A Hole In The Dome – Steve Brezenoff

In the darkness, though, they lost all their color. Rather than a rainbow, they seemed dull and gray. It made the creek seem less magical and more mysterious. Flossy took a deep breath and carefully stepped into the ice-cold creek water. It reached well past her knees, and soon her pants were soaked.

She pushed through the freezing water. She tried to forget that the pebbles beneath her feet released chemicals. Dad always said the chemicals were safe for people and for all the good plants. But over the last few days, Flossy had begun to doubt a lot about Lysande. Dad had been so short with her when it came to the creek. Mom seemed unwilling to even talk about the dome. Was this something new in the way her parents spoke to her?

Or had they always been like this when she’d asked questions about life in Lysande, but she’d been too young to notice? The creek was shallow on the far side where it met the dome’s anchors. The anchors were complex metal equipment that Flossy couldn’t begin to understand. She just knew they helped form the dome wall.

They hummed constantly and quietly. Flossy raised one hand, letting it hover just above the dome wall. She’d never touched the hard light before. As far as she knew, no one had. It was forbidden. But the dome stretched for miles in each direction. It was a huge globe hanging over their whole world.

Surely some other curious kid had broken this little rule. The dome wall crackled. Tiny sparks bounced between her palm and the wall. It was as if the wall wanted to be touched. Flossy put her hands on the hard light of the dome. It sizzled under her palms, but it wasn’t painful.

It was gentle, like the bubbles popping at the top of a glass of sparkling juice. It made her smile. But as she gazed through the dome wall, all Flossy could see was the familiar red, dusty nothingness. No lights. No people. She heard the wind, though—the wind outside the dome. It sounded wild and strong, as if a gust would knock her down.

Except it couldn’t be the howl of Rodmark’s winds. She knew the dome was soundproof. The sound was not coming from outside, but from the ground near her feet. Flossy crouched and found the source of the sound. Hidden by a fern and just beside one of the anchors was another device.

It was a cube the size of a footstool. All the sides Flossy could see were solid black metal, except the side that faced into Lysande. That side was a slatted grate. Flossy put her hand to the grate and felt the whoosh of warm air. Air from outside the dome was coming into Lysande? But the Rodmark air was poisonous, wasn’t it?

She pulled her hand away as if she’d burned it.

When I look at the night sky, I wonder—does scary stuff happen up there just as it does here on Earth? Sounds can’t travel through outer space because there’s no air. So if frightened people were out there, we’d never even hear their screams. I wonder . . . In A Hole in the Dome, humans live on a distant moon. A special dome protects them from their world’s poisonous air. Nothing can live outside the space colony. But one summer, a girl and her brother spot a shadowy figure beyond the dome.

What scares the girl most is that the figure doesn’t look like an alien creature. It looks human. 1kitap1.com/en 1 Three million light-years from Earth One was a blue gas giant called Bastion. The planet had fifteen moons. Some were quite close to the large planet, and some were far away.

One orbited in the middle zone: a red, dusty moon known to people who lived on it as Rodmark. No one, it was said, could survive on Rodmark—except within the moon’s one huge city. The people there were protected by a massive dome of “hard light.” The not-quite-clear energy surrounded the city and stopped anything from getting in or out. The domed city was named Lysande, from an old Earth One word that meant “shining.”

People liked to say their home was “a shining beacon in the dark and terrifying wilderness.” For that was what lay beyond the dome walls of Lysande. The rest of Rodmark was a horrible wasteland. Even the air was poisonous. Only the toughest animals and plants lived outside of Lysande. There were stinging insects as big as dogs, with poisons that paralyzed. Plants grew leaves as hard and as sharp as steel.

Then there were the monsters. Each one was as tall as three grown men, and as wide too. It was said they moved so quickly that one could catch you, kill you, and eat you before you even knew it was there. You’d barely have enough time to scream. But stories like that were never true, of course.

Inside the domed city of Lysande, everything grew. Or at least, everything the Lysandians wanted to grow. Elm trees, maples, ferns, and glorious green grass covered the land. People of all races and beliefs made their home there too. All their ancestors had come from Earth One, hundreds of years ago.

Although few people remembered that anymore.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 6cb47ff110b49f3c
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 9,115,895 bytes (8.694 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781496579034, 9781496579072, 9781496590329
• Pages: 83
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 59.34 minutes
• Total Words: 11,868
• Total Characters: 65,586
• Average Words per Page: 142.99
• Average Characters per Page: 790.19

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