Menewsha Avatar Community - Beautiful Emma (read please?)

This is only the first bit of my story, so far it's thirteen pages, but I'm working mainly of developing the middle, so I'd like some feedback on how to make this part clearer.

The pop of cracking twigs underfoot went shooting through Emma's entire body. It echoed into the distance, screaming the fact that everyone she’d ever known was gone. Emma shook her head; they weren’t all gone, only the one’s that mattered. She wasn't the only child who had been locked within the Plasti-Factory. She wasn't the only girl who was locked within the vast steel and titanium walls when the gas had issued forth from a long rent in the Earth's crust. But since the first day the doors of the factory had opened and the children had scattered, Emma had only laid eyes on two other workers.

Something about the world had been different after The Dividing. The children, watched closely by Commodore were not allowed to leave their stations from six-thirty Monday morning, to nine-thirty Saturday night. They had all heard the strange rumble of the earth renting, and the shake that soon followed jarred the factory, stopping the products rotation. Yet the twelve-foot robot overseer would not push the button that released the various twelve and thirteen year olds from their cushioned Plasti-cloth seats, and so they had simply to sit still and wait for their lunch break to arrive. The children were allotted two five minute eating breaks each day, but were not permitted to leave the building until the week's work was done. The Dividing had occurred on a Monday morning too many years ago for Emma to remember the exact date. The children had not known what was happening outside, weren't aware that their parents were being strangled by a strange smoke, didn't know that their little brothers and sisters were having their skin burned by the acid pouring from the sky. Even the buildings were melting away, having been built exclusively from Plasti-glass. Only the ancient factory had survived.

Emma leaned back on her heels, ignoring the leaves and twigs below and studied the trail before her. She had been tracking one of the others for several days, unbeknownst to him. The boy's name had been Tyler, but Emma had seen him gathering with a small group of the others, and his friends called him Knives. Emma had changed her name herself, but had made a point of avoiding the others until now. She wasn't sure why she was following Knives, but since her stomach had begun burning with fire one year before she had wanted desperately to find a companion.

Emma had been eleven when the divide happened. She wasn't yet old enough to be working in the factory then, but a glitch in the system had allowed her in to work. Emma’s family had been one of the last on earth. The factories of Plasti-corp had successfully gassed nearly all of the ten billion humans on earth in their quest to dominate the world. The rest had been forced to come live on a strip of Plasti-glass houses, their every move watched by cameras, and neighbors. The proclamation had gone out that all children twelve to thirteen were to be sent daily to the factories. The presence of Plasti in the air was sure to kill nearly one third of the children, and that was exactly what the King wanted. He knew once the world had been depleted to only a few hundred people he would be able to mate them however he wanted. What the king wanted was a superior elite and an inferior workforce.

Emma remembered the first night she spent after The Divide. While the other children had run out at the end of the week joyfully, not knowing a barren world awaited them, Emma had walked out slowly. Her limbs ached, and she coughed frequently from the week of work she'd suffered through. The doors of the factory closed with a frightful clang behind her and the windows went dark. Unable to go much farther and frightened by the strange, shimmering flatlands before her, Emma settled down under the sparse protection of an overhanging walkway built into the factory’s wall. The acid in the sky had chewed it and parts sagged dangerously, but Emma was more concerned with sleep than where she slept. After a brief period of crying Emma had fallen into a fitful sleep.

That night was the last night it rained acid. Of the five hundred children running from the factory only a small fraction had found suitable shelter, the other children had their bodies ripped and pitted away as they slept. Though their screams echoed through the air all night long, Emma slept, trapped in a dream of her parents and robots and the Plasti rising up to encase her. As she struggled with her fears, she flung her body around wildly, once her hand was flung out from under the walkway’s protection and was crippled before her spasmodic efforts had brought it back to her. When Emma woke in the morning she found her hand a burnt knob at the end of her wrist and cried once more. That morning the living children collected in front of the Plasti-factory and picked sides for the cruelest game any of them had ever played.

Emma glanced forward, through the brush and saw Knives' sinewy form crawling into a distant tree to harvest what fruit he could. The factory still stood in the distance, it's doors still closing and opening on the eternal timer, but no Plasti had been made in years. Emma was distracted from Knives, and nearly missed him jumping from the tree and continuing into the valley. Emma ducked out of sight as Knives turned to glance behind himself. In a few hours he would have reached the river, and she planned to show herself to him then. She was no longer the child she had once been, left behind while the children divided into ten teams of five or six each.

While the other children had gathered to fight their way through the northern forests, she remained in the city. Emma preferred to wander in and out of the underground cellars next to the houses and live within them, eating their bounty. She didn't need the help of the others as long as she had food and shelter she could obtain with her one hand. The first cellar she visited was her father’s. Through a thick curtain of tears Emma had searched for the finger gun and it’s leather pouch. The finger gun was a small firearm; it was operated by one hand and needed a single finger to be shot. Emma planned to use it to melt locks from the cellars. Once a girl had approached Emma's precious city while holding a poorly made knife above her head. Emma had shot the unknown girl with the finger pistol from afar. But now Emma had a strange need to find someone.

The first harsh years had erased all of Emma's roundness from her body. While her time spent wandering the clear, glossy plains left behind by the melted houses under the harsh sun had tanned her skin a deep earthy color. The last year had brought a woman's shape into her body, and she felt that her delicate curves were neither too small nor too large. Her dark eyes and raven hair complimented her, making her look like an exotic queen from another world.

She'd been keeping track of the other groups migration, making sure they did not approach the city, and noticed that Knives group had always remained near the city's border, though three would go out at a time to hunt. Emma was not sure why Knives had gone out alone, but she didn't care, it made her job much easier. She could hear water in the distance, and knew Knives would reach the river before dark, yet she didn't want a nighttime ambush. Many of the children had become unusually violent in the years since the divide, and already one dwindling group had been captured and assimilated into another. Emma decided to stick the night out in a tree overlooking the valley, and prayed that Knives would decide to stop as well...

-Kitty LeFay Hawkins