The Gender End

by Bella Forrest

  “There,” Violet said, pointing to a spot on the side of the road. Ms. Dale pulled to a stop, Amber stopping behind us, and Violet got out. I watched her go, curious, as she raced into an alley mouth. She disappeared from sight, then returned, holding her hand in a fist against her stomach, long, thin pieces of… something clutched between her fingers.

  The street was more or less deserted, and she moved quickly, getting back in the car and closing the door.

  “Keep heading straight for two blocks,” Thomas said. “Go right and then keep going straight.”

  Ms. Dale pressed her foot on the gas, and we sped off. Violet took her gloves off with her teeth and then began smoothing out the strips of paper she’d collected, using the rolling light of the streetlamps to read them out loud. Tickers—she had found some news tickers.

  “Patrians turn on Matrian kindness. Terrorist attacks at the water plant cost the lives of nearly… eighty Matrian wardens. Terrorist attacks are suspected within Matrus from Patrian insurgents. All Patrian males in country to check in regularly with neighborhood warden’s office. Failure to comply will result in arrests.”

  “Dear God,” Owen said softly. “These poor people.”

  “Elena always did have a way with words,” Ms. Dale muttered as she took another turn.

  “The rest of these are just as bad,” Violet continued as she sifted through more ticker tape. She must’ve dug them out of the trash, so they were a few days old, but still, it was good to know what we were dealing with. “Instability in Patrus and the future of Matrus in question. Biological agents used on Matrian soldiers. Brutal male regime establishing control. War inevitable…”

  She looked up from her reading and then crumpled up the strips. “How can we ever battle all this?”

  “We can,” I said, trying to fill her with confidence. Come to think of it, I was confident. Nervous, yes. Worried, of course. But I was confident. “We can, Violet. If Morgan is right, Alyssa’s voice will mean a lot, especially because she’s established. We forget this, but Elena’s new to the people. They’re still getting to know her as queen. Their opinion will be easily swayed if there’s a more trusted voice telling them the truth.”

  I finished my impromptu speech and leaned back. The cab of the car went quiet, and then Owen leaned forward to look at Thomas, sitting on the other side of me. “What are the odds for this mission, Thomas?”

  Thomas looked up from his handheld and over at Owen, giving him a bewildered look. “The odds?”

  “Yes, the odds. And don’t pretend you didn’t run them. You always do.”

  “That’s true, I do.” He turned back to his handheld. “Turn left on the next street.”

  The silence returned.

  “So what are they?” Owen pressed.

  “The odds?”

  “Of course—don’t talk in circles. Are you keeping them back on purpose? Are the numbers low?”

  Thomas sighed and turned his knees toward mine, facing Owen a little more directly. “There are three reasons why I might not give you the odds, Owen. The first is that they’re dismal, and I recognize that by telling you, I would reduce the chances even more by killing your hope of a successful mission. On the other hand, I might feel I don’t have to tell you if the numbers run the other way, and I already know we’ll be victorious. Telling you that could backfire into making you over-confident, and therefore turn the mission into a complete failure.”

  He turned back to his handheld, studying the map. We fell silent again.

  “What’s the third reason?” asked Violet from the front seat, her voice curious.

  “That there are too many working parts in this plan, so the odds are impossible to calculate. Turn right, we’re almost there.”

  Ms. Dale turned right, and I looked out the window, focusing on the scenery again. We’d made it to a residential area, with houses, not apartments, and I could tell this was the nicer, wealthier part of town. The houses were better crafted, on larger pieces of land so they could have a yard or a garden, with fences and security gates in place, keeping them locked away from all the common riffraff. Ms. Dale navigated more confidently—I was reminded that she had probably known about this woman, when she’d been a head Matrian spy—as the streets became tighter, turning into one-way lanes through dark residential streets, houses peeking out from behind the branches of trees, seeming to my nervous brain to watch us as we drove by.

  Eventually, Thomas said, “Here,” and Ms. Dale pulled to a stop. A brown brick wall, about seven feet tall, ran along the road, and ahead, I could see the break in the sidewalk where the beginning of a drive began, cut off from the street by an ornate wrought-iron gate. Thomas barely looked up from his modified handheld, his fingers moving over buttons as the lines of white code on a black background illuminated his face.

  “I’m not detecting any frequencies that indicate cameras or comms, but the gate seems to require a key code.”

  “How can you tell that?” I asked, and Thomas grinned, not looking away from the screen.

  “I can see the box.”

  I strained my eyes in his direction and saw it—attached to the opposite wall on the other side of the driveway, continuing around the property.

  “I should’ve noticed that,” I muttered, and Thomas reached over and absent-mindedly patted me on the shoulder.

  “Nobody is perfect. Ms. Dale, could you please drive up to that gate, and I’ll hand you the cable to plug into it?”

  She put the vehicle in gear and then approached the gate slowly, keeping the headlights off. As she turned, the window was almost immediately filled with the heavy, ivy-covered gates that clearly parted in the middle. Thomas handed Ms. Dale a cable, and she rolled down the window, reaching across and running her fingers over the box until she found a port.

  Once jacked in, Thomas hit something, and the green on his screen shifted to red, numbers flying over it, almost too fast to see. After a second or two, they came to a stop, and a four-digit code appeared on the screen.

  “Two, two, three, eight,” Thomas announced, and Ms. Dale pulled out the cable and input the code. The box beeped, and there was an electric hum as the gates slid apart—just like Ashabee’s had. As they came apart, they revealed a circular cobblestone driveway with a fountain in the center. Just beyond that was a modest house, more of a two-story cottage, the cut-rock front and rustic columns resplendent with even more ivy.

  Ms. Dale pulled forward, and I saw a light go on through a window on the first floor.

  “She knows someone’s here,” I said. “We need to be careful—we don’t want to scare her.”

  The car stopped, and Ms. Dale killed the engine. “The rest of us will stay on the other side of the cars. You, Violet, and Morgan introduce us.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Thomas?”

  The man grabbed his handheld and hopped out, and I followed right behind him. I closed the door as Thomas moved around to the other side, where Ms. Dale was. Violet slipped her hand into mine, and we moved to the second car, where Morgan was getting out.

  “I should go up there first,” she said. “I met her when I was a kid. I mean, she would come by the palace a lot to advise Mother.”

  “We agree, but we should come with you, so you can introduce us to her slowly,” Violet suggested.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, and Violet chuckled.

  “It was Ms. Dale’s, of course.”

  Morgan smiled as she pushed past us, heading toward the house. The light over the porch came on and the door swung open, revealing a very short, slightly stooped old woman wearing an ankle-length white nightgown, her white hair falling straight down her back in a long trail. She seemed frail, her skin translucent and spotted with liver spots, but her hands were steady—and so was the big shotgun cradled in them. She already had the stock on her shoulder, but the barrel was pointing down, for the moment.

  “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing on my property?” she demanded in a
surprisingly strong and loud voice.

  “Alyssa?” Morgan said softly, taking a slow step forward and holding her hands up. “It’s me, Morgana. I’m Rina’s sixth daughter. Take a minute. I’m wearing a disguise. It was… hard to get here to you. We had to take precautions.”

  Alyssa blinked and frowned, the lines in her face becoming more pronounced. “Morgana? What are you doing here?”

  “You can call me Morgan, please. And I’m here because… because I have friends here from Patrus. We’ve been on the other side of this war, and we have something big, news that we want you to hear first, before anybody else. We’re not here to hurt you. We need your help. Please listen to our story, so you can understand why we chose to come to you.”

  Alyssa’s frown deepened, and her brown eyes flicked to Violet and me, and then past us to the six others standing behind us. “They’re all Patrians?”

  “Actually, I’m not,” Violet announced softly. “I’m Violet Bates—the name might sound familiar to you. This is my husband, Viggo Croft. He is Patrian, but Ms. Dale there isn’t. Neither is Owen—he’s Matrian born. The others are mostly Patrian.”

  Alyssa blinked and gave us a hard look. “Huh,” she said after a moment. “Well isn’t that interesting. Come inside. There should be enough seats for you all in the parlor. I’ll put on some tea. Just make sure you wipe your feet on the mat.”

  She disappeared into the house before I could stop her, so I tried to hurry my steps while staying nonchalant, not entirely certain I should let her out of my sight. I hadn’t known what to expect from this woman earlier—and I still wasn’t quite sure now.

  OceanofPDF.com

  26

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  VIGGO

  For an elderly woman, Alyssa was quick, and by the time I went down the hall and followed her into the kitchen, she was already running water from the tap into a large metal kettle. She shot a glance over her shoulder at me, and then stepped back.

  “Do you mind?” she asked.

  I moved forward to help and waited for the faucet to finish filling up the kettle. Nodding, she stepped to one side and began reaching into cabinets, pulling out teacups with saucers. Her movements were practiced, as if this encounter hadn’t been entirely unexpected.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said as she moved, the clinking of ceramics filling the air.

  I shut off the water and picked up the kettle. “Oh?”

  “Not very much. I retired when Rina was still queen, so I stopped getting all the juicy details quite a while ago. But I have a few contacts in Patrus. I was consulted about the death of your wife, Miriam, actually.”

  “Consulted?” I turned from where I had just placed the pot on the stove, gaping at her. “You were consulted?”

  “Sorry. That wasn’t the best term, was it? But yes. I was, for lack of a better word, consulted. Rina had already petitioned the king, as was her diplomatic right as queen, to stop the execution—no official power in that, sadly; it’s just a statement in the end—but she wanted my thoughts on whether we should demand an inquiry into the event. To see if there was any foul play on your part.”

  There had been, but it wasn’t in the way she intended. “And?”

  She looked up from spooning sugar into a serving bowl and sighed, placing the spoon down. “I worked very hard to establish more rights for Patrian husbands in Matrus. It’s one of the things that made me popular. Yet as much as I did, it never seemed like enough. So I fought for other things: prison reforms, improving the conditions of work camps, restructuring the orphanages… I’ve done a lot for Matrus. But one thing I have never, ever done, is take a step into Patrus. Do you know why that is?”

  “No, and I’m not sure I’m going to like your answer.”

  “You’d be surprised. The truth is… my late husband was Patrian, and, much like you, very forward thinking, and he was adamant that I never go. Feared the idea, really. He knew that if I went there, even if only to make him feel more comfortable, I would never be able to adjust to the strict laws the Patrian government had designed to keep women subordinate. Eventually, I would fall prey to something, or say something considered out of line, or… get caught up in a situation much like your wife did.”

  She pulled out a teapot and set it on the tray, pulling off the lid. She began putting tea into the mesh steeper, her crooked fingers moving with more dexterity than I would’ve thought possible.

  “That’s why I tried so hard to change the laws for men in Matrus—not just Patrian males but all men. I figured if I could give the Patrian males fairness in the system, they’d be less inclined to make their wives move, and we could keep our citizens safe. But once they cross that river, their fate is out of our hands.”

  Her message was clear and painful, but not unexpected. There was nothing she could’ve done about Miriam, either. She finished preparing the tray and looked up at me.

  “The water should be hot. Pour some in here, and let’s see if anyone was silly enough to sit in my favorite chair.”

  “How would they know that?” I asked as I began pouring the water, steam wafting up around my head, a few drops of sweat pearling on my forehead.

  “Because it’s my chair,” she said, and I turned, holding out the pot. She shook her head. “Leave the pot over the fire. We’ll be coming back for more soon, I bet.”

  She moved, leaving the tray for me, and I quickly replaced the pot on the stove burner and grabbed the tray, following her as she strode out of the kitchen and into the parlor that sat right across the hall.

  Alyssa’s parlor resembled a library more than a sitting room. Ceiling-tall stacks of books lined the exposed walls, and stuffed chairs spread out around the room. Violet and Ms. Dale were sitting nearest a wooden rocking chair with a cushioned seat. As soon as I spotted it, I realized what Alyssa meant about it being her chair—it stood out alone in the room, much like she did.

  She moved to it, sitting and pulling the blanket draped over the back onto her legs, smoothing down the soft fabric. I followed, weaving around a few chairs until I got to the middle of the room. I put the tea set down on a little coffee table, gently shoving aside some books to make room, and began setting out the cups.

  “So I hear you have a story for me,” she said after taking a few long moments to get comfortable. “Please help yourself to the tea, but talk and drink—I am old.”

  “Alyssa, thank you so much for this,” Morgan said, and Alyssa held up a hand.

  “By ‘old,’ I meant ‘impatient and cranky.’ Let’s get to the point.”

  I listened as Morgan began telling her the story, starting with the circumstances around her and her sister’s enhancements. When she got to Violet’s part, Violet took over and began telling our story, starting with her mission to Patrus. I interjected a few times, but mostly kept quiet, listening.

  Tim spoke next, filling Alyssa in on some of the more… gruesome details of the experimentation performed on him. It was difficult to stomach, but he spoke with clarity and honesty, his broken words still completely able to convey the horror he’d witnessed. I watched Alyssa’s face closely as she listened, and was pleased to see that she was affected by his tale, her color draining slightly as he spoke. He wanted to demonstrate his ability for her with a knife trick involving his hand, but she called him off, telling him that wasn’t necessary, and Violet resumed her tale.

  Even with only the most pertinent details, it was a long story, and it took the better part of an hour to get out—during which time Alyssa sat calm and attentive, occasionally asking a question, but for the most part silent and thoughtful. Everyone had spoken about something, including Logan, who described life inside the Patrian city before, during, and after the Matrian attack.

  After our tale came to a close, Alyssa leaned back in her chair, tapping her fingers against the armrests.

  “I don’t suppose you have any proof of all this,” she said after a pause, and Morgan raised her eyebrows, nodding.

&
nbsp; “Actually, we do.” From her pocket she pulled a data chip and held it out toward the old woman. “This contains all of the documentation we could recover from the lab in The Green, the raw video Violet took of Tabitha talking about the boys and Elena’s plan to kill Maxen, the video we made to show to the Patrian people, footage of the sabotage of the water treatment plant recovered from their security cameras… Everything.”

  Alyssa leaned forward and took the data chip from Morgan, setting it on the coffee table in front of her. Immediately a green light came on around it, and a screen came up, flat and glowing, right in front of Alyssa’s face. She began swiping her hand over it, and I heard Thomas give an excited gasp.

  “Interactive holotable,” he said in a high-pitched voice, and I smiled at his obvious enthusiasm, even under the circumstances.

  She thumbed through files, her expression thoughtful as she flipped from one to the next. “This is a lot of material,” she said. She continued flipping for a few more seconds, then dropped her hand and picked up the chip, the screen and table returning to their original state. “What are your intentions here?”

  I looked over to Violet and then leaned forward. “Morgan said you might be able to help us. We’re trying to stabilize Patrus, but we can’t keep doing that as long as Elena is queen.”

  “So you mean to assassinate her?” Alyssa’s eyes were hard.

  “No,” Violet said quickly. “We intend to have her stand trial for her crimes. The victims of what she’s done deserve to tell their stories. Everyone should hear it, and she should be punished.”

  “She really should be killed,” Ms. Dale said crossly. “But Morgan correctly pointed out that her death wouldn’t help our credibility.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Alyssa said. She opened her mouth to say something, and then shut it, as if reconsidering her words. “These are extremely serious and dangerous accusations, but you’re prepared. Very prepared.” She looked away, her mouth tightening. “Poor Rina.”