The Gender Plan Read online

  Morgan didn’t respond, but suddenly her trajectory changed, and without warning she dove into the water, the line of her body as sleek as an arrow. She began to swim in long strokes to where Cody thrashed in the water, trying to keep his head above the surface. She was halfway to him when there was a deep, metallic clanking sound, and the water began to churn.

  The treatment system! They had managed to initiate the purge. But that meant…

  I stopped short as the water began to churn, and then I started to struggle. “Jay! Cody!” I shouted as Desmond grunted. I swung my cast, trying to hit her face, knowing that she wasn’t allowed to kill me, but she jerked back out of my reach and did something clever with her hand, somehow rolling me over her and down on the ground.

  As I scrambled to get to my feet, my ribs and head aching, I could already hear a warden’s pounding footsteps as Desmond shouted, “Grab her and let’s go!”

  37

  Violet

  A strong grip grabbed me under the arm before I could make my mad dash to freedom, hoisting me up. I lashed out with my legs, trying to buy time and keep us on the ground, but the woman who held me had already managed to get an arm around my throat and twist my left arm tight behind my back, locking it into place. “I’ll break it,” she warned in a low voice as she walked me up the ramp—a threat that resonated almost worse than the threat of being shot at this point. I twisted around to try to look back at the pool, but she pushed me through the door, releasing me at just the right moment to upend my sense of balance and have me stumbling across the metal floor in the bay of the cabin.

  I whipped around and gasped for air, the tears that the motion squeezed from my eyes making the world swim around me. I watched as the warden helped Desmond on board and slammed the button to close the bay door. Desmond hobbled over to me, her cast thumping against the ground. I could see the pain in her eyes, the agony and hopelessness, but she didn’t stop moving. I supposed her sense of duty ran too deep. “Don’t make me rethink the decision not to shoot you,” she muttered halfheartedly as she drew near.

  With my watering eyes, I realized she had something in her hand a second too late, and I winced as the cold metal handcuffs snapped closed around my left wrist—my good one. She turned and beckoned over the warden who had manhandled me onto the heloship. The woman obediently moved forward, and held out her arm. Within moments, we were handcuffed together.

  “Search her,” Desmond ordered gruffly as she hobbled forward. “Pilot, get us airborne now. We need to fire on the plant.”

  “Ma’am?” came the surprised voice of the other warden—the pilot—from the front, and I shifted my stance slightly as the woman next to me began to pat me down. “Our orders were to retrieve you and—”

  “I’m modifying the orders,” Desmond snapped as she stepped into the cockpit, blocking my view. “The plant has been taken over by hostiles. We need to take it out before they can—”

  “Stop you!” I shouted loudly. “Don’t do it! She’s having your people pour poison into the water! Elena’s trying to kill all these people—”

  My words stopped short with a choke as the warden patting me down straightened and, without prelude, struck me square in the throat. I doubled over, my casted right hand pawing at my throat as I struggled to draw in breath.

  I was hauled roughly back, my knees knocking against something hard enough that I lost my balance and slammed my back against the beveled edges of the wall. The warden loomed over me, her hazel eyes flat and disinterested, and I realized she’d pushed me into one of the seats. “Tilt your head up,” she ordered, gripping me hard under my chin and forcing me to obey.

  My throat immediately relaxed, and I dragged in a shuddering breath as the heloship’s engines began to roar. I was too busy gasping for breath to dodge when the guard leaned over me and stuffed the fingers of her free hand into my ear, pulling out the earbud that was part of my communicator set. She tsked, threw it to the ground, and stepped on it, the fragile bit of electronics crunching beneath her heel. Next, she ripped the tiny microphone from my jacket collar and repeated the procedure, and I groaned involuntarily.

  “Better,” she said.

  Desmond and the pilot’s voice were masked somewhat, but I could hear them both arguing over firing the missile. Apparently the pilot wanted to make it to the minimum safe distance first, but Desmond just wanted it over and done with. Maybe Jay’s refusal of her had affected her more than I’d thought possible—I’d never seen her this angry before.

  The fuselage shook slightly as we lifted into the air. I sucked in another breath under the warden’s supervision, not trusting myself to speak, and she nodded approvingly. “While you are handcuffed to me, you will be silent and calm.” She spoke as if this were any other Tuesday and we were discussing the weather. “In exchange, you may get bathroom privileges and food and water. If you are not, then you can soil yourself and go hungry. Are we clear?”

  I felt a burst of déjà vu, followed by a supreme stab of cold rage, and glared back up at her. “She just shot and left her own son for dead,” I stated flatly, but my heart felt like it was being stabbed over and over again with each beat. I tried to keep more tears from coming. I had to stay calm so I could get through this. “After she made him participate in an experimental program where they kept him in a cage and traumatized him for years. No—I am not going to be good for you, her, Elena, or anyone else. Monsters like that deserve nothing short of death.”

  The larger woman opened her mouth to say something, her expression barely changing, when the heloship jerked and swung in midair, violently enough to cause me to bounce around in the seat and the warden to reach over me and steady herself using the wall. “What the hell was that?” I heard the pilot say.

  If anybody responded, it was lost in the sound of a heavy, tectonic groan coming from the massive bay door in the back of the heloship. The warden over me leaned back, lowering her arm, and then began tugging me up using the chain connecting us.

  “Something’s on the back,” Desmond said, whipping around and glaring at me. “Do you know anything about this?”

  I couldn’t respond, just shook my head as there was another groan, and I heard the hissing sound of air rushing in as an alarm went off behind me. “I got a seal breech on the bay door,” the pilot announced as the alarm went silent with a crash.

  The groaning continued, and I slowly backed up, away from the door, this time tugging on the guard’s arm. She looked over and then took a healthy step back as she realized what I was doing, opting to move with me rather than order me out of the control area. I saw her reach down into her thigh holster, pulling out her pistol. “Give me a weapon,” I said, but she didn’t acknowledge me as we continued to move back.

  Lights flickered and then fell dark as the air noise began to intensify. “I’m going to shake it off!” the pilot said, and suddenly we were swinging from side to side. I reached out and braced myself on one of the exposed beams, sliding the tips of my fingers into the coarse webbing that was meant for cargo and holding on as best as my casted hand would let me, my body being flung back and forth against the various things restraining it. The creaking sound continued, the rush of the wind growing louder, and then suddenly sparks shot out from the sides of the wall by the cargo door.

  There was a sharper, louder groan than before, a squealing of rending metal, and I felt the heloship shudder beneath my feet. Then the wind was rushing in from the open hatch, kicking up papers and sucking them out of it. I jerked back, my spine hitting the wall, as a dark figure swung into the rear. The figure moved, and I realized it was Solomon—he must have forced the hydraulic door open with sheer strength.

  The warden next to me recoiled, and I slammed into her out of pure instinct, hitting her with my shoulder. Her gun went off, shooting over Solomon’s head, and he snarled and loped forward in a crouch. I spun away from her, trying not to get caught up in what he was about to do, but the chain held me fast, and the next thing I kne
w, I was flying in the air.

  I hit the ground with a thud, and then felt an intense pressure on my wrist. I gasped in pain as the entire joint felt like it was about to disconnect, and looked over to see the warden slipping over the edge of the torn-open bay door. Before I could fully register the implications of what would happen if she fell, I jerked out my hand and grabbed her hip, arresting her fall and then yanking her back with a surge of adrenaline unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

  Behind me, Solomon roared, and I heard gunshots going off. I focused solely on moving the warden I was attached to farther and farther away from the edge.

  Glass shattered in the cockpit, and I fell over on top of the woman as the heloship bobbed and weaved. I turned toward it, keeping a hand on the now unconscious guard to keep her from dragging me back to the edge.

  “Help me!” the pilot screamed as Solomon ripped her chair out from the brackets and tossed it aside. Her scream was cut short by the subsequent crashing noise. Solomon turned, surveying the room around him, his chest heaving.

  When his dark eyes came across me, he kept still and looked at me, a raw, hopeless kind of pain in his eyes… and a kind of understanding. I saw his mouth moving, trying to form words.

  He’d been following me, protecting me, just like he’d always done.

  I opened my mouth to warn him, but then Desmond stepped into the doorframe, her back to me, blocking most of my view. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see Solomon’s, his eyes staring at the sight before him. I had time to wonder if he’d seen Desmond since he took her berserker pill—if he still remembered her as the leader of the Liberators, the woman whose cause he’d given his humanity fighting—

  “Solomon—” I began, not sure what I was going to say.

  Then Desmond made a snarling noise in front of me, her arm jerking up, and gunshots sounded—once, twice, a third time. Solomon stepped back, his hand going to his stomach. “No!” I found myself shouting. She was going to kill him. I looked around for something, anything—

  Solomon roared angrily, the confusion on his face blossoming into pure rage, and I heard his footsteps as he moved forward. Desmond shot twice more, and then grunted as he slammed into her. I rolled up and over the guard’s body as he moved past me, carrying Desmond by the waist with two hands.

  “Solomon, wait!” I shouted, but it was too late. Without pause or thought, he pitched her into the black space created by the open bay door.

  Her scream quickly faded, practically disappearing in a second. Solomon stood there for a moment, his chest heaving, and then spat into the open space after her. He scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand before slowly turning around. He locked eyes with me and blinked. Lowering his hand, he flashed me a crooked smile, and then tumbled forward onto his chest, landing hard, a wet glisten beginning to pool under him in the moonlight slanting in from the ripped-off bay door. He’d been shot more than three times. He was going to bleed to death, and fast.

  I sat up, ignoring the aches and pains in my wrist, shoulder, and back, fumbling through the guard’s pockets, my fingers feeling too fast and too clumsy. “Please tell me Desmond gave you the key,” I whispered under my breath as I searched. My fingers brushed against something metal in the pocket of her chest, and I pulled out a ring of keys, trying not to think about how there was no longer a pilot in control of the heloship. One crisis at a time. I searched through them until I found the one that unlocked the cuff, and then snapped the open handcuff around one of the built-in handholds on the bench.

  I verified that she was still breathing, and then reached over her to grab one of a set of emergency flashlights out of its mount on the wall. Clicking it on, I scanned the floor and quickly recovered the warden’s gun—so she couldn’t have it—and then moved into the cockpit.

  The chair was lying on its side, the pilot still strapped to it. I straddled the seat to check on her. She also had a pulse, but there was blood coming out of her nose, and her arm was pinned awkwardly between the heavy metal chair and the grated floor. It was definitely broken.

  I stood up and moved over to the cockpit, wincing when I saw that most of the screens had been smashed in Solomon’s attack. I spotted the comms the pilot was wearing dangling from a cord overhead, and slipped the heavy headphones over my ears.

  “Mayday,” I started to transmit, and then ripped the comms away from my head as the sharp squeal of feedback transmitted painfully in my ear. Looking at it, I realized the microphone was cracked and barely holding together.

  I leaned over and checked out the window, surprised to see that we were now higher up than I had thought, and farther away than I had believed possible. The river was rapidly disappearing behind us, and I recognized some of the buildings below us as belonging to Matrus. It seemed so strange to see the peaceful, tidy streets, lights on, but with very little movement.

  Everything calm. Peaceful. Still. Such an unfair contrast to the other side.

  I put it out of my mind, and turned to the horizon. The navigation LED, which remained intact, read east, and I realized this direction would take us deep into The Outlands, a place no one had ever returned from. I couldn’t even wrap my head around that, so pushed it aside and focused on what I could change. Another glance through the window told me the path was clear—as far as I could tell in the low light of the moon—but it was hard to know how long that would last.

  I stared for a moment longer, and then grabbed the first-aid kit from the bracket next to the bathroom. My assessment of the situation was this: I was alive and conscious. We were headed into unknown territory. I didn’t know whether the heloship was still running because it’d been set on autopilot or an emergency homing protocol, or if it was randomly going to sputter and die at any moment. The radio was fried, the controls panels busted, the pilot unconscious, and Solomon was bleeding out from multiple gunshot wounds in the bay.

  “Basically,” I whispered as I knelt next to Solomon and opened up the kit, “we are royally screwed.”

  38

  Viggo

  The bang of a fist on metal came again, and I motioned everyone away from the door. I heard Alejandro hissing, and glanced back to see him trying to pull out the revolver he carried in a thigh holster. He jerked it out with a gasp, panting, and I saw the agony he was in.

  I leaned over and slipped Mags’ arm around my neck, sliding my arm under her knees. I lifted her up and then began backing away from the door. Harry and Gregory were two steps ahead of me.

  “Cruz, we got hostiles on the door.” The earbud was silent as I motioned for the three of us to stop halfway in. I moved over to where Alejandro was propped up in a wide and deep break in the wall that functioned as a server room. I stepped over him and carefully set Mags down as the thudding on the door intensified, growing more and more insistent.

  “We are retreating, my friend. Several more came in and climbed the walls to us. We are trying to find a way around.” Cruz’s voice held deep regret and shame.

  My stomach dropped as I absorbed his message—no backup from that end. I heard the metal groan and turned, making my way back over to where Harry and Gregory were crouched on the floor. I moved in between them and pulled the strap off my rifle, moving in front of the control panel.

  Beside us, I heard Tim humming under his breath as his fingers flew over the controls, inputting the codes to activate the purge. I glanced over at him, nestled in the alcove, confused about why he would be humming at a time like this, and then noticed that he wasn’t taking time to check the instruction sheet Thomas had made for us. What he was humming were the instructions: he must have memorized them.

  The metal groaned, and I watched it flex inward. I pulled out my final magazine and set it down in front of where I knelt. “Short, controlled bursts,” I reminded them. “When they get in, try to plug the door with their bodies.”

  Harry and Gregory nodded, shouldering their rifles. I took a deep breath to clear my mind, and then followed suit. The door contin
ued to flex open, the blue-gray paint flaking off the surface as it warped underneath. The top hinge ripped, the rod in the middle of it clattering free.

  The sound stopped suddenly, and then the door came flying right toward us. I ducked down, but Harry got caught in the shoulder. The bearded man cried out as he fell over, the door landing partially on top of him.

  I began firing at the hole even before I was fully looking at it. Sparks flew as I hit the wall, but I adjusted fire and shot the woman stepping through in the chest. Her body crumpled, but another woman was already there pushing past her falling form. Gregory got her with a single shot to the head. We continued to fire, the loud sound of the gunfire ringing in my ears, making it difficult to hear anything.

  The third woman tripped over the first woman as she fell, but the fourth woman wasn’t where I expected her to be in the doorway, so I almost missed her as she swung up and over the third woman, landing hard on her feet and then rushing forward. Gregory fired, but she sidestepped him and then kicked me in the chest.

  I staggered back a few feet, the breath knocked out of me. Doubling over in pain was a reflex, but it was one that could get me killed. So I straightened and moved, ignoring the panicked signals being emitted by my internal organs. I managed a small gasp of air as I scooped my gun off the floor. Gregory was kicking the woman off of him, having disabled her in close combat, and he turned to confront the next woman coming in.

  I had started to fire, when the sharp sound of a thud against the second door behind us had me whirling. The hand wheel shook, but the wrench held fast, locking it in place. The shake stopped, and I turned back to the fight in time to see Gregory being lifted off his feet by one of the wardens, his face purple as he gagged for breath. I leveled my gun at the woman and fired, catching her in the side. She fell, and Gregory dropped to his hands and knees, his hands around his throat.