SUN KISSED Part 5 Still, a part of me feels deathly afraid as Sol activates the chute, and the old machinery chugs to life with a deafening cacophony of whirring and chugging. What if the thing breaks down halfway to the surface? What if the top has been sealed off by debris? That elevator could…
SUN KISSED Part 4 True to his warning, we walk for a long time. We stumble a little here and there, and our radars alert us to a wide chasm, which we skirt around carefully, but for the most part, the terrain is level. Hours pass and I’m beginning to feel a little uneasy. We’re…
SUN KISSED Part 3 After renting all our equipment and making sure everything is in working order, we head off. I let Sol lead the way, since he’s the one that’s done this before. Even so, we walk slowly. In unfamiliar territory, it’s only too easy to misstep or hit your head on a low-hanging…
SUN KISSED Part 2 He pulls me down the wide, familiar central corridor that we call the Spine and from which all the smaller corridors branch out leading to housing, dining, recreation, and tech areas. Each time I feel the whoosh of circulating air from each of the passing side-passages, I wonder if we’ll be…
This is part one of a short YA dystopian story (4k words total) that I submitted to one of Writer’s Digest’s short story contests. It’s about a girl who lives underground in a place called The Hive, and her friend, Sol, who takes her on a special birthday journey that she won’t soon forget. SUN…