The Gender End (The Gender Game #7)

“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.





26





Viggo