The Gender Game

by Forrest, Bella

  "And… I should also mention that Mr. Jenks’s preference is for us to go to The Green to train."

  "What?"

  "Yep," she replied.

  The Green was the dense forested region that ran across the entire northern border of both Matrus and Patrus. The river that separated the nations also ran through it, and that was one reason why its water was so toxic.

  The Green's biosphere was not deemed safe to take up residence nearby; the trees and vegetation were noxious. But it was also avoided for another reason: the wildlife that lived there.

  "Why does he want us to train there?" I asked. "What's wrong with your training rooms? Don't you still have them?"

  "I do," Ms. Dale replied, almost apologetic. "But Mr. Jenks said that training in The Green will make it more of a… high-stress scenario. Apparently, that's something you're going to have to get used to."

  My jaw tensed.

  "The Green won't kill us," Ms. Dale went on. "We'll only be there for a few days during the daylight hours."

  I felt nervous that this mission might turn out to be more dangerous than I’d thought. Though, given the stakes and the weight of the prize I had been promised should I succeed, it would be naïve of me to think it would be easy or of moderate risk.

  It was with a tighter throat that I entered the bathroom. I hurried to brush my teeth and take a shower. After drying myself off, I bound my hair into a tight knot atop my head before slipping into my new clothes.

  Ms. Dale was waiting patiently for me on the edge of the bed. Her brown eyes rose to meet mine.

  "Your breakfast was delivered." She pointed to the bedside table, where a tray of sandwiches had been placed along with a jug of water. I picked at and drank as much I could stomach before returning my focus to Ms. Dale.

  "You ready?" she asked, cocking her head.

  "Yeah," I muttered, even though I felt anything but.

  Two wardens followed us as Ms. Dale led me out of the palace, across the gardens, and toward the main gates of the compound. Reaching them, she turned to me and said, "Wait here with the wardens. I'll fetch my truck."

  She returned about a minute later driving the same old truck she'd owned five years ago. The wardens escorted me through the gates and piled into the backseat, sandwiching me between them before giving Ms. Dale the go-ahead to leave.

  I had been hoping that I could be alone with Ms. Dale for the next three days; that she would be deemed enough security. But apparently the wardens still considered me too much of a threat—to what, exactly, I wasn't sure.

  The streets were all but empty as we rode through them, which meant our journey to The Green passed faster. Soon the outline of the forest and its halo of greenish mist began to creep into view. A wiry fence was all that separated the mass of trees from the countryside, because there was nobody to keep out. Nobody ventured here, just like nobody ventured into The Outlands either—the desolate wilderness beyond Matrus' eastern and southern borders.

  Well, almost nobody. There had been cases of rebels venturing north particularly; usually mothers of marked boys who were mad enough with grief to think they could find their son if they just walked far enough. They paid no heed to the impossible size of The Green.

  As much as Matrus' leadership made efforts to emphasize that every law and restriction instituted was for the sake of our nation's — and womankind’s — long term peace and well being, and that it was only because of a long history of misbehavior by men that we were in this position to begin with, their assurance wasn't enough for a minority of women whose lives had been touched by the screening. Whenever I thought of my brother, it still wasn't enough for me. But I hadn't lost my mind. At least, not yet. I had learned enough about the world outside from Ms. Connelly and almost every teacher I'd had in school—nobody who tried to escape came back.

  Their words still haunted me now as we closed the final distance. The truck stopped in a meadow, a quarter of a mile before The Green started. Ms. Dale slipped out and trudged around the vehicle, opening up the trunk. She pulled out two breathing masks and handed one to me while placing the other on herself.

  She addressed the wardens. "I'm sorry. I thought I had a couple more masks back there."

  They frowned as Ms. Dale took my arm and guided me out of the truck. Without a backward glance, she began traipsing across the field of brittle grass toward The Green, pulling me along behind her.

  I sensed that she didn't want the wardens shadowing us, either.

  In any case, the two women had no choice but to wait in the vehicle unless they wanted to risk getting sick.

  "Stay within earshot," one of the wardens called after us.

  "We'll do our best," Ms. Dale replied. "But I must go wherever is most conducive for training…"

  I could feel the atmosphere intensifying the closer we drew to The Green. The temperature also seemed to spike, though perhaps that was just me working up a sweat. I found myself wishing that my clothes weren't so tight, that my shoes were made of a thinner material.

  As the mist pervading the trees began to touch us, Ms. Dale stopped and reached into her bag again. She pulled out a gun from the back compartment and two pairs of gloves from a mesh side pocket. She handed one pair to me and we both pulled them on before continuing.

  We reached a narrow door in the fence. Ms. Dale drew out a key, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. My breathing sounded labored as we stepped through it and entered the first line of trees. From the outside, I never would have guessed the mist was this thick. I could hardly see more than ten feet in front of me. We wouldn't have much warning if an animal came charging for us.

  We had entered a world of low-hanging trees bursting with green sap. Moss-covered boulders, purple mushrooms, and dead wood littered the deep, moist undergrowth. Slimy vines that resembled snakes hung down from the canopy of leaves—a canopy so thick, it was rare to catch a trickle of sunlight. The lighting was gloomy and altogether surreal in its greenness.

  Ms. Dale strode a step in front of me, her gun at the ready. Sweat trickled down my forehead behind my mask as we ventured deeper.

  After thirty minutes had passed, I was sure we'd traveled well out of the wardens' earshot. Ms. Dale was obviously not afraid of me. Not only did she have the skills to easily overpower me, I doubted she truly believed I'd become the criminal the wardens made me out to be.

  She stopped abruptly. I followed her gaze straight ahead through the trees.

  "Do you hear that?" she whispered.

  "What?" It was a struggle to hear much other than my own harried breathing beneath this heavy mask.

  "Listen closely," she said.

  As I strained to hear, I realized what she had noticed—a low buzzing, coming from somewhere in front of us, in the distance. A buzzing that was growing louder.

  My heart skipped a beat. "Red flies?" I whispered.

  "Sounds like it, doesn't it?" she murmured grimly.

  Ms. Dale began scanning the ground around us. She darted with me through the trees until she located a hollow trunk. She pulled out another object from her backpack, an aerosol container, and sprayed the hollow. Shiny black centipedes the length of my hair squirmed out, worming themselves into the brushwood. Then Ms. Dale pushed me inside. I cramped my body up as small as I could to make room for her to crawl in next to me. There was enough room for us to sit side by side while still having a view of the outside.

  The buzzing was hard to miss now. It thrummed in my ears.

  Ms. Dale sprayed the aerosol again, through the opening of the trunk and into the forest's atmosphere. She acted just in time. A few seconds later, a blur of brown zoomed through the undergrowth with a dense red cloud moving at an alarming speed close behind. It was a wild boar, running for its life from a swarm of huge blood-colored flies. It darted out of sight, the flies maintaining their close pursuit.

  I could only be grateful that it was the animal they were chasing, rather than us.

  Ms. Dale and I waited stiffl
y until the buzzing faded, then climbed out of the hollow and straightened.

  "So, Violet," Ms. Dale muttered, brushing off her pants. "Now you've seen it for yourself. The flies do exist."

  "Yeah," I said, my throat hoarse. Those flies were supposed to be vampiric. They attacked in swarms and if there were enough of them, they could drain an animal or even a person to the point of death. But I was already facing certain death by execution if I failed this mission, and I trusted that Ms. Dale was trained to deal with this environment.

  "Let's continue," she said curtly. She handed me the aerosol can. "You carry this for now."

  During the next stretch of our journey, the occasional squawk of a bird made me jump, and I was introduced to yet more insects—jumper bugs and rope leeches—as well as a silver python that looked large enough to swallow me whole. But Ms. Dale deftly guided me onward.

  She stopped again as we arrived at the first clearing we had come across since entering The Green. Taking the aerosol container from me, she roamed its perimeter and sprayed generously. It was some kind of pest repellent, evidently, but it also had a side effect of clearing the mist, making our vision a little clearer.

  Then she moved over to a fallen tree whose carcass was thriving with new life. She scraped away the weeds and moss from its surface, then placed her gun atop it, along with her backpack, opening the bag's zipper.

  "Come here, Violet," she said.

  I approached and stood next to her as she began to empty the bag's compartment of… more weapons. Guns—large and small. By the time she'd finished, her backpack had shrunk to a fraction of its previous size.

  My eyes met hers. "You're going to train me to use… weapons?" I whispered.

  "Yes," she replied. "At the request of Mr. Jenks."

  My eyes trailed over the assortment of guns. Only wardens, authorized warden trainees, or professionals like Ms. Dale were allowed to handle weaponry. All of my defense training to date had consisted solely of physical contact.

  Now I couldn't help but suspect that putting me into a "high-stress" situation wasn't the scientist's main motivation for wanting me to train in The Green. He probably wanted to keep all this undercover as much as possible, and the primary appeal of this location was its isolation.

  "So I have just three days to perfect my skills?" I asked.

  "I don't expect you to be perfect," Ms. Dale replied. "But I do expect you to become proficient. Once you're in Patrus, as a woman, it's highly unlikely you'll find an opportunity to train or practice… You'll be lucky to get hold of a gun at all.”

  “Then what's the point of training?”

  “Because it will push your comfort zone—something you need to get used to for your time in Patrus. Moreover, it's what Mr. Jenks wants, so let's start."

  She set up a target—a rotting log—before picking up the nearest weapon to her, a handgun. She began demonstrating how to stand, aim and fire. She hit the target dead in the center, several times over, before passing the gun to me. It felt cold and heavy in my gloved hand. And so very foreign.

  I spread my feet apart as she instructed, assuming a firm stance before taking my aim. I missed wildly.

  She made me try again and again, until I got closer to the target. It took me all of two hours to hit the exact center.

  "Good," Ms. Dale said. "Let's move on to something larger."

  Great. Larger and probably noisier.

  I had been on edge the whole time, constantly glancing around the clearing, afraid that our noise would draw unwanted attention from the creatures of The Green.

  Ms. Dale picked up the gun with the longest barrel and handed it to me after a brief explanation of the differing mechanisms between this and the previous firearm. Then she allowed me to fire. It didn't take me nearly as long to succeed in hitting the target with this. I was warming up, I supposed.

  She made me try out a third gun, and then a fourth. By the time three p.m. struck, I was famished.

  "We'll continue practice after lunch," she said, taking my gun from me and resting it on the dead trunk along with the others. "Let's head back. There's food in the trunk."

  As she placed the backpack on her shoulders without the guns, I frowned.

  "You're just going to leave those here?" I asked.

  "Yes," she said. "They'll be here when we return. It's not like there are thieves roaming around in this place."

  We traipsed back the way we'd come and returned to the truck. The wardens looked thoroughly bored. Judging from the bag of dirty napkins on the floor in front of the passenger's seat, they'd found something to eat already.

  It was a quick lunch and we rested for another fifteen minutes before returning to the clearing for our afternoon session.

  We resumed where we had left off, and by the time darkness began to close in—which was as early as six-thirty due to the denseness of The Green—I had worked with every single weapon Ms. Dale had brought with us. I'd definitely had my comfort zone pushed, but once I'd gotten the hang of the technique, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d envisioned. Wielding a gun had started to come naturally to me. That didn’t make me any less afraid of the weapons, though—not so much of being shot at as afraid of the damage I could inflict with them myself. I had a hard enough time controlling my fists.

  We packed everything up, headed to the truck, and journeyed back to the palace. It was late by the time I arrived in my room. We'd hit rush hour on the way back and been delayed. Ms. Dale told me she would greet me at nine the next morning.

  Except for a chambermaid to bring me some dinner, nobody came to see me that night. I'd thought that Alastair might, but perhaps he wouldn't bother until the papers were ready—supposedly in two days.

  With my arm muscles sore and body aching, I slept far more easily that night, though my slumber was punctuated with a nightmare involving echoing gunshots, red flies, and silver snakes.

  * * *

  The next two days passed in much the same manner as the first, except that Ms. Dale varied the weapons she taught me to use. On the second day, we focused on crossbows and knives, and on the third, she brought along a sack full of more common objects. Every day items that could be turned into weapons, like pens, rope, and hair pins.

  We met with a few more scares from the wildlife—like a pack of wolves Ms. Dale warded off with an explosion of gunshots, and a horde of venomous spiders raining from the trees. But otherwise, thanks to her experience in this environment, things went as smoothly as I could have expected them to go.

  I could have sworn, though, at one point, that I actually saw the shadow of a person darting through the trees—or some other kind of creature that stood tall and upright. But it vanished quickly, before I could even point it out to Ms. Dale, leading me to conclude it was the mist playing tricks on my eyes.

  At the end of the third day, we finished half an hour early and sat together on the log, steeling ourselves for the journey back.

  I sensed melancholy in my trainer. Melancholy that I shared. Neither of us knew when, or if, we would ever see each other again.

  She gazed down at her gloved hands, her feet grazing the soil.

  "I saw that you were a disturbed girl," she said quietly. "But I never thought it would come to this."

  I stared at my own hands. "Neither did I."

  "I wish I could have done something to help keep you out of trouble. I know you cared about my opinion."

  "I doubt there's much you could have done," I muttered. I was on a collision course.

  I was beyond wanting to explain the details of the murders I'd committed to Ms. Dale, because the details didn't matter. All Matrus saw was that I had claimed two lives.

  "Maybe encouraging you to pursue the occupation of a warden was a mistake on my part," she said, as though she hadn't heard me. "Maybe you should have been channeled into something tamer, though it would've been a waste. You were my best student."

  I dug my nails into the log. She was speaking as though this seco
nd lease on life I'd been granted by Alastair was hardly much better than being put down.

  "Ms. Dale… Did Mr. Jenks really not tell you any details about the task ahead of me? Nothing at all?"

  My trainer hesitated for a moment, then shook her head. "He didn't give me specifics, because he said they were not required… I will say one thing, however." Shifting on the log, she twisted to face me. Her expression was serious, her brown irises glimmering in the pale evening light. "Once you reach the other side of the river, trust no one, Violet. Do you understand me?"

  Swallowing, I nodded.

  7

  After Ms. Dale returned me to my room, I was left to wait alone. I didn't know when Alastair would come for me. The papers were supposed to be ready, but it was possible they could be delayed.

  There was nothing I could distract myself with; no books or newspapers. I ended up taking a long shower to wash my hair free of all the gunk that had accumulated in it from The Green. When I emerged in the bedroom in my bathrobe, I was surprised to find a chambermaid waiting for me. I hadn't heard her enter through the noise of the shower.

  "Mr. Jenks wishes to know if you are ready for a reception," she said, her voice a tad monotone.

  "Uh, yeah. I will be in a minute."

  She nodded and exited the room.

  Grabbing some fresh clothes that had been placed in the closet for me during the day, I quickly dressed and draped my hair in a towel.

  I moved to sit down, but my nerves would not allow it. This was it. My last night in Matrus. Wringing my hands, I paced up and down the far end of the bedroom until footsteps sounded outside the door. There came a polite yet sharp knock.

  "Come in," I called.

  The door glided open. In stepped Alastair sporting a deep blue suit and carrying his crossbow again, followed by… I could not believe my eyes.

  Queen Rina.

  The queen of Matrus herself.

  I hardly knew how to react. I stared, rooted to my spot and gaping at her as she glided into the room after Alastair, who closed the door behind them.