Chapter 1: The Beginning

Meet 18 year-old Davy, living on a refugee station with his siblings, and his best friends Maddie and Jesse.

Faster. I needed speed. The adrenaline pumping through my veins kept telling me, Faster, David, faster. I stepped on the afterburner of my board and the flame from the accelerator burned brighter, rocketing me higher in the atmosphere. The twisting canyon below looked like a drawing from this distance, not quite real to my squinting eyes. My solar-sail flared in the bright orange sunlight, allowing the wind to pick me up higher as I quenched my need for speed.

Higher, higher, faster, faster! Further and further up I went, until the air thinned around me, until my visor fogged up, until I couldn't hold my breath any longer. Then I kicked the “off” switch with my back foot and fell.

The sail snapped back into the board as I crossed my arms across my chest. I dived down, the wind whistling in my ears as I let sweet, sweet gravity do its work. The rush of ascending was nothing compared to this, the danger, the impending impact, the speed. A small smile came to my face as I enjoyed the absolute feeling of being alone, just me, my board, and the wind on my face. There was nothing like it.

When I was about two hundred meters from the ground I kicked my board back to life, grabbed the handle on my sail, and pulled up as hard as I could. The bottom of my board just scraped the ground as the engine propelled me forward into the canyon, going a hundred miles an hour through the winding maze. One wrong turn and I'd be a pancake on the cliff face.

Left, left, right, left, up, down, right, right, I could do this maze in my sleep, I'd done it so much. My jacket tail billowed out in the wind behind me, and I imagined just how cool I looked gliding along. I made my board do a three-sixty, kicking on the afterburners as I finished for even more speed. This was exciting, this was exhilarating, this was fun...

Suddenly I came to a stop, falling off my board as my momentum still carried me forward. I was no longer in the canyon, but back in the whiteroom of the holocourt. Someone had turned off my program.

“Hey!” I shouted, rubbing my leg where I hit the floor, “What's the idea?!”

I stood up and limped towards the door, ripping off my visor as I went, but there was already someone there. He wore his prescription goggles on top of his disheveled red-brown hair as he gave me a stern look. His vest, shirt, and pants were dirty, suggesting that he had just gotten off work in the engine rooms and hadn't showered before interrupting my fun, and his bright blue eyes, eyes he inherited from our father, were narrowed crossly. I swear, he was scowling at me.

“What the hell, David?” Adam's tone was exasperated, like he was more tired of looking after me than actually worried, “The safety was off!”

“Yeah, so?” I shot back, “I turned it off.”

He straightened and gave me his best Listen to me or else look. “If you had fallen, you would have been dead. As in, game over, as in, never coming back.”

Again I asked, “So?” I didn't care. I wouldn't have fallen at all if he hadn't turned off the simulation. Except for that one point where I meant to, but that was still more of a controlled dive than actually falling.

“Didn't your accident teach you anything?” he asked, drudging up memories of two years before. I had fallen off the board with the safety off, and had been in the hospital for two months after. “Don't you care? If you died, what do you think would happen to us? To the girls?” He had a point, of course, but I wasn't going to let him know that. I did care about my sisters, even if I couldn't stand my brother.

Not meeting his eyes I said, “Whatever.”

Adam ran his fingers through his hair. “What happened to you, Davy? Why do you feel the need to risk yourself like that?”

“'Cause it's fun, Adam, or don't you know what that is anymore?”

Adam glared at me. I knew I was being unfair �" he had to spend most of his time looking after me and the girls, and the rest of it working so that we could stay in this refugee station. But Adam had an infuriating way of killing any fun I might possibly have. “You've grown into such a jackass, Davy.”

“Lay off, Adam.”

“Grow up, kid,” he shot back. I didn't say anything to that, but of course it wasn't enough for Adam. “I swear, you were never this rebellious before Dad died.”

“That was because I actually thought we could still be happy as a family. He proved me wrong, though, so I don't see why I should bother trying anymore.” I pushed past him out into the hall.

I think he knew that his last comment had gone too far, because all he said to my back was, “Go see the medic about that leg. I'm serious, David!”

* * * * * * * *

I did go to the medic's office, but I didn't bother him with a sprained leg. Instead I just took a couple of bandages and limped around the corner to tie it myself. I was re-wrapping it for the third time when I heard an Irish accent above me. “You really suck at that, you know?”

“Shaddup,” I replied. Still, I moved aside as my red-haired friend knelt down to tie it for me.

“What'ja do?” Maddie asked, “Fall off your board?” She knew about my old accident; when I got back from the hospital that time it became a running joke between us, like I wasn't coordinated enough for solar-boarding.

“Adam turned the program off on me.” Maddie laughed. “It's not funny!” I protested, starting to chuckle myself. I couldn't help it �" Maddie's smile was infectious.

She stood up, her sparkling green eyes looking straight at me as she laughed, “Come on, Davy, you did fall off your board. You're such a klutz!”

“Yeah, yeah. I'd like to see you try,” I smiled despite myself. That was why I liked Maddie. She could look me in the eye and treat me like an equal. When I was around her and Jesse I didn't feel like just another refugee from a dead country �" I was me, David, with no one judging every move I made.

“Can you walk okay?” she asked me, offering her shoulder for a crutch. I let her support me, my pride spent for the day as we moved down the corridor. “Jesse's in the rec room �" we can meet up with him there.”

The Refugee Station Indigo was large, originally meant to be a scientific laboratory but turned into a refugee camp ten years before when the Devonians destroyed half of England. My mom's name was in the list of the dead from that day, as was Maddie's mom and Jesse's dad. After a little over a month of living on the military base in cramped quarters, they moved us up to a space station orbiting the moon. It too was cramped quarters, but much less so than the base.

Maddie, not having a father, lived on the station with her uncle, and calling him a jerk would be a compliment. Maddie worked hard for her and her uncle's keep, but he would spend their grocery money on cheap whiskey and cigars. We never went inside their quarters, but Jesse and I smelled the foul things when we walked Maddie there. I didn't know how she stood it, but she never complained.

Jesse and Ryan lived with their mom and grandpa. They were close as a family, like me and mine used to be. Ryan and Mercy had lessons together, just like Jesse and I'd had. Maddie was a year behind us, but she could still help us with our work on top of her own. She still had a year to go, though, while we were just finishing up. We all worked on different parts of the station, but hung out whenever we got the chance.

Mostly we met in the rec room and played some of the table games they had there, but sometimes we went to the holocourt and played sports with some of the other kids. Maddie, I'm ashamed to say, could beat all of us boys at most of the sports we tried. She was faster than any of us, and what she didn't have in strength she made up for in speed. I was sometimes jealous of that, especially when I got that adrenaline rush telling me the go faster. Maddie was a tomboy, keeping her red hair back in a ponytail and wearing cargo pants and work boots around the station. It was hard to remember that she was a girl most of the time, even though the sweaty tank tops she wore when in the holocourt were skintight and showed off her good parts.

Of the three of us, I was the strongest. My solar-boarding on the holocourt, mainly from pushing and pulling the sail, had left me able to bench-press over twice my body weight. It came in handy when working in the cargo bay, moving crates off the loading dock onto the lift that took it to the ships. If it weren't for the fact that Maddie could outrun me, I'd have had no problem playing against her.

We made it to the rec room, and my Asian buddy Jesse met me with a similar reaction to Maddie's: “You know, Davy, you're supposed to stay on the board.”

Jesse was athletic, but his build didn't let him excel at sports. He was on the thin side, more lanky than buff, with a grin slightly too wide for his face. His dark eyes, slanted when we met, had filled out more with age. His skin had gotten paler from living on the station, but it hadn't lost its yellow tinge. Jesse may not have been fast or strong, but he evened out with flexibility. This was the guy I wanted around when I got in trouble. He had a way with people that allowed him to talk his way out of any situation. His silver tongue got the three of us out of more punishment duty than I care to dwell on.

“Yeah, well, my brother had other ideas.” I limped over to one of the five couches in the room and sank down into it, elevating my leg on the coffee-table.

Maddie sat down next to me. “And instead of letting the medic have a look at it...?”

“He's got worse stuff than my leg to deal with. I can wait.”

“Davy, you can barely walk,” Jesse pointed out, “How do you expect to go to work tomorrow like that?”

He had a point, so I had to concede. “Alright, I'll go see him tomorrow morning.”

“He's out to spite Adam in any way possible,” Maddie explained, poking me in the side, “Even if it means unnecessarily prolonging the pain.”

“Whatever.” I leaned back against the sofa, turning to Jesse and changing the subject, “How's Ryan doing? Last I heard he got some military contract for his programming skills.”

“He hasn't got it yet,” Jesse told me, sitting in a chair across from me, “There were some Raider Corps reps here a week or so ago, looking into all our records, and I saw a few more today. One of the guys I work with says they've been around all week �" I think another tax is going to hit.”

Taxes were the numbers that told how productive the refugee families were, compared to the price of their allotted space on the station. Raising these was rare, but hit us whenever the government decided that there were too many people here �" England wasn't the only country the Devonians hit in this war, and more and more refugees arrived when another was fleeced. The taxes were on a person-to-person basis, assessing how much a refugee was worth and attaching a number to them. If a family couldn't pay the full amount, than any family member whose number fell outside what they could pay was drafted into government service. That way they got more space in the station for new arrivals, as well as cheap labor for the military or the mines.

Raider Corps was a private contracting corporation for the United Nations Defense Military Branch. They provided many services, from police to mercenaries, and even had a section for investigative sciences. I'd heard Ryan was being considered for a job there, but if representatives from Raider Corps were checking the station's records then Jesse was probably right; they'd want to get their new hires as cheaply as possible.

“When do you think?” Maddie asked, thinking the same thing.

“I dunno,” Jesse shrugged, “A matter of weeks, maybe. I'm just glad Ryan isn't of age yet.” A human, of whatever race, had to be seventeen to be up for draft �" Ryan had just had his sixteenth birthday a month before.

“Yeah, great for him,” I said, “but what about us? We're all of age, even Maddie has her seventeenth birthday in a week.”

Maddie poked me in the side again. “Don't worry 'bout me, Davy. I plan on signing up first chance I get.”

That got my attention. “Sign up for what?” I asked stupidly.

“The United Military, dummy.”

“You do know there's a war on, right?” Jesse pointed out.

Maddie made a face at him. “What other choice do I have?” she asked, “Way I see it, it's either that or stay in this dump the rest of my life.”

Jesse and I looked at each other. She was right, for more than just herself �" unless a long-lost relative popped up out of the blue, there was no way we could get off this station with anything more than the clothes on our backs. I hate to admit it, but joining the service was the most logical option.

“Well, when you put it that way...”

“Come off it, guys,” she rolled her eyes, “you know I'm right.”

Jesse stood up. “In any case, we don't need to think about it for awhile. The next scheduled visit for the Corps isn't for another month or so.” He ought to know, his mother having worked in the paper-pushing department for the past couple years. With that he said goodnight and left, it being close to curfew.

I tried to stand too, but my leg had other ideas. It was hurt worse than I'd thought; now that the adrenaline was good and out of my system, it felt like it was on fire when I made the slightest movement. Maddie ended up helping me to my feet and out the door after Jesse.

* * * * * * * *

“Shouldn't we have turned left back there?” I asked Maddie after twenty minutes of slow, painful walking. We obviously weren't heading towards my quarters, but I thought maybe I was walking her back. Stupid, considering my condition, but I think the pain was making my mind fuzzy. But after twenty minutes and a few wrong turns, even I figured out that wasn't our heading.

“Nope.” She guided me towards a door at the end of the hall, and I suddenly realized what she had done.

“No, Maddie, please, I'm fine. I told you I shouldn't bother him with something as small as this. I promise, I'll go tomorrow morning, just please, please don't make me do this tonight!”

She stopped and looked at me sideways. “You... Davy, you're scared of the medic, aren't you?” she accused.

I tried to stammer out excuses, but she hit the issue dead-on: I did not like doctors. With a passion. Don't get me wrong, Kirkland was a great physician and a nice guy �" for some inexplicable reason, I did not like him.

Despite my protests, Maddie soldiered on with half-carrying me to the door. I'm ashamed to say I fought her there, but since I couldn't even stand on my leg, much less walk on it, she still got me through the door relatively easily.

“Hey, Doc? One more before curfew,” Maddie called to the back room, having sat me on the table and holding me there.

“What's this, then?” Kirkland poked his head out from the back room, giving Maddie a quizzical look.

Burton Kirkland was a two-meter tall, lanky nerd in a lab coat. He even wore the big round glasses that fit the stereotype; he had a pocket protector as well. Kirkland's head was always in the clouds, coming up with various ideas for science projects and blowing up his lab every other week. His arms and legs were long and flexible, but his skin was a pale white from not enough time under a sun-lamp. His glasses made his eyes look too big for his head. Right then they were both staring at me with a questioning look.

“The idiot fell off his solar board,” Maddie explained.

“Ah, yes, yes, yes. Be right back!” Kirkland pulled his head back in the other room. I gave Maddie a pleading look as we listened to something that sounded suspiciously like a blowtorch on metal. A minute later he came back out, wearing a soldering mask over his head and tossing a metal cube up and down in the air. “Sorry, working with highly unstable alloys. I'm not certain, but this thing might explode. Now, what seems to be the problem?”

Maddie answered for me as I made another move to escape, “It's his leg. He didn't get it looked at right away, and now he can't stand on it.”

“Really?” The medic actually seemed fascinated by my injury, as though he'd never seen anything like it before. It did not help my confidence. “Could you please remove the textile concealment from the extremity in question?”

I just stared like an idiot until Maddie whispered, “Roll up your pant-leg.”

Nodding to her I did as instructed, removing the bandage too and wincing when I saw a very green bruise along my knee. Kirkland moved his face closer, muttering to himself as he did so. “Fascinating,” he was saying, “To get a pigmentation that exact hue would be most uncommon, at least in that exact placement. What would happen if I did this?” He poked the edge of the small cube into the joint below my kneecap, and a wave of unbearable pain shot through my whole leg. I couldn't help but cry out, and had to resist hitting him upside the head for that. Not out of deference to the medic, mind you, but for fear that the metal soldering mask would just injure my hand and make my visit longer. But for Kirkland's part, he just said, “Be right back!” again and ducked back into the other room.

He came out a second later with a scanner to get an exact reading of my leg. After a couple minutes, he declared, “Ah, as I thought! Fractured in four locations. Not extremely severe, but opened further through continuous use. When was this accident?”

“'Bout an hour or two ago,” Maddie answered. Kirkland turned towards her as though just noticing her presence.

“Is that Madison Daniels?” he asked, “The impeccable young lady who never misses an appointment? The one with the adept appendages? The same! Well met!”

Maddie blushed, embarrassed. “It's good to see you too, Doc. Can you fix him?”

“Certainly, certainly,” Kirkland waved the implication off like a mosquito. “Just let me get my tools.”

“You do know she means fix my leg, right?” I asked, unsure of what “tools” he might be going to get.

“Hm? Oh, yes. Quite. Be right back!” He ducked into the back room again.

I gave Maddie a glare, silently asking her why she brought me to this quack. She shrugged and gave a reproachful look in response, as if telling me Be on your best behavior, or else.

I won't bore you with the details of the rest of the visit, so I'll just hit the highlights. Kirkland came back out with a thick metal tube, about six inches across, which he roughly fastened onto my knee. He hit a few buttons on it, and I can't remember the next ten to fifteen minutes. Maddie later told me I fainted, but I prefer to think I just blocked out the memory of me being very brave despite agonizing pain. When I came to, however, my leg felt as good as new.

As I went to get off the table, Kirkland stopped me. “Use these,” he said, handing me a pair of crutches, “Until you go to sleep. Tomorrow it should be good as new!”

I thanked him and took the crutches, heading out of that metallic doom-room with Maddie. She walked slower for me on the crutches, and I could tell she was glad not to be carrying me anymore.

I offered to walk her to her quarters, but she shook her head sternly. “I want to make sure you don't ditch those crutches the second my back is turned. I'll walk you back.”

* * * * * * * *

She did more than that. When we got to my family's quarters, she called Adam to the doorway.

“Make sure he stays off that leg for the evening,” she told him, “No, Davy, don't give me that look. He's not to use that leg until morning.”

“Thanks, Maddie,” Adam replied, “and thanks for dragging him to the medic. He'd never have gone on his own.”

Maddie crossed her arms and glared at him. “He wouldn't have needed to go if it weren't for you. Next time, warn him before you shut him down.”

“Oh? Is that what he told you?” Adam said, turning to look at me as he continued to talk to my friend, “and did he happen to mention that he was playing with the safety turned off? Or that there was no safe way for me to warn him before pulling the plug?”

Maddie looked shocked, worried, and angry in rapid succession. She glared at me when she said, “No. He conveniently forgot to mention this.”

“G'night,” I said, closing the door on her. I'd pay for that one later, but just then I couldn't handle both her and my brother ganging up on me.

Adam just looked at me, and I noticed my sisters listening in from the dining table in the living room. I just growled a “What're you lookin' at?” to them, and went to the bedroom to my cot. When the others came in I pretended to be asleep. Why did my family have to be so annoying?

Author's Note

In this chapter I'm hoping to portray a teenage boy who wants more than what life is giving him. Am I coming across as too spoiled and/or selfish for the audience? I'd like for people to relate.

Reviews

[Kuandio]

Nice way to start, right into motion, and I was surprised that it was a program simulation. You displayed an above average proficiency at tech talk and as a writer in general. You don’t drop too much info, but reveal more or less the right amount at the right times. Are you sure you want to use first person narrative for this type of book? It seems alright, but just something to consider. I thought maybe some of the dialogue was a bit bunched together. I was able to understand who was talking, but I think it could cause some confusion. A few of the lines that I liked were “Listen to me look”, and “drudging up memories”, but there were others. At one point you mentioned Maddie’s speed twice in one sentence, which I don’t think you want to do. The characters weren’t bad. The relationship with the brother is interesting. The protagonist I’m not sure about yet. I feel like I’ve read and watched many movies with similar characters. My favorite is Kirkland. I get the feeling that this kid will be the hero, but try not to make it too predictable in the way its achieved. I felt like maybe some type of deeper conflict is missing, doesn’t have to be outer, but could be inner, situational, that really will make the reader connect to this at another level. Maybe provide some vulnerability in this kid? I don't know, a flaw, some kind of turmoil. At the end I realized that I missed your prologue! Woops.
Overall, very good job