The Gender Plan (The Gender Game #6)(87)

“Don’t worry, Morgan. You’re still as beautiful as ever.”

Just like when I’d complimented her, Morgan didn’t reply, but I noticed her cheeks going darker in the dim light from the console. I looked at Owen, who was obliviously heading down the road, then back to her and the casual way she was trying to hold herself. Realization came like a bullet, and I met Morgan’s eyes in the darkness.

No wonder she was so interested in what was happening with Owen. I’d thought it had to do with the fact that they had been Liberators together, but it had never occurred to me that there was something more to it. Maybe it had been hard for me to imagine anybody feeling that way about Owen, even before everything had gone down, because he’d always felt like a brother to me. But Morgan liked him. Romantically.

She held my gaze, her eyes flat, expressionless, and then turned back to the window, presenting me with a shoulder. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it, which was fine. We weren’t really in a place to have that conversation anyway, for so many reasons.

“Slow down, Owen,” Lynne said from the passenger’s seat, her voice soft. “What is that?”

An acrid smell of something burning filled my nose seconds later, and I wrinkled it in distaste. Whatever was burning wasn’t wood. I leaned over to look out the window, and paused when I saw the dense haze we were driving through.

Owen hissed and jerked the wheel as an object loomed out of the darkness in front of the car, narrowly missing it. “I can’t see anything in this,” he spat. “What was that?”

“I think it was an overturned barricade,” Morgan said.

“What is that?” breathed Lynne into the darkness. “Is that the guard post?”

The alarm in her voice had me crowding Morgan over so I could shove forward in between the seats again. The dense, dark gray fog began to glow red as we rolled forward, and the smoke started to thin. Owen slowed us down to a crawl as he navigated us past another two barricades—one smashed, the other overturned—and then the smoke cleared.

At the mouth of the city, a fire raged from inside the crop harvester Cruz had used to crash through the barricades. Angry red flames engulfed the cab, black smoke roiling off the top and pouring into the sky. With the windows of the buildings on either side of it, the image looked like a face screaming in anger.

Right in front of it, resting on its side a few feet away from the burning, was the trailer we’d kept Solomon in, rolled on one side, like some offering to a dangerous god.

“Stop the car,” I ordered. “I have to go look at it!”

“Are you insane?” said Lynne. “Solomon could be out!”

“Solomon could be hurt,” I snapped back at her, my fingers searching blindly for the handle. I met Owen’s eyes in the mirror. “You don’t have to come,” I told him as I successfully found and opened the door.

“Yes, I do,” he said solemnly as he slid open the door and stepped out onto the pavement. “Keep it ready to go,” he told Morgan, and she slid out of the backseat to switch places with him, her face flushed but focused.

Doubt diminished my certainty as I took a step forward on the road I’d witnessed a battle on hours earlier, and I paused for a moment, fighting through it. There were so many fears I could entertain, but unless I kept moving forward, I would never know what the truth was. After what Solomon had sacrificed for me—his very sanity—I wasn’t about to ignore him for the sake of convenience.

Owen shadowed me silently as we cautiously walked up the road toward the trailer, his eyes darting around the overturned barricades and past a vehicle with half the roof missing. I didn’t blame him for being jumpy—I felt exposed and vulnerable in the middle of that road. The fire lit up the sky, but it created long, creeping shadows, cast by the broken things left over from the battle, which seemed to be reaching towards us. If Solomon was out there, we would step on him long before we ever saw him.

“This is where she swerved the trailer,” Owen said suddenly, and I started. He held up his arm and pointed to a set of still standing barricades, set up in an L across half the road. “She took it left, and tried to hook it back around.”

I saw what he was talking about. The L-shaped configuration had created a space to the left of it, but it tapered sharply back around. Desmond had smashed through many barricades by this point, and gauging by the view of the front of the cab, it had been smashed to pieces.

Honestly, I didn’t care how she had done it. What I cared about was the trailer and the cargo it had been transporting. I pulled my gun out as we drew closer to the cab. With a nod at Owen, I pulled to the right and went wide, keeping my gun trained on the sideways rectangular hole where the windshield used to be.

The cab was empty, deserted, but I kept my gun on it while Owen moved close, making sure no one was still inside. “It’s empty,” he called, and I let out a deep breath.

“We need to check the back,” I told him, moving past him along the long metal shipping container we had been keeping Solomon in. The fire roared just behind it, only a few feet away, and I could feel the heat coming off it in thick waves, making sweat break out on my forehead. “This thing is a steel oven. He could roast alive.”

“Violet, slow down!” Owen said, jogging up and catching my arm. “It’s my job to keep you safe, and while I knew you wouldn’t make it easy, I didn’t think you’d be this careless with your own safety. At least let me check the area around us first.”