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

a round, a process that required me to use my armpit and pray that no flesh or fabric got caught in the grooves. Belinda watched the process with a wary look on her face, but I ignored it and turned toward the door.

Stepping around Solomon’s still form, I hit the button to open the bay doors. There was an odd grinding sound, and then the door jolted forward a few feet before stopping and slowly lowering down.

Immediately, bright yellow light streamed in, carrying with it a dry and dusty heat that blasted the atmosphere inside from warm to just plain hot. I had shrugged out of my jacket and sweater earlier to reveal the short-sleeved shirt I was wearing beneath—the cast made regular long-sleeved shirts difficult to wear, and for once that was to my benefit.

The door continued to open painfully slowly, the gears groaning loudly, before it settled with a clang on the hard shell of the platform of the building we’d landed on. I stepped out first, using my cast to shield my eyes from the bright sunlight. The burning ball of light was fully over the horizon now, steadily climbing up toward its zenith, but still hours away from noon.

The light created long shadows, and luckily, a portion of the tower blocked the bulk of it, creating more shade. We were just shy of being sheltered by the shade created by the tower; however, any remaining darkness would shrink away, rather than stretch toward us, as the sun climbed up into the sky.

I crept out of the ship, my eyes searching for any sign of movement.

The air seemed to ripple, and I realized it was from the heat—sweat was already beginning to collect at the base of my spine. I continued forward down the ramp, blinking furiously against the intensely bright light.

I paused when I came to the end of the ramp created by the door and bent over, examining the surface of the tower wing we’d landed on. What had appeared from far away to be a solid black thing was actually a deep rich brown, almost the color of earth that had been brought up from deep below. It also wasn’t metal, as I had expected, but made up entirely of glass. And it wasn’t like any glass I had ever seen before. For one thing, I couldn’t see any sign of cracks or damage, even though an object of great size and weight had just crashed into it. For another thing, the glass itself was lined with small, perfect circles, black in color, running in tidy rows across it.

On impulse, I knelt down on the edge of the ramp and pressed my face to the pane of glass, doing my best to cut out the ambient light to see if I could peer through it. I couldn’t, and didn’t dare hold my face to the panel for too long. It was already hot from the sun’s rays. After a little while, who knew how hot it would get outside of the ship? I was beginning to worry about the weather being as dangerous as anything else out here. We needed to move fast.

I stood up and stepped off the ramp, my gaze immediately going to the spot where the platform attached to the tower. If anyone were to come for us, I suspected it’d be from there. It was some hundred feet away, so it would be easy to see if anyone was coming, though there was no way to know that there weren’t hatches elsewhere too.

“Is it clear?” Belinda called from behind me.

Stepping around the far side of the ship, I exhaled and lowered my gun. The platform in my view was still empty. “It’s clear,” I called back to her.

I hurried back into the ship as Belinda slowly helped Kathryn down, and I headed for the toolkit to make their jobs easier. Tucking my gun back under my armpit, I hefted it up and headed back out, following Belinda and Kathryn as they made for the nose of the ship.

Now we were on the shaded side of our ship, and the contrast between the sun and the shade was startling. Without the blazing rays beating down, I felt almost a touch too cold in my t-shirt. Still, I knew that would change soon enough—as soon as the rising sun reached its peak. Just one more reason to do this as quickly as possible.

I set down the toolkit and proceeded to help Belinda unscrew a panel under the wing, taking it off. All too soon, however, there was little for me to do, as the job really required the use of two arms—and Kathryn’s expertise.

So I resigned myself to guard duty, and walked a path, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but decidedly non-elliptical around the heloship. Patterns made it easier to make plans, and whoever was inside the tower had to be watching. I wasn’t sure how, yet, but they would be.

If there was anyone in there, that was. Minutes had already ticked by since our landing. Almost half an hour, in fact. Granted, the place seemed huge, and perhaps traveling across it would be difficult, but that still seemed odd. Wouldn’t anyone inside be able to see us through the panes of glass? But what if the odd platform structures didn’t have anyone inside? For all I knew, they could be filled with machines that performed some important function. Nobody had ever talked about something that could sustain life inside The Outlands. Nobody had ever come from here, despite the close flying distance, and there had never been any reports of such a tower in Matrus… Though, knowing the higher-ups as I did now, I realized that even if there had been such reports, they might never have shared them with the public.

This place was a complete mystery to me, and the truth was that there was no way to know what was happening inside until someone chose to come out. If there