Outlanders: Part 3

By MARGARET BEAMES, Illustrator SAM WHEELER

I promised I'd deliver. I made several attempts, but nothing I did felt right. I even looked through my portfolio to see if I had anything stashed away there that would do, but everything looked stale and flat no matter how good I'd once thought it was. Boring, that was the word - like everything else lately. I tossed aside the stylus I'd been doodling with on the computer screen, stuffed an old-fashioned sketch pad and pencil into the deep pocket on my tunic and set off in search of inspiration.

I climbed to the highest level of Dome, up to the recreation area where hectares of curved roof encloses and protects the city from the harmful rays of the sun. The light up there is strong and clear. It's the nearest any of us ever come to the real thing. I found myself wondering what I meant by 'real'. Anything actual, not imagined, of course, but that wasn't it. I decided I meant anything natural, not manufactured. But everything in Dome is man-made. The very air I was breathing came from laboratories deep in the depths of the city. What if they made a mistake one day?

Publisher: Scholastic, $13.95

Age group: 11 + years