Emily was on her knees, with bruises everywhere, especially on her arms. She was silent, looking down at the ground. One of her hands clutched a chromium pistol that let out a nauseating gas from the end of its barrel. She wore an all-white outfit, with no inscription or mark anywhere on her shirt or pants but only an obnoxiously bright white coating all around. She was on the brink. Her hand clutching the pistol was white at the knuckles, and her other hand was in a fist position. Without realizing it, she was pressing down as hard as she could on her knee with that hand. She was swaying, shaking. Breathing from her mouth, she didn’t want to smell anything around her.
There would be no soul in sight for another minute at the most. She, with disgust, slowly looked ahead. One of her eyes was bloodshot with fresh bruises and cuts all around it.
A man wearing a CCC uniform was lying on the ground. His body was in an unnervingly crooked position. Blood was slowly spreading around him. The panels right behind him screamed with red exclamation points and loud sirens. The conference table that was surrounded by these semi-translucent screens also had another officer on top of it. Blood dripped from the table on the clear crystal floor. The splashing of the droplets was louder than waterfalls.
The room was silent as it could be in fact. Compared to the complete chaos that just took place a minute ago, this silence was quite contrasting. Reminded of the silence, she slowly turned her head to the right, every bone and muscle aching in her body as a result of doing so, and looked at the stainless-steel sliding doors.
All of a sudden, a woman’s voice filled with the still room “Take the SkyLife the floor above, please.” The voice was scared, or at least the woman the voice belonged to was filled with anxiety. She was taken aback by the voice but did not move.
“Emily, please.”
She looked at the screens. Rather than exclamation points filling the red screens, someone’s face was there now. A girl in her early 20s was looking straight at her, with the most terrified and concerned look Emily has seen in a long time. Strands of black hair were all over her face. She was sweaty, her head frantically moving up and down from frantic breathing which the microphones also picked up.
Emily didn’t want to move or was too scared to try, she wasn’t sure. Her body silently told her that if she tried to stand up, she would fail “Who are you?”
“My name is Sadie. No matter what happens, look for me. I am-“
Sliding doors started to move with a noise akin to a gate opening up. Her whole body was put into motion by the noises.
“Listen, I am in Sanzber. Get to the upper floor, there is a-“
The whole connection was cut as the room filled with the lights resonating from the screens and the rectangular lights attached to the walls fell into darkness. The gate stopped opening with a loud, low-pitched thump. Only moonlight illuminated the room. Emily saw an officer squeezing through the quarter-open gates.
She could move now. With adrenaline filling every single of her veins, she got up and aimed her pistol at the officer. He still didn’t notice her in the darkness, but the white outfit helped as a moment later, the thin rifle in the officer’s hands was aimed right at her.
“Drop the pistol.” The man yelled as loud as he could, and another officer entered the room. She knew a lot more of them would squeeze in after one another. He could see a silhouette on the other side of the room, but she was sure that he couldn’t see the pistol aimed right at him.
There was no escape, and she thought she had no will within herself to survive. Until now, that is.
As her instincts to survive kicked in, she fired a shot at the officer standing right in the open. Then, before the first body could hit the floor, she started walking toward the second officer and took a second shot. The rest of the bullets, she spent on the agape gate and picked up a rifle that was softly held by the gloves of the first officer. The rifle was thin but long, with a stock designed to lessen recoil as much as possible.
As she saw another head looking through the door, she fired the rifle, backing away as she did so. The gun was almost quiet. The firing process did not use gunpowder but micro-plasma explosions.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
She heard the thump of a body hitting the floor. She moved to the stairs attached to the wall, located on the right side of the conference table. Her rifle was still pointing to the door. She fired at irregular intervals to keep them out.
When her last step back hit the first step, she stumbled backward and her back screamed with pain as she fell onto the staircase.
As she got up and started running up the stairs, turning her back to the gates since the first moment the first officer walked, a metal casing entered the room, sliding across the floor.
She had a second at most before the first flashes made her completely blind and deaf. This singular second was enough to reach the end of the staircase. At the very last step of her sprint, her head was instantly filled with pain so great it felt like it was going to split open. She fell to the ground screaming, covering her head with her arms. Her ears were buzzing beyond belief. Eardrums rattling like a bomb just went off inside her head, he somehow found the strength the half crawl, half sprint towards the glass doors.
As the glass shattered and she used her hands to cover her fall, the glass shards splattered all around the balcony and cut her hands wide open. The pain took away some of the shock of the grenade and she was barely able to put himself into the SkyLift.
There was no power, but Emily blindly believed the words of that girl. She had no other choice but to believe it. I have to survive, she thought to herself, the liberation plan is still underway.
There were eight seats on the lift. They were separated as pairs, two pairs on each side, back-to-back. Emily stumbled inside, hitting every corridor-side seat on the way, and falling down on the empty space at the front of the lift. There were no buttons, no prompts, nothing. She just had to wait. Her head was still filled with the splitting headache and the dark corners of the lift flashed with white silhouettes of their geometry as her surroundings pulsated inside her blurry vision. She was shaking, and she was trying to control her shaking enough while looking at the glass doors that have automatically closed behind her, all of a sudden, she felt her stomach rising. Her vision going even more blurry, she leaned into the seat and puked in front of the seat she was holding onto to keep herself from falling down. She couldn’t smell it; her sinus was burning up. She was glad to be not smelling it; and to prolong that, she crawled away to a seat on the other side of the small cube and crawled under the seat.
She was now hiding between two seats, crouched over inside the small space between them. The guards would take their take going through the room downstairs and upstairs. Still, it was only a matter of time till they would find her.
She started silently praying. Her vision was shaking like she was drunk beyond belief, and the shaking only got worse with every passing second. She prayed to the watchers above, residing in the stars. Since she was transported to the outer walls, the cities’ lights made it impossible to see those stars. She prayed that they saw her. She prayed for courage, and for her life to be saved. This wish came true as the words escaped from her parted lips “Make this junk work.”
And it worked. The white beams on the ceiling came to life and without hesitation, attached to the rope above, the box started moving between the long and thing skyscrapers. The thin whistle of the steel contraptions powered by electricity and magnets filled the place like a soothing whisper, and she let out a comforting sight for the first time in a long while. The machine was moving slightly upwards. Considering the trajectory and the impressive speed of the machine, she deduced that the trip would take less than ten minutes.
These ten minutes were enough for the effects of the flash grenade to slowly pass, but they would linger, even if weak and almost unnoticeable, for days. After a few minutes of passing out and coming back to, she could muster to energy to get herself up and actually sit on the seat.
She looked outside. Colors from the entire spectrum filled her vision all the way to the obstructed horizon. Structures as tall as hundred floors were all connected by the wires of SkyLifts, a countless number of them. The skyscrapers were all thin and their outer shell, if not filled with billboards or contraptions, were of a color that was a mixture of white marble, steel, and darkened glass. This place was called the outer walls, circling around the capital Ephesteron. This circle went on for thousands and thousands of kilometers circling around the capital, hundreds of kilometers wide.
With the way the buildings were getting closer together and were pushing the 100 floors limit of the outer walls, she realized that the lift was going towards the capital. If this machine took her to a checkpoint, she was as good as dead. With concern, she looked around for the rifle. It was not here. She must’ve dropped it after the grenade exploded. Her hands covered her face and washed it with imaginary water. The adrenaline slowly went away, and her body started aching. Her legs, arms, and every inch of her body were in pain as the bruises and cuts all around her made themselves known.
At that moment, every single emotion kept away by adrenaline and the horror of the situation she had just gone through bombarded her all at once, and she started crying, face still covered up with her hands. All alone inside this metal box, she sobbed and sobbed. Her shoulders shaking, she tensed up even more. How was she to survive, let alone continue the liberation plan? She didn’t know. And for a single moment, for the first time since she was born, she didn’t care.