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Fiction Action & Adventure

Dome, The

by (author) Suzanne Craig-Whytock

Publisher
Bookland Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2019
Category
Action & Adventure, Dystopian, Thrillers
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781772311013
    Publish Date
    Oct 2019
    List Price
    $19.95

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Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels

  • Age: 14 to 18
  • Grade: 9 to 12

Description

It is the year 2135, almost four decades since the Water Wars ended. Much of the continent is a desert wasteland, and the powerful Consortium rules Adanac, one of the few habitable areas remaining, with an iron fist. Cee and Dee, 16-year-old twins who share a special, almost psychic bond, are runaways from a Consortium workhouse. Now living as Freeworlders in the largest tent city in Trillium province, they are determined to survive--Dee spends her days thieving with her best friend Rogan, and Cee makes a living selling his handmade woodcarvings to the Fancies, the wealthy elite. Like all Freeworlders, life is a struggle, made worse by the constant threat of The Dome, where punishments for the slightest offense are meted out by the Dome Master.

When devastating circumstances force the twins to become separated, all seems lost until the sudden appearance of Darv Bouchard, leader of an underground resistance movement, who reveals some shocking truths. Rumours become reality, enemies become friends, and old foes resurface. Dee and Cee are tested to their limits as they confront the demons of their past and try to save the future, for themselves and all of Adanac.

About the author

Love of literature and writing came to Suzanne Craig-Whytock at an early age and continued into adulthood, leading her to earn an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature from Wilfrid Laurier University. She has worked in education most of her life and was a high school English teacher in Ontario for over 20 years. She has authored both fiction and non-fiction works, from short stories and poetry to academic documents and educational resource materials. She regularly publishes humorous essays focused on city life, politics, current events, and popular culture on her website. "The Dome" is her second published novel.

Suzanne Craig-Whytock's profile page

Excerpt: Dome, The (by (author) Suzanne Craig-Whytock)

Chapter 1: Dee

Heart pounding, feet pounding."Pick up the pace, Dee!"

"Just dump them, Rogan--it's not worth the risk!"

"No!" he gasped. "We can eat for a week on this. Keep running!"

My lungs had started to burn as soon as we'd hit the third set of stairs in the abandoned apartment building, but with a Lobot on our tails, I couldn't afford to slow down. Rogan showed no signs of giving up the search for a hiding spot, despite the fact that so far, the doors to every floor were locked. Fourth floor--no luck. Fifth floor--the same. Sixth floor--the whirring noise was getting closer. Seventh floor--finally! The door lock was broken, and we pushed through, looking wildly behind us as we raced down the hallway. The apartments were mostly empty as we passed them but the second last place, despite half the exterior wall being blown out, had some furniture in it--better yet it had an old stovetop with an oven. We could stash the baubles in there, hide in the closet and wait for the Lobot to give up. I slammed the apartment door shut behind us as Rogan threw the baubles into the oven, then we dove into a closet with louvered doors and pulled them closed--I pushed back up against the wall, while Rogan knelt down to look through the slats.

"Shhh!" he whispered sharply to me. "Listen." I tried to control my breathing so that I could hear what was happening. There was a faint hiss--the Lobot was using one of its lasers to cut a hole through the apartment door. Then there was a thud, as part of the door fell onto the floor, and a low whirring sound. I inhaled and held my breath as the Lobot flew slowly by the closet, tracking the microchip signal coming from the baubles. Suddenly it stopped moving and hovered in mid-air, rotating its antennae toward the old appliance. Then I could hear banging, and Rogan smothered a giggle. He moved back and motioned at me to look for myself. I knelt down and I slapped my hand over my mouth so I wouldn't laugh out loud. The Lobot was slamming itself into the glass door of the oven; it was able to sense the microchip signal and see the baubles, but it couldn't figure out how to get to them. I turned to Rogan, and in the dim light, I noticed an old blanket on the shelf above us. I pointed to it and Rogan nodded. This would be tricky and dangerous, but we didn't have a lot of choice at this point--we needed to act before it started using a laser. Rogan took the blanket down and quietly opened the closet door. I just hoped that the Lobot was so preoccupied with the baubles that it wouldn't notice much else. Rogan began creeping towards it--it was still unaware of him. Finally, at about three feet away, he took a deep breath and threw the blanket over the Lobot, knocking it to the ground. Before it had a chance to squirm or struggle, he jumped on the blanket with all his strength, over and over, until the Lobot was still and silent. He smiled triumphantly at me.

I hesitated. "We should make sure," I whispered. I tiptoed over to where Rogan was waiting and gingerly lifted up a corner of the blanket. Sure enough, the Lobot was dead--its lights were out and it looked pretty crushed. We both stared at it in distaste--the tranquilizer darts and locator cuffs it carried were spilling out of it like guts. Suddenly I was filled with fury, and I turned on Rogan.

"That was really stupid, Rogan! Do you realize how close we came to being caught?! Which body part are you willing to lose for a couple of coins?!"

He looked taken aback and his brow furrowed defensively. "Neither of us is losing anything, and that stash is worth more than a 'couple' of coins. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been chased by the Lobot for so long, you know that. I had everything under control--it's all good, Dee. Now come on." He opened the oven door and took out the baubles--a necklace and two rings--which glittered in the light. "That stupid Fancy won't miss them--she probably has plenty more where these came from, anyway. Serves her right for wandering too close to Divinity without any Blues nearby to protect her."

I sighed in frustration. "Well, it was still awfully close, and I happen to like my hands and feet just as they are, thank you very much."

Rogan leered at me. "I like your hands and feet too, my lovely!"

"EWW! You sound like a Fancy!" I slapped him on the shoulder in mock-anger.

He slapped back at me then peered around the corner of the apartment door. "All clear. Anyway," he continued cavalierly, "you could always choose an eye, although I hear it's pretty painful. Come on. We need to get out of here before some ambitious Blue tracks that Lobot and shows up."

My stomach flipped at the thought of having an eye removed, and then I was overcome by a wave of emotion--a sense of questioning and worry. It was my twin brother, Cee. I focused inward and sent feelings of calm and reassurance back to him. Not only did we look exactly the same--green eyes, and hair that was called strawberry blond when strawberries used to grow, but we were on the same wavelength, so to speak. We couldn't read each other's minds exactly, but we could project feelings to each other. Right now, he was sensing that I was scared and mad, and I was telling him that everything was okay. He hated it when I went out thieving, especially with Rogan, who was a real risk-taker. It was one thing running a scam or getting a Fancy to cough up a little spare change, but outright robbery in broad daylight wasn't for the faint of heart. Not that I had much of a choice. Cee and I used to be workhouse kids, and like all "provincial wards", once you hit 15, you were sent to the agri-complexes up north as farm labour. The alternative was to run away and fend for yourselves as "Freeworlders". And after spending most of our lives as workhouse kids, neither of us wanted to finish out our days as agri-slaves in the Upper Belt, so we made our way to Divinity, a tent city in Metro.

Cee and I had been left at Happy Valley, one of the workhouses up North, when we were about three months old. After the Frag riots in 2087 and the Water Wars that followed, babies were being abandoned on a regular basis by parents who couldn't afford to take care of them, sometimes as many as twenty a day, so The Consortium, a supergroup of countries across the water, set up the workhouse system. All the kids were given letters of the alphabet instead of names, and he and I were the third and fourth babies dumped there that day, so "C" and "D". Our actual "designations'" are a lot longer and include the date as well. By the time most ward kids were 4 or 5, they'd been given nicknames or picked out new names for themselves, but we were fine with Cee and Dee. The workhouses weren't great, but if you kept your nose clean and did what you were told by the Protectors, the adults who ran the place, you could survive. And you were told a lot. By the time you were a One, you were expected to stay with an older kid, a Guardian, who either worked in the dorms or the kitchen--like an apprentice. Depending on who your Guardian was, you either got slapped regularly or ignored most of the time. When you got to be a Five, you were responsible for making beds or washing dishes, or garden work. At Ten, you worked in the nursery with the babies, in the kitchen doing meal prep, or in the schoolhouse, teaching other kids about soil and plants from a textbook. At Twelve, you started working the fields full-time, in preparation for a life-time of servitude in the Breadbasket, which was the area of the Upper Belt where farms could still exist. All the fruits and vegetables from up North were planted and harvested by agri-slaves, mostly the workhouse kids who had chosen farm labour and three meals a day over freedom and starvation. But it was a hard life too--from what I heard, most agri-slaves didn't make it into their thirties--too much exposure to chemicals. I was pretty sure that Cee and I stood a better chance on our own--if we didn't end up in The Dome, that is.

Cee and I ran away from Happy Valley right before our 15th Drop-Off Day. That wasn't a "birthday" exactly--none of us really knew when we were born, but the workhouse had a record of the dates that all of us had been left there, and if you'd been a good little "agri-slave in the making", you got a piece of candy on your Drop-off Day each year. Kind of a twisted thing to celebrate, but we didn't have much else. Anyway, Cee and I had no intention of going to the Breadbasket so we took off and headed for Divinity, the biggest tent city in Trillium Province, where we've been for over a year now. Scraping together a living hasn't been easy. Cee brings in a little money at the Hidden Market, where he sells his handmade "pretties" to the Fancies, the rich people who come into Divinity on Sundays with their Blue bodyguards, looking for unique objects to impress their friends with. He's an amazing woodcarver--he can take an old scrap of anything and turn it into an elephant or a parrot, things that sell really well because they're extinct now. I don't know how he knows what they all look like, but they're beautiful, and the Fancies will pay a lot for them. The problem is that we can't both be out at the same time. It's a cutthroat world, and your tent and everything inside it is fair game for squatters if you leave it empty. Someone has to be there at all times to protect it, so Cee can't come thieving with me, and I can't go to the Market with him. Not that either of us minds. His hands are his most important asset--if he got caught by a Lobot, he'd get sent to The Dome, and more than likely the crowd would choose hand over foot--they usually do for thieves, unless, like Rogan said, you want to give them a real thrill and choose your own eye. As for me, I hate the Hidden Market. Well, I don't hate the Market, I just hate the Fancies. They come in their finery and jewels, with their servants and bodyguards, sometimes with Lobots hovering around them for extra protection, and then they want to barter for lower prices. It's sickening really, when I think how long Cee works on his pieces and how little he has to sell them for sometimes.

I felt his wave of worry start to subside, and I sent a projection of the idea of home to him, so that he'd know we were on our way. Rogan once asked me what the "idea" of home was, since I couldn't actually send a picture of the tent to Cee--the only way I could describe it was to say it was like the emotion you felt when someone you loved squeezed your hand. I know it sounds stupid, but home to me was always just Cee, never a place. Whenever I was scared or sad, I could always count on him to take my hand and hold it tight, to let me know that, no matter what, we were together and that nothing could separate us. That was home. Then, just for fun, I sent him the feeling of being well-fed--we were going to eat well as soon as we pawned our hard-won treasures.

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