“Pardon me,” he said as he approached Dr. Tierney, his tone husky. I rolled my eyes. “Madam, it is a pleasure to see such radiance thriving, in spite of these primitive conditions. May I have the honor of your name?”
Dr. Tierney cocked her head at him, an incredulous look on her face. “No,” she said decisively. “Absolutely not.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing as the small doctor stepped around Cruz and walked out, still cradling her mug of coffee. I should’ve known better than to doubt even for a second Dr. Tierney’s ability to handle unwanted attention from a male. As for Cruz, well… I hadn’t exactly expected better from him.
Moving back closer to Violet, I watched as the man left, my smile growing as he approached the door, then deepening when I saw Jeff standing on the other side, about to come in. He stepped out of Cruz’s way to enter the kitchen, bustling over to both of us.
“Oh, Violet, I’m so glad to see you’re okay!” he said, interrupting Ms. Dale. He must have been truly emotional about it—I’d never seen Jeff interrupt anybody before unless he had to.
Ms. Dale just grinned at the intrusion and leaned over to Violet to finish her thought. “I think you might be onto something. Bring it up at tonight’s meeting, and maybe find time to talk to Thomas about it.” With that, she left.
“Hi, Jeff,” Violet said, reaching up to hug the taller man. He hugged her as if she were a fragile thing, and then quickly let her go.
“How ever did you survive?” he asked, his eyes wide.
“Actually, I was saved by that weird elevator that led to your room. It allowed me to sneak out from under Desmond and get the drop on her.”
Jeff’s mustache twitched and he took a step back, his cheeks flushing. “I see.”
Violet took a step forward, clearly concerned by his distress. “Jeff? What was that thing? Why was it so small?”
Jeff met my gaze, and then hers, and his flush deepened. “Ahh, I suppose you would never have seen a dumbwaiter before,” he said, with nothing condescending in his tone, only a bit of embarrassment. “It’s meant to carry food from one part of the house to another. Not people. At one point in the house’s life, that room used to be a kitchen.”
“Oh,” she said, her face screwing up as she digested the information. Most of the time, it didn’t show that Violet had grown up in an orphanage—and a series of terrible work camps—but at moments like these, I could see the people around her remembering.
“Then why did it lead to your room?” she asked Jeff, and I could almost see the gears in her head turning. When she’d told me that story, I’d had similar questions.
Jeff stroked his moustache, perhaps nervously. “Well, you see… Mr. Ashabee didn’t want the other servants to know about his secret armory. I was the only one he would trust with his secret, and the only reason he did that was because…” His moustache turned down. “I was responsible for maintaining his collection, you see. And also, of course, for checking on him to make sure he didn’t dwell down there too long when his more creative manias struck him. With the dumbwaiter left over, he told me I had to move into the room it was in so that I could go help him in secret. Oh, I begged him to modify it and make it bigger, but he refused on the grounds that constructing another would be too obvious to the other servants. I quite disliked that thing. It was… humiliating. But… if it saved your life, then I am grateful for it, and to him, for having any kind of elevator there at all.”
Violet’s face softened, and she pulled the butler in for a hug. “Ashabee was not a good man,” she said as she hugged him tight. “And you are. Here.”
She pulled something from her pocket and handed it to Jeff. He grabbed it, and I realized it was a picture. Inside it was an image of Jeff and an older woman, probably his mother. “You took this for me?” he said, his voice slightly strangled.
“I hope you don’t mind. I just saw it in your room and thought… Well, I’m glad I did now. Especially with what happened.”
Jeff smiled, his eyes glistening. “I left all my pictures behind,” he said wistfully. “I didn’t want to carry too much, anything that would slow me down.”
Violet nodded, her hand on Jeff’s arm. “I understand. I know what it’s like to lose pictures. I’m sorry I didn’t grab the rest.”
“This was the best one you could’ve grabbed, under the circumstances. Oh, thank you, Ms. Bates.”
The emotional butler wrapped his arms around Violet, embracing her in another heartfelt hug. I watched it all, realizing with a strange jolt that somehow, Violet had managed to find one more beautiful thing in the whole ordeal with Owen.
I just hoped I would be able to as well.
11
Viggo
Three days seemed like an eternity when the whole world felt perched on the edge of a knife. It was exhausting not knowing anything, and the waiting was downright stifling. Yet the camp continued about its business, ignoring the feeling of a long-held breath, waiting to learn whether it should exhale slowly, or scream.
Everyone had their own ways of ignoring the looming questions, little mindless jobs to help achieve a feeling of accomplishment in the face of the unknown. I, for one, thought it was a good sign. For good or for ill, there was a sense of accomplishment within the group. A camaraderie that was beginning to form between us from all the trials and tribulations we had endured. In leading the way, Ms. Dale, Amber, and I had demonstrated that we could fight back.
Yet, without any word from Tiffany save the brief updates assuring us she was still alive, there was still this question mark involving the city. It cast a shadow, a taint, over the day-to-day routine of the camp.
All of us were trying to figure out what to do with the seven-day deadline Desmond had given us. According to her, the boys would be executed when she didn’t return to whoever she had with them. Wherever they were keeping them. If there was such a plan, there would have to be safeguards, or else Desmond would never have been able to go anywhere without checking in with her cronies. We had our spies scrambling for information on where they might be, but it was hopeless.
Desmond hadn’t been allowed to see any of our base or the route to it. We’d gotten Dr. Arlan to treat her broken leg and drug her heavily as soon as we got to camp—making sure her blindfold stayed on the whole time—and, while the group of us who acted as leaders had held a furious conference, we couldn’t justify killing her after what she had said… at least, not yet. Not until we had more information. She was in the den right now; we’d converted the room into a makeshift but fairly secure prison cell, to hold her until we could make a more permanent decision.
At the moment, our best plan was, if we still knew nothing in a week, to take her to the middle of the city via heloship, drop her blindfolded with her hands tied where a Matrian patrol would come see her, come back before we were seen, and move camp… again.
It was a pathetic plan, a joke, and I dearly hoped we could figure something out soon. If we’d known where the boys were being kept, who knew about them, how to find the Matrian command… then at least we would have had a start at figuring out how to rescue them before time was up. But we had no leads. And who knew, even if we did release her, that Desmond wouldn’t kill some of them anyway, just out of spite? She’d done it before. She wouldn’t waste all of her precious weaponized humans, I knew that, but she was not above sacrificing some of them just to make us suffer. The thought had us all running scared.
With this weighing on our shoulders, none of us had much free time. But we spent what we had recovering, preparing, planning, and watching each other to make sure none of us broke from the stress.
Violet visited her brother for the first day, and then helped him move into a nearby tent with Jay. She flew the drone around the countryside, looking for signs of the boys or other people to recruit into our small army. But if there were any refugees, she hadn’t found them yet. A part of me was beginning to believe that we wouldn’t find any—Mr. Kaplan was th
e last civilian I remembered seeing in what felt like forever, and he had been taken away by a Matrian patrol.
Violet had also been spending time with Cad, Margot, and their children. Eating meals with them was becoming a regular pastime for all of us, Jay, Tim, and myself included. It felt good to have those moments—Violet was continuing to strengthen her relationship with them, as we all were, really. Although at times, I found it hard not to think about Alejandro. I was worried about him, and I prayed he was safe. He and Jenny both.
Ms. Dale spent a majority of her time away from the camp, leaving in the early mornings and returning late into the night. She pressed farther each day, searching for a suitable base of operations and coming back with dozens of options, most of them rejected due to their location, lack of power or facilities, size, or proximity to the city. She was playing our move cautiously—not that I blamed her. With winter drawing ever closer, and the threat of snow looming, it was only a matter of time before, more than the Matrians, the weather itself began to threaten the lives of our people.
Amber avoided Owen like he was a plague bearer. She spent most of her time with Thomas, Jeff, or some of the other refugees who were interested in learning how to pilot the heloship. She’d said that she wanted there to be backup pilots in case anything happened to her, but honestly, I believed she cared more about her role being flexible, so she could be free to do fieldwork. I didn’t like it, but there was no arguing with her logic—or with Amber in general—so I let it go.
Between watching the radio channels, strategizing about Desmond and the boys, and keeping all our electronics working smoothly, Thomas continued working on the egg, studying the technology that held the embryo in stasis. Because it was in stasis, according to Thomas’ analysis of the thing. Frozen in time until it could be implanted in a surrogate. That was the highlight of his discoveries thus far, although the fact that he hadn’t learned much else didn’t seem to deter him from handwriting new reports and sticking them in with our personal files three times a day.
I also noticed Thomas trying to coax Owen into talking a few times. There was no telling what they actually discussed in the short exchanges. They mostly started with Thomas coming over, saying something, and then Owen moving away, leaving Thomas standing there with a sad slope to his shoulders. I admired his resilience. He never gave up, never wavered in wanting to be Owen’s friend, in spite of what he had done. He’d forgiven him. I envied that… that unconditional affection he held for his friend.
Owen kept his head down. He avoided most human contact, although Lynne and Morgan managed to get close to him from time to time. Never for long, not even for a meal, but it was there. In some ways, I was grateful for it. I hated the idea of him going through everything alone, trapped with the awareness of what he had done.
And then that silent anger would return—rush into me like a whipping whirlwind or the backdraft from a fire. It set a violent edge to my teeth, made me strain for air while my heart pounded hard against my ribs, as if it wanted to break free from my chest and throttle Owen itself. During those moments, I wanted to scream at him. I had put my trust in him, and he had used it to stab me, Violet, all of us, in the back. Because his selfish need for vengeance had overwhelmed his common sense.
I wasn’t objective enough to decide whether he needed to be punished. I couldn’t make up my mind.
So I worked through it, spending my time doing all the manual labor I could get my hands on. Helping with the latrine work or splitting cords of wood. I washed dishes and clothes with some of the women in the camp, listening in on the snippets of conversation, letting their words provide a distraction from the ongoing problem of what to do about Owen.
And when that stopped working, I turned to physical activity, waking up early to run around the camp and through the guard posts, just to keep them on their toes, before returning to our tent and running through sit-ups, push-ups, and various other strength-building exercises. It was a good distraction, and a familiar one.
In spite of everything I had been doing around camp, there was one thing above all that I both dreaded and looked forward to: my daily visits with Cody, the surly kid who’d made a habit of challenging my authority ever since we’d met back in The Green’s facility, and whom we’d brought back to our base along with Ian’s corpse after the incident at Desmond’s death camp.
We’d been keeping him in the barn. Its doors had been thrown wide open as I approached now, and several tables piled with equipment sat in front of the building. People were performing various tasks around the tables, from divvying up the inventory into three separate groups, to dissembling the guns for transport—there wasn’t anyone sitting idle. We were starting to divide the supplies, as it grew more and more likely we were going to have to splinter off into smaller groups for the winter.
I stepped around the chaos and into the barn, the old boards under my feet sagging slightly. It was several degrees cooler inside the barn than outside, since it didn’t get any good exposure from the sun. Inside, the smell of mold and musk filled the air, marking the old age of the structure.
Here, more of our people were fast at work, but it was an organized chaos, easy to navigate around. I headed for the back of the animal pens, to the largest one, where Cody was being kept. It had undergone some serious renovations since we had brought him there, in order to make the area feel more like a room and less like a stall in a barn.
I didn’t like that we couldn’t find some way to bring Cody into the house, but with Henrik’s convalescence (and his risk of infection), we just didn’t have the room. Which was why we had renovated this space, covering the walls with thin boards to prevent the draft and give him some semblance of privacy. I pushed open the door, the hinges creaking, and stepped into the lantern-lit room, a smile on my lips.
Dr. Arlan was in the middle of giving Cody the booster shot for the mild muscle relaxant we were administering to him. There had been a lot of debate on how to handle Cody when we had rescued him, and it had been a hard sell all around. Violet and I were adamant about giving him some semblance of freedom, but Ms. Dale was adamant about keeping the members of the camp safe. She wasn’t wrong to insist on the measures—at the end of the day, Cody didn’t want to be with us. From his perspective, we had kidnapped him, and we were the enemy. So, compromises had to be made, and in order to circumnavigate his enhanced abilities, we had agreed to drug him.
I hated it, but I understood that it gave people—not just Ms. Dale, Amber, or Thomas, but the entire camp—some peace of mind when it came to Cody. I just wished that translated into people being more open and less guarded around him.
“Hey, Cody,” I said with a wide smile. “You ready to go for our walk?”
Dr. Arlan pulled the needle out of Cody’s arm and set it down on the tray balanced on his knees. “All done,” he said affectionately, as he stood up and moved over to the small desk in the corner. I watched him go, smiling at the painting hanging on the wall just over it. The walls were a bit worn, and honestly, sad-looking under the dim glow emitted by the lanterns distributed about the room. Jay or Tim must’ve found it in the stuff we had taken out of the den to make room for Desmond, and hung it up for Cody.
There was a rap at the door and then it pushed open, revealing Jay, Tim and Samuel the dog, who barked when he spotted me and bounded over, his tail wagging. I knelt, and immediately Samuel lay down and rolled over onto his back, presenting his belly to me. I scratched his stomach a few times and looked over to see Cody staring at me, a sullen expression in his eyes.
“I don’t want to walk,” he said.
I smiled at him. “That’s okay. We can play a game. I’m pretty sure there’s a deck of cards floating around.”
“It’ll be fun,” added Jay, leaning into the room. “Although the forest is beautiful right now—the trees have all pretty much lost their leaves.”
Cody’s eyes flicked between us, and he gave a reluctant sigh before standing up. I watched him put on
his jacket from my position on the floor, still rubbing Samuel’s belly. He zipped his coat up and then walked past me, burying his hands in his pockets. Jay and Tim stepped aside to let the young boy pass, and then turned to follow.
I lingered a moment, slowly rising to my feet. “He asked about Desmond today?”
Dr. Arlan sat down his pen, and sighed. I turned to see him leaning back in his chair. “It’ll pass,” he said after a moment. “Honestly, I don’t even acknowledge the question anymore, and neither should you.”
Frowning, I nodded, and turned to follow the boys, thrusting my own hands in my pockets. I trailed behind them as Jay and Tim cut through the chaos outside and toward the house, aiming for the bit of forest resting just behind it. Dr. Arlan’s recommendation didn’t sit well with me—but then again, it could have just been personal for me. It was hard to tell.
Jay led the way, pushing through the lower bare branches and making sure there was a clear path for Cody. I eventually caught up to them, and we continued to hike in relative silence through the forest. It was beautiful. The red, gold, and yellow leaves were strewn on the forest floor like a thick carpet that rustled together as we walked through it.
Samuel raced through the leaves, his legs kicking them up as he ran back and forth across the trail. Sometimes he’d spook a rabbit and take off after it, barking loudly. The rabbits always seemed to slip away, but I didn’t think he honestly wanted to hurt them, given how wildly his tail waved back and forth as he ran. He just found joy in the chase. I only wished I could be as carefree.
We eventually reached a clearing, and Tim slipped off his backpack and pulled out some water bottles and two cans of peaches. I felt a little guilty as I popped them open—peaches were Violet’s favorite—but they also doubled as a treat for Cody, so I doubted she would mind.
The Gender Plan Page 10