2022-07-18 16:25:55As he was thrown off his feet, the would-be-thief thought maybe he had made a rather poor choice. He didn’t mean for their prank to get out of hand. This was just what he and his friends did; find chances to have a laugh at other’s expense. These laughs were harmless, or so he thought; something to look forward to in an otherwise dull, and sometimes terrifying world. Rarely did their pranks have any real consequences.
Today, the consequences were quite real—and fast.
CLUNK
Thrown off his feet, the goon barreled over as the gym bag flew from his grip. He tumbled into a patch of sidewalk hidden beneath the shadow of a dreary-looking apartment, shaking. The sidewalk was cool on his cheeks; suddenly he felt an overwhelming urge to have a nap. If he laid there quietly, perhaps all of his bad decisions that day would go away by themselves.
Victorious, Devon picked up his bag and headed back towards the bus stop. No sooner did he turn around that he saw his other assailant, Jaxton fumbling with his phone.
“OK, this man assaulted me and my friends,” Jaxton said, putting on a pathetic and sniveling expression. “Everyone look at this assaulter. Get him on camera.”
Devon couldn’t help but laugh. The whole thing was ridiculous and only getting worse. He shook his head and kept on walking to the bus.
At seeing his reaction, Jaxton’s eyes flashed. He bit down on his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood.
“What’s so fuckin’ funny, feather-hat?”
“Dude… assaulter?” Devon tried and failed to surprise a smile.
“Cause you fucking did it!” snarled Jaxton.
Devon maintained his smile, shaking his head. This whole incident was near fermenting with idiocy and was getting above Devon’s pay grade, as the saying goes. “You’re saying I assaulted you? Bro, you tried to grab my hat and your buddy over there stole my bag!”
“No, we didn’t!” Jaxton said breathlessly. “We didn’t—stop lying. More lies—” Jaxton was panting from the sheer force of adrenaline pumping through his veins. “—more lies from feather-hat, everyone!”
“The hell is wrong with you? Yes, you did! I heard you, you stupid-ass!” Devon said.
Jaxton shoved his phone in Devon’s face. Devon swatted it away. “See, everyone?” Jaxton snarled. “Did you see what he just did? More assault. More lies and assault from feather-hat. Get a look at his face! Get a good look… the assaulter and the liarist, everyone! Let’s get his name out there! #FeatherHat!”
Liarist? Where did these kids go to school? Not that Devon went to a particularly great school growing up, but he would have gotten his ass kicked for using a word like ‘liarist’. Kids these days…
…except Devon was only 22. That thought gave Devon a pause. There was something wrong about feeling so old at such a young age. Devon couldn’t be much older than the young man posturing and preening and shoving his phone in Devon’s face, all of which Devon wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. What happened to the world that brought such a gap between them?
Devon decided the best thing to do was to ignore them.
He marched back towards the bus stop with his bag while Jaxton followed, flitting around him like a summer fly, getting him on camera at all angles. A few people across the street also had their phones out, recording no doubt. Devon seethed. At that moment it seemed the entire world would not leave him alone and let him wear his own goddamn hat.
Meanwhile, Jaxton became ever more frantic in his attempts to get a reaction out of Devon, hurling insults in all kinds of nasty flavors.
“Leave. Me. Alone.” Devon snapped.
“No. Fucking make me, you stupid feather-hat wearing fuck. We were just messing around and you had to make it an escalation.”
Devon’s eyes widened.
“Oh, you were messing around?”
“—and you went and assaulted us!”
Devon laughed. “So you admit it, you were messing with me. You just admitted on camera, it was you who started this.”
Jaxton’s eyes widened. There was a beat of infuriated silence.
“No. That’s not what I—I didn’t say that! Don’t fucking gaslight me!”
This had gone on long enough. Devon turned around, spreading his arms in aggressive frustration. Jaxton recoiled as Devon shouted. “Gaslight? Bro, I’m waiting for a fucking bus! The hell do you want from me? Go back to school or something— stop acting like a fuckin’ goon.”
Off in the distance came the soft rumbling of bus wheels. Devon closed his eyes and prayed:
Please, please let it be the 712. Please get me out of here. I just wanna go to the Convention and be done with this crazy goon.
As Devon was waiting, one of Jaxton’s friends came over and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Yo, Jaxton, just let it go man, let’s go check on Kaier, he’s still laying on the sidewalk. I think he’s got a concussion or somethin’”
Jaxton snapped his friend’s hand away. Adrenaline laced sweat dripped off Jaxton’s face and soaked into his shirt until the young man was stinking with hormone-laced aggression. “Don’t fucking touch me, Steve, I swear to god.
Steve pulled his hand back. “Bro, relax, you’re tilting hard right now!”
“And don’t fucking tell me to relax! Nobody asked your opinion, grandpa… you and your old-man-name, fuck you!”
Steve put his hands up. “Hey man, you know how I feel about my name. You don’t gotta throw insults at me like that. "
Jaxton screwed his face and voice into a mockery of a toothless old man, holding up a shaking, arthritic finger for effect as he wheezed:“Oh me, oh my, you don’t need to throw insults young man, my name is Steven, I was born long ago in 2002… shut up!” Jaxton’s face snapped back to its original shape and voice with rather impressive speed.“I’m not tilting, and if I am, it’s all ‘cause of fucking feather-hat over th—Hey! Don’t you fucking walk away from me, feather-hat! You think you can just walk away after assaulting a student—HEY GET BACK HERE, I’M NOT DONE WITH YOU, YOU FEATHER-HAT-WEARING FUCK!”
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Chapter 52
His room had been cancelled. Just like that. No warning, no notice. At the snap of Marc’s fingers, Devon had been unceremoniously tossed out of a Convention that he literally gave up his family to attend. Devon stared at Marc for a while. Then, he laughed. He laughed quietly, then he laughed loudly, cackling, until he had no more breath in him. And still he laughed. This had been, by far, the most ridiculous weekend in Devon’s entire life. He had given up his family in a moment of anger, suffered assault and insult nearly daily, only to befriend some kind of foreign royalty who, while defending his newfound friend, had sacrificed the only housing he would have for the foreseeable future. Ridiculous! His life had become a joke, some absurd and wild story written by a mad idiot. This was a weekend that would define the rest of his life, and it all had just been so unbelievably stupid. Meanwhile, Marc looked as though he were about to leap out of the Executive Lounge window from shee
Chapter 51
Things were getting out of hand. Zayin needed to think quickly; his Prince was going to start digging himself into a deep and terribly expensive hole. Yes, Ali had certain entitlements to his family’s wealth…in theory. But Ali had never tapped into his family’s wealth before—Zayin wasn’t even sure that he could. It was a poorly kept secret that more than one relative had access to Ali’s accounts…including Cousin Sayid. To his shame, Zayin was quietly praying that there was not enough left to embarrass the Prince. He never thought that he would ever wish for relatives to embezzle the Prince’s funds. Even with his Aunts and Cousin Sayid dipping into his funds, Ali’s personal wealth was enough that he could make serious trouble for himself, as well as the Kingdom. And with the stone-set fury on Ali’s face, trouble would come. Perhaps the key to solving the trouble lay in Ali’s ‘brother’. “You.” He pointed at Devon and spoke in English. “Come with me, please.”Quietly, Devon complied.
Chapter 50
It was not the strangest occurrence to ever happen, but it was one of the strangest that had ever happen to Zayin.He stood nearly speechless as Marc, a hotel functionary, sputtered and nearly fell down on his knees trying to explain to Ali how all of this had been an enormous mistake. There had been in Marc’s words, ‘a deep and serious cultural miscommunication that New Hudson Convention Center will work tirelessly to reconcile’. It was ten minutes of this kind of diplomatic nonsense, and Zayin had to admit that he was doing quite well with it. In another life, and with another passport, Marc would have made a great presenter for one of the old State Television channels. More amusing still was, for the first time since knowing him, Ali acted like a prince. This was the greatest shock. Zayin was confident in this assessment—that Ali would be easily brushed aside by his more competent cousins and tossed out of Zhabaiye public life. Cousin Sayid would place him on a farm in the middle
Chapter 49
Since the construction of the New Hudson Convention Center, there had never been a moment quite what Marc Abramov experienced in that Executive Lounge. Since its actual opening some twenty years prior, there had never been so many people silenced all at once with just a few short words. Time seemed to freeze and Marc’s armhairs stood straight on their ends. The VIP…more like the VVIP in fact…was expecting an answer. Why did Marc make the VIP’s brother cry?He clasped his hands and began, “Well—“ Well what? Nothing. The words caught in his throat. Something about the young man’s look—and he barely registered as a man at all—struck him with a sense of absolute terror. The VIP’s gaze encompassed his entire being, utterly and completely, as though he were no more than a fixture of the room. Marc had a sudden, curious idea that there was a sword hanging over his neck. And if he did not speak very, very carefully, that sword would drop and lop his head clean off from his body. There
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
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
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