The Gender Plan (The Gender Game #6)

“I got a group pinned down behind some pipes by the west entrance,” Amber shouted over the din, gunfire blasting in her mic, indicating—I hoped—that she was firing. “But my team is keeping them in place.”


I finally got Cruz out, unceremoniously dropping him on the pavement. I grabbed Tim’s attention, signaling to him, and we switched places. He started tending to Cruz’s wound, and I knelt by the trunk of the car, peering around the corner.

The dead littered the white concrete concourse, and I wished I could have been happy to see that it was more Matrian forces than our own—but ours were there too. Men and women in dark clothes, lying still, blood seeping out from their cooling forms. I knew most of their names, and I determined that if I lived through this, I would learn the rest of them, too. It was a bitter consolation.

I looked past them, my eyes focusing on the metal door beyond. Our entrance. Several women were holding the door, hiding behind industrial barrels they’d hastily stacked around it. Muzzle fire came from small gaps in between them, and they had built them up to converge to a small point in between. It was well defended, and gauging by the muzzle fire, they had more than enough people and guns to hold it for a small span of time.

Time we don’t have, and manpower we can’t afford, I thought, coming to a snap decision. “Wait here,” I told Tim, and I peeled away, heading for the car we had just abandoned back on the hill.

I raced around it, noting the bullet holes that bit into the front of the car, and pulled Drew’s dead man out, laying him on the pavement next to it as respectfully as I could, given the circumstances. I slammed the rear door shut and then climbed in, closing the door behind me.

The keys dangled from the ignition, and after a quick prayer, I twisted them. The car shuddered, the engine struggling to catch. I held the key down for a second and then, on impulse, tapped the gas. The engine roared to life.

Throwing the car into gear, I slammed my foot onto the gas pedal and cut the wheel hard, turning on the inner axis. The tires squealed as I swung right, and I cut it back to the left, swerving past Tim and Cruz’s car and aiming directly for the barrels, squeezing between them and the massive black pipe on the other side.

There was a moment’s lull in the gunfire as their barricade came into view, and then a woman stepped out into the gap between the barrels, a rifle leveled at me. I grabbed the handle and threw open the door, throwing myself out of the speeding vehicle just as she opened fire.

I landed hard on my shoulder, rolling across the pavement as the car plowed into the barricade. I couldn’t see it, but I heard the shouts and the crash of barrels and the imploding sound of its mechanisms breaking. By the time the world had stopped spinning and I had come back to myself, Tim was kneeling over me, his face taking up my entire frame of view.

My vision began to jerk to the right, and it took me a moment to realize that he was slapping me lightly on the cheek… and that he had been doing it for a while, judging by the concern lining the young man’s lips.

I sat up, my shoulder aching fiercely, and allowed Tim to help me up, rotating the sore limb a few times to determine how damaged it was. It wasn’t bad, all things considered, but I couldn’t turn my neck as far as I would have liked, and was betting I had deeply bruised the muscle. I gritted my teeth, knowing I had to move on. As long as I didn’t let it stiffen, it should hold up through the battle.

The car had smashed against the barrels, scattering them into the Matrian forces. One woman—the one who had fired on me—had rolled over the hood, but the others were down, barrels on top of them. The car blocked the door, but I could see Alejandro and several other people pushing it back, while Mags darted around, checking to see if the Matrian soldiers were dead or wounded.

I pushed aside the feeling of weariness and hobbled over to the entrance, preparing myself to give orders and get inside.





32





Violet





Morgan downshifted quickly, swerving left around a still burning car in the middle of the street. The tires made short squealing sounds as she cut the wheel back around, rounding out the turn, and I found myself gripping the overhead handle just to maintain my balance.

“You know, for a girl who’s done very little fieldwork, you drive like a pro,” Owen said as the turn concluded. “Seriously, how’d you learn to drive like that?”

Morgan’s attention was fully dedicated to the road, her eyes darting around as she kept a firm hand on the wheel. “Desmond cross-trained me a lot. I guess she really didn’t know what to do with me, so it was train on this, with that… over and over again. Until I got relegated to this sort of… security guard slash trainer.” She shrugged, and I chuckled.

“Wasn’t what you were hoping for?” I asked.

“When is life ever what you were hoping for?” she retorted bitterly.

I started to reply when the sound of gunfire blared through the street and bullets clinked against the side of our car. I couldn’t help but jerk down in the seat, even though I knew I was overreacting. We had taken one of Ashabee’s special cars, a small vehicle with top-of-the-line body armor and bulletproof windows.

The gunshots continued, on either side of the vehicle, and Morgan bit off a curse as the window went gray. We were driving into smoke. She slowed the car immediately, reducing our speed to a crawl. “It’s insane out here,” she said as she inched forward, trying to pick a path through the swirling darkness, the headlights barely illuminating our path.

I moved back in my seat. The gunfire was still happening, but behind us, and definitely moving away from us, possibly even faster than we were moving. The haze was thick, obscuring most everything in soot and shadow. I peered through the glass, hissing as a dark shape passed close by the window, my hand tightening on the gun.

“Can you pick up the pace, please?” asked Lynne, her voice taking on a high-pitched quality. She was nervous, not that I could blame her, and—

“Violet?” Thomas’ voice in my ear cut my thought off before it had fully formed.

I pressed my fingers together. “What’s up, Thomas?”

“I got good news, bad news, and worse news.”

“What’s the good news?” I immediately asked, and then regretted it. Amber always saved it for last, and maybe it was better that way.

“I found Desmond, or rather, where she was as of two minutes ago. She’s definitely making her way to the plant, and you’re right on her tail.”

I let everyone know the good news, and Morgan smiled—more a baring of her teeth—and said, “Good.”

“What’s the bad and the worse news?” I asked.

“The bad news is she’s on a safer road than you, so you might be delayed. The worse news is that the rioting in your area has gone from bad to worse.”