Machines

• Steven George, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2015

Skye ran down the moonlit alley, the slapping of her shoes against the cobblestones the only sounds around. The wind quickened, so she turned her black trenchcoat’s collar upwards to block her olive skin from the pinpricks of rain. Her long hair, as purple as a stormy night, trailed behind her as she ran away from it. She thought she had escaped, but she was blinded as her eyes were pierced as a bright white light surrounded her. She realised in a split second that she was trapped, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. She hit the sides of the cone of light with all her might, but this attempt was in vain as she had nowhere near the strength needed to break the solid light. She felt the floor beneath her fall away, as she was hoisted away by the thing above her. Smash. Skye suddenly felt gravity reassert itself around her. She tried her best to brace for the impact onto cobblestones from twenty meters in the air. She landed on the ground, managing to only break the bones in her left hand. She ran away from the unloving machine above her, as she ducked into a crumbling warehouse, the air filled with the stench of death and decay. She quickly ran the scenario and all possible actions through her mind as she reminded herself to thank someone for breaking the light cone. The resistance wasn’t going to be able to save her, nor was she going to be able to escape with ease. She found only one option in which she lived to regroup with the resistance. She needed to significantly lower her body heat so that the harvester couldn’t locate her. Skye found two ways to achieve this. Either swallow her death pill, painful, or locate enough fire extinguishers to cloud herself for a significant time. The former being a last ditch effort, she ran around the warehouse, finding three extinguishers in total. She pulled the pin out of the first one and started spraying the makeshift cloud above her, not worrying about the fumes because of her military grade gas mask, and hoped that the harvester had passed. Once she had drained the second extinguisher, she risked going outside and trying to find her way back to the resistance. She briskly walked out of the warehouse, being extremely wary, looking out for all the signs of a harvester ship. Being happy with her observation skills, she concluded that there wasn’t one nearby, so she ran eastward, hoping that the resistance hadn’t moved since she left for a supply run, which had resulted in all this happening. She realised that her best shot would be to go to where that shot that had broken the solid light originated. Bang! Sizzle. Skye fell down on her face as she was thrown forwards from a blast from a harvester scout, her skin scorched. The last thing she saw was its mechanical arms descending as she swallowed the pill.