Entries for Write To Rank 2023 Contest by @Action
! NOVA : A Story In Snippets !
In a dystopian world where most lives are confined into walled steel cities, Nova - the daughter of the 13th City's renowned pharmacist, joins the Society of the Shield...
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"I am fine, Michael." Nova sighed, crossing her legs on the hospital bed, glancing in disgust at the white washed interior of the clinic.
"Getting a message about my daughter shot at by the wilds hardly left me unbothered."
Nova glanced at her father's unwrinkled suit, pressed tie and a polished, shiny pair of wooden sole shoes. Firm and inflexible, quite like the man staring at Nova with his back at the little square window.
"They didn't shoot me for no reason; I trespassed in their city boundaries to obtain the passcodes." Nova explained, meeting Michael's distasteful stare.
"Then the facility should've sent in trained men as spies instead. I'll talk to the Mayor about this correction."
"You will not do anything of the sort." She bit angrily.
"Why not?" Michael quirked his eyebrow. "Why do you, of all people, need entrance into this facility? You should be a pharmacist like me, and here you are, risking yourself." He gestured towards the tightly wrapped bandage around her right shoulder and arm.
"Because maybe this is the only thing that makes me feel alive, and not like one of the wilds' corpses I have seen in your laboratory, father!"
He straightened his framed spectacles, and with a smirk of amusement, he pushed his brown strands away from his eyes. "In that case your new opinion would enjoy the sight of some more wilds' corpses."
"More?" Nova asked, a frown replacing her fatigue. "You're going to bleed them dry too?"
"Nova, as your father and a person with genuine concern for you, you ought to refrain from conversing with Floyd."
"You are going to concoct a cure by slaughtering them?" Nova asked, forcing him to meet her eyes, a copy of his own green and shrewd ones. "Is there really even a cure?"
Michael closed the middle button of his black-fit coat, while the deafening siren of the alarm began to blare. He opened the door of the clinic room, ignoring her question as she hurled another. "Are they in your laboratory?"
He stopped, holding the door open, deliberating. He sighed at last. "They are imprisoned here in this facility…for now." Michael shot her a concealed glance, and hastened out.
The sickeningly loud volume of the alarms made her head pound along with the wound on her arm. While her heart hammered rhythmically with a dizzying and heavy beat of urgency she feared to name.
For the sake of lost humanity Nova could not let the wilds be subjected to either death or injected with the serum; which, to her, sounded far worse than quick death.
