Two coloured squares took their places above the subway carriage doors, and, despite their material existence being nothing more than what met the eye, they loomed over the passengers like armed guards with fingers on the trigger.
Surveyors of the populous. Two painted squares disguised as simple markings standing shoulder to shoulder with the exit sign.
A blue square, and a green square.
Above the nearest pair of doors, the next ones down, the ones after that. Blue and green lines ran down the centre aisle, accented the doors, coloured the seat fabric and even stained the grab handles.
The cabin was a blue and green world: a mix of two colours that occasionally mingled with each other, but never with red or grey.
Never with red or grey. Those worlds were separate, entirely alien.
Red doors, grey-accented footpaths, red and grey amenities—to a resident of the blue and green, red and grey was unsettling, distressing, even.
Dangerous.
Two coloured eyes watched the squares as they always did when riding the subway. Out of morbid interest or perhaps unhealthy fixation, the reason those eyes took a keen interest in such an ordinary part of everyday life was unclear, contrary to the dull jade irises themselves.
Razor sharp, needle-thin, predatorial.
Alis’s eyes were consistently extraordinary, but one had less chance of spotting them amongst the scrambling bodies of his blue and green world than stumbling upon the Emperor himself.
And that was why he was good at what he did. Rats weren’t singled out in sewers, nor were locusts in a swarm.
He blinked the smoke from the hundred or so tobacco pipes out of his eyes, wishing the ‘no smoking’ sign held as much weight as the two colours above the door. But like rats in a sewer or locusts in a storm, the majority of green passengers all shared one mind.
A smoke to reward themselves for another day’s work.
Sewing machines, leather tanning, bricklaying, welding. Manual, menial labour all culminated in the same stretched faces: stubble-ridden meat hanging loosely from the cheekbones, squinting through bloodshot eyes and blinking away the fatigue for another few minutes.
Not much more waited for him if he turned his attention towards the stifled yawns and tepid grumbles that, even as part of the listless chorus, never cleared the sound of the carriage’s wheels running along the track. He’d grown tired of such faces long ago. There were only so many combinations of worn features one could register before every single face began to look the same.
The two squares at least stood for something more than a crushing workday and a strained marriage.
The carriage engaged its brakes, and dull sparks pounced from the wheels, dancing to the melody of metal against metal and giving light to the decaying tunnel brickwork.
The cattle movers of the subway worked around the clock to keep industry moving; there was no time to stop the flow of labourers to maintain the infrastructure. If, or rather when it collapsed, routes would simply be diverted, and in a sickening two-for-one deal, the rubble would be death’s eager gravedigger.
Every hour lost in the army’s great war machine could mean a battle lost on its front. A front that crawled and retreated like a living organism, changing shape before its cartographers could finish their previous rough sketch.
The final jerk before the train came to a halt roused Alis from his death stare and knocked his briefcase into the dozing passenger in front of him.
He meant to apologise, but didn’t find the chance to as they stumbled towards the doors, opened them, and with an almost drunken instability, stepped onto the platform. It was as though he’d kicked a wind-up toy back to life. As vulgar as that line of thought was, he couldn’t help himself from following it. Picturing the city’s green denizens as metal trinkets running on elastic bands felt morbidly fitting.
Many other automatons filtered past him and onto the already busy platform, the tide favouring arrivals over departures. With them went much of the smoke, and Alis felt his soul begin to heal. Grimy train station air wasn’t exactly a perfume he’d encountered quite yet, but perfume wasn’t something he’d encountered much of at all.
The same couldn’t be said of the two officers who parted the flow of disembarking commuters and took their places beside Alis. Their button-up blue uniforms and mocking chuckles were a sordid sight for already fatigued eyes.
At least the uniformed ones were easier to deal with. It was the draping trench coats Alis had learned to look out for over the patently ranked shoulders.
Officers of such a calibre were often blue rather than green. While it did make sense for them to board the carriage irrespective of their profession, men and women of the law were above subways in every way. Nothing forced them underground besides the few boxes they were required to check by the end of the day.
A quota of sorts in the form of a checklist, handed down to Alis's ULEF branch by a sympathetic officer in the city’s metropolitan police department. What was to the officers a boorish to-do list to maintain accountability had become to ULEF a holy grail in black and white writing.
What officers were looking for on a daily basis, which tasks were easiest to complete and hence best to steer clear of, and what kind of person was most often targeted.
Sidestepping the beast’s path had become ULEF’s new obsession since then, and chases through the city street had become a long-dead nightmare. Even so, not every situation was avoidable.
Packages were a crucial vessel of information: one of ULEF’s arteries. To those who knew where to press their ear, telephone lines were tappable, and telegrams were as secretive as public service announcements. Even through hand-delivered letters, little separated fact from fiction when the evidence wasn’t resting in one's hands. In such a loose organisation of sub-factions, trust was a luxury.
So packages were sought after. Physical tokens of intelligence served also as tokens of respect, with the sender being equally at risk as the receiver. Hence why green citizens with baggage were a target for regular checks, written there with printed black ink in ULEF’s holy grail.
Alis gripped the leather handle of his briefcase tighter and looked out the window, feigning ignorance as the train left the subway and entered the open air.
A short stretch of the journey that passed across a river, never failing to brand his eyes with too much light on a sunny day. The brightness disguised the grime of the city’s periphery, only making visible the ever-growing skyline of thousand-eyed towers, each a repository of more stone than a cliffside.
He heard the particular city he was forced to call home held neither the height of Vesmos’s capital nor humanity’s more modern designs.
His city had apparently once been one of great castles and commerce, brick slate layered on by history’s greatest forgotten masons and furnished by some of its most talented unnamed artists. Stripped of heraldry, the slums survived. Lightning only hit the tallest tree, and so from under Vesmos’s thumb, the backwaters had begun to build their buildings taller under its Emperor’s watchful eye.
Overgrown slums.
Now their sloppy, heavy-handed gardeners turned to Alis, intent on pruning the overgrown weeds.
“Morning,” one of the officers said, cracking a small smile. “How are you today?”
Alis kept the sigh inside his chest, flipping a switch in his brain and meeting the officers with an uncharacteristic smile.
“Fine, officer, yourself?”
“Not too bad. Not too bad at all, now…,” he said, pausing to scratch his second chin as though unwilling to do what was coming next. “That briefcase. My colleague and I were wondering what that’s exactly for. We don’t see too many of those…you know…among these carriages.”
He delivered the last sentence with an avoidant frown, insinuating with his dull brown eyes as they darted from sunken face to sunken face.
The first officer’s colleague eyed Alis with an obdurate persistence, silently filling in for the other half of the good cop routine. Maybe it was a lack of experience; officers who spent time with the greens eventually knew how to speak their language and drive a bargain. Not that it was ever fair.
“Oh,” Alis chimed, maintaining his smile. “I came from a job interview. Had a shift the hour before and had no time to go home, so I had to bring a change of clothes.”
The good cop pouted and raised his eyebrows, acknowledging Alis’s excuse as a sound one but refusing to believe it.
A ‘nice try’ sort of smirk that got on his nerves.
“Well if you don’t mind, we need to do a bag check.”
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“Certainly,” Alis said, almost too quickly. He handed the briefcase over to the unprepared officer, who stumbled to react and receive. Both officers now watched him with much the same expression. One raised eyebrow answering another seemed to cancel out, so they continued.
The scowling officer cleared a space while the other walked over to an unoccupied chair and used it as a makeshift desk. He unclipped both buckles and lifted the lid, finding, as promised, an extra set of clothes not much nicer than the unironed shirt and fraying pants he was already wearing. If pressed for a comment, ‘better preserved’ would be all they could warrant.
The officer began to rummage through the folds, feeling them for any unusual bumps before moving on to the briefcase’s lining itself.
“Bit too small for a bomb, I’d think,” Alis added with a courteous smile.
“And how’d you know how big a bomb is?” the bad cop snarled.
“Oh, seen a few demolitions myself, what with all the old buildings making way for the nicer ones. Out with the green in with the blue and all that.”
The first officer, reluctantly satisfied with his search, closed the briefcase and handed it back to Alis as he had received it.
“Keep vigilant,” he concluded as the brakes once again engaged on the carriage wheels, “there’s been talk of insurgents in our small neck of the woods. You’ve got to think what the world has come to!”
They turned away, and the train came to another halt, this time Alis’s stop. He moved past, keeping his eyes on the ground and refusing to acknowledge them until he cleared the doors. There was no point in building rapport now as long as he left the station smoothly.
His was a small one, with only one platform and a staircase leading to an open street. Unhelpful if he was blocked in, but an easy exit made for an easy escape otherwise.
Or, an easy ambush.
That was at least the ideology of the two men Alis brushed past, both pulling handguns from underneath their coats.
Alis kept his head down. His brass knuckles had little to work with where there was no magic. He was a courier, nothing more.
Besides, he’d never seen those two men in his life. That’s how it worked.
Four gunshots split the air into quarters, the echo of the concrete tile chamber doing little favours for his eardrums.
The doors were already halfway through closing by the time he heard the two officers’ remains fall to the floor. The train, as though oblivious, began to pull out of the station.
“By authority of the Leheg group of the ULEF, any officer found in this station will be shot on sight! Spread the word! They should be scared!”
Alis kept walking, dedicating an hour or two on the agenda to finding a new train station.
Flander’s Street Fish and Chip Shop, the self-proclaimed ‘best chips this side of the city’, was sandwiched between two conjoined apartment buildings that in turn linked up with a complex spanning the entire street. Inelegant, but easy to build. Cheap too.
Green doors the entire street down, although the state of the area itself made any colour indicators entirely redundant.
Built-up trash, rough roads, polluted creeks. Civil services rarely reached out so far from the city centre, no matter how rich the area got.
The people made ends meet, and the gangs and ULEF outposts kept order. An uneasy state of self-sufficiency, enough to not put a target on anyone’s back.
Alis climbed the gutter sloppily outlined in white before reaching the counter. The chalk on the menu board was beginning to fade, and he remembered it being one of his long line of duties as a part-timer.
He dinged the service bell with his thumb as he peered over into the glass cabinet, eyeing the day’s pre-made batch for anything better than the usual crumbling fish and thin batter. Unfortunately, nothing caught his eye.
Being a foodie had poisoned him, elevating his taste beyond the colour green entirely. A decent meal to him now not only cost his salary but potentially his neck.
Reds, greys and even blues could sniff out greens by table manners alone. He wasn’t thankful for his time in the army, but being taught how to carry himself was, by far, the thing he most appreciated.
A balding man, mid-sixties, emerged from the kitchen, a thin layer of oil coating his face and steam clouding his glasses. Good news, considering that meant he was getting work.
“Hiya lad. Back early,” the man said.
“Yes, Mr. Rockshall. Just a jaunt into town.”
“Took the subway from Leheg?”
“Yes, Mr Rockshall. Not anymore, it seems. Is Ryan in?”
“Yes, he’s just upstairs. Why? Did something happen?”
“Leheg boys, Mr. Rockshall. The crew from down the road shot two police officers dead.”
“By gods,” Mr. Rockshall sighed. “They chose their time wisely, didn’t they? This business is finally taking off too.”
“Certainly a lot of nerve for a single-outpost branch, Mr. Rockshall—”
“Rockshall this, Rockshall that, go see Ryan. Go on, I’ve got customers.”
“Yes sir,” Alis said, giving a courteous smile before stepping past the counter and into the back. He passed the kitchen’s oil baths and steel counters, his body not exactly eager to get back to work growing sick from the smell.
There was a small stairwell on the other end of the kitchen, with tall steps ascending over a broom cabinet, and to the second floor.
Barely any light got to the second storey, even on blinding afternoons. Ryan had made sure the fabric was as thick as possible before folding it, stitching it and hanging them as curtains. Alis couldn’t fault the man’s sewing skills.
A set of bright green eyes stared at him as his head poked above the floorboards. Curly hair neatly combed back with hair wax, and stubble shaved within an inch of its life, leaving a moustache above his upper lip.
By all accounts, he was a businessman. Well-groomed, smartly dressed in a three-piece suit, easily mistaken for a blue or even a grey in the correct circumstances.
“Alis,” Ryan said, sitting upright in his red leather chair. “You’ve got something for me?”
“Yes,” Alis replied. “Met with the man you mentioned. Gave me these.”
Alis placed down the briefcase by the stairs and walked up to Ryan’s almost empty desktop. He rummaged a hand through his jacket, finding one of the many crudely cut pockets and taking from it a small envelope.
“Coppers didn’t give you trouble?”
“They did sir, only checked the briefcase, though.”
“Did they now?” Ryan asked, taking the unmarked brown envelope and passing his eye over it. “Glad to know we can trust our boys in blue to take their jobs seriously. Can’t think of what would happen if they didn’t.”
“They’d get shot sir, evidently,” Alis said.
Ryan glanced his eyes upwards and raised his eyebrows in quiet astonishment. “Really now?” he said, reaching for his desk drawer. “Who shot them?”
“Leheg men, sir” Alis said, keeping his eyes forward in an old military habit. “Local boys that started out last month a few blocks down.”
“Bastards,” Ryan muttered as he grabbed a letter opener and closed the drawer. Alis had seen it before; a knife welded into a slit in an unfired bullet. “Probably thought they needed to prove themselves on the onset. They’re going to get themselves killed.”
“Does the Leheg group have any presence on the Board of Leaders, sir?”
“Course not. Headquarters have us as their main branch in this region.” Ryan shook his head as he sliced the paper open. “I was planning on bringing them into our sphere, lend them a few guns and some funding. There goes that idea.”
Ryan reached into the letter and pulled out its contents; a set of six printed photographs that he examined for only a moment before throwing them onto the table.
“What are they, sir?”
“Photographs,” Ryan said, listlessly.
“What do they prove, sir?” Alis corrected himself.
“That there’s a Vesmos spy plane flying over northern Sidos. Don’t know but my best guess is they know of something hidden in Sidos’s neck of the Northern Chain.”
“Spy plane?” Alis asked. “How has it not been detected?
Ryan raised his eyebrows, pulling Alis back into line.
“Sir,” Alis said, correcting himself again.
“Not much you need to know besides it’s the start of a new partnership with an inside informant, and possibly an opportunity to bargain with the Sidosian government.”
“Weapons, sir?”
“Why else would we want anything to do with Sidos?”
Alis nodded. “Very good, sir. Will that be all?”
“Yes, Alis. You’re dismissed.”
Ryan gave the final nod, and Alis turned, once again heading for the stairs.
Two colours spread themselves across the upper end of Alis’s neighbourhood, stringing along greens towards their doors while the blues were escorted to theirs. The lines on the footpath, street signs, and taxi doors, all an extension of the cattle movers that ran under his very feet.
‘Hidden in plain sight’ weren’t the right words. They weren’t hidden, but no one seemed to care.
Just signs and markings, universal glyphs like an exit sign made to guide people, help people, and assist them when they were unsure of where to go or what to do or what to think.
The four colours ruled Alis’s life in a different light. They were directly responsible for nothing, more like a nail in the coffin. They just proved that no one ever considered escape as a possibility, or change as an option.
They were a sign to Alis that Vesmos had already won long ago. Just as obvious, just as visible.
He opened the green accented door to the local post office and stepped inside, beelining for the front counter while he took out another envelope from his jacket.
“I’d like to post a letter,” he said, placing the envelope on the counter. The middle-aged woman behind it, already familiar to him after over thirty visits over the last few years, quoted him a price without even needing to calculate.
Every letter he sent was the same; express postage to an address in Excala city.
“Same as always," she said in a tired drone.
“Yes, ma’am,” Alis nodded, getting a familiar scoff out of the woman.
“Do you call everyone ma’am, or just me?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, ma’am.”
“Ah. You’re an odd one, you are, as always. Speaking of….”
The postal workerturned around and addressed the wall of leftover packages from the morning’s deliveries. She plucked a letter from between a set of packages and handed it to him.
Every letter he got was the same: express postage from an address in Excala city.
He received the letter and immediately began to open it.
“Ah!” the post worker cautioned, tapping a form attached to a cork clipboard. “Sign.”
Alis rolled his eyes. “You know who I am, ma’am.”
“And if you know who I am, you know I don’t like the idea of losing my job.”
Alis was cornered, and he surrendered fair and square, tearing the letter open the moment his name was on the form.
The familiar shoddy handwriting on flimsy notebook paper—it was low effort, but the words on the page always managed to make up for it.
Dear Alis,
I’m sorry I was so late in writing to you. A lot happened, but I think you heard about it through the radio. I was busy with that. Sorry. I can’t really remember what you wrote in your last letter, but the food sounded tasty. Sorry, I don’t remember.
How are you? How is work? I wish we could talk more, maybe on the phone. I know we’re not supposed to, but I want to try anyway. The things you write in your letters make me wish I spent more time talking with you. It’s almost three years.
I found out who what I am. I think. There’s no evidence, but someone told me, and I can’t help but think it’s true. They said I was the Spirit of Destruction, and then I killed them. I couldn’t control myself. I wasn’t angry but I was. I don’t know. It makes too much sense.
Mum is taking it well, but she’s secretly stressed about it. Marie is trying her best to protect me and says the Queen is trying to do the same. Dad is okay but he has to be, or else no one would. But people don’t like who I am, and I’m scared.
The city is getting worse. The rubble is clearing, but no one knows how to get rid of the trees. It’ll take years. People who have no homes are living in the Great Library or moving away. A lot of the school kids whose parents were doing the things are having a hard time. Sorry. Too much bad news.
I’m going to school now. I had to because my client was going who I was supposed to protect. Her name is Crestana. She’s my other friend. Don’t be jealous, please. She’s really nice but she’s having a hard time too. She was in the middle of it all and doesn’t have parents right now. I don’t know if she ever will again.
More bad news I’m sorry. I’ll do my best to think of some better things for next time.
I hope I hear back from you soon.
Sincerely,
Iris
Alis folded the letter and pocketed it, storming out of the post office.
“What’s gotten you in a rush?!” the post worker asked.
“I need to ask about my leave," he said, feeling the brass knuckles in his jacket drawing closer to their counterpart.