Chromium || A Little Match Girl Retelling

Chromium

"ᴅᴏᴡɴ, ᴅᴏᴡɴ, ᴅᴏᴡɴ"
...

The battery entered the slot with a final push and slid into place with a clink that echoed through the gap between the transformers. The lantern flickered to life. The cold drowned in the circle of light pooling at the engineer's boots and its fangs retracted from their desensitised fingers.

Alison's breaths clouded the air before the respirator covering their lower face. The goggles shielding their eyes had frost blooming on their reinforced glass. The object of their ire was a tangle of frozen wires bursting through an ajar metal door. A pair of bare metal wires had touched each other and the resultant short circuit had shut down the power supply to Sector Thirteen.

The Central Command cared enough about the Underworld Sector to send one engineer to the power station in a impending snowstorm without backup to find and repair the defect. A curse left Alison's mouth as the torch slipped from their grasp and plummeted into the snow piling at their feet. The lantern's warmth was ebbing already; the chromium-coated battery was running out faster than what they had anticipated.

"FOF844 to Control," Alison huffed, trying to blink away the dryness stinging their eyes. "I repeat, FOF844 to Control."

Radio static buzzed in their ears over the eerie howls of the alien winds. The lantern was struggling to provide illuminance, and waiting for the controller to respond in the bitter cold felt like a death sentence.

Outside the station lay the pristine snow-covered expanses of the colonised exoplanet. Watching over the white terrain from their perch in the heavens were three gilded moons, their faces scarred by the remnants of fallen alien cities. Lights on the transport vessels stationed in orbit blinked at them with the stars of the unfamiliar constellations.

The winds draped the dunes of snow over the stark white permafrost- to Alison's eyes, they looked like fluttering bridal veils. The blizzard soon washed over the field of sleeping machinery and parades of giant snowflakes tossed and turned before them.

"Could've issued a warning," Alison mumbled. The light from the dulling lantern made the white snow look blue.

A frozen sigh emerged from the filters of their respirator. Their free hand dipped into their front pocket and felt the smooth chromium-coated surfaces of three batteries.

The engineer's cabin was a long walk away. The rewiring could wait.

They slid the first of the three batteries into the slot.