noise.

  My brain recognized the object but refused to believe what it was. I was frozen, trapped in a nightmare all over again—bombs going off around me while I was dying. Owen shouted something, but it was impossible to hear over the panic causing my heart to skip beats and my ears to ring.

  Owen turned to face me, his eyes wide, and my shock barely registered as he grabbed me, like he once had in The Green, throwing my stomach over his shoulder and running toward the back of the garage.

  I barely noticed the throb of pain that pulsed through my ribs, focused on the grenade as it bounced, up off the landing, down toward us. We weren’t far enough. We weren’t going to make it through this.

  And then, a shadow detached itself from the dark edges of the room, moving quickly in the dim light. I had time to register a tall, lanky frame and mop of tangled dark curls, all too familiar, racing the opposite direction that we were, toward the stairwell.

  Time seemed to slow. In a motion almost too fast to understand, the figure stooped down and grabbed the grenade, making my heart leap up my throat. Then, almost before I could think, his arm drew back and he threw the object back up the stairs. Whirling, he ran toward me and Owen. I reached out for him over Owen’s shoulder, my arm straining to touch him.

  Tim’s name was on the tip of my tongue as Owen knelt and slung me to the ground, hunching his body over mine to shield me just as the blast went off. The sound of the explosion was loud but oddly faraway, and I had time to wonder exactly how far Tim had managed to throw the grenade. I clasped my hands over my head as I felt the force rumble through the house, the lights in the basement flickering.

  A wash of heat, dust, and small debris washed over us, and for a moment I hoped that was all. Then, with a huge creaking and a groaning, the room around us went dark, and I heard the sounds of timbers splitting and cement cracking. I felt Owen jerk above me as rubble rained down around us, and then he was falling down on me, pushing us both the short rest of the way to the floor.

  3

  Violet

  For a while, it seemed like everything around us was rumbling. I couldn’t see anything, and I was pinned to the ground by Owen. There was no way to tell whether moving or staying here would be safer. All I could do was pray, Tim’s name still on my lips.

  Slowly, silence fell. I started counting after the noise of debris falling stopped, wondering whether there was still more of the house above us slowly falling apart. When I got to thirty, I began to hope it was finally over.

  I realized I’d closed my eyes during the cave-in. I opened them again. Blackness greeted me, and I blinked once, then twice. Now that I’d realized I was alive, I also began to notice the new set of aches running through my body. I struggled with the warm weight holding me down: Owen was lying on top of me, his chest pressed to mine, his hair tickling my chin. And he wasn’t moving.

  A throb of fear pulsed through me as the blackness did not lessen, the feeling unfurling slowly in the pit of my stomach as awful possibilities raced through my head. What if we were trapped underneath this building? What if Desmond was digging us out as we lay here? What if she left us for dead? What if I had gone blind? What if Owen was… I cut that one off. Had I really seen Tim? And if so, where was he now?

  A fear unlike anything I had ever known gripped me. I had survived a lot of things, but I wasn’t sure I could handle any of those possibilities, let alone all of them at once. It was too… too terrifying a thought. My vocal cords clenched, and my body started to shake. When I caught myself whimpering, I stopped and took a deep breath.

  I worked through the questions, starting with the silliest. I wasn’t blind. My eyes would have been in pain if they’d been injured. More likely, the lights in this part of the basement had broken. If there was no light, at least they hadn’t started a fire. If we were buried under
here—another wave of panic flushed my chest, and I struggled with the question. I couldn’t know for sure that we were trapped unless I checked. That went for most of the other questions too. Except—

  Tim. He was the one who had saved us from the grenade. It had definitely been him. The memory was crystal clear. He must have been in the basement the entire time, hidden in the shadows at the edges of the huge room. Why hadn’t he come to us when we’d raced down there? Why hadn’t he said anything? Why wasn’t he saying anything now?

  I focused on Tim, pushing the rest of the questions back into the farthest recesses of my brain. If I tried to find him, the rest of the things would fall into place. They had to. I hoped.

  First things first. “Owen?” I whispered.

  There was no response. But the steady feel of the man’s heart beating from inside his ribcage, and the sound of his breathing, softer than my own, reassured me he was still alive.

  I shoved awkwardly at Owen, trying to push him off me. My left arm wasn’t as strong as my right, but I continued straining with my whole body, first wriggling my hips out from under him, and then my shoulders, making for freedom, ignoring the pain. Nothing seemed that dire, though I was sure, as my chest heaved, that my bruised ribs were going to be set back in their healing process. Dirt and rubble on the floor gritted under me as I shifted, scraping loudly across the floor.

  Shoving a final time with my hips, I pulled free of Owen. He slumped, his breath coming out in a grunt, but he showed no signs of waking—well, from my limited perspective. My guess was that some of the rubble that had missed me had hit him on the head during the cave-in. Maybe his attempt to protect me had helped after all.

  My anger at Owen was still there, but it was pressed deep down beneath a layer of fear. I couldn’t process all these feelings right now. I just needed to make sure he wasn’t injured too badly. And find Tim, I thought, but one thing at a time. I needed to find a light first.

  Sitting up, I began running my hand over the floor, trying to feel for my backpack. My fingers sifted through fine dust and chunks of wood and concrete, but found nothing. Irritated, I turned and reached for Owen’s still form, running my hands over him. His backpack was still on his back, though it was covered in dust and debris.

  I fumbled with it, the darkness suffocating, until I managed to work the clasp open. Getting on my knees, trying to ignore my growing anxiety, I began pulling things out hastily, letting them shift down and clatter to the floor before feeling them one at a time. There were several items I couldn’t identify in the dark, then a long plastic tube that felt promising. I found the button on the side and clicked it back.

  Nothing. I clicked the button three or four times, harder each time, without success. I shook the stupid contraption and heard a clinking sound. Whatever had happened to it, it wasn’t working.

  Breathing out in sour disappointment, I checked the bag again, and then began searching his pockets. Each second felt like an eternity, like this nothingness would forever be my reality.

  I gasped when I felt something rectangular and metal brush against my fingertips as I dug my hand into one of Owen’s pockets. Grasping it between clumsy fingers, I was pleased to find that it had a familiar weight. I pulled it out and held it to my nose. The smell of the flammable liquid teased my nostrils, and the smile that broke on my face must have looked kind of manic. It had to be a lighter.

  Flipping open the lid, I struck the spark awkwardly, and was rewarded when the device ignited, its bright orange-and-blue flame erupting bright enough to make my vision gray for a second.

  “Tim,” I whispered, turning to the stairwell. The flame bounced and flickered, the darkness rushing in and out as I spun it around, but it remained lit, casting a circle of hazy orange light around me. The light cut over Owen’s face, and I paused as I saw the trickle of blood coming from his forehead. I spared a moment to check his eyes, peeling back the lids. His pupils responded to the light, even if he didn’t wake up. The rest of his body seemed thankfully intact.

  “Tim?” I repeated as I began to move slowly toward the stairwell. Stepping around a twisted, broken metal shelf, I picked my way around overturned boxes, screws and bolts that had spilled out onto the floor, and large bits of rocks. It looked as though some of the sides of the secret room's walls leaned in, and most of the area around the door to the stairwell had collapsed. Something overhead creaked, and I stopped, raising the lighter up and looking at jagged, deep cracks in the ceiling where the broken concrete, brick, and mortar bits seemed to barely cling to each other, radiating outward from the area of the door like fingers.

  I lowered the lighter and moved forward a few steps before stopping again, realizing that the pile of debris blocking my way toward what had once been a stairwell was bigger than I'd thought. A long counter was lying on its side, partially obstructing my path. Draped across it at an angle were several thick wooden boards, topped by broken bits of mortar and brick that looked precarious in their positioning. The boards were holding for now, creating a small gap in the rubble underneath them, and that was my only way through toward where I remembered the door was. A massive shelf had fallen on it at an angle, the objects and boxes under it propping it up slightly. It was a maze of chaos. Nothing looked sturdy at all.

  I knelt down to try to peer down the accidental tunnel, and then gave a small, involuntary cry as I saw Tim lying there. His eyes were closed, his cheek resting on the floor. Blood was running from his nose in slow drips. I scooted forward into the hole, sticking my fingers over his mouth and nose before I had time to think. My heart beat twice before I could feel his slow and steady exhale. I held my fingers there for several more seconds, reassuring myself that he was breathing. Then I sat down, close to the boards. Eyeing the distance between myself and Tim’s hand, I braced my foot against the cabinet. I pushed on it a few times to ensure that it wasn’t going to shift as I began to pull. Taking a deep breath in, I closed the lighter. I carefully placed it in my pocket, and then leaned slowly forward, stretching out my hand for where I remembered Tim’s was. I had to adjust my hand a few times, but eventually I grabbed his arm, just above the wrist, and pulled.

  Tim shifted forward easily, and I gasped as my ribs pinched together painfully with the effort I was exerting. I didn’t let go of Tim, but relaxed my effort before taking another deep breath and pulling again. Once Tim’s shoulders were clear of the boards, I slid both arms under his armpits, and then squat-walked back with him a few feet. I stumbled on pieces of brick and banged the backs of my calves on a fallen table, but I made it clear of the worst of the debris.

  My baby brother definitely wasn’t a baby anymore, I thought as I sat down for a moment and let the warm, dusty, stifling air of the basement do its best to dry the perspiration that had formed on my skin. My breathing was ragged from exertion and fighting through the pain, and my head had begun to ache. After a few moments, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the lighter, flicking it on again.

  Tim’s pants were torn in a few places, and there were cuts on his legs and thighs. He wasn’t bleeding profusely, but he was bruising horribly, the skin around the wounds already almost black. This was another side effect of Queen Rina’s experimentation—not only was Tim hypersensitive to touch, so much so that it bordered on pain, but the capillaries just under his skin would rupture more easily and in greater amounts than an ordinary person’s. He was going to hurt for the next few days.

  I stroked my fingers through my brother’s hair and then stood up. Ashabee’s secret armory had another exit on the opposite side of the room, a secret driveway for the cars. When Viggo and Owen had explored it—I found myself thinking bitterly of the days when Viggo and Owen worked together, and had to refocus—they had found that there were tunnels that branched off out of this room, one to the fields, another to a location inside the house’s walls. They were both well-disguised on the outside, so there was a good chance Desmond didn’t know about either of the hidden exits. However, openin
g it now would reveal that advantage to her and her guards, and if she was alive and looking for me, there was no way I would be able to get Owen and Tim out as well. At that moment, I wished desperately for Jay’s strength, knowing that with only my own two arms, it would never work.

  Which meant I needed, somehow, to fight them. And not only to fight them, but to beat them. My mind whirled, leaping to and discarding a dozen ways to avoid a fight, and then a dozen more ways of bringing the fight to my opponents. There wasn’t enough data, I realized. I had no idea what I was working with.

  So, I scavenged. I started with Owen’s bag, then dug up my own from a pile of rubble that had barely missed me, scraping my hands and feeling the dust build up beneath my fingernails. I found a counter against the wall much farther back that was untouched by the cave-in, and placed the bags atop it. I pulled out every item we’d packed one by one, giving myself a quick inventory, and then began searching the room. When I found my flashlight, I almost grinned again, immediately shutting the lighter off to conserve its fuel.

  My search wasn’t nearly as detailed as I would have liked, but it would have to do. From what I remembered, it had been almost six when Desmond had shown up. I was surprised to find, based on the watch on my wrist that was miraculously still working, that it had been under an hour since then—it already felt like I’d been here in this basement for hours.

  It took the better part of twenty minutes to search the room and give first aid to Tim and Owen with the half-used, mouse-gnawed first-aid kit that I’d uncovered in a drawer underneath the counters. It was nearly seven thirty by the time I finished my hurried exploration. My search had yielded more than I'd thought it would, but then again, my group had left Ashabee’s in a hurry, and they’d all said multiple times that there hadn’t been enough room in all the vehicles for everything.