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

The windowpane ended as we neared a junction, and I looked back to note how many turn-offs we’d passed to get there. The uniformity of the shell made it all too easy to get confused. I didn’t want that happening to me if I had to make a run for it.

“This way,” Jathem said, pointing to the left. I turned the corner and saw a door with a white, glowing section of wall just above it. I couldn’t grasp how they’d made the wall do that—but the sign at least was recognizable, a glowing red cross set in the center of the white panel. I pointed at it and looked back at Jathem, and he nodded.

This door, unlike the one before, was simple and had a flat-hooked handle. I followed MacGillus and Jathem through it, then blinked at the sudden expanse of whiteness that I saw. This entire area seemed to be white walls on white ceilings on white floors, all blending together. I focused dizzily as the two men in front of me led on. We seemed to be following some kind of glowing line in the floor, and I put my mind to memorizing that, too, as we went through several atrium-looking rooms and to another door marked with a glowing panel. With no people anywhere inside, the strange atmosphere of the area was only increased, and I felt more tense than I’d been since I’d gotten them not to fight me.

When we went through the door, a bald woman with dark tattoos on her scalp looked up from a petri dish she held in one hand, a dropper in the other hand hovering over it. She frowned when she saw us, and then sat down the petri dish and the dropper on the clear table in front of her.

Her eyes were dark brown, as were the strong eyebrows over them, and her mouth was like a tight rosebud.

“Knight Elite Jathem,” she greeted formally, shooting me and my cast a curious look. “I assume this is what the level was cleared out for?”

“It is indeed, Medic Selka.” He pronounced her name oddly, elongating the “s” and putting an emphasis on the “ka,” and I wondered how the group knew English but spoke it differently than we did. Now that I noticed it, they all said some words differently, though not enough that I couldn’t understand it.

The medic blinked coldly and looked me over, her curiosity replaced with professional aloofness.

“Come here,” she ordered, moving to a wall. She pulled a panel out of its side, revealing a plush-looking bed, and patted it. “Please sit down.”

I approached it and sat. It took a small jump to do so, given its height above the ground. Medic Selka pressed a few panels on the wall next to me, and the next thing I knew a flat beam of light had turned on and was moving over my head. I felt a tingle where it hit me, but nothing else. The medic reached out and grabbed my cast, looking at it with disdain and alarm, her brows furrowed tightly together.

“What is this thing?” she sniffed, her nose crinkling.

“I broke my arm not long ago,” I replied, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the cast.

She looked over at Jathem and MacGillus, disbelief stamped over her face. “What is going on?” she demanded. “Who would’ve done something this… this cruel to another human being?”

I blinked and pulled my cast out of her grasp. The machine overhead whirred loudly, and I looked up to see the light retract back into the wall as the section below it lit up, the words “Image Generating” scrolling across it.

“Relax, M. Selka,” Jathem soothed, his hands going up. “She’s an undoc. Her family kept her well-hidden for years.”

“Wow,” she said with a surprised blink. “There hasn’t been an undoc in, what… two years?”

“Not that we’ve heard of,” MacGillus replied. “But you can see why the council wants it kept quiet. Bad for order.”

“Especially given how old she is,” replied Selka in a conspiratorial whisper.

Jathem frowned and crossed his arms. “This is classified protocol ten, M. Selka. Don’t let your curiosity get you in trouble.”

The woman frowned, a flash of irritation passing over her features, and then turned back to the screen. “Her arm was broken,” she said, and I looked back up to find an incredibly realistic view of what was presumably my arm on the screen. The definition and detail in the picture was amazing, and it was completely colored in, but the outer layers of the flesh were translucent frames atop the picture of my bone. It was all there—skin, muscles, tendons, and veins. I’d known basically how bodies worked, and learned more from working with the experienced medical personnel in our group, but I’d never expected to see a picture of the inside of my own body. It was fascinating.

From the image, even I could see the break. It was partially healed, delicate little strands of bones slowly reaching out toward each other, some of them already connected with more on the way. It looked like it felt—painstakingly slow. It was mind-blowing that they could see into my body so vividly.

“These injuries are weeks old. Did she get caught in a gear?” M. Selka asked, her eyes moving as the images moved, following her fingers as she dragged them across the wall. She pinched them together over my shoulder and chest, the image shooting in, and then drew them apart, the image drifting down to my ribs. “Her ribs are still bruised from whatever happened, and she experienced some first- and second-degree burns. Her head…”

She trailed off then, her mouth working as she stared at the hole in my skull. I touched the scab that was still thick from the procedure, and looked up at her. M. Selka looked like she couldn’t decide whether to be sick or not; her face was pale and disturbed.

She quickly collapsed the