The Gender End by Bella Forrest (the giving tree read aloud TXT) 📕

spot too many, and I would be damned if I was going to take that sort of comment at the expense of someone too ignorant to know what she was talking about.

“Maybe your sister and all of those soldiers shouldn’t have been posted all around the city to keep people trapped while your homicidal queen had even more soldiers poisoning the water supply. Maybe then, she’d still be alive—she might anyway! My people don’t particularly enjoy killing.” I knew I shouldn’t have said it as soon as it came out of my mouth, but being tired and angry was making my mouth move faster than my brain could keep up.

“You are just like those women, those Porteque women we read about in the files,” Belinda hissed. “Trying to serve your Patrian man on his mad little conquest and stop us from helping those people!”

I faltered, surprised at the sick and disgusting comparison—one so disgusting that it made me pause and consider, for a fraction of a moment. What if I was? I shuddered, remembering the one who had taunted me so long ago, and met Belinda’s gaze with a fury.

“Never compare me to those women,” I said stonily, a violent rage blossoming to life under my skin. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“ENOUGH!” Kathryn shouted. “Belinda, I’m sure Francis is fine. Violet… I’m sure you feel you’re on the right side of things. But neither of those things matters right now! What matters right now is that we need to turn this bird around, and get home!”

Her words—the same words I had been trying to get into them both not too long ago—slammed into me. Belinda and I had baited each other, and I’d lost sight of the big picture in the process, letting my pride get the better of me.

Not that I regretted saying it. Nor did it stop me from wanting to plant a boot in her face. But at the same time, I hated all the death on my hands. As much as I blamed Elena, I also blamed myself. I had pulled the trigger. I had used grenades. I had pushed a man off a flying motorcycle, and I had set a woman on fire… every time making a choice—them or me.

And I had nightmares. Awful, terrible things. And I knew I would carry them with me forever. Yet if that was the price I had to pay to put an end to the madness Elena had caused, then so be it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, after taking a long moment to calm myself. “I sincerely hope we did not kill your sister.”

Belinda’s mouth tightened, and she nodded. “I’m not sorry, but I’ll… try not to bring up the war.”

It would have to do. Kathryn nodded to us both, and then sighed. “Now that’s over with, let’s see what we can do about that interface.”

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5

Violet

Twenty minutes of brain-wracking later, I stood over Belinda as she carefully peeled away a wire’s plastic casing, using a knife I had provided from my boot. Belinda clearly hadn’t been happy about that, but hadn’t commented. I was trying to keep myself awake as we went through the mind-numbing task of attaching the multitude of wires to the handheld. Silence seemed to be the best way forward after our brush with violence, and I, for one, was grateful to contribute.

She carefully pulled the wire, freeing a bit more slack from the panel it ran on, and then began to twist the exposed wire around a metal contact under the handheld’s hard plastic case. I dutifully held out the wire solder tool—a white tool with a metal ball at the end that emitted heat when the button was pressed, warming the metal end and melting the wire to the contacts on the back of the handheld.

I was glad I had thought of it. Kathryn said otherwise the only option would’ve been to land manually (something she had added she wasn’t sure she could do without the computer to read elevation), but it had taken some time to find it. And now, it seemed it was going to take time to get the computer interfaced with the handheld.

“Violet, I need you to flip the page.” It took a moment to register, but I leaned over to flip the page on the flight manual lying in front of Kathryn, ignoring the small stab of anger at how surly her tone was. Maybe it was petty, but it wasn’t like I liked this situation any more than she did.

I looked up at her and realized she was sweating again, and I could tell the pain was beginning to overcome the patch I had given her. She fought through it, so I had to give her some respect—which meant I needed to let this irritation go. It could be that she was so focused on trying to carry through that she didn’t have time for politeness. And I would almost buy into that, too, if she weren’t giving the instructions to Belinda with all sorts of polite words, like “please” and “thank you.”

As she began to read the next bit of instructions out loud to Belinda, prefacing them with a “can you,” I refrained from rolling my eyes in annoyance and moved away a few steps.

A part of me was just frustrated that I wasn’t doing anything at the moment. We needed two good hands to get the handheld interfaced, which meant Belinda, and Kathryn was the only one who could quickly decipher the more complicated terms in the manual and deliver the instructions in a clear way. So until they were finished, I was sort of a third wheel. I had managed to do a quick inventory of our food, water, and any other supplies that might be useful, which had been frustratingly small, and then checked on Solomon. His condition was the same, as best as I could tell. God, I wished Dr. Tierney was here.

Scratch that—I wished we were back there.