The Gender End (The Gender Game #7)

“Get over here, you two. You’re who we’ve been waiting for.”

“What’d Maxen do?” I asked as I moved up to the table, ignoring the grins on Amber and Owen’s faces as I yawned again. Thomas sat at the table a few seats down from them, his eyes focused on his modified handheld, his posture tense and threatened, not having even looked up at our entrance.

“Well, for lack of a better word, he escaped,” Ms. Dale announced, her mouth tightening.

Thomas didn’t look up from his handheld. “With a heloship, several cases of guns and ammo, and—”

“Wait,” I said, interrupting him as the seriousness of the situation began to sink in. Amber and Owen seemed to be having a joke at our expense, but now that I noticed it, Ms. Dale and Henrik’s faces were grim, tight. They could have gotten even less sleep than Violet and I had. “He took all of that?”

“He also stole several of my data chips with a few programs I was working on,” Thomas said, and I felt myself sliding into a chair at the table, too surprised to stand anymore.

“How?” asked Violet around a mouthful of stale bread she’d picked up from the table, rage simmering in her voice. “That man is a complete twit! How did he pull this off?”

There was a pause in which I could feel all the built-up resentment toward the man rising to a boiling point.

“He had help,” Ms. Dale said.

Ice flashed through my veins, quickly replaced by the rushing of a dangerous rage.

“Was it one of our—”

“No, not that,” Henrik said. “It was the Patrian wardens. One or more of them must have been gathering intelligence for him—studying our programs, the guard patterns, making a plan. From what I’ve seen, Maxen certainly couldn’t have thought this through on his own.”

“Do we know which ones—” I began to ask, but Ms. Dale cut me off.

“They all left with him,” she said, “so it hardly matters.”

I thought of Mark Travers—who had been so glad to see me—and anger churned in my belly.

“I was careless,” Thomas said, his voice low and dark, and I realized that the small man was also upset—he rarely showed so much emotion. “I carried on conversations about what I was developing with group members while some of the wardens were listening, instead of insisting they leave. I took a gamble. I thought it might increase their chances of trusting our command if it was clear we had superior technology.”

My head was beginning to ache at how much thought Thomas put into almost every action. Henrik waved the man off, and I was glad when he said, “The blame is on all of us, Thomas. We were watching Maxen, but none of us kept as close an eye on the wardens. We assumed they would support us because of the king.”

“It’s worse than just that,” Ms. Dale said. “One of them might have been in contact with the Porteque gang, too.”

“I’m scanning the records of our handhelds for unknown numbers right now,” Thomas said. “Another thing that I should have thought of—”

“Thomas, nobody is perfect,” Violet chided him, sitting down at the table, her bread finished, her eyes sharp and alert with worry. “Why would we think they’re joining forces? This still doesn’t explain how he escaped.”

“We had a patrol heading out at three this morning. They were going to do flybys in concert with a ground unit we’ve been sending out each night to make sure everyone’s safe and no one is trying to loot,” said Henrik, the look on his face positively glum. “It was a strong time to make a move—nearly all of our best fighters were taking a break from the last few days, and there was only a skeleton crew on guard.”

Ms. Dale picked up the narrative without even seeming to notice that she was finishing Henrik’s sentence. “Just when the patrol was changing, members of the Porteque gang launched three separate attacks, at three separate locations, drawing the original ground crew into a firefight and separating them from our heloship team. Thomas summoned another heloship to help put out the fires, and the ship left, but… it didn’t get to its assigned destination. We found the original crew tied up and stuffed into a storage room after the ground unit reported their backup wasn’t arriving. By the time more of us had woken up to guess what had happened, the king and the wardens were long gone—and the gang members conveniently stopped their assault and retreated very soon after.”

“This kind of coordination among factions of the Porteque gang is highly unusual, especially given current circumstances,” Thomas said. “The likelihood that their attack was a strategy meant to distract us at a moment when we had the fewest active troops is… Well, I’ll say it’s very, very high.”

I cursed and leaned forward. “What could he possibly be thinking?” I asked no one in particular. The crown had never before allied with the Porteque gang—even the king wasn’t crazy enough to support those kidnapping, brainwashing thieves. If Maxen had stooped to using Patrus’ most scum-of-the-earth faction, he was more desperate than any of us had given him credit for.

A voice at the door surprised me with an answer to my rhetorical question. “Why should we care?” I blinked in surprise, turning and seeing Mags, her hair sticking every which way and her uniform disheveled, as though she’d just rolled out of bed and come down here. She stalked through the doorway. “Sorry I didn’t report sooner,” she said, “but I didn’t want to interrupt the briefing. Anyway, the king’s got what—five men with him? He’s not exactly a fighting force. I mean, the heloship is big, but we’ve got eleven more. He’s probably just running while he can, before he gets ousted and has to face the people on the street. He doesn’t have a lot of loyal subjects left.”

I frowned. A voice in me wanted her to be right, but my gut was telling me Maxen had a plan. He was a coward, and if there was one thing cowards did best, it was lash out blindly when pushed into a corner. But there wasn’t much we could do, so we would just have to wait and see.

It seemed the king wasn’t keen on waiting: his move came much sooner than any of us could have anticipated, only two hours later. The group of us had had breakfast and too much coffee by then and were deep into discussions about our next move as sunlight grew steadily outside. Drew and Logan had joined us, one coming back from his patrol duties, one from his rest hours—so we were all there when Thomas’ handheld made a horrible noise that none of us had heard before.

“What the hell is that?” Logan demanded, slopping coffee everywhere as Thomas stared intently at the screen until the sound shut off.

“It’s the default emergency notification sound from my program for broadcasting to handhelds,” Thomas said, his voice going even flatter than usual as he turned the screen around to show us. King Maxen’s name was flashing on it. Thomas stood up and moved over to the room’s large viewing screen, jacking in the handheld and turning on the screen.