Placing the handheld on the table, he dropped into the closest chair—right next to Morgan—and stifled a yawn before writing a few things down in his notebook. The room was exceptionally quiet, and it was easy to see why. Everyone was exhausted and still coming down from the excitement from yesterday and today, but there was very little end in sight. There was no relief, no one to take over for us while we slept. And so we trudged on, trying to put out fires we couldn’t even see yet.
“Well, we’re all here,” announced a gruff voice from behind us, and I turned to see Andrew “Drew” Kattatopolous, one of the three rebel faction leaders, walking toward the table with Logan by his side. Between them was Mags, still wearing her sling, and she shot me a smile as she plopped into the chair at the far end, opposite Henrik. Owen brought up the rear, and I was surprised to see him there for just a moment—we hadn’t had time to discuss or change his station in our command chain before the battle, but it hardly seemed to matter. I was happy to see him; noticing my gaze, he nodded toward Henrik, as though to explain his presence, before sitting down on Morgan’s other side. She jerked slightly in surprise, and then seemed to sink farther into her chair, fidgeting with her hands. I didn’t even think Owen noticed. He was staring nervously at Violet and me, as if waiting for some sort of punishment. I gave him what I hoped was a friendly smile, but he looked down and away quickly.
Henrik looked up from some papers he had started rummaging through while I was talking with Mark and gave us all a tired smile. He looked pale, and I knew for a fact the man was running on zero sleep, but he exuded control as he leaned forward.
“I know it’s been a long forty-eight hours, everyone, but we have some things we need to discuss before we can get to bed.”
“Like?” asked Drew.
“Like the command structure, the vote, and our next move,” said Henrik, tapping the papers together. “And... a report from The Outlands, apparently.” He gave Violet a pointed look, and she nodded gravely.
“I know it’s not necessarily about what is happening here,” she said, looking around the table, “but you guys will really want to hear this one.”
Violet and I had decided that we had to tell the whole group about the tower at once—there was no stopping the questions, and the revelations we’d found out there were world-changing. Besides, we didn’t want to have to explain this twenty times within the next week; better to get it over with all at once. I guessed that Ms. Dale had relayed our decision to tell everybody about it to Henrik while we were showering.
Violet’s statement was met with raised eyebrows from Drew, obvious interest from Mags, and a curious look from Ms. Dale, who had already seen some of the alien technology.
Henrik nodded. “I have no doubt we will,” he said. “Let’s just get our command structure straightened out, and then we’ll go straight to your report.”
“That’s easy—” Mags spoke up immediately, looking right at Henrik. “Our new commander should obviously be you.”
Drew gave her a surprised look, clearly having expected Mags to try to take command herself, and her grin grew. “I lead only when I have to, Drew. When there’s someone more capable, I step aside. Henrik knows his stuff—it was his and his team’s planning that made it possible for us to succeed. Even you have to give him credit for that.”
Drew looked over at Logan, who gave a little shrug. “I have no problem with it,” Logan announced. “I asked around, and Henrik here used to be a warden back in the day—one with a stellar record.”
Frowning, Drew laced his fingers across his chest and tilted his head up to think about it. After several heartbeats, he nodded, and I felt a burst of relief, followed by the thought of We should have more meetings when everyone’s tired. It seems to move everything along rather quickly.
“Well, glad that’s over,” grinned Henrik, who seemed to have no objections to his new position—and no ego, either. “And I’m grateful for your trust in this. I promise I’ll do my best to listen to what you all have to say, but we’re all leaders here in one way or another, so I don’t expect you to make it easy for me to get my way.” He winked comically, and it seemed to defuse some of the strain that had settled into the room. “Violet, I’ll hand it off to you now.”
Violet took a breath, and I could see her mustering her thoughts, trying to decide what to tell everyone first. Logan and Amber, who’d seen the tower firsthand, looked out at the others with expressions of smug anticipation, which would have been more amusing if I hadn’t watched them bicker for an entire heloship trip.
Finally, when the quiet was getting a little jarring, Violet spoke, and I could see she was going for broke. “Guys,” she said, “we’re not alone out here. There are people living in The Outlands.”
The reactions across the table were a mix of disbelief, shock, wonder and curiosity—I could see the idea breaking across people’s faces in waves, as Mags’s mouth dropped open, Morgan’s eyes widened comically, Drew fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat, Owen’s hand opened and closed a few times… Henrik stroked his beard, his eyes narrowing in intensity.
“Don’t just leave us hanging like that,” Ms. Dale finally said, breaking the silence. “Tell the rest, Violet!”
Then the whole story had to come out—and even summarized, it was impressive. The flight with Solomon, Desmond’s death, the tense situation with two Matrian wardens who wanted to take her back to Matrus and execute her—it sounded like something out of an action comic, even to me. At Violet’s description of the tower, the people and their strange greetings—and then, their horribly powerful light beam that weaponized the sun—people’s faces got even more intense. We’d all been tired; but this put new energy in the room, if only for a moment.
“They healed Solomon’s bullet wounds?” Morgan said. “Do you think that they… Do you think they fixed his brain, too?”
Violet stretched out her own healed right hand as if considering. “I don’t want to dare to hope that,” she said. “But if they could heal my arm in 24 hours…”
“What I’d do to get my hands on a weapon like that,” Drew said wistfully. “Do you think they are really not open to trade? We could learn so much from another society. I can’t believe they’d just let you guys go, frankly.”
“Sounds like bad news to me,” Ms. Dale said, shaking her head. “We’ve already seen what one mad queen can do to a group of people. But forcing them to stay in their tower and never even acknowledging that you were there? That is a dangerous amount of control, and it sounds like a ticking time bomb if you ask me. People can’t stay in these kinds of situations forever. They start to want answers. We should know.”
Violet nodded, her eyes solemn.
“I regret,” Henrik said finally, “to say that we have to move on to the things that are actually going to affect our situation here. While this is all fascinating… fascinating… it’s just too big for us to even deal with right now, I’m afraid. So here are our next items on the agenda: one, coordinating a vote to see if the people in Patrus wish to continue letting King Maxen rule over us, and two, the ongoing threat that is Queen Elena.”
Slowly, we all settled back into having to deal with the world we faced just outside our doors. “We can’t deal with Elena until we have a leader,” grumbled Drew. “We need to set up a provisional government and alert the people about it.”
“Which is why I think we should table this discussion, for now,” announced Ms. Dale, leaning forward. “What you’re talking about is going to take a lot of time, and that’s something we don’t have right now. Elena is coming, and you can bet that she’ll be using enhanced humans to try to finish the job.”
“She’s going to have a pretty easy time of it,” announced Mags tiredly. “We haven’t completed a full census yet, but a rough estimate based on the numbers we have so far is that there’s only about two thousand people left in Patrus—and that was before the groups left to go back to the farms around the city. Not to mention, most of the
m are women, which means they’ve had no education in self-defense or fighting.”
“Just another way the Patrian… lifestyle has made this fight exceptionally difficult,” remarked Amber.
“I’m surprised Elena’s forces aren’t here already,” commented Logan. “From what you all have been saying about her, it seems like she would be pressing the advantage. We’re not much of a threat at the moment, sad to say, although the fully stocked and loaded heloships will certainly help to act as a deterrent.”
“Well, I have a theory on that,” announced Thomas. “And that theory is—in the simplest terms—that by hitting that airfield, we may have set her plans back some, which buys us time to think of a solution.”
“We might just have that solution,” Henrik said. “With young Miss Morgan here.”
Morgan started, and then looked around the room at all of us, her green eyes taking us all in, one by one. She swallowed visibly. “You mean a coup, don’t you?”
That… wasn’t the worst idea I’d heard, but I didn’t have enough information. I needed to know her whole story before I could entertain the possibility. For all we knew, she was a criminal to her own people, which would make any claim she had to the throne illegitimate.
Luckily, Henrik had the same idea. “That is a possibility, but before we do anything, we need to hear your story, young lady.”
I followed Henrik’s gaze over to Morgan again. Her eyes slid from his face to Violet’s, and her mouth tightened slightly. She stood up abruptly, and moved over to the large screen mounted on the wall.
“Will this thing be on for a while?” she asked, pulling a chain off her neck. I craned forward, curious as to what she was doing.
“It will. The generators in this building are full for the time being, although I calculate that running every piece of technology in here would eat through the fuel in thirty-six to forty-two hours.” A shuffle of papers drew my gaze over from Morgan to Thomas, and he looked up at me, adjusting his glasses. “I gave everyone reports on it.” He delivered his last line awkwardly, as if suddenly uncertain whether he had revealed too much, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“That’s good to know,” said Ms. Dale cheerfully. “What are you doing, Morgana?”
Morgan’s back was to us, but I saw her spine stiffen. She was silent for a moment before shaking her head and bending over to fiddle with the data chip reader at the base of the screen.
“Much like Amber, I am not the biggest fan of my full name. Morgan is fine.” She reached over and hit something on the side of the screen, and it flicked on.
Immediately, blocks of typed words filled the screen.
Morgana, my beloved daughter.
I was reckless. Foolhardy and blind. If you and your sisters were the only good thing to come out of the poor decisions I made, then I consider myself blessed in spite of the suffering I have caused.
Please don’t blame yourself, my daughter. You are not responsible for the mistakes of your mother, and I hate the burden my mistakes have become to you. I am doing everything I can to fix it. Believe me, you are my heart, my world… my everything. To have come so close to losing you… I can’t even begin to describe the searing pain in my heart… the sickness in my stomach.
I visit you every day, sweetling. You lie in the bed, still as a statue, while machines and doctors fight to keep you alive. I brush your hair and sing to you. Can you hear me? I hope you can… I want you to know you are loved. You were born a fighter, my love. Desmond sings your praises after every one of your training sessions. She says that one day, no one will be able to stand up to you.
That was all I ever wanted for you and your sisters. I wanted to give you strengths and abilities that would keep you safe. It is true what they say. Most men are physically stronger than us. Evolution has made them that way, and I tried to defy evolution, but I see the cost of that every time I see you in that bed.
I will fix it, baby. I will, but please don’t leave me.
With love,
Mother
I looked at Morgan, who had moved over to the side of the screen, her hands shoved deep into her pockets. Her back was rigid, her gaze locked on a spot on the wall.
“What happened to you?” Violet asked, the words tumbling from her mouth. I looked over to see the concern on her face, and realized she had come to care about the renegade princess, and I couldn’t blame her—there was definitely something about her that made me want to care too. It was just a gut instinct, really, but I had learned to listen to it long ago.
Morgan licked her lips and took in a long deep breath, then exhaled, counting slowly, and I suddenly felt bad that we all needed to hear her story. I could see how hard this was for her.
“My mother and Mr. Jenks”—she said his name bitterly, like a curse—“didn’t anticipate all of the side effects that would come from the genetic manipulation they did to me and my sisters. My sisters were born with some… minor problems. Elena suffered from chronic migraines and bleeding from the nose, ears, once from the eyes. Tabitha would go into fits and start slamming her head against the wall.
“Like Tim, my skin hurts when I am touched. I think my pain receptors are even more sophisticated. The softest breeze on my skin would feel like fire, but I could grab a fly out of the air with unerring accuracy. I was a prototype, after all. But where Elena and Tabitha seemed to be able to cope with the… side effects… I was more… sensitive, I guess. Weak was the word Elena would use, every time she found me crying. She’d push me, slap me, telling me it would make me stronger, but it never did.” She gritted her teeth, and I realized she was fighting back tears. “I couldn’t even ask my mother for a hug—because it hurt so bad. Can you understand what that’s like? Being a little girl who only needs a hug, but, whenever she’s touched, would only scream and scream and scream until her voice gave out?”
The words marched out of her, forced between angry teeth and stiff lips, but I felt the anguish brewing just beneath the surface. The memory of a despair so deep on a night so dark, it made it impossible for Morgan to find any source of light.
“Growing up with Elena was hell. She used to call all of us her grand experiments. Tabitha was her first project, obviously, and she learned how to direct her. Selina and Marina followed, and Elena used their codependency against each other, locking them apart from each other when they wouldn’t do what she wanted. For a while, Lena and I were a team. We would keep an eye out for each other, help each other if she ever came by, but Elena found a way to get to her. Which was to pit us against each other. Make her hate me. Elena made her choose between us, and, well... It was easy, I suppose. My enhancement was far more advanced than hers, and Desmond would fawn a lot over me as a result. I guess it made all my sisters hate me in a way, but Lena…” She trailed off, her lips trembling. “She said such cruel things to me. Things no little girl should hear, should even think. Once Lena joined Elena’s little faction, only Sierra and I remained, and Sierra was still an infant. Once I held Elena’s full attention, she was relentless. They’d hold me down and hurt me in every way they could imagine. I won’t… I’ll spare you the details.”
“So, one day, Elena went too far,” concluded Ms. Dale. “And you were hospitalized.”
Morgan gave a bitter laugh, and shook her head, fighting back against whatever was tearing her apart. “No, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Dale, but Elena was too smart for that. I… I ended up hurting myself.”
Silence met her statement, and she carried on, explaining how she had planned and executed her suicide attempt. She’d snuck into the medical ward and swiped dozens of pills, specifically ones that weren’t intended to be mixed together. She’d taken every single one and then fallen asleep, as expected.
“I guess I just didn’t ever consider that our mother actually loved us,” she said, her throat thick. “She refused to let the doctors give up on me. When she found out what had happened, she began to take steps to… fix her mistakes. That’s when she au
thorized Mr. Jenks to begin experimenting on the boys of Matrus. They expanded the program, started taking boys at unprecedented rates.”
“How old were you?” asked Viggo.
Morgan licked her lips again, and met his eyes. “I was ten,” she whispered. “Elena was eighteen.”
“I don’t understand. How did you wind up with the Liberators?”
Morgan faltered, and then sighed. “After Mother found out what Elena had been doing, she told her that she wasn’t going to allow a psychopath to become queen. That led to a huge fight, one that for once, Elena wasn’t winning. So she agreed to get counseling three times a week, and agreed to get the other sisters to go, too, as well as helping to keep them in line while Mother figured out how to… fix us.”
“But she still resented you for even bringing the problems to your mother’s attention,” said Owen, and Morgan gave another bitter laugh, pressing her back into the wall, as if trying to keep it from falling over.
“Of course she did. Now she had to be more careful. The staff was instructed to report any bad behavior, and the therapists reported only to my mother, as did Mr. Jenks. Elena was furious with me and what I had done. As though I had planned this outcome, when I only wanted… I only wanted… Well, Elena doesn’t get furious so much as annoyed. She despises delays, and any inhibition to her plans. I had delayed her, and so it was on her to find ways of making me pay.”
She shrugged. “Things happened, Elena denied involvement, and my mother couldn’t condemn her without evidence—not without having to explain to her subjects what she had done to the royal line. So she had Desmond hide me. At first it was in a safe house, but later Desmond forged papers to have me imprisoned for a while. It was so she could get me credence with the Liberators, and by the time she brought me to them, saying that she had recruited me, I was older—enough that nobody recognized me or connected me to the princess they’d heard was in the hospital in the news. I knew Desmond was close to Elena, but worked for my mother. I knew I could never tell a soul who I really was. She held it over me that she was the only thing keeping me alive—and I was never sure if that meant Elena thought I was dead, or alive and performing some sort of task for her. I even once entertained the small hope that therapy was paying off for Elena and she was getting better. Then, when Mother was murdered, it turned out that Desmond and Elena had been working together behind my mother’s back, too.”
The Gender End Page 15