The Ashen Wrath (Watty's SHORTLIST recipient 2018) CHAPTERED VERSION

*2

Although I was deathly afraid of the airdrones and stilt striders, my grandfather's words never quite sank in until the day my brother was taken. Kooper had been given his own plot of land when he turned 21 but struggled to produce enough bushels of rye to meet his cultivation quota. Not meeting quota prevented a Thrall from receiving full rations, making survival a steep challenge.

Tired of seeing my brother struggle, I snuck away one night after the Meal Trill sounded. I crept to Kooper's plot and waved to him through the plastic window of his tent.

"Danth! What are you doing?" whispered Kooper, looking panicked as he approached the window. "If the stilstry sees you wandering around during Meal Period, you'll be killed!"

"The machines didn't see me...I was careful," I said, feeling a measure of pride. "Let me in, I brought you some bread."

My brother cut his eyes at me in frustration. He put his hand against the canvas wall of the tent and pushed my shoulder. "Idiot, you're only 12 years old! I don't want your death on my conscience! Do you want Granddad or the girls to miss quota because you couldn't follow the rules? Take your bread and go." He turned his back on me.

I shrank away and returned home, fighting back tears. I didn't realize it at the time, but Kooper was attempting to distance himself from the rest of the family, likely thinking it would make his inevitable death easier for us to handle.

I vividly remember the day Kooper finally snapped. After watching the last of his rye wilt under an airdrone's jet of exhaust, he threw a tarpaulin over the offending orb and began bashing it with log plucked from his woodpile. The thing wobbled as it rose from the dirt and flew away, covered in a spiderweb of cracks. The rest of us looked on in shock as my brother sank to his knees and wept.

Although there weren't any immediate repercussions, Kooper knew he had no choice but to run. While the drone was away, we all said a tearful goodbye and wished him luck. Deep down we knew he was just leaving so we wouldn't have to watch him die.

Terror gripped our family as night fell. It wasn't long before the clank of ratcheting gears announced the approach of a stilt strider. The hunched fiend briefly scanned the area until its pulsing blue light turned bright orange. After blaring a piercing tone, it stomped away as quickly as it had arrived, heading in the exact direction Kooper had fled.

I was awoken late in the evening by a series of red flashes high up in the hills. Minutes later, the stray stilt strider returned to the village. It hunched over Kooper's ruined rye field and belched orange flames over every inch of the plot. I saw my brother's blood dripping off the machine's foreclaws in the firelight. When the machine's grim task was complete, it took a slouched posture on the edge of the village to resume its watch.

Kooper was gone. All of us were too petrified to mourn. We resumed our work the next day, lining up in the field in our grey coveralls as if nothing had happened. I began to feel jealous of the other kids I had met during the Interaction Periods. None of them had never seen the blue light buried in the black glass shell of a drone start to glow like a hot ember as it hunted its prey. They were lucky.