Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
chapter one /the skybox
BEING BORN in space was, as of the year 2149, normal, and it has been for the past ninety-seven years. It has been normal ever since the Earth crumbled to ash and filled with radiation from missiles that were released without warning back in the year 2052. The only known survivors were, luckily, scientists and doctors and engineers who had their bases located out in space during the explosions. For almost the last ten decades, Earth has been unsurvivable for everyone and everything. People were told that Earth wouldn't be survivable for another hundred years— meaning, four more generations of being locked in space.
Twelve operational space stations came together after the nuclear destruction that occurred on the ground. And now a thriving population of 2,659 people lived within a singular station called the Ark. One station forged from the many, and what used to be twelve stations. Yet, there were exactly a hundred people within that Ark that weren't really apart of the forged station. Those one hundred people were prisoners, children.
The Ark didn't believe in floating children, or those under eighteen, without a fair trial first. So, any kid who committed a crime was put into, what the one hundred called, the Skybox until they were, what used to be considered, the legal age.
Rachel Slater was one of the one hundred kids that definitely didn't feel apart of the society that was made up on the Ark. Especially when she has been trapped in the same metal room since she was sixteen. She was forced to be there, locked away, until the day she gets floated from the crime she committed. Which happened to be when she turned eighteen, on her birthday. And much as Rachel hated the room she was stuck in, she didn't want her eighteenth birthday to come around.
Her eighteenth birthday was tomorrow, it fell on September 13th. For the past two years, Rachel has doing the same thing since her birthday has gotten closer— sitting on the floor of her cell, laying against her bed frame, and fidgeting with the compass necklace her father gave her when she was fourteen.
All she could think about as she stared at the plain metal walls around her was the fact that she was going to die tomorrow. Someone will be pulling the lever, someone that she probably won't even know, and sending her into space from the airlock chamber. And there was nothing she could do anything about it.
The only reason she hasn't been floated yet was because she was still just a kid, especially when the crime she committed happened. And now that she was technically going to be an adult very soon, the Ark would never take her side with the crime she committed. Not after she killed their best engineer and her father.
