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

scrap of fabric had been tied around his midsection, the front saturated with blood. I was moving before I could even register it, my hands going out to take the young man’s weight off Morgan and support him.

“April!” I shouted over my shoulder as I gently turned him over.

Jay’s wide brown eyes looked up at me, his lips quivering. Sweat and water droplets streaked his face, and I could see how much pain he was in by his intense grimace and labored breathing. Worse than that, though, was a kind of numb, dejected, absolute misery in his eyes.

“She shot me,” he whispered hoarsely, and I could see how much effort it was taking him just to talk. My stomach churned seeing the young man so pale and hurt… and I felt a wash of rage coming over me, as well as ice-cold fear. Where was Violet?

“Who did?” I asked. “What happened?”

I looked up at Morgan for an answer; her mouth was pinched, her green eyes hard and angry. “Desmond shot him. It was a mess.” She met my gaze and faltered for a moment. “She and some wardens captured Violet and took her onto a heloship. But Solomon was following us. I saw him jump onto the heloship from the top of the plant. He’s… He’s been helping us, so maybe he’s helping Violet? I-I hope he’s helping her. I couldn’t, I didn’t have time, I was fighting my—uh—” She faltered again, her head shaking.

Jay coughed, and I looked down at him as he took in another shuddering breath. Tim was kneeling next to him, holding his hand over Jay’s wound, his silver eyes worried. “Tell him who you are,” Jay said, addressing Morgan. “Trust him.”

I looked from Jay to Morgan and back again, but Jay was focused solely on Morgan. Despite the severity of his injury, his face was firm—and dead serious. A small hand pressed insistently on my shoulder, and I gently lay Jay down as April pushed me out of the way. She ordered Jay not to move as I stepped back a few feet and looked at Cody and Morgan.

“What is Jay talking about, Morgan?”

It was Cody who answered, his voice oddly hollow. “She’s… a princess from Matrus. She killed her twin sister.”

I looked down at the young boy, and back to Morgan, wondering if it could possibly be true. It was all so very much to take in. Violet was either in enemy hands or Solomon was on board—and both ideas were awful for completely different reasons. Morgan was a princess… and had killed her twin? I was going to need the story on that. But there were so many things that needed my attention. Jay was wounded, Cody looked lost and broken, Alejandro and Mags were injured, and… My mind kept going to sickening places, where Violet was already dead. I had to go after her.

“I’m nothing like my sisters,” announced Morgan flatly, interrupting my thoughts. The look of sheer disgust on her face made it hard for me to believe she was lying.

Blinking at her, I nodded, and then turned away, needing a minute to sort through what I could do something about and what I couldn’t. The injured were going to be cared for by people more qualified than me, so that was off my list. Morgan could wait. We just needed to notify Ms. Dale and Henrik about who she was, but if what Cody was saying was true—and at this point, I doubted the kid was cogent enough to think of a lie—then that meant that whatever her background, she was definitely on our side. So she could stay.

“How long ago did they take Violet?” I asked, turning around.

Morgan’s brows drew together over her green eyes, and she checked her watch, her mouth moving slightly. “About… I don’t know, twenty, twenty-three minutes ago?”

“Okay.” I squeezed my fingers together, activating my microphone. “Jeff, how much fuel is left in the heloship, exactly?”

There was a pause, and then Jeff’s voice filled the line. “The readout says five percent, Viggo, but I’m not quite sure what that means in terms of flight time.”

“It means about twenty minutes of flight, probably less,” supplied Amber’s voice in our ears, a strange reminder that half of what I was saying was still being broadcast to members of all our teams. “What’s going on?”

“Violet was taken by Desmond on a heloship, heading…” I looked at Morgan expectantly, and her frown deepened, her eyes anxious.

“East,” she supplied.

“East,” I repeated into the comm. “Solomon was seen on the heloship as well, so there’s a chance he got in and caused some damage. We need to get to a Patrian airfield, and find some fuel, so we can track the heloship down.”

“You can’t,” replied a rich masculine voice, and I recognized it as Logan Vox, one of the rebel leaders we had recruited to take out the soldiers at the plant. “It’s the reason I went into hiding and started recruiting for the rebellion. The Matrians started collecting pilots and dismantling aircraft. Our storehouses for parts—fuel, tools, munitions… they were all cleared out. It’ll take at least a few days to repair the heloships, if we can even find the parts we need to repair them. It’d be too late at that point.”

“Well,” said Ms. Dale imperiously, her voice firm and commanding. “We’d better figure something out. Violet Bates is the reason we’re all here and in this fight, boys and girls. She’s the one who cracked this conspiracy wide open, and we owe it to her to go after her. So let’s think of a way.”

As if on cue, a car roared up toward us. Alarmed, I turned and yanked my gun around, my heart pounding uncomfortably, only to relax my aim when I saw Owen throwing open the door. Blood streamed from a small cut over his eyebrow, but the rest of him seemed relatively unscathed.

“Viggo,” he shouted when he spotted me. “There’s something I have to—”

“Madre de