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

“The blame is on all of us, Thomas. We were watching Maxen, but none of us kept as close an eye on the wardens. We assumed they would support us because of the king.”

“It’s worse than just that,” Ms. Dale said. “One of them might have been in contact with the Porteque gang, too.”

“I’m scanning the records of our handhelds for unknown numbers right now,” Thomas said. “Another thing that I should have thought of—”

“Thomas, nobody is perfect,” Violet chided him, sitting down at the table, her bread finished, her eyes sharp and alert with worry. “Why would we think they’re joining forces? This still doesn’t explain how he escaped.”

“We had a patrol heading out at three this morning. They were going to do flybys in concert with a ground unit we’ve been sending out each night to make sure everyone’s safe and no one is trying to loot,” said Henrik, the look on his face positively glum. “It was a strong time to make a move—nearly all of our best fighters were taking a break from the last few days, and there was only a skeleton crew on guard.”

Ms. Dale picked up the narrative without even seeming to notice that she was finishing Henrik’s sentence. “Just when the patrol was changing, members of the Porteque gang launched three separate attacks, at three separate locations, drawing the original ground crew into a firefight and separating them from our heloship team. Thomas summoned another heloship to help put out the fires, and the ship left, but… it didn’t get to its assigned destination. We found the original crew tied up and stuffed into a storage room after the ground unit reported their backup wasn’t arriving. By the time more of us had woken up to guess what had happened, the king and the wardens were long gone—and the gang members conveniently stopped their assault and retreated very soon after.”

“This kind of coordination among factions of the Porteque gang is highly unusual, especially given current circumstances,” Thomas said. “The likelihood that their attack was a strategy meant to distract us at a moment when we had the fewest active troops is… Well, I’ll say it’s very, very high.”

I cursed and leaned forward. “What could he possibly be thinking?” I asked no one in particular. The crown had never before allied with the Porteque gang—even the king wasn’t crazy enough to support those kidnapping, brainwashing thieves. If Maxen had stooped to using Patrus’ most scum-of-the-earth faction, he was more desperate than any of us had given him credit for.

A voice at the door surprised me with an answer to my rhetorical question. “Why should we care?” I blinked in surprise, turning and seeing Mags, her hair sticking every which way and her uniform disheveled, as though she’d just rolled out of bed and come down here. She stalked through the doorway. “Sorry I didn’t report sooner,” she said, “but I didn’t want to interrupt the briefing. Anyway, the king’s got what—five men with him? He’s not exactly a fighting force. I mean, the heloship is big, but we’ve got eleven more. He’s probably just running while he can, before he gets ousted and has to face the people on the street. He doesn’t have a lot of loyal subjects left.”

I frowned. A voice in me wanted her to be right, but my gut was telling me Maxen had a plan. He was a coward, and if there was one thing cowards did best, it was lash out blindly when pushed into a corner. But there wasn’t much we could do, so we would just have to wait and see.

It seemed the king wasn’t keen on waiting: his move came much sooner than any of us could have anticipated, only two hours later. The group of us had had breakfast and too much coffee by then and were deep into discussions about our next move as sunlight grew steadily outside. Drew and Logan had joined us, one coming back from his patrol duties, one from his rest hours—so we were all there when Thomas’ handheld made a horrible noise that none of us had heard before.

“What the hell is that?” Logan demanded, slopping coffee everywhere as Thomas stared intently at the screen until the sound shut off.

“It’s the default emergency notification sound from my program for broadcasting to handhelds,” Thomas said, his voice going even flatter than usual as he turned the screen around to show us. King Maxen’s name was flashing on it. Thomas stood up and moved over to the room’s large viewing screen, jacking in the handheld and turning on the screen.

Instantly an image of Maxen’s face filled the screen, the cockpit of the heloship he’d stolen behind him.

“Well, at least I know my program works,” said Thomas ruefully, producing another handheld from his pocket and pulling up a screen full of coding. “He must be using the network I set up.”

The king’s voice sounded out loud in the room—just when we’d thought we would finally stop hearing it in these rooms—and I could see all of us give a collective shudder.

“My fellow Patrians. I know there has been… some unhappiness with me as of late, and I can’t blame you. I have failed you, my people. I failed to see the threat that was Matrus, just like I failed to be there to fight for you when they invaded.

“But I am bound to you through a sacred oath, to serve and protect you, always, and while I have failed at that in the past, I am willing to step up and do it now. My people, we worry about all the things we don’t have, the things that at any moment could fail us. Water, food, fuel, power… stability. Well, even as we struggle to rebuild, to bury the dead, Queen Elena of Matrus, the architect of our woes, continues her assault… and now she has resorted to using the mutated freaks that are the fruit of a very tainted