The Gender Fall (The Gender Game #5)(61)

By the time I had arranged Cody as comfortably as I could, Dr. Arlan held a syringe in his hand. He stabbed the tip into a bottle filled with amber liquid, then pulled the plunger back and removed the needle from the bottle, slipping the liquid back into his pocket. Turning, he looked at the form on the blanket and paused, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion.

“This is just a boy,” he said, his eyes moving up to meet my gaze.

Before I had a chance to reply, Ms. Dale tsked, snatching the syringe out of Dr. Arlan’s fingers. Without hesitating, she dropped to one knee and slammed the syringe into Cody’s thigh, depressing the plunger.

“Think of him as a weapon,” she informed Dr. Arlan as she pulled the needle out. “Or rather, a victim of experimentation who has become a weapon in the wrong hands.” She met Dr. Arlan’s appalled gaze as she held the syringe out to him, her eyes flashing. “He’s dangerous right now, and he has superhuman powers. We cannot afford to relax our guard just because of his age or his size.” She stood up, brushing dirt off her knees.

“We need to find that tracker,” I told the doctor gently.

He blinked, turning his gaze from Ms. Dale to me, and then nodded. “Of course,” he replied.

Thomas moved around him, holding out a long, skinny rod connected to a small box by what looked like a good deal of electrical tape. He hovered the rod over Cody’s body, running it up and down and staring at the box. As he worked, Dr. Arlan slipped a small, pale metal box—which I recognized as Ashabee’s portable medical scanner—out of his own pocket and began following Thomas’ motions, performing his own scan. I took a step back, giving them space to work.

Owen came up beside me, watching closely. The box Thomas held beeped as he drew it over Cody’s thigh. “There,” he announced.

Dr. Arlan moved his box over it, and frowned. “It’s there,” he confirmed, looking up. “But they put it in deep—it’s dangerously close to the femoral artery. If I try to perform surgery on him out here and slip, he’ll bleed out in moments.”

“We have to remove it here and now,” I said, sensing the doctor was going to insist on moving the boy to another place. “It’s too dangerous for us to keep it in.”

Dr. Arlan bristled and stood. “You people are too much,” he said, placing his hands on his hips. “I’m a doctor, and I swore an oath to help my patients, and not to put them in any unnecessary danger.”

I felt my breath come out in a deep huff. I could respect Dr. Arlan’s position, but at the moment, we needed him to get the job done—we had no time. “This boy was being used as a slave,” I informed him. “He’s on medication that makes him susceptible to control by our enemies. He has a tracker in his leg they are certainly monitoring, and when they find him, and us, they will kill us all, and he will go back to being a slave. I understand the risks, and I wish we had a better way, but we don’t. So please just do it.”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair, the adrenaline still surging through my veins making my muscles twitch and jump under my skin. But my impassioned rant about the boy had done something other than motivate Dr. Arlan—it had jarred my memory of how they’d been controlling Cody earlier.

I fished the earbud out of my pocket and held it out to the group. “By the way, he was wearing this.”

At the sight of the thing, Thomas cursed. Marching over, he plucked the earbud from my hand with two fingers and rushed over to the car he’d come in. Curious, I followed, watching as he opened the back and pulled out a black box, about the size of a jewelry box, but considerably heavier, from the way he was handling it. He grunted as he pulled the lid open, and then dropped the earbud in and slammed it shut with a thunk, flipping down the top and locking it.

Silence followed, and I felt a keen sense that something was wrong. Everyone else seemed to feel it as well, because, almost as one, we turned to look behind us, as if something had managed to sneak up on us. The headlights from both cars illuminated the small clearing, but shadows pressed in relentlessly beyond their reach. I searched them, finding nothing, and after a moment, released a tightly held breath.

I turned back to look at the others, and then felt a chuckle slip from me. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” I quipped, and I saw Ms. Dale roll her eyes, while Owen grinned nervously.

While Dr. Arlan efficiently set out his tools and began preparing to make an incision in Cody’s thigh, sanitizing and marking the skin while wearing a deep frown of concentration, Thomas stepped toward us, away from his heavy box, dusting his hands. “The box is lead-lined. They won’t be able to track that earpiece through the frequency they were utilizing anymore.”

“I’m glad you brought that,” I said. “I had completely forgotten to mention that earbud earlier, but I figured it might be something you could use.”

“Maybe,” Thomas hedged. “But it’ll be useless taking the tracker out of that kid if they can track us through their earbud. I don’t know if it was worth the risk. Won’t know until I get it back—and even then, I recommend taking it far away from the camp before we try.”

Ms. Dale cleared her throat, and we turned, looking at her. “The boy,” she said. “Tell us more about how he acted when you were fighting him.”

“Right,” I said, shaking my head. “His eyes were… blank. Like there was nothing behind them. He wouldn’t talk except to whomever was on the other side of the earbud. It was like he’d been programmed or something.”