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Duke of Two Cities Chapter 41
Devon’s wallet yawned in hunger, its leather mouth hungering, almost pleading ‘don’t take what I cannot give’. He would need to be careful—it was all the money he would have for a while. Slowly, as though handling a fragile teacup, he put his wallet away lest the money fly out on its own and poof into nothing. As he finished his own money business with care, Ali came back with an enormous grin plastered on his face. In his hands at least half a dozen shopping bags loaded with toys. “Look!” Devon smiled. “Looks like a good haul, man.” Ali blinked. “ ‘Good haul’ means what?” “Oh…when you get a lot of nice things, we call it a ‘good haul’.” Ali, suddenly a patient and eager student, nodded. “Yes. A good haul for me. And a good haul for you.” Devon shook his head. “No, I didn’t get nothing. I…uh…these things are real expensive, you know? I’ll just…I’ll get my haul another time. But Ali was busy searching through one of his bags. Plastic and cardboard clinked as pleasantly as t
Duke of Two Cities Chapter 42
After what seemed like two hours, Ali found what he was looking for. Buried beneath the knickknacks and memorabilia were two small printed cardboard boxes, each the size of a football. With an enormous grin, Ali took out the two boxes. Devon’s eyes widened. His hand went to his mouth. “Dude…”In Ali’s hands were two figures from Warriors of The Endless Road (WotER), an anime series of some popularity. Devon had watched a few seasons—it was a good show by any measure, but not one of his favorites. Still the show commanded a large fan base, with some bordering on zealous fanaticism. Fans of the show were famous for their heated arguments around small details in the show, and amongst the anime-crowd they had become something of a meme. Much of the show followed a typical format—struggling warriors forge difficult friendships under the specter of war, and through their growing bond become stronger. Devon was absolutely not surprised to discover that’s Ali’s was a fan. He was surprised
Duke of Two Cities Chapter 43
“Are you serious?” Devon put a hand to his mouth. “You don’t like?” Ali’s face suddenly became crestfallen. “No! I mean yes! I mean—“ Devon had become flustered. This was not something that he had expected, and certainly not in front of a crowd of salivating nerds. Here was Ali, a stranger that he had met only today, offering him his pick of a nearly $1800 limited edition collectible action figure. People in New Hudson killed for that kind of money. They killed for far less money, in fact. A good pair of sneakers worth $300 could make an innocent jogger into a juicy target. Life was cheap in Devon’s part of New Hudson—a steady influx of the desperate poor from other parts of the country, and from other countries were things were even worse, kept a steady glut of bodies for the city’s industries. Fast food, low income retail, cheap electronics filled with intrusive advertisements and sneaky fees to leech off the destitute and the outcast. Those $300 sneakers could be resold at a f
Duke of Two Cities Chapter 44
“Of course it would be you,” Tamyra snarled. “Who else would be so entitled? All I needed to finish my was going to finish my Warriors of the Endless Road collection was that Dashu. And you took it.”Tamyra’s face had flushed past crimson and was on its way to purpose. Her princess wand was quavering in her hand. At the slightest provocation, Devon feared she might actually use it. He held up his hands as though the wand were about to shoot lightning from its glittery points. “Look,” Devon began, “I’m sorry about your collection, but like—how are any of us supposed to know that? We can’t read minds or anything.”“You took it,” Tamyra intoned. Devon’s logic had no place amidst her anger. And there was much to be angry about—between the incident at the entrance, the horrible mess in the Fantasy writer’s panel, and now this. Just over the past two days, Ali and Devon had been a thorn in her slippers. and she had just about enough. “And it’s not enough that you have the nerve to troll in
Duke of Two Cities Chapter 45
It began with a push. Once again, Ali was surrounded by an angry crowd, with someone screaming at him in a language that was not his mother tongue. In Al-Zhabai, nobody would dare speak to him in such a way—even the cousins who looked upon him with contempt would never stoop to such behavior. In the moment, Ali felt the most curious sensation—that his soul was leaving his body, watching it from above. Perhaps the shock of the push had killed him, he thought. Curiously, in this dissociated state, he didn’t seem to have any feelings at all, though his body was nearly convulsing in terror. Time seemed to lose its smooth passing. Suddenly everything became terribly slow, as if the convention and everything in it was moving through thick honey. Down from above his own body, Ali gazed as Tamyra, whose face had become a terrible mask of vindictive rage. She lunged at Ali— to snatch Devon’s gift, he thought. But Tamyra’s dexterity had vanished before the heat of her own anger, and whom m
Duke of Two Cities Chapter 46
Far away from the chaos of New Hudson, in the Golden City of Al-Zhabai, King Ibrahim al-Zhabai stood on his private balcony, thinking of a joke. Once, the land that his Kingdom sat upon was a flat cropping of rock surrounded by a lake of sand. No trees, no oil or minerals, or any of the other resources that make a city worth building existed there. A hundred years before King Ibrahim’s time, this useless plot of land was gifted to his great-grandfather, Usman al-Zhabai, Founder of the Kingdom, as the world’s most expensive prank. It was a little known truth. Very few people beyond the deepest circle of the royal family knew this story. Not even foreign websites could publish it, for the instant they did al-Zhabai’s Ministry of Communications used every means at their disposal to take it down. Family lore said that when Founder Usman, talented and overlooked, was finally gifted the land he had worked for all his life. When the empty plot of land was finally revealed, his “benefac
Duke of Two Cities Chapter 47
Zayin’s head throbbed. He wished, more than he’d ever wished for anything in his life, that he could wake up back home, in Al-Zhabaiye. He missed his coffee, he missed his 17th story view of the desert, he missed the smell of the cedar paneling of his building’s elevator. All these little things he missed, many of which he had not appreciated before. His head ached until the pain seeped down into his shoulders. So tense were all his muscles that even the slightest movement ached. And it was well to be tense, because his ward, the PRINCE OF AL-ZHABAIYE HIMSELF, chose to behave like a childish idiot. Now Zayin and his security team occupied the hotel’s Executive Lounge, where they had extradited the Prince from a possible attempt on his life. The Prince sat on the couch with his head in his hands, refusing to look at or speak to anyone. One of his security team had thoughtfully prepared a plate of dried fruit and cheese. The plate sat in front of the Prince, untouched. Good. Maybe the
Duke of Two Cities Chapter 48
Devon sat crosslegged on the floor, squishing his hunter’s hat for comfort. He stared at a spot of carpet, trying to drown out the sounds of the frightening-looking man screaming at Ali. Devon could piece together that the goons all worked for him—some of them were half in costume, others dressed like regular folk. A few wore golden watches. Were they thugs? If so, they weren’t like any gang members that Devon had ever seen, and New Hudson was unfortunately filled with those. These men looked too clean-cut. They didn’t have the casual swagger of the gangs he knew, and other than a little bit of rough-handling on the way to the top-floor lounge, they hadn’t been beaten. Furthermore, gang attacks usually don’t take this long, and by this point they had been sitting in the lounge for twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Ali had begun to shout at the man who kidnapped him. That was the strangest part of all of this--when Ali shouted, the man who kidnapped them listened. And so did his goons. At