The Gender Fall

by Bella Forrest

  Stabilized on the flat surface, I closed my eyes and tried to fight the dizziness that had assaulted me. Then I felt a hand fall on the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades, another one gently supporting my elbow as I breathed, willing the world back into clarity.

  “Are you okay, Violet?” Ms. Dale’s voice overflowed with concern as she carefully helped me move away from the table. I kept my eyes shut, trusting she wouldn’t walk me into anything, and then felt something brush up against my knees. “Chair here,” she murmured, helping me to turn, and then allowing me to lean on her as I slowly sat down.

  Settled in the chair, I took a few more deep breaths, and then, slowly, opened my eyes. The world trembled slightly, threatening to spin off the rails again, but I pushed the sensation back, focusing on my hands in front of me, steadying myself. “I’m fine,” I breathed. “Just got hit with a dizzy spell. Give me a minute and I’ll be good to go.”

  Ms. Dale gave me a doubtful look as she dragged a chair over, sitting down in front of me. My skin felt clammy, a cold sweat dotting my forehead, upper lip, and shoulders. My breath was still coming sharply. “Violet,” Ms. Dale began hesitantly. “You have done enough for today. I think we’ll be fine if you stay here.”

  I felt the urge to protest, which must have shown on my face, because Ms. Dale leaned forward, her expression soft. “It’s not just because you’re unwell, although that is a good enough reason in and of itself. However, Viggo and Owen are gone. Thomas, Amber, and I—we all have to go to the pickup, for various reasons. That’s all our leadership, Violet. If anything were to happen to us…” She met my gaze, her brown eyes glittering with intensity. “We need you here to carry on, should anything happen to us. Someone has to remain behind.”

  She was right, of course. I had known that even before she’d started speaking. At least, I had known that, physically, I was still in no condition for fieldwork. Viggo and I had talked about it just yesterday. But the other stuff… Well, that was something I had not considered right at this moment. Even though I’d definitely used that argument on other people in my care before, I’d never really thought to apply it to myself.

  “I know,” I told Ms. Dale, risking a nod. “And we have a good plan. I just… I’m having a hard time accepting my new, uh, limitations.” I gave her a small smile, just a flash of humor, and Ms. Dale smiled in response. “I trust you and Viggo to get in and out of there. Thomas, I trust you, too,” I added, noting the reproachful look Thomas had shot me over Ms. Dale’s head. I hoped that affirmation would tell him I knew fieldwork wasn’t his forte, but he was doing his best. If he needed the support, I was happy to give it.

  “We’ll be back before you know it,” Ms. Dale assured me, and I watched them exit the room, presumably heading off to find Dr. Arlan and Amber.

  24

  Viggo

  Even as I drove through low grasses and around bushes, the uneven terrain jerking the wheel under my hands, I couldn’t help checking over my shoulder at the backseat. It was almost habitual at this point. I needed to make sure Cody was still unconscious, and not about to leap into action and kill us both.

  “He’s fine,” Owen assured me for what felt like the fiftieth time. “He’s still out.” We’d turned our subvocalizers off for the time being, relying on the regular microphones included in the little black collars; there seemed to be no point to subvocalizing, with the two of us in the airtight car.

  I turned my gaze back to the landscape ahead of me, slowing us to a crawl in order to roll over some very pointy rocks, and nodded. “Last thing we need is for him to wake up right now.”

  “I’ve got my gun trained on him,” Owen informed me, his voice brittle. “I’ll do what I have to, if it comes to that.”

  I held back my retort, partially because I knew it would be counterproductive and partially because I knew those words coming from Owen’s mouth were forced through his teeth. He didn’t like the idea of hurting Cody any more than I did.

  Downshifting, I pushed hard on the throttle and began heading up a hill, my eyes drifting over to the topographical map Thomas had downloaded to my handheld before the mission. The area Violet had given us had to be close; there weren’t a lot of other hills. The car’s engine growled and roared under us in protest, but it held firm.

  “Viggo, you should be coming up to the area soon,” Violet announced in my earpiece, almost on cue. “Ms. Dale and the team are waiting.”

  The terrain before me began to level off, and I exhaled in relief as we crested the hill and began slowly, carefully, heading down the other side. I could see the silhouettes of Ms. Dale, Thomas, and Dr. Arlan standing next to a car at the bottom, the headlights cutting through the darkness like a beacon. They had told us they would bring a car in the heloship and land the latter nearby, but not where.

  “Viggo, please confirm that’s you I’m seeing,” Ms. Dale’s voice came crackling over my headset. Peering toward the figures I was nearing, I saw she was waving to me.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and flashed the lights in response.

  When I finally made it down the hill, I stopped our car a few feet away from theirs. Leaping out, I raced around to pull open the passenger door. Owen had already gathered Cody’s small form in his arms, and he passed him over to me. I gathered the boy up and raced as quickly as I dared over to where Dr. Arlan was waiting, setting him on an old camp blanket they’d spread over the drying grasses as we descended the hill.

  By the time I had arranged Cody as comfortably as I could, Dr. Arlan held a syringe in his hand. He stabbed the tip into a bottle filled with amber liquid, then pulled the plunger back and removed the needle from the bottle, slipping the liquid back into his pocket. Turning, he looked at the form on the blanket and paused, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion.

  “This is just a boy,” he said, his eyes moving up to meet my gaze.

  Before I had a chance to reply, Ms. Dale tsked, snatching the syringe out of Dr. Arlan’s fingers. Without hesitating, she dropped to one knee and slammed the syringe into Cody’s thigh, depressing the plunger.

  “Think of him as a weapon,” she informed Dr. Arlan as she pulled the needle out. “Or rather, a victim of experimentation who has become a weapon in the wrong hands.” She met Dr. Arlan’s appalled gaze as she held the syringe out to him, her eyes flashing. “He’s dangerous right now, and he has superhuman powers. We cannot afford to relax our guard just because of his age or his size.” She stood up, brushing dirt off her knees.

  “We need to find that tracker,” I told the doctor gently.

  He blinked, turning his gaze from Ms. Dale to me, and then nodded. “Of course,” he replied.

  Thomas moved around him, holding out a long, skinny rod connected to a small box by what looked like a good deal of electrical tape. He hovered the rod over Cody’s body, running it up and down and staring at the box. As he worked, Dr. Arlan slipped a small, pale metal box—which I recognized as Ashabee’s portable medical scanner—out of his own pocket and began following Thomas’ motions, performing his own scan. I took a step back, giving them space to work.

  Owen came up beside me, watching closely. The box Thomas held beeped as he drew it over Cody’s thigh. “There,” he announced.

  Dr. Arlan moved his box over it, and frowned. “It’s there,” he confirmed, looking up. “But they put it in deep—it’s dangerously close to the femoral artery. If I try to perform surgery on him out here and slip, he’ll bleed out in moments.”

  “We have to remove it here and now,” I said, sensing the doctor was going to insist on moving the boy to another place. “It’s too dangerous for us to keep it in.”

  Dr. Arlan bristled and stood. “You people are too much,” he said, placing his hands on his hips. “I’m a doctor, and I swore an oath to help my patients, and not to put them in any unnecessary danger.”

  I felt my breath come out in a deep huff. I could respect Dr. Arlan’s position, but at the moment, we needed him to get the job done
—we had no time. “This boy was being used as a slave,” I informed him. “He’s on medication that makes him susceptible to control by our enemies. He has a tracker in his leg they are certainly monitoring, and when they find him, and us, they will kill us all, and he will go back to being a slave. I understand the risks, and I wish we had a better way, but we don’t. So please just do it.”

  I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, the adrenaline still surging through my veins making my muscles twitch and jump under my skin. But my impassioned rant about the boy had done something other than motivate Dr. Arlan—it had jarred my memory of how they’d been controlling Cody earlier.

  I fished the earbud out of my pocket and held it out to the group. “By the way, he was wearing this.”

  At the sight of the thing, Thomas cursed. Marching over, he plucked the earbud from my hand with two fingers and rushed over to the car he’d come in. Curious, I followed, watching as he opened the back and pulled out a black box, about the size of a jewelry box, but considerably heavier, from the way he was handling it. He grunted as he pulled the lid open, and then dropped the earbud in and slammed it shut with a thunk, flipping down the top and locking it.

  Silence followed, and I felt a keen sense that something was wrong. Everyone else seemed to feel it as well, because, almost as one, we turned to look behind us, as if something had managed to sneak up on us. The headlights from both cars illuminated the small clearing, but shadows pressed in relentlessly beyond their reach. I searched them, finding nothing, and after a moment, released a tightly held breath.

  I turned back to look at the others, and then felt a chuckle slip from me. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” I quipped, and I saw Ms. Dale roll her eyes, while Owen grinned nervously.

  While Dr. Arlan efficiently set out his tools and began preparing to make an incision in Cody’s thigh, sanitizing and marking the skin while wearing a deep frown of concentration, Thomas stepped toward us, away from his heavy box, dusting his hands. “The box is lead-lined. They won’t be able to track that earpiece through the frequency they were utilizing anymore.”

  “I’m glad you brought that,” I said. “I had completely forgotten to mention that earbud earlier, but I figured it might be something you could use.”

  “Maybe,” Thomas hedged. “But it’ll be useless taking the tracker out of that kid if they can track us through their earbud. I don’t know if it was worth the risk. Won’t know until I get it back—and even then, I recommend taking it far away from the camp before we try.”

  Ms. Dale cleared her throat, and we turned, looking at her. “The boy,” she said. “Tell us more about how he acted when you were fighting him.”

  “Right,” I said, shaking my head. “His eyes were… blank. Like there was nothing behind them. He wouldn’t talk except to whomever was on the other side of the earbud. It was like he’d been programmed or something.”

  As I spoke, even I noticed the emotions beginning to vacate my voice as I tried to distance myself from the anger still surging hot and deep in the pit of my belly. I needed to focus right now, and that anger would only make the situation worse. But God—he was just a boy.

  There was a rustling sound, and I craned my neck over the top of Ms. Dale’s head in time to see Dr. Arlan gesturing with a free hand, the other holding a set of small, intricate tools. “I need a little help,” he announced.

  “I got it,” Thomas replied, heading over to Dr. Arlan. I watched him go, and then turned back to Ms. Dale and Owen.

  “How could they do that to those kids?” I asked after a moment. “How could they train them to be so obedient?”

  Ms. Dale licked her lips. “There are methods, but to be honest, it takes longer than a few weeks. The process could take months, even years.”

  “It must be the Benuxupane?” Owen asked, crossing his arms. “Violet mentioned that when she took it, she felt more compliant?”

  “She said she was able to resist a bit,” I replied. “It didn’t seem to have a very strong effect on her. But to make those kids into emotionless drones... They must have really made some changes to the formula.”

  “Desmond has access to the whole Matrian government’s top scientists and funding,” Ms. Dale said. “If anyone could isolate the component that had that effect, I would imagine she’d have the resources to do it. And once they isolated it…”

  “They would have enhanced it,” I spat.

  Ms. Dale nodded, her jaw clenched. “I really hate that woman,” she said under her breath.

  “You and me both,” I muttered.

  “Guys, you better not leave me off the list—plus Amber, Henrik, all the Liberators, Jay…”

  I chuckled as Owen began ticking off the names on his fingers, waving a hand in front of him.

  “All right,” I said. “We all agree that Desmond is a vile witch. But that doesn’t get us anywhere.”

  We fell into silence, mulling over the seriousness of the problem. Finally, Owen sighed. “We really need to find a way to destroy the Benuxupane. Something that does this to people… it shouldn’t even be allowed to exist.”

  Heads nodded all around the group. I agreed too—once again, we’d been so caught up in responding to one crisis after another that we’d lost sight of the bigger picture. We had to find a way to strike back.

  “Destroying it is only addressing one part of the problem,” Ms. Dale said. “We have no idea how the boys’ bodies will react without the Benuxupane. Desmond might have found a way to, I don’t know, make them dependent on it. If we destroy it without testing that, we might be killing them.”

  “Good point,” Owen replied. “What if they react violently? Right now, the drug might be helping them cope with the side effects of their isolation and emotional maladjustment. It might be like kicking the crutch out from under a man with a broken leg.”

  I raised my eyebrows at the metaphor, but couldn’t help but agree. “I guess that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get to it. Right now, the fact that the Matrians are using them at all is a bigger concern, so anything we can do to…”

  I trailed off, noticing Ms. Dale and Owen’s eyes had jumped to a place just over my shoulder, their faces blanking, draining of casual emotion. A tense silence had once again descended upon the clearing, and I felt a prickling at the back of my neck as the hair there rose in anticipation of danger. As slowly as possible, I turned.

  Another boy wearing a black mask and black clothes stood only twenty feet away from me. My fingers twitched as I stared at his small form. He was breathing heavily, his shoulders and chest heaving, and I could see, even in the sparse light, that his black outfit was soaked with sweat.

  I watched as the boy pointed at his ear, and then looked at me expectantly. I stared, baffled, and the boy slowly lowered his arm and then waited. After several long heartbeats, he repeated the gesture.

  “Maybe he wants us to put the earpiece in,” Owen whispered behind me.

  Seeing no better option before me, I cautiously moved toward the trunk of Ms. Dale’s car, keeping a careful eye on the boy. He didn’t move, making no sound but that of his labored breathing, even as I opened up the trunk and pulled out the box, grabbed the earpiece, and slid it into my ear.

  “Hello, Mr. Croft,” a feminine voice crooned from the other side.

  I balled my hand into a fist, my response scraping out through gritted teeth. “Hello, Desmond.”

  25

  Viggo

  “There’s no need for that tone, my dear boy. After all, I’m just here to congratulate you on revealing which of our frequencies you had that dear, sweet moron Thomas monitoring.”

  My eyes flicked over to Thomas, and I pointed at the earbud, shooting him a pointed, questioning glance. “What do you want, Desmond?” I asked.

  Nodding sharply, Thomas moved over to the car, and I stepped aside to give him access to the trunk. I heard him moving items around behind me, but I didn’t look, turning my full attention to the boy standing in the clearin
g. He hadn’t moved, but I knew he was listening in. I could only hope nothing Desmond said now could be interpreted as a command on his part.

  Desmond chuckled through the line. “You know, I really do have to congratulate you,” she said. “You were clever not to return to your secret base. I’m surprised to see you had that much common sense. Is my failed protégé with you?”

  “Which one?” I retorted. “I seem to be collecting a set of them.”

  “I see you still have that clever mouth… and zero insight about when best to use it,” the woman chided. She clucked her tongue in disapproval, and I resisted the urge to add something else incendiary. “The failed protégé I was referring to is the industrious Melissa Dale. Tell me, is she there with you?”

  I cast a look at Ms. Dale, who was watching me closely, her mouth pressed into a thin line. “She’s here. She says you should go take a dive into Veil River.”

  “I’m sure she did. Ah, well, she never really was up to my standards. I won’t miss her after I kill her.”

  I clenched my teeth together, refusing to rise to the bait. “What do you want, Desmond?” I repeated.

  “Patience, patience, Mr. Croft. You’re ruining all my fun… Now, where was I? Ah yes. It is a shame you haven’t led me straight to your base, but no matter. I’ll find it soon. Are you sure you don’t want to help me out a little bit? Give me a direction?”

  “How about down? Just stop when you see flames.”

  “Hmmm, color me unsurprised. You always were a stubborn little thing.”

  “Well, that’s just part of my charm,” I said.

  Behind me, I heard Thomas muttering to himself. I looked back just in time to catch his eye: the small man motioned to his wrist as though he was tapping a watch, then flapped his hand in a circular motion as though to say, ‘Come on!’ More time, I realized. He wants more time.