Exile: Arc

by Jack Lance

  She took them along the bright, spiralling corridor to a place where a manhole to the internal vent system had been painted over. She tugged at it with strength he wouldn’t have attributed to her, and they all climbed into the pipe within.

  There were voices from the upper side of the corridor, and so Bailey quickly closed the manhole, and they climbed through the pipes away from the scene of the escape.

  Modular Glamour.

  Rhia and Bailey emerged from a wide pipe and dropped the two meters to the path beside a highway tunnel within the wall of a district. They beckoned and one by one the children dropped down into their arms.

  “What should we do with them?” Rhia said, looking around the dirty corner they now found themselves in. “Their parents are… well we need to take them to someone. Can’t leave them alone in a place like this.”

  East Syndicate.

  “East Syndicate.” Bailey said. "South Syndicate will be in upheaval right now.”

  “I don’t know anyone East.” she said.

  “I’ll take them. I have contacts inside.” he said, not really sure if he was being honest. “They’ll be taken care of. I promise.”

  They walked down the road to a bog standard apartment district where Rhia left Bailey at the tunnel. She walked off into the closest neighbourhood while Bailey took the kids up to a tram station and waited.

  Once one had pulled up they took it across the districts to the South Syndicate village.

  Bailey walked along the road past the empty houses while the group of children followed close behind. They walked a little way past his own home and then Bailey pressed the keys to call his car.

  The semicircle of tables and parasols still blew in the wind a few fields away he noticed.

  The children stepped back onto the path as the car rolled smoothly up to them.

  “Inside fast.” Bailey said to them, and they piled into the back seat and a few on the front passenger side.

  Bailey took the car up onto the crystal highways and over to the metropolis central. Police were flying by with sirens howling, seemingly without any kind of real coordination. He hoped there wouldn’t be any checkpoints set up yet, not that it would make sense to do so, since all the action had taken place beyond the dome wall.

  A lot of the children seemed to have taken their time to digest the situation by now and were starting to cry like they meant it.

  “Hush now.” Bailey said, trying to sound like a good guy.

  He parked in the hollow for East Syndicate and everyone got out. There were police vehicles everywhere along the stable lanes. Some read Border Sec across the side while others were just plain robotic busy bodies. They asked no questions of them as Bailey took the children at speed into the building, and up the elevator to the warehouses.

  Inside the offices of Colec Warehouse B, Bailey sat the children in the workshop at the back. He had to stop one of them opening the cupboard door, and then locked it so they wouldn’t get hurt by what was kept inside. There were growls from the cupboard.

  “That’s just my doggy.” he said, then clapped his hands together at the sad children. “Does anyone want any milky?”

  Most shook their heads but a few nodded or looked puzzled.

  “I’ll get you some lemon-squash.” he said and opened the small refrigerator beneath the left workbench. He got out the family sized bottle that Colec had stocked up on before his demise, and handed the bottle to the kids.

  “Pass that around.” he said then sat back on a stool, rubbing his forehead. “Just let me think for a second.”

  He sighed and thought.

  Call Francine. She must take you to the Sagars.

  “Sagar Family.” he said and looked at the kids, who now looked a little more at ease, having had a few swigs of nice cool fizzy pop.

  There were two huge posters of Barton and Cix on the right wall, and notes connected by strings between the pins. Bailey glanced at them and then looked at the children who seemed uninterested.

  Francine Adyms came after being texted and Bailey met her outside the warehouses with the children.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “You were escaping with them?”

  “I’m sorry, Francine. That’s why I wanted to settle things up here quickly. So you could take it over with a clean sheet.”

  She knelt down to the children and began cleaning a few of them up with her thumb.

  “I need to bring them to the Sagars. Can you help me with that?” he said. “I need to tell them what happened. It all went horribly wrong.”

  After a couple of phone calls, Francine took them up to a level that was signposted on the wall as being the CEO offices. He followed Francine with the children around a few bends in a wide carpeted office space, that seemed to be mainly reception desks and meeting rooms. Eventually they came to the end of the executive promenade, to a pair of large double doors made of heavy wood.

  Francine knocked sheepishly on them and then opened one of them. They all entered a huge office with an appropriately enormous desk. There were two chairs behind the desk, filled by a man and a woman. One was Lon Sagar while the other he didn’t recognize.

  The rest of the room was filled with other people, some of whom were relations of Cix and Barton. He recognized immediately Lon’s fiancé, Dora Beldin and her brother Rupe.

  “Come in please.” Lon said as he shifted uncomfortably behind the desk. “Shut the door.”

  The younger woman at his side stood up and walked around to the children.

  “Come here.” she said kneeling down to them and hugged a few of them.

  “Aaron Bailey? So this is all that’s left?” Lon said frowning.

  “There may be a few more. I don’t know.” Bailey said, looking over the faces of the syndicate leaders.

  “It seems there’s been a strange incident. As you can see, South Syndicate have come to us for aid. Border Security in league with Old Gang are already plundering the Beldin building. They seem to have wasted no time. It’s all a little suspicious, isn’t it Mr Bailey.” Lon said, tapping a finger on his lips.

  “I agree. I’m sorry. I tried to save them all.”

  “No need for apologies here. From our intel this cataclysm was the work of Dr Chester Barron. I don’t know why we didn’t see it coming.”

  Play with the kids. Play with Sagar.

  Bailey knelt down to the children, opposite the woman, and began petting the children. She smiled, but Bailey was too stunned to reciprocate.

  “You can leave the children with us, Mr Bailey. I am Lon Sagar as you know. My daughter Bede has business ties to boarding houses and the like. We can always use new young things in our organization.”

  Bailey suddenly shouted out “Yeah? For what?”

  Lon Sagar, a little shocked calmed himself with a smile and said “This isn’t Old Gang my friend. We won’t whore them out if that’s what you were afraid of.”

  Bede put a hand on his sleeve and said “I won’t let anything happen to them, friend.”

  Bailey looked at her hand and smiled at her.

  Keep track of these children. Stay in touch with the lovely Bede Sagar, and this corporate whorehouse. We have our second stepping stone.

  Part II

  Old Gang

  What’s Best For You?

  The train hissed hard and then began to roll away from the platform. A lady bent down to pick up her thin cases, then proceeded to exit the platform and station. Her name was Wendall Jayne, known as Jayne in her private life.

  Jayne was a small woman, weak in body and often wore a little too much clothing, especially since she'd been sent here to live in the prison city. It was a cloak against the horridness that filled the place, and one she realized didn't work in actuality, but still gave her that warmth of feeling. Most people here were horrid people, mercenary folk that you couldn’t really trust, and maybe they deserved to be sent far away from good people. Jayne was different to them.

  Jayne had a secret. She wasn
't a mugger or thief; how she had looked down on them all from her quiet cottage in the west.

  She’d arrived on the east side of the city, where she had never visited having spent her three years of city-life in the west districts.

  There was very little reason to move about once you had been accepted as part of a district. The local Drug Lord, as scary as he was to the rival gangs would tend to regard themselves as protectors of those within their own patch. But recently everything in the colony had changed.

  Jayne had travelled to the East Syndicate village that, as most people in the colony knew was owned and occupied by the Sagar crime syndicate. It was noticeably more crowded than the village once owned by South Syndicate, with far more homes and terraces spidering out over what would have been fields.

  It was difficult for her to find her way through them all, as she walked along, head bowed with a file of paintings at her side. She went directly to visit her old friend, Bede Sagar, who although being related to one of the most powerful crime enterprises in the whole colony, tended not to associate too much with that side of the family business. Jayne had come here to attend a craft fair being held within a Sagar controlled district, and being run by Bede herself.

  “So good to see you!” Bede cried out on opening the door to her home in the cramped village.

  The houses here weren’t of the same calibre as those of South Syndicate, but then, there were more people to accommodate now since South Syndicate had all but disbanded.

  Jayne entered the house and was taken upstairs to a room that looked familiar.

  “It’s just like your old room on Seiknojelles.” Jayne exclaimed, and dropped her bags beside the bed. “I feel like I’ve slept here before.”

  “I started to miss home.” Bede said smiling at her creation. “Some of it I brought with me. Most of it was recreated from memory.”

  “Looks just the same.” Jayne smiled.

  “I’ll let you unpack.” Bede said and shut the door.

  Jayne looked around at the blues and purples of the room. There were dolls she remembered playing with, some with imperfections that someone had pained to recreate. There was a sound system on the floor that looked just as badly treat as it ever did.

  Jayne found many details that fitted her memory of her life back on the colonies. She knelt down on the carpet in front of the dressing cabinet and began fishing through the makeup boxes. She found an old tub of blood-pink lipstick that looked familiar enough to be real. It was the kind of thing Bede would have brought to a place such as this. Jayne opened the lid and rubbed her finger inside, and then applied it around her lips. She watched herself in the cabinet’s main mirror, as she smudged her lips together, and looked at herself a moment longer recognizing another person she hadn’t seen in a while.

  The next day came around lazily, as it always did when with true friends.

  A flock of racing birds flew by the tall windows of the hall hosting the craft fair. Jayne followed them as she sat at the table she had been given. Her paintings were laid out around the table with small stickers denoting price.

  A few people came and went as she waited for someone, checking her watch a little too often to seem normal. Then she saw him, a medium sized man dressed in Border Sec Officer’s uniform strode into the hall, smiling as he found her.

  The man strode up to her table and sat on the corner, sliding the table slightly askew and said “Wendall… Pleased to meet you at long last.”

  Jayne smiled shyly and said “Kane?”

  “Officer Kane Minik.” he said tapping his pips, and held his hand out to her, which she pensively shook. “I feel like I know you, but here you are. You look so different to your photographs.”

  “I guess we do know each other on a level. I’ve met a few great people through the pen friend network. I’ve never left it this long to meet anyone though. I was a little shy of you actually.”

  “It was pure chance I found you on that chat network. I was searching some pretty wild things.”

  “Yeah we aren’t exactly compatible. But maybe opposites attract?” she said, and then cringed against her own cliché.

  “Well, you did invite me…” Kane sniffed and looked around the quiet fair.

  “That’s right. The time seemed right.”

  “Oh yeah. I was sorry to hear about your little village. Bloody funny thing that. Our boys got a tip off there were some pretty big hauls going through there, then when they started shooting back, what were they supposed to think?”

  “The gangsters got a tip off too.” Jayne said. “The drug lord was told you were about to raid them out, so they had their guns loaded up.”

  “Too many coincidences in my opinion. But what’s done is done. Can’t bring them back to life, can I?” Kane said coldly.

  “Well… my life is done that’s for sure. I don’t even have a home anymore. Nice you’re so sympathetic though.” she said, almost sarcastically.

  Not hearing it, Kane said “It’s my pleasure. We’ve chatted so many times I couldn’t wait to finally meet up. Tonight maybe you could come out with me and another girl?”

  “A what?” she blinked.

  “Some bitch from the station.” he said leaning back as if nothing had been said. “Come on, all those times we chatted… You want it like I do.”

  “I may have got drunk a few times…” she said blushing.

  “Come on.” he waved at her. “Come cruisin’ tonight.”

  Looking down now in pains of shyness she said “Leave your number; I’ll get back to you.”

  Kane wrote his number on a blank pricing sticker and stuck it on the desk beside her elbow.

  “I knew you’d be sport.” he said and stood up. ”Call me if you’re free.”

  Jayne nodded, glancing at him momentarily, and Kane turned and strode out, waving and greeting someone he knew as he did.

  Jayne saw Bede coming over with an exited look.

  “So? How did it go?” she beamed, but Jane simply looked depressed. “Oh dear… You had such high hopes. I mean, an officer in Border Sec!”

  Jayne looked at her and shook her head quietly.

  “Ah ok. Well at least now you know.” Bede shrugged, and Jayne nodded.

  “Yep. That’s right.” she said.

  Bede left to continue administration of the fair. Jayne unstuck the price sticker and number from the desk, nipped it in half and threw it into the waste paper bin.

  Jayne decided to walk home from the hall, since the district was safely under Sagar control, and was only one tunnel away from the syndicate village district.

  Bede had asked her boyfriend, a man called Aaron Bailey, who had said “It’s that way.”

  Jayne followed his direction across the neighbourhood from the old church hall, that sat on the edge of a field amongst the towering apartments. She walked primly along each path to the district tunnel, which seemed a little badly maintained to belong to such an affluent family as the Sagars. She walked through it since she had been sent this way and emerged into a cavern she did not recognize.

  She stood at the arched opening of the tunnel and surveyed the acre of factory units, spewing toxic pollutants to the fans in the ceiling and walls. It was a district on the outskirts of the city, and she had gone the wrong way.

  Suddenly she heard a screech, from someone moving toward her from behind and shadows began to move along the sides of the tunnel around her. She curled up slightly as punk kids flew by her on either side, screeching and howling like a pack of angry wildcats having found some lone prey. They came together and stopped to stare at her from their thick white-painted faces. They had wide, lost eyes but confident enough to make her see that this was a terrible situation to be in.

  “Bede, you air head…” she hissed to herself.

  “What’s in the case?” one of them nodded to her thin craft holder, stepping toward her.

  “Just my paintings. You can have them.” Jayne said and offered them up.

  “I
can have anything I want.” he grinned madly. “Get undressed.”

  He held up a thin rod that extended so far as to just skim hitting her.

  A tear slaked across her cheek, as she knew that the situation was hopeless, and she was actually about to be raped.

  Just then there was a timely whistle, like someone calling a dog. Jayne looked shakily in its direction seeing another gang sitting and standing on the industrial service scaffold that spiralled the cavern walls. A huge extractor fan churned behind the young men, and a short woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform.

  They weren’t wearing paint or gang clothes, but wore industrial work pants with white shirt and bracers. The couple sitting on the scaffold were wearing skates, so she knew not to relax just yet. A gang was a gang, and they were all macho assholes as far as she was concerned.

  “And what do we find down the posh end of the prison?” one of them yelled over the industrial noises.

  “Outskirts! Old Gang territory! This is none of your business, Thom!” the would-be rapist spat.

  “Well, well.” he smirked at the others as they each jumped down to the adjoining road, and began rolling with a mock grace toward them. “I think we’re making it our business, dickhead.”

  “And we’re supposed to just leave her and run away pissing in our pants?” he snarled, and the gang got ready for a serious fight. They each extended a long metal rod, and crouched like feral animals.

  The skaters fearlessly glided down the lane toward them and then the two gangs crashed into each other, and all grace was abandoned. One of the skaters was pushed back, toppling into the gutter and hitting her head against the curb, while members of the opposing gang were wrestled and beaten onto the floor. The fallen skater was unconscious, while the others were spurred to fight harder, and soon the other gang was moving to get away. A few of the smallest of them ran away around the side of the units, while the two largest fought on a while.

  After a while of being punched and kicked they realized it would be wise to cut their losses and after eyeing each other they turned and ran after their friends.