Assignment day arrived. Kasia lay on her bed, faking normality by chatting to oblivious friends, nervously waiting for her destiny to change.
Her alarm went. Time to do the unthinkable: she turned her phone off and hid it under her bed. Gathering what she did need, she made it to the doorway. A final moment of doubt held her back - fears of arrest, violence, humiliation - but the potential rewards were too seductive. She carried on.
Sermon had already arrived. Kasia joined him in an uneven, boggy car park; a meeting spot behind a high street loud with the business of tacky shops. They acknowledged each other and waited silently, awkward and out of place, as a misty sideways rain drifted their way.
The pickup arrived, crunching over the shingles to park near them. It was an old Royal Mail van, windowless and compact, familiar and inconspicuous. Conveniently red too, Kasia noted, though the driver's cabin had been heavily tinted.
The two recruits waited for a cue and found none. They shuffled forward. Sermon raised his fist to knock. Before it made contact the side door slid open and a hand pulled him in. Luca sat them both down on folding seats and hammered the roof. Three other recruits were bunched around him.
“This is Sermon and Kasia,” Luca motioned his head to the others, “Zenia, Daryl, Curtis. The guys up front you won’t be dealing with.”
Sermon checked behind him and found a partition blocking the drivers off. He tried to lighten the mood, saying how lovely the weather was for a day out. Luca flicked his head in agreement. Everyone else kept quiet, still unsure and figuring each other out.
Kasia, ever defensive and sceptical, formed a negative impression of her teammates. Zenia seemed most out of place; genderless and alt, with brown dreads and piercings. She at least looked able to fight. Daryl was too wiry and unkempt to trust; a man easily mistaken for a vagrant, poised to blow at the first challenge. Curtis had the opposite problem, still visibly poor, with a shaved head and etched frown, but with an inert dimness that made him look unthreatening and lumpen. Kasia doubted she’d get close to them, and didn’t want to. Luca she did like; boyish but comfortable, and in charge.
He began his brief.
“A reminder that you are working for nobody; you are zero hour workers picking up the odd gig, a courier service for hire. We’ll visit a few places tonight to exchange packages, and I will watch you handle yourself. And that’s all you have to do! Stay composed, be reliable, better opportunities may come.”
Sermon sniffed, leant forward, and scratched his brow.
“What’s in the packages?”
“Doesn’t matter. Your job is to deliver and collect, not to open and ponder.”
“Are they heavy? Explosive? Alive?”
“If there was anything you needed to be aware of I would have told you. You just have to pick the damn things up…” Luca huffed, “but I will say if the police catch you they’ll have a pretty good time of it.”
Sermon swatted the air and snorted.
“Drug distribution!? Didn’t you check my background? I could dead drop with a headset on -”
“I’ll expect you not to lose your cool then,” Luca addressed the others, “you all wanna do work like this forever? This is literally the easiest you’re going to get it, you need be discreet and professional. I don’t want cowards or glory hunters.”
“No Man City supporters then?” Daryl chucked.
“Not unless you’re from Manchester, and only the correct part of town.”
"Of course."
The men began arguing about the Super League. Kasia considered her destiny. Apparently it had arrived, and all she had to do was shift boxes around. Whatever training she had done, her food shop would have been better practice. As they rocked and swayed to their destination, she fell drowsy. She rested her head against the cold metal of the cabin.
A fist banged on the other side.
A rattling garage door enclosed the van in an underground car wash. The room felt humid and reeked of chemicals. A faint radio chattered from the rear office, mingling with the clanking sound of tools and the whisper of hoses. Artificial light fought its way around gigantic side washers dripping with suds.
Swarthy workers emerged from these columns and surrounded the recruits with suspicion. Kasia found it unnerving and unnecessary - they were meant to be on the same side. The oldest and fattest of the men barked in Arabic. His closest employee started brushing the recruits with a scanner. Zenia passed quietly; Curtis followed with a little more stiffness.
It was obvious from Daryl’s sighing he was going to set it off. The scanner brushed his ribcage and rang out with clicks and whistles. The man in charge stomped forward, rustled his hand under Daryl’s jacket, and pulled out a steel rectangle. With a deft swish, he flicked the rectangle open to reveal a blade.
“What is this my friend?”
“It’s for me walk ‘ome! I live in a rough area mate,” Daryl tried to sound matter of fact, but came across whiny. Luca placed himself between the two men.
“And didn’t I tell you, my friend, not to turn up armed?”
“Yes Luca...” Daryl backed down childishly. Luca pushed him away and addressed the manager in broken Arabic.
“Please forgive me, friend. They have the first day today. Much nerves.”
“Does this look like a crèche you fucking shoe? How difficult is it to check the new guys beforehand?”
“I promise you! All of we work for same team. I teach them more; before you can say Allah Akbar I have five soldiers stand in front of you.”
Luca opened his palm to Kasia and Sermon, beckoning the worker to continue scanning. Kasia stared ahead as so many strangers eyes burned into her. The worker stepped back and moved on to Sermon, but the manager was already on him, sniffing the air around Sermon’s jacket.
“You bring fags for us?”
Sermon's eyes darted about, computing the options.
“Are you buyin’ boss?”
“Which you have?”
“Lesser Panda, bought from a reliable old soldier in an imperial barracks. Always sealed, always uncut.”
The manager grunted in disagreement. Sermon produced two cigarettes and held them up.
“Try?”
Uncertain glances were exchanged. Luca grit his teeth as his recruit hijacked the assignment, but he said nothing. The manager spent a few seconds rubbing his beard, then winked and slapped Sermon's arm. The workers passed their free cigarettes around and eased off. The recruits got to work. They had a heap of large sacks to drag into the van, each requiring two people to carry. Three times Luca had to yank Kasia into place, as she kept getting in peoples way. She would have cursed herself, but no one said if she had to rush or treat the sacks carefully, so she blamed everyone else.
After heaving the final sack on board, she spotted Luca giving the manager a slim metallic case. It had to be cash. Given its size, she imagined if it was even Chinese gold sovereigns - a coveted currency compared to the brick shaped stacks of English sterling.
They drove away. Luca waited for distance to pass and made a start on the wrongdoer.
“Daryl what the fuck were you thinking? I told you not to bring anything! You put the lot of us at risk.”
“7 grand that knife cost me!” Daryl flailed against the seatbelt, “when am I gonna get it back!?”
“You can buy another one when you earn 7 grand through us. You should have listened to me.”
“I brought it 'cause we ‘aven’t been trained to defend ourselves!”
“You job isn’t to defend yourself you are a delivery assistant. Your job is to shut your mouth and lift my cargo.”
Daryl pointed at Sermon, “an’ sellin’ fags is alright is it!?”
Sermon tutted and turned away. Luca went for him anyway.
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“No it was not okay, and if he brings smokes again he's out. What’s your excuse then Sermon, needed them for self-defence as well did you?”
“Brings the luck of the Panda, as you saw, and I gotta agree with this guy about trainin’,” he nodded at Daryl, “what we gonna do if we’re attacked?”
“You’ll have to get stabbed and die, won’t ya!” Luca folded his arms, “as if you’re important enough for any more than what you've got… I think we found the egos in the group; you should be more like these ladies here. Nice and quiet…”
Zenia and Kasia smirked at each other. Curtis gawped to himself. Daryl and Sermon muttered and went into sulking.
The other drops passed without trouble, each involving similar premises - garages, warehouses, depots. Kasia eased into her courier role; a destiny she could manage safely. Still, each recipient met them with tension, with no clear reason for why.
As they departed from the last drop, the recipient told them with a smirk to ‘spend it wisely’.
And there, Kasia knew with a sinking heart, was the reason.
She had assumed the sacks contained drugs - that Luca had been exchanging coin for pills.
It was the other way around. The recruits were sat on fat rolls of sterling cash - enough to end their hardships a hundred times over.
Luca sat back and waited for someone to try. His recruits were darkly quiet, plausible schemes darting about in their heads. All they had to do was get past him. He expected Daryl to break first, and expected the rest to seize the moment and follow. He rested his hand inside his jacket.
“You know wha’ I think little man...” Daryl slapped Luca’s knee, “I think you should dip into one o’ them sacks and fetch me 7k for me losses.”
“And ah fink we’d be held captive till we gave it back. This isn’t our money. When we deliver it you’ll get paid.”
Daryl turned to his teammates.
“Even one o’ them sacks could fix us all up for months, wha’ you lot playin’ at? Let’s make off with a cut we deserve,” he stared at Luca, rising with confidence, “an’ you’ll be grateful we left you with the rest, and your pretty li'l face intact.”
Zenia fidgeted. Curtis kept still in way that felt forced. Kasia took the chance to, for once, outdo Sermon on principles.
“I came here to get somewhere higher; you won’t get nothing with that money if the country’s still broken.”
“Then you don’t fuckin’ know what it’s like out there, do ya!?”
Daryl spat at her. She pushed back against her chair in fright. Sermon yelled out and clutched the panther badge on his hoodie, as if it were a weapon to defuse tension. Daryl laughed at them both and pulled himself up.
Something shrill whistled through the van. A bolt of crackling energy pounded Daryl’s chest. He flew to the floor and spasmed violently. The recruits froze in shock as the bloodied bolt snaked its way back to the taser in Luca’s hand. Luca reclined back casually, with cold calm on his face, and reloaded it.
He called for the drivers to pull over. Daryl writhed on the floor, gasping for air and swearing when he found it. Luca looked down on him with disappointment.
“Congratulations Daryl. Unemployed again... I won’t have you causing a scene outside though. Kasia?”
“Yes!?”
“You wanted to get somewhere higher?” he flicked his hand between her and Daryl, “choke him out.”
Kasia stumbled. The heap laying at her feet spluttered miserably. It felt cruel to make him suffer more.
Luca refused to let her hesitate, “what’s the matter? You ran into a vagrant den and risked your life, now you can’t manage this? Is this guy any better than half the guys you saw killed?”
A hand pushed her gently from behind. Sermon’s. He knelt down and pinned Daryl's arms back to give Kasia an easier time. She lowered beside him and gripped her forearm around Daryl’s neck. After a quick, violent scuffle, he flopped.
They found an abandoned bustop covered in sagging tape and broken glass, and left the blacked out recruit under it. Luca spent the rest of the journey playing with his taser, as Kasia clutched her euphoric heart, and the rest of the recruits behaved.
They made it to the end. Luca led them into the biggest depot yet, where security patrolled the catwalks above, and a hundred workers busied themselves below, handling supplies for what Kasia could only assume was to be a siege of London.
Now she realised how five recruits could be tested with the money they had collected. To Revolution Britannia it was pocket change.
Once they emptied their cargo Luca thanked his recruits, handing them each a thick envelope of money, and shutting them into the van to be taken home. Left to themselves the surviving recruits talked more freely. Zenia admitted with self-aware embarrassment she had been non-binary long after the trend had died out, but now she in this role she was unsure again. Curtis waited for a chance to ask Sermon about cigarettes; Sermon blagged a new customer. Everyone congratulated Kasia on her actions, making her beam with pride.
They all promised to add each other as friends and separated.
It was 5am when Kasia got home but she was beyond feeling tired, still buzzing from her handling of Daryl. She had scrapped with vagrants already but this felt more official, like an execution, and she had been picked over anyone else.
She scrabbled for her phone and caught up on her feed, glowing when she found Zenia and Curtis’s friend requests. Then she decided to wake her daughter up.
“Cześć moja córko,” Kasia tiptoed to rest her head on the Eva’s mattress. Eva rubbed her eyes and yawned.
“Were you out last night?”
“Yea, and look what I got for you,” Kasia waved a £500 note in Eva’s face. Eva jolted awake.
“Kurwa macz… dziękuję bardzo! Where did you get this?”
“I won it at work! We had a kind of... trial game…”
“You what? You never win anythin’ you’re crap at gamin’.”
Kasia shrugged and handed the note over, “well, what you gonna spend it on?”
Eva studied the note, and rolled it into a tube, “I might keep it like this and do gear with it.”
“Will you really!?” Kasia leant forwards with praying hands, “can I have some?”
“I’ll have a word with my dealer,” Eva jumped down from the bunk and made for the wash corner, “you just keep winnin’ them games.”
Alone, Kasia held the packet of money against her nose and breathed in. All the things she could buy.... she wanted more work, and she wanted to train more and earn it too. Everything so far had been the perfect balance of easy and challenging; the rewards drip fed to her at just the right pace - quick, gradual, and small.
And, if she kept it up, the greatest reward lay ahead of her in the shape of a uniformed man.
She waited for Eva to leave for school, locked herself indoors, and let her desires decide the rest of the day.
* * *
Police filled the house with tear gas and stormed it. O-V were not used to being traced. They would respond harshly, and so as these unlucky constables found to their relief: the target location was uninhabited.
Two figures paced through the settling gas to confirm their first suspicion: the enemy had known they were coming and fled. The second suspicion - that a trap waited in the enemy's place - was yet to be proven.
Gemma swept the house with relish. Too much of her job had been reduced to data collection. Here she had a chance for real detective work, and if she was lucky, a chance to put her martial skill to use. The interior was as decrepit as the outside; carpets stripped away, battered wooden planks and loose strips of tack remaining. From every corner of every room branched the speckled veins of black mould.
The only furniture they found was a folding bed in the lounge. Luis lifted the mattress up with his polished Chelsea boot.
“No vigilantes lurking under here.”
“Yes, but get a proper smell of it, and look at the ceiling,” Gemma motioned to the circles of nicotine stains above.
“A drug addict for sure,” Luis puffed on his vape, “this ‘Kristoff’ of ours could be a vagrant informant, if not a fully fledged terrorist.”
“I’m not sure about that. The way he smiled at his mates as they lit up… he was far from coerced.”
Sergeant Webb called the detectives from the kitchen. The room was gutted. Gemma guessed the appliances were sold to feed the addiction.
A small stack of printed photos rested on the kitchen counter.
“There’s our Kristoff,” she raised the top photo, “with his sister, no? See if she comes up.”
Luis tapped his aviators online and scanned the girl. Gemma flicked through the stack of images. Each showed the siblings; both lean and poor. There was weight under their eyes - youth having to grow up too fast. Kristoff looked in his mid 20’s, though with a bald head and slim frame. His sister, no more than 12, looked hapless and vulnerable.
They clearly had a close relationship. Gemma deduced that the two lived here, and absence of parents told her Kristoff was a young carer. For the girl’s sake, Gemma hoped this wasn’t a serious drug den.
“No she’s not coming up at all,” Luis took another photo off Gemma, “do the Blacks expunge relatives? Or could the girl also be involved in some way?”
Gemma stopped. She whipped her glasses off and clicked her fingers for the photo in Luis’s hand. Placing them back in order she restarted. Both detectives caught the sequence - a chronological narrative of the siblings life.
Something about the girl turned wrong. Scans of paperwork followed - medical insurance claims rejected, loan applications denied, charity appeals with queues into the years. So many flavours of corporate excuses. The girl turned pallid grey. Her eyes hollowed into her skull. Kristoff appeared earnest, then desperate, then resigned to the inevitable.
In the final photo he stood alone, holding a cheap urn. The mural behind it was not a holiday destination - some dreamland never reached - but a hospital. A funeral turned political statement. In this photo, his resignation had given way to contempt.
Luis exhaled through his fingers and sniffed, pushing sadness back. Gemma sealed the photos in an evidence bag and handed them over.
“Still think our man's a vagrant?”
“Not at all. You have the textbook case right here,” Luis flapped the bag of photos, “the birth of a terrorist.”
“He sold his possessions to pay for her healthcare then.”
“Yes. And when his sister died drugs filled the void, until someone in a mask offered him a darker vice. We should -”
An earsplitting siren. The room jolted. Constables pointed their weapons in all directions and screamed. Webb shouted at the detectives to get out but above the screech nothing could be heard. He held his phone up and pointed at it frantically. They were all receiving phone calls, their ringtones changed to the Veda’s cry, the profile of the caller a dead girl’s decaying face.
The girl from the photos. Her eyes rolled forward and fixed on Gemma’s. The bruise on her left eye grew. Her mouth stretched wide open and grimaced. Opus Veda's wail crescendoed high. Gemma went white.
“Everyone get out! Now!”
Her order came too late. The house roared with stress. The floors churned. Half the officers were cramming through the door when the blast tore through them. Blinding debris flew upwards. Luis crawled choking across the splintered floor to find his partner slumped and motionless. He pulled her over his shoulder and limped outside, moaning with pain.
The scene outside was worse. Several officers spread quartered along the road in smoking chunks. Sergeant Webb tried to secure a getaway vehicle but all were obliterated. In the centre of the police column, he found the source of the blast: the blackened skeleton of the detective’s car. More unsettling still, the usual crowds filming such a scene were nowhere in sight. The entire area had been deserted.
The internet shorted nationwide. Seconds later it returned, too quickly for anyone to question it.
But Kristoff’s face, once glimpsed in the video of the vagrant massacre, had changed into infinite alternatives, and nobody knew which version was the truth.
Nor did they notice the original image, the man's true face, had been taken offline forever.