The Gender End (The Gender Game #7)

“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 authorized 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.”

Morgan trailed off, expelling a shuddering breath. “I had no idea what to do, especially after I found out that’s what Mother meant by helping us—using those children to refine us. Strip away the bad so only the good could remain. I never asked her to do that! I didn’t find out until after she died. And I was afraid to act. Desmond could have turned me over to Elena at any moment, made me into another of my sister’s pawns again. She held that over me, too. As long as I was her good little operative and didn’t say a word, she kept me out of my sister’s hands. Until you guys came along and blew her cover with the rest of the Liberators. But you know that part.”

She met our gazes, her eyes flashing. “So yeah. That’s my story.”

I looked around the room, trying to gauge everyone’s reactions. I, for one, felt nauseated by her tale. I had never once considered how Elena might have been when she was younger. Truthfully, I couldn’t even wrap my head around the idea that she had ever been young. She seemed too sinister to ever have any qualities of childhood ascribed to her, even in her appearance.

“Thank you for telling your story,” said Amber. “I know how hard that can be.”