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

the “unconscious” guard’s foot whipping sideways. I sidestepped, hopping up on the opposite bench and back down again, over her leg. I yanked out my gun, as casually as I could, as I looked at the larger woman, my exhaustion disappearing behind a rush of adrenaline and caution.

Her eyes opened to slits, and she sat upright, using her cuffed hand as a brace to pick herself off the ground. “It doesn’t matter that you escaped,” she said, smoothing back the wisps of hair that had slipped free of her neat bun with her other hand. “We’ll catch you again, and this time you’ll pay for your crimes.”

I gaped at her. Was she slow, or just that determined? Either way, I wasn’t having it. “Before you get all high and mighty issuing threats, I encourage you to think about the position we’re in.”

The warden—her sky-blue uniform marked her as a royal guard—looked around the bay, seemingly seeing it for the first time. My eyes drifted to the patch over her breast pocket, where the surname Carver was embroidered. The insignia above it marked her as a lieutenant.

“What happened?” she asked.

Glancing at the cockpit, or rather, the damaged remains of the cockpit, I sighed. “Desmond is dead. The controls to the ship are damaged, and we’re flying into the middle of nowhere, and have been for the last”—I consulted my watch, trying to remember the last time I had looked at it—“hour or so. I’m on my way to wake up the pilot, hopefully, so that she can help us get out of this mess.”

The woman squinted up at me, a frown line creasing the space between her thick eyebrows. “You’re lying.”

I resisted another sigh, unsurprised by her mistrust, and considered my options. Frankly, they all sucked. Tucking the gun back into the band of my pants, I pulled a tiny silver key out of my pocket—the one I had gotten out of her pocket a few hours earlier, while she was truly unconscious—and tossed it at her. She made no move to catch it, and it bounced off her chest and landed with a ping on the hard metal floor of the bay.

“I don’t have time to earn your trust,” I politely informed her. “So that’s the key to your handcuffs. Use it or don’t, I don’t care, but if you become a threat to me or make this mess worse, I will shoot you.” I made to leave, and then paused, as if a thought had occurred to me. Honestly, I was playing with dramatic timing on this one, but hopefully it would garner me a small amount of support from a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, an enemy. “Oh, and I tossed the rest of the guns overboard, so feel free to waste your time and search for one. Or don’t. I really don’t care.”

Indifference would work, or at least I hoped it would. With luck, it would make her more likely to believe the severity of our situation, but also make her cautious about trying to attack me. Truth be told, I didn’t want to have to kill either of the women on board. It wasn’t their fault they viewed me as a criminal—they’d been fed nothing but lies. Not that it bothered me how they looked at me. I had been a criminal before. But it was much harder to take knowing that this time, they were condemning me for crimes I hadn’t committed.

Anyway, none of that mattered now, and I needed to show them that it didn’t, that we had to put aside our politics and differences to get a grip on this situation. We were going to have to work together. I didn’t know much about heloships, but I damn well knew there was no way it was flying, landing, or anything as it was. I needed Lieutenant Carver to be up and walking. I needed her to not be a burden, but to actually help me of her own free will, because I wanted to get home alive. That meant I had to give a little early on, so that when things got hard, she’d hopefully be more willing to work with me.

I left the warden to her own devices and finished making my way into the cockpit. The pilot was where I had left her, still belted into her seat. Her seat, however, was lying opposite of the cockpit, just a few feet from the bathroom door, tipped on its side. The back of it was to me, but I could see her legs sticking out from the seat cushion, and they didn’t seem to have moved.

Carefully and cautiously, I stepped around her. Her eyes were closed, but the warden in the cargo bay had been pretending before. Yet she hadn’t been injured, and the pilot undoubtedly was—her left forearm was clearly broken, and there was a gash in her forehead. It had stopped bleeding some time ago, but dried blood was caked to her forehead, trailing down her nose and under her eye. The patch on her chest revealed her last name to be Durnell.

Reaching out, I took her pulse, relieved to find it still beating strongly, and then opened the first-aid kit. I sifted through the packets, and found the one marked with a hollow red square. Checking the list on the back of the lid, I confirmed it was the ammonia inhalant, and then cracked it open. Immediately a smell that reminded me of feline urine hit my nose, and my eyes began to water.

I held the packet under the pilot’s nose, and her eyes twitched, and then snapped open. She jerked against the belt buckling her in, and then cried out in pain as she jostled her arm.

“Easy,” I said soothingly, placing the opened packet into the box. The ammonia smell was still heavy, but it would fade quickly. “Take it easy.”

“What happened?” she asked, panic thick in her voice. “Ah, God… My head.”

“Wait, I have