Danger Zone ▷ Bellamy Blake [SU]

01.

DANGER ZONE

CHAPTER ONE

Alice Ever's laminated name tag dangled off the soft fabric wrapped around her neck. As an intern for the Ark's technology department, she was expected to have a form of identification on her at all times. Seeing that she's merely seventeen, she can't be walking into a blocked off zone without reason.

And reason she had.

For the past ninety seven years, mankind has been living in a space station called the Ark. After a nuclear apocalypse turned their planet, Earth, into a radiating nuclear mess, twelve running space stations all formed together to create their home. Alice's home.

Like every other person residing in the space station, Alice had never felt the sun on her face, continued to breath artificial air, never felt rain dance upon her skin, and never went a day without hearing the mechanical hum in the background.

All of which brought herself to now, out of the twenty candidates, all prodigies when it came to their skills with technology, Alice Ever was the single one chosen to get an inside look on a top secret program. Abby Griffin and her partner, Jackson, were the two running the said program, both of them also mentoring her and allowing her to get a feel for what exactly they were doing.

Alice had been informed that there was recently a malfunction in the system that created their oxygen and held it within their station, making it so that they could all live there for another one hundred years until they would finally be allowed to return to the ground. Four more generations of stale air and seemingly confinement. The walls of the Ark always seemed to make things so cut off, Alice not knowing what it was like to be in one place all on her own. Her home, a residential compartment, consisted of a single square room with three beds, one for her, one for her mother and one for her father. It wasn't exactly large. They had a table, a closet, and that was it.

Either way, the malfunction in this said system was becoming even more drastic. They thought that surely they'd be able to fix it, but there was no possible way, which meant now they were taking desperate measures.

Desperate measures that Alice Ever was very much apart of as of now.

Everyone had their place aboard the Ark. There were your mechanics, your technicians, simple living folk, school kids, all sorts of people, and then you had your delinquents. They resided in what was called the Sky Box. There, any teenager under the age of eighteen who had committed a crime, whether it was stealing, murder, or anything in between, would live until they were old enough for review. Once finished with review, they would then be deemed to carry out their lives as a regular person, which was very, very rare, or to be floated, which meant they'd be put in a solitary glass confinement before the doors leading out into space were opened. It was a quick death, the lack of pressure practically making their bodies spontaneously combust. It was the most humane way they could think of at this time.

Except, all one hundred of the teenagers within the Sky Box were never going to see that defeat - they were never to be floated. Now that oxygen supply was merely down to three months, four once the one hundred are gone, the one hundred expendable teens were being sent down to the ground even if it's not said to be safe for another one hundred years.

It was desperate measures.

Alice didn't necessarily know how she felt about the whole thing, if she was being honest. She knew that sending them down there was their only chance at survival, but if it wasn't, then her best friend, Nathan Miller, was just sent down to his death, and she would have been apart of it.