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

heloships in the air, flying over Matrian airspace, either looking for us or trying to keep away from any more attacks.”

“Unless we destroyed their entire fleet,” Logan challenged. “And it’s perfectly safe.”

“Don’t be dense,” Amber muttered, and the man shot her a bemused look. I drew close to the window as the platform dropped away and the river that ran below came into view, the blue of it bright and vibrant against the cracked yellow earth surrounding it.

“Amber, can you turn the ship around for a second?” I asked. “Did you guys notice this?”

“The river?” asked Viggo, and I nodded, my eyes watching the landscape rotate steadily as Amber slowly turned us back toward the tower, angling the nose down slightly. I reached up to brace my right hand on the frame, enjoying the lack of clunky plaster that had made that move irritatingly ineffective in the other heloship, less than an hour ago, and then watched.

As the nose dipped lower, more of the tower came into view, as did more of the platforms—of which there appeared to be four below the one we’d landed on. The area between the tower and the river had been dug out, like the tower was sitting on an additional river bed, and from the side came a swirling, metallic blue liquid that dumped into the churning river waters. I had never seen a color like that. The way it moved and flowed made it seem thick.

“They’re poisoning it,” I said, confirming what I had already guessed to be true.

“Yeah, but why?” asked Amber, her neck craning to see what we were looking at. “To what end?”

“It could be industrial byproduct,” Viggo suggested. “Running anything out here that could let humans survive would probably create a lot of waste. It would have to go somewhere, but that’s… a messed up choice, poisoning the river.”

“Maybe they just assumed it didn’t matter because they thought they were the only survivors,” Logan speculated. “That’s what we did, after all.”

“We don’t pollute anything this badly,” Amber pointed out, a snide touch to her tone. “We have to tell them, right? They’re destroying the river. Making it harder for us to live and survive.”

I hesitated, genuinely torn. On the one hand, she was absolutely right: assuming they weren’t doing it on purpose, they did need to know that dumping their waste in the river was creating a threat to us. On the other hand, telling them that would key them in to where our societies were located, and that could mean them coming to us. After all, Devon had eyed the heloship with a hunger that made the hair on my neck stand up. And CS Sage had basically threatened to blow us out of the sky if we ever came back. It was not an easy call.

I looked at Viggo, who seemed deep in thought, considering the problem. “I think we had better…” He trailed off, his eyes going to the tower. “Amber, what is that?”

“Um, hold on a second,” she said. I heard her clicking a few buttons, but I was squinting, trying to see what Viggo had spotted. “I got an enhanced image on the holotable, Viggo.”

I turned, the holotable glowing brightly as it activated. Then the image of the tower flickered into view, the 3D picture showing a view from much closer than we actually were. I immediately spotted what Viggo had seen, and frowned. One of the platforms seemed to ripple, as if something had just impacted, and a shockwave was radiating outward.

My frown deepened as I moved over to the table. Nothing had hit the tower. There was no impact, no missile, and nobody to fire such a projectile but us. Instead it seemed the panels of glass were lifting up off of the wing jutting from the side of the tower. There were rods attached to the underside of each one, and the dark brown glass shone a bright white as they caught the rays of the sun.

“What is that?” I breathed, repeating Viggo’s question. The panels were rearranging into a bowl shape, as the rods behind them reoriented the newly configured… whatever it was to point toward the west.

I felt my stomach drop as, suddenly, the array flashed white under the bright yellow sunlight, catching the rays of the sun so intently the glass bowl glowed with a brilliance that rivaled the river and the sun combined. I wanted to squint my eyes, even looking at a camera feed patched in from the hull of the ship.

“Where’s Belinda’s ship?” I asked, and Viggo moved over to where an inset keyboard was on the opposite side of the table and clicked a few buttons. The image zoomed up as the outer camera panned, and I could see the other heloship making its way—slowly but steadily—following the glowing blue part of the river back to Matrus. Studying it, I realized the bowl thing was pointed almost directly at them, and I felt the pit of my stomach drop out completely.

“You have to warn them,” I shouted at Amber. “Broadcast all frequencies and tell them—”

The glowing seemed to have reached some sort of critical mass, because even as I spoke, a beam of spectacular white light burst forth from the bowl, streaking toward Belinda and Kathryn’s ship.

For a second, I hoped that whatever the light was, it would just be some sort of high-technology gadget that didn’t cause any harm. A scanning beam. A warning signal.

The next moment, my fragile hope was shattered. I gaped as the beam of light cut through Belinda and Kathryn’s ship, slicing it cleanly in half, the edges of where the beam of light had touched bright red even from this distance and clearly melting into slag. The two halves of the ship plummeted downward, each tumbling on an oblong axis toward the broken earth below.

“No, no, no,” I gasped, taking a few hesitant steps toward the window, unable to comprehend that they were just… gone. It wasn’t fair.