I'm Just A Kid

Chapter 1: Pilot

The Sky Box had never been designed for children. At least, that was what I told myself whenever the walls seemed to close in around me. The cell was small enough that I could cross it in six steps. Four if I took bigger ones. The walls were dull grey metal, scratched in places where other prisoners had decided that leaving their mark was more important than following the rules. A narrow bed was fixed against one wall, alongside a sink that occasionally made a horrible clanking noise and a transparent panel in the door that meant the guards could watch me whenever they wanted. They called it security. I called it creepy.

I had been here long enough to know which guards were kind, which ones were pretending to be kind, and which ones seemed to wake up every morning making it their personal mission to ruin somebody's day. I knew their footsteps, too. Everyone in the Sky Box had their own way of walking: heavy boots, quick footsteps, or the scrape of someone dragging one foot behind the other. After twelve years of living on the Ark, I had become good at noticing small things. When you lived in a place where every corridor looked the same and every day followed the same rules, noticing things was one of the few ways to entertain yourself.

My name is Emmy Beaumont. I am twelve years old. And according to the people in charge, I am a criminal. Technically, I suppose they were right. I had broken the law several times. But I did not think that made me a bad person.

My mother used to say that there was a difference between breaking a rule and doing something wrong. She was the first person who ever taught me that adults were not automatically right just because they were adults. She was clever, patient, and stubborn when she thought something mattered. I got the stubborn part from her. The mouth came from my father.
My father was still alive.

That was the strange part. He was a guard on the Ark, which meant that even though I had not seen him since I had been locked away, he was somewhere out there. Walking the corridors. Patrolling the Ark. Watching over prisoners. Sometimes, late at night, I imagined he would be the one walking past my cell. I imagined hearing his footsteps before seeing him through the glass. I imagined his face changing when he realized I was there. I imagined him finding some way to talk to me, even if it was only for a few seconds.

I wished for it more often than I wanted to admit. But it never happened. Not once.

My mother was gone. She had been floated. The word was so ordinary on the Ark that people sometimes forgot what it meant. They had taken her life because she had broken the law, and I still remembered the day they told me. I remembered standing completely still while the adults explained what had happened, as if staying perfectly motionless could somehow make the words untrue. My mother was gone. I would never hear her voice again, never see her smile, never have her put a hand on my shoulder and tell me that everything was going to be okay.

She had left me with one final lesson, though: Don't let them make you believe you're small.

I had not understood what she meant then. I understood now.

I learned quickly that being alone on the Ark was dangerous. I also learned that people were much more willing to overlook a twelve year old stealing food than they were to overlook a twelve year old asking uncomfortable questions. Unfortunately, I asked a lot of questions. Why were some people allowed more food than others? Why did the Council get to decide who lived where? Why was Earth supposedly completely uninhabitable when the old recordings showed forests, oceans, animals, and cities?

Nobody liked those questions, especially not when I refused to stop asking them. And sometimes, when I was feeling particularly brave or particularly stupid, I asked myself another question. Where was my father? Was he on patrol? Was he working outside the Sky Box? Did he know where I was? I hoped he did. I hoped that someday he would walk past my cell and see me. I hoped he would stop. He never did.