The Gender End

by Bella Forrest

  “Fair enough,” I replied. “Good luck.”

  She inclined her head and then cast another look up at Belinda before nodding. “I gotta go perform a quick check of the engines,” she announced. Turning, she moved toward the cockpit and then paused. “Thank you for helping us out. That was… really big of you, all things considered.”

  Kathryn didn’t wait for my reply, just moved forward into the cockpit before I could even begin to formulate a response. Which was good. I wasn’t even sure how to respond, considering she had actually thanked me. I was so stunned, I was fairly confident a stiff breeze would knock me over.

  “Is that your fiancé?” Belinda asked, and I started and tore my gaze from the door that Kathryn had disappeared through. I saw her looking at Viggo, and smiled.

  “He is indeed,” I replied.

  She scrunched up her face, taking a moment to examine him, and then, to my utter surprise, gave an approving nod. “He’s handsome.” My surprise quickly evaporated as the large blonde woman met my gaze and grinned wolfishly, revealing a gap in between her two front teeth, as well as a set of cavernous dimples. “Get married before we catch you. It would be a shame to hang you both before you had a chance to proclaim your love. And it’s pretty clear that he loves you.”

  I pressed my lips into a tight line to try to contain my smile, but it was impossible. “Belinda, I had no idea you were a romantic.”

  The smile slipped from her lips, and she narrowed her eyes at me to the point that she looked like she was squinting. “Yeah, I didn’t mean for that comment to be taken as a ‘let’s be friends.’ Because we’re not. And we never will be. Best of luck, Violet. You’re going to need it.”

  She abruptly turned on her heel and began moving toward the cockpit. “Hey,” I called after her, and she paused, turning her ear toward me. I waited for her to turn, but after a second it was clear that she wasn’t going to. “I really do hope your sister is okay. If she is, and we have her, I’ll see about getting her back to you. Francis, right? Francis Carver?”

  Belinda turned, and gave me a scowl. “How very charitable of you,” she sneered. “How very kind. Let my sister go because we were forced to rely on each other to survive, but what about the others your people might have caught? Gonna just keep them as prisoners?”

  I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t want to keep anyone prisoner,” I replied honestly.

  “Right. Which was why you kept Desmond a prisoner.” I opened my mouth to protest, because that was different, and she held up a hand, forestalling me. “Save it. We were in a tough spot. We helped each other. That’s it.”

  With that, she propelled herself forward into the cockpit, disappearing within. I hesitated, and then turned back to where Viggo was waiting for me at the bottom of the ramp, moving to him quickly.

  “How’d it go?” he asked, and I shook my head.

  “They’re finding their own way home. We should go. I doubt very much the people inside the tower would be pleased with us staying any longer.”

  He frowned but nodded, reaching out to take my hand. “Let’s get you back home then,” he said with a smile, wrapping a strong arm around my shoulder. I leaned into his side, suddenly feeling beyond drained, and together we walked over toward the other heloship probably twenty feet away. We might be out of this stew of problems, and it was beyond wonderful to be with Viggo again, but this just meant that I had to find the strength to continue back into the mass of problems waiting for me at home.

  As we drew near, a familiar young woman strode down the ramp, a confident swagger in her gait. As the mop of red curls with close-shaved sides appeared, I felt a smile cross my lips.

  “Hey, Amber. I heard that you’ve recently upgraded to pirate status.”

  Amber placed her hands on her hips and posed dramatically, like a heroine out of one of the graphic novels that were popular in Matrus, and I chuckled as I threw my arms around her neck, pulling her in for a quick hug.

  “I’m so happy you’re okay,” I told her, and her arms came around my shoulders, hugging me tightly back.

  “Same here with you, Violet. Don’t get me wrong—I love Ms. Dale, but she’s old, and Morgan has never been particularly fun. Of course, now I understand. She’s a Matrian princess, and it seems those girls are wound up tight.”

  I snorted. I couldn’t help myself, but then I felt a pang of regret at my own humor. Morgan was a princess. Clearly she’d gone rogue or was against Elena, but for what reason? She’d killed her own twin, which meant she could be ruthless, and she was enhanced—likely with the same enhancement Tim had, given the skills she’d displayed last night. Still… I liked her, and she’d risked herself and her cover to help me track down Desmond at the water treatment plant, so whatever her reasons, I was willing to hear her out.

  “Hey! Are we leaving yet? This place is really starting to creep me out.”

  I broke away from Amber in time to see her roll her eyes and then suck in a deep breath as Logan Vox sauntered down the ramp. He was taller than I had realized. Amber’s head barely came up to his collarbone. And he was strikingly handsome. Not as handsome as Viggo, of course, but I was exceptionally, unapologetically biased, and maybe some people might have thought the comparison apt. Black hair, short at the back and fashionably long in front, was smoothed over to one side of the pilot’s face, and his bright blue eyes seemed to twinkle, as if he were in on some secret joke he wasn’t quite sharing with anyone. By the looks of him, he kept himself in good working shape. He looked like a swimmer, lean and athletic, but from how he moved, I could already see that he could be lethal if necessary.

  Amber turned toward him, an exaggeratedly slow smile spreading across her face until it became the baring of teeth. “Logan, this is Violet, a very dear friend of mine, whom we are out here to rescue. Do you think you can just… retract the stick in your butt for one minute while I say hello?”

  Her voice was saccharine-sweet but also filled with disdain—an unusual combination of the two that I’d never heard from Amber before—yet for some reason all it did was make Logan smile slowly and wink at her.

  “Nope. I’m way too jealous.”

  She sucked in a breath, opened her mouth as if to say something, and then gave an irritated tsk and stalked past him, reaching out and shoving him to one side as she went past.

  “I’ll be in the cockpit,” she declared imperiously as he stumbled to one side, chuckling and rubbing his shoulder. He looked around, saw me looking at him, and shrugged before following her into the cockpit.

  I looked back at Viggo, who was slowly climbing up the ramp behind me and shaking his head, already answering my unspoken question. “I’ll tell you about it later. They’ve been like that the entire trip. I had to put up with that for four hours. Four. So you better love me so hard right now.”

  I laughed, reaching down and grabbing a fistful of his vest to pull him toward me up the final few feet of the ramp. “I really, really do,” I breathed, tilting my head up to him.

  “I’m closing the ramp!” Amber shouted loudly, and then Viggo’s mouth was on my own, his tongue slipping past my parted lips in a burst of passion so heady I felt my innards become as gooey as the stuff in my new high-tech cast. The kiss ended with him drawing my lower lip in between his teeth, sending delicious shudders through my body, right down to my fingers and toes.

  When we broke apart, I felt my eyes slowly open and a wide—probably dopey—grin break out on my face. “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you too,” he replied. “Now let’s go grab a seat. Vox was Amber’s instructor at one point, and they, uh, tend to disagree on who should be in command. It got a bit rocky before, and we should really… get into a seat. With a seatbelt. Or twelve.”

  I chuckled, probably too loudly. Maybe I was laughing at everything, even things that shouldn’t be funny, but it was uncontrollable: Viggo was here, we weren’t going to die… and now we knew there were people. Other people outside of Matrus and Patru
s. And they were thriving. We weren’t the only humans left in the world after all. It was exciting, surreal. I was so tired I was probably delirious.

  The deck under my feet shuddered as the high-pitched noise of the engines grew, and I moved toward the cockpit, taking a quick moment to check that Solomon was okay and strapped down for takeoff. He was, and some sort of… pink goo had been applied over the multitude of bullet holes in his gut, presumably by CS Sage. Yet his vitals were strong, and he remained unconscious.

  I entered the cockpit in time to see the tower’s platform slowly growing smaller. The other heloship was pulling away, and I watched as they headed back down the river—back the way we had come.

  “Are we going to follow them along the river to Matrus?” I asked. “Or fly via The Green?”

  “The Green,” Amber replied, flipping some switches in rapid succession on the control panel, her eyes focused solely on the gauges. “It’s better. Elena is going to be pissed after what we did to her airfield, so I wouldn’t put it past her to have put any remaining heloships in the air, flying over Matrian airspace, either looking for us or trying to keep away from any more attacks.”

  “Unless we destroyed their entire fleet,” Logan challenged. “And it’s perfectly safe.”

  “Don’t be dense,” Amber muttered, and the man shot her a bemused look. I drew close to the window as the platform dropped away and the river that ran below came into view, the blue of it bright and vibrant against the cracked yellow earth surrounding it.

  “Amber, can you turn the ship around for a second?” I asked. “Did you guys notice this?”

  “The river?” asked Viggo, and I nodded, my eyes watching the landscape rotate steadily as Amber slowly turned us back toward the tower, angling the nose down slightly. I reached up to brace my right hand on the frame, enjoying the lack of clunky plaster that had made that move irritatingly ineffective in the other heloship, less than an hour ago, and then watched.

  As the nose dipped lower, more of the tower came into view, as did more of the platforms—of which there appeared to be four below the one we’d landed on. The area between the tower and the river had been dug out, like the tower was sitting on an additional river bed, and from the side came a swirling, metallic blue liquid that dumped into the churning river waters. I had never seen a color like that. The way it moved and flowed made it seem thick.

  “They’re poisoning it,” I said, confirming what I had already guessed to be true.

  “Yeah, but why?” asked Amber, her neck craning to see what we were looking at. “To what end?”

  “It could be industrial byproduct,” Viggo suggested. “Running anything out here that could let humans survive would probably create a lot of waste. It would have to go somewhere, but that’s… a messed up choice, poisoning the river.”

  “Maybe they just assumed it didn’t matter because they thought they were the only survivors,” Logan speculated. “That’s what we did, after all.”

  “We don’t pollute anything this badly,” Amber pointed out, a snide touch to her tone. “We have to tell them, right? They’re destroying the river. Making it harder for us to live and survive.”

  I hesitated, genuinely torn. On the one hand, she was absolutely right: assuming they weren’t doing it on purpose, they did need to know that dumping their waste in the river was creating a threat to us. On the other hand, telling them that would key them in to where our societies were located, and that could mean them coming to us. After all, Devon had eyed the heloship with a hunger that made the hair on my neck stand up. And CS Sage had basically threatened to blow us out of the sky if we ever came back. It was not an easy call.

  I looked at Viggo, who seemed deep in thought, considering the problem. “I think we had better…” He trailed off, his eyes going to the tower. “Amber, what is that?”

  “Um, hold on a second,” she said. I heard her clicking a few buttons, but I was squinting, trying to see what Viggo had spotted. “I got an enhanced image on the holotable, Viggo.”

  I turned, the holotable glowing brightly as it activated. Then the image of the tower flickered into view, the 3D picture showing a view from much closer than we actually were. I immediately spotted what Viggo had seen, and frowned. One of the platforms seemed to ripple, as if something had just impacted, and a shockwave was radiating outward.

  My frown deepened as I moved over to the table. Nothing had hit the tower. There was no impact, no missile, and nobody to fire such a projectile but us. Instead it seemed the panels of glass were lifting up off of the wing jutting from the side of the tower. There were rods attached to the underside of each one, and the dark brown glass shone a bright white as they caught the rays of the sun.

  “What is that?” I breathed, repeating Viggo’s question. The panels were rearranging into a bowl shape, as the rods behind them reoriented the newly configured… whatever it was to point toward the west.

  I felt my stomach drop as, suddenly, the array flashed white under the bright yellow sunlight, catching the rays of the sun so intently the glass bowl glowed with a brilliance that rivaled the river and the sun combined. I wanted to squint my eyes, even looking at a camera feed patched in from the hull of the ship.

  “Where’s Belinda’s ship?” I asked, and Viggo moved over to where an inset keyboard was on the opposite side of the table and clicked a few buttons. The image zoomed up as the outer camera panned, and I could see the other heloship making its way—slowly but steadily—following the glowing blue part of the river back to Matrus. Studying it, I realized the bowl thing was pointed almost directly at them, and I felt the pit of my stomach drop out completely.

  “You have to warn them,” I shouted at Amber. “Broadcast all frequencies and tell them—”

  The glowing seemed to have reached some sort of critical mass, because even as I spoke, a beam of spectacular white light burst forth from the bowl, streaking toward Belinda and Kathryn’s ship.

  For a second, I hoped that whatever the light was, it would just be some sort of high-technology gadget that didn’t cause any harm. A scanning beam. A warning signal.

  The next moment, my fragile hope was shattered. I gaped as the beam of light cut through Belinda and Kathryn’s ship, slicing it cleanly in half, the edges of where the beam of light had touched bright red even from this distance and clearly melting into slag. The two halves of the ship plummeted downward, each tumbling on an oblong axis toward the broken earth below.

  “No, no, no,” I gasped, taking a few hesitant steps toward the window, unable to comprehend that they were just… gone. It wasn’t fair. We had worked together to save ourselves, and in under a second, our hard-won victory had been ripped away by the people in the tower.

  “It’s moving toward us,” said Viggo, and I turned. Sure enough, the dish was twisting toward us, much faster than it had zeroed in on Belinda and Kathryn, and I felt a stab of anger.

  “Amber! Dive!” I shouted, just as the panels on the array began to glow white.

  OceanofPDF.com

  13

  OceanofPDF.com

  VIGGO

  Amber was rushing to move the heloship almost before Violet shouted. She threw the control beam forward, her arms extending straight out in front of her, her teeth gritted. The deck dipped, and the view through the bubble was suddenly filled with earth and water rushing up to meet us at a phenomenal rate. I felt myself go weightless, and a high-pitched noise filled the air.

  I caught sight of the holotable in time to see the white streak of light filling the screen—then the table went dead, and a juddering, jolting shudder ran through the ship. Something splattered onto the deck, and a klaxon alarm began to sound. Looking up, I could see that a wide strip of the roof grating overhead had turned red hot, and bits of molten metal were dripping down to the deck below, landing with sizzling plops.

  Heat blossomed inside the cockpit, and sweat formed instantly across my brow. I pulled Violet away from the dripping wound in the ship, trying t
o get into a more secure position in the heloship.

  “Arm the missiles!” Logan was shouting at Amber. “Shoot the bastards back, dammit!”

  “Shoot at a giant beam of light? Are you crazy?”

  “Not at the light beam, at the… the weapon!”

  Amber’s voice sounded dangerously close to hysteria. “If you have time to aim right now then do it yourself!”

  Logan lunged at the controls with a grunt, but he stumbled and slid across the cockpit as Amber began to yank back on the helm, shifting us left at an uncomfortable angle. “And get that damn alarm shut off!” she ordered, the muscles in her arms straining as she angled us up and away.

  I managed to toss Violet onto one of the built-in seats before the rise of gravity again began to pull me back. My foot slipped out from under me as the deck grew steeper and steeper, and I would’ve fallen flat on my face had Violet not reached out to grab a fistful of my shirt.

  “HANG ON,” she yelled, and I wrapped my hand around her forearm.

  She looped her other arm through and around the unbuckled harness behind her, gripping the one from the seat next to her, and then she was holding my weight, as I was suddenly dangling from her arm. Violet gave a pained grunt, and her legs came around my chest, hooking behind my back, under my armpits, her hold the only thing keeping me from plummeting into the bulkhead below.

  I looked out past her, toward the bubble, and saw the beam of light streaking across it, right in our path. Vox shouted something—it was hard to hear amid the chaos—Amber screamed in reply, and then we were dropping again. Violet and I slammed to the floor in a tangle of limbs as the angle on the deck slid toward ninety once again, but this time we both managed to make it to the seats and strap ourselves in.

  “To hell with this,” Amber roared, and she pushed one control forward, holding the other one back. We began to spin in the air, the sky, earth, and water pin-wheeling through the bubble at dizzying rates as we dropped lower down, the earth growing larger. Just when I thought we were about to hit, Amber gave an angry shout and hauled back on both of the controls, forcing the nose back up, away from the impending earth.