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

foot on the gas, and we sped off. Violet took her gloves off with her teeth and then began smoothing out the strips of paper she’d collected, using the rolling light of the streetlamps to read them out loud. Tickers—she had found some news tickers.

“Patrians turn on Matrian kindness. Terrorist attacks at the water plant cost the lives of nearly… eighty Matrian wardens. Terrorist attacks are suspected within Matrus from Patrian insurgents. All Patrian males in country to check in regularly with neighborhood warden’s office. Failure to comply will result in arrests.”

“Dear God,” Owen said softly. “These poor people.”

“Elena always did have a way with words,” Ms. Dale muttered as she took another turn.

“The rest of these are just as bad,” Violet continued as she sifted through more ticker tape. She must’ve dug them out of the trash, so they were a few days old, but still, it was good to know what we were dealing with. “Instability in Patrus and the future of Matrus in question. Biological agents used on Matrian soldiers. Brutal male regime establishing control. War inevitable…”

She looked up from her reading and then crumpled up the strips. “How can we ever battle all this?”

“We can,” I said, trying to fill her with confidence. Come to think of it, I was confident. Nervous, yes. Worried, of course. But I was confident. “We can, Violet. If Morgan is right, Alyssa’s voice will mean a lot, especially because she’s established. We forget this, but Elena’s new to the people. They’re still getting to know her as queen. Their opinion will be easily swayed if there’s a more trusted voice telling them the truth.”

I finished my impromptu speech and leaned back. The cab of the car went quiet, and then Owen leaned forward to look at Thomas, sitting on the other side of me. “What are the odds for this mission, Thomas?”

Thomas looked up from his handheld and over at Owen, giving him a bewildered look. “The odds?”

“Yes, the odds. And don’t pretend you didn’t run them. You always do.”

“That’s true, I do.” He turned back to his handheld. “Turn left on the next street.”

The silence returned.

“So what are they?” Owen pressed.

“The odds?”

“Of course—don’t talk in circles. Are you keeping them back on purpose? Are the numbers low?”

Thomas sighed and turned his knees toward mine, facing Owen a little more directly. “There are three reasons why I might not give you the odds, Owen. The first is that they’re dismal, and I recognize that by telling you, I would reduce the chances even more by killing your hope of a successful mission. On the other hand, I might feel I don’t have to tell you if the numbers run the other way, and I already know we’ll be victorious. Telling you that could backfire into making you over-confident, and therefore turn the mission into a complete failure.”

He turned back to his handheld, studying the map. We fell silent again.

“What’s the third reason?” asked Violet from the front seat, her voice curious.

“That there are too many working parts in this plan, so the odds are impossible to calculate. Turn right, we’re almost there.”

Ms. Dale turned right, and I looked out the window, focusing on the scenery again. We’d made it to a residential area, with houses, not apartments, and I could tell this was the nicer, wealthier part of town. The houses were better crafted, on larger pieces of land so they could have a yard or a garden, with fences and security gates in place, keeping them locked away from all the common riffraff. Ms. Dale navigated more confidently—I was reminded that she had probably known about this woman, when she’d been a head Matrian spy—as the streets became tighter, turning into one-way lanes through dark residential streets, houses peeking out from behind the branches of trees, seeming to my nervous brain to watch us as we drove by.

Eventually, Thomas said, “Here,” and Ms. Dale pulled to a stop. A brown brick wall, about seven feet tall, ran along the road, and ahead, I could see the break in the sidewalk where the beginning of a drive began, cut off from the street by an ornate wrought-iron gate. Thomas barely looked up from his modified handheld, his fingers moving over buttons as the lines of white code on a black background illuminated his face.

“I’m not detecting any frequencies that indicate cameras or comms, but the gate seems to require a key code.”

“How can you tell that?” I asked, and Thomas grinned, not looking away from the screen.

“I can see the box.”

I strained my eyes in his direction and saw it—attached to the opposite wall on the other side of the driveway, continuing around the property.

“I should’ve noticed that,” I muttered, and Thomas reached over and absent-mindedly patted me on the shoulder.

“Nobody is perfect. Ms. Dale, could you please drive up to that gate, and I’ll hand you the cable to plug into it?”

She put the vehicle in gear and then approached the gate slowly, keeping the headlights off. As she turned, the window was almost immediately filled with the heavy, ivy-covered gates that clearly parted in the middle. Thomas handed Ms. Dale a cable, and she rolled down the window, reaching across and running her fingers over the box until she found a port.

Once jacked in, Thomas hit something, and the green on his screen shifted to red, numbers flying over it, almost too fast to see. After a second or two, they came to a stop, and a four-digit code appeared on the screen.

“Two, two, three, eight,” Thomas announced, and Ms. Dale pulled out the cable and input the code. The box beeped, and there was an electric hum as the gates slid apart—just like Ashabee’s had. As they came apart, they revealed a circular cobblestone driveway with a fountain in the center. Just beyond that was a modest house, more of a two-story cottage, the cut-rock front and rustic columns resplendent with even more ivy.

Ms. Dale pulled forward,