The Gender Fall (The Gender Game #5)

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.