The Gender Plan (The Gender Game #6)

He’d been following me, protecting me, just like he’d always done.

I opened my mouth to warn him, but then Desmond stepped into the doorframe, her back to me, blocking most of my view. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see Solomon’s, his eyes staring at the sight before him. I had time to wonder if he’d seen Desmond since he took her berserker pill—if he still remembered her as the leader of the Liberators, the woman whose cause he’d given his humanity fighting—

“Solomon—” I began, not sure what I was going to say.

Then Desmond made a snarling noise in front of me, her arm jerking up, and gunshots sounded—once, twice, a third time. Solomon stepped back, his hand going to his stomach. “No!” I found myself shouting. She was going to kill him. I looked around for something, anything—

Solomon roared angrily, the confusion on his face blossoming into pure rage, and I heard his footsteps as he moved forward. Desmond shot twice more, and then grunted as he slammed into her. I rolled up and over the guard’s body as he moved past me, carrying Desmond by the waist with two hands.

“Solomon, wait!” I shouted, but it was too late. Without pause or thought, he pitched her into the black space created by the open bay door.

Her scream quickly faded, practically disappearing in a second. Solomon stood there for a moment, his chest heaving, and then spat into the open space after her. He scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand before slowly turning around. He locked eyes with me and blinked. Lowering his hand, he flashed me a crooked smile, and then tumbled forward onto his chest, landing hard, a wet glisten beginning to pool under him in the moonlight slanting in from the ripped-off bay door. He’d been shot more than three times. He was going to bleed to death, and fast.

I sat up, ignoring the aches and pains in my wrist, shoulder, and back, fumbling through the guard’s pockets, my fingers feeling too fast and too clumsy. “Please tell me Desmond gave you the key,” I whispered under my breath as I searched. My fingers brushed against something metal in the pocket of her chest, and I pulled out a ring of keys, trying not to think about how there was no longer a pilot in control of the heloship. One crisis at a time. I searched through them until I found the one that unlocked the cuff, and then snapped the open handcuff around one of the built-in handholds on the bench.

I verified that she was still breathing, and then reached over her to grab one of a set of emergency flashlights out of its mount on the wall. Clicking it on, I scanned the floor and quickly recovered the warden’s gun—so she couldn’t have it—and then moved into the cockpit.

The chair was lying on its side, the pilot still strapped to it. I straddled the seat to check on her. She also had a pulse, but there was blood coming out of her nose, and her arm was pinned awkwardly between the heavy metal chair and the grated floor. It was definitely broken.

I stood up and moved over to the cockpit, wincing when I saw that most of the screens had been smashed in Solomon’s attack. I spotted the comms the pilot was wearing dangling from a cord overhead, and slipped the heavy headphones over my ears.

“Mayday,” I started to transmit, and then ripped the comms away from my head as the sharp squeal of feedback transmitted painfully in my ear. Looking at it, I realized the microphone was cracked and barely holding together.

I leaned over and checked out the window, surprised to see that we were now higher up than I had thought, and farther away than I had believed possible. The river was rapidly disappearing behind us, and I recognized some of the buildings below us as belonging to Matrus. It seemed so strange to see the peaceful, tidy streets, lights on, but with very little movement.

Everything calm. Peaceful. Still. Such an unfair contrast to the other side.

I put it out of my mind, and turned to the horizon. The navigation LED, which remained intact, read east, and I realized this direction would take us deep into The Outlands, a place no one had ever returned from. I couldn’t even wrap my head around that, so pushed it aside and focused on what I could change. Another glance through the window told me the path was clear—as far as I could tell in the low light of the moon—but it was hard to know how long that would last.

I stared for a moment longer, and then grabbed the first-aid kit from the bracket next to the bathroom. My assessment of the situation was this: I was alive and conscious. We were headed into unknown territory. I didn’t know whether the heloship was still running because it’d been set on autopilot or an emergency homing protocol, or if it was randomly going to sputter and die at any moment. The radio was fried, the controls panels busted, the pilot unconscious, and Solomon was bleeding out from multiple gunshot wounds in the bay.

“Basically,” I whispered as I knelt next to Solomon and opened up the kit, “we are royally screwed.”





38





Viggo





The bang of a fist on metal came again, and I motioned everyone away from the door. I heard Alejandro hissing, and glanced back to see him trying to pull out the revolver he carried in a thigh holster. He jerked it out with a gasp, panting, and I saw the agony he was in.

I leaned over and slipped Mags’ arm around my neck, sliding my arm under her knees. I lifted her up and then began backing away from the door. Harry and Gregory were two steps ahead of me.

“Cruz, we got hostiles on the door.” The earbud was silent as I motioned for the three of us to stop halfway in. I moved over to where Alejandro was propped up in a wide and deep break in the wall that functioned as a server room. I stepped over him and carefully set Mags down as the thudding on the door intensified, growing more and more insistent.

“We are retreating, my friend. Several more came in and climbed the walls to us. We are trying to find a way around.” Cruz’s voice held deep regret and shame.

My stomach dropped as I absorbed his message—no backup from that end. I heard the metal groan and turned, making my way back over to where Harry and Gregory were crouched on the floor. I moved in between them and pulled the strap off my rifle, moving in front of the control panel.

Beside us, I heard Tim humming under his breath as his fingers flew over the controls, inputting the codes to activate the purge. I glanced over at him, nestled in the alcove, confused about why he would be humming at a time like this, and then noticed that he wasn’t taking time to check the instruction sheet Thomas had made for us. What he was humming were the instructions: he must have memorized them.