The Queen

Chapter 4: The Ebony Kingdom

Sabrina nudged over to the plates edge and flipped around to the bottom of it. The board slammed up against the plate’s underside. She flipped a switch on her wrist and the boards polarity switched, pushing her off the underside. Leaning forward, she weaved among the propulsion ports and gears, headed for the central spire. A cart on the spire began to descend from the Upper Plate. Leaning forward, she pushed the board faster and it began to heat up beneath her feet. She pushed it as fast as it would go, the metal nearly white hot beneath her feet. Still inside the climate control sphere, she had no method of cooling it down. She angled for the cart, hoping to ride it down as far as she could.She lunged for the cart, her board becoming confused as it’s rider jumped, leaving it behind. It spun around in place several times before dropping without a call signal to follow. As it plummeted out out of the climate control radius and instantly began to cool as ice began to coat the riding surface.

Sabrina’s hands hit the edge of the cart and she grabbed onto it, curling her knees up before she slammed into the glass. She clung the roof and stretched her legs out, trying to reach the platform below. She looked inside to see a Knight and his attendee. The Knight looked over at her and glanced away. Sabrina released the roof and grabbed the platform, swinging her legs up and activating the magnets in her boots. Snapping them against the bottom, she dropped her head down as the Knight looked back with a confused look.

Twisting the knob on her wrist, her board stopped falling and returned to flight, rising towards her until it stopped and nudged her arm. She grabbed it and placed it on her back, hanging in for the ride. They passed quickly through the Metro Plate and the Middle Class Plate before it stopped at the Highest Lower Class Plate. Slum E1 through Slum E3. Not a hundred feet below lay Slum F1.  The best slum to hold the invalids, the unworthy and forever unemployed.

Releasing the platform, Sabrina's boot magnets increased their strength to keep her on the cart. The suits internal software figured out the distance to be ninety-three feet and seven and three quarters of an inch from her head to the ground. This would be cutting it a tad close. Anything over a hundred feet she would feel in the moment in her legs and the rest of her body and it was too much she would break every single one of those bones. Reaching out to her wrist, she deactivated the boot magnets, receiving several warnings to her current height and that due to its closeness to the maximum height limit, not all impact force would be eliminated by the suit. Then she was airborne, falling through the air for just a few seconds in which she flipped herself over and braced for impact. Her feet met solid ground once more and the shock sent vibrations the entire way up her legs, jarring her entire body. Her legs supported her for a brief moment as she walked away from the slight impact crater and then gave out, depositing her on the sidewalk.

She twisted around and landed on her back, her face screwing up from the pain of her legs. She lifted the helmet’s face mask just enough to let the breeze brush her lips and the tip of her nose. She took deep breaths and saw a girls face appear over her. Her left eye hung half closed with a mess of burn scars around it.

"Are you okay?" She asked.

"Yeah," Sabrina said, "I won't be doing that again." She pushed herself up into a sitting position and slid the mask down. "What's the fastest way to the next plate down?"

"We can't leave,” the girl said. “It’s impossible for us to leave.  Travel between the E3 and E4 Slums are allowed for family, but this is Slum F2, there is no leaving.”

“Ah, but you had to get here somehow, now, how’d you get here?”

“No one knows, it’s been nearly a hundred years since anyone arrived here. But you, you feel from the Plate above.  Why did you do that?”