The Significant (5 page)

      
She knew she was going to prison and
likely facing death for conspiracy and treason.

      
Kailynn cried herself into exhaustion.
She was sleeping heavily when Raphael carefully moved from behind her and went
back into the flat, seeing the woman he had picked up the previous night still
passed out on his bed. He groaned and shook her awake, telling her to find her
clothes and leave. She was indignant and angry, but he did not care about
preserving her feelings. His thoughts were focused on Kailynn.

      
The failed plan was no minor occurrence.
The Heart of Trid gang and Kailynn were in an enormous amount of danger.

      
Raphael carried Kailynn to the bed and
covered her with all the blankets he could find. Once he was sure that she
would be warm, he left the apartment and went to her job, telling Brad that she
was very sick and could not work. Brad grumbled, but he must have seen the
worried look on Raphael’s face because he did not press the Trid with
questions. Once Raphael had taken care of that, he ran to the different members
of their own gang, telling everyone that the Heart of Trid gang had been captured
for a failed attempt to shut down Venus and that they needed to find out what
had happened to the members, particularly Theo.

      
Raphael went to everyone he could think
of and asked if they had heard about the warehouse incident the previous night.
A few had heard about it through other contacts and that sent Raphael on a
chase for some solid information. He was hearing everything from twelve
Officials being killed to the entire Heart of Trid gang being killed in the
warehouse and dragged away to become medical subjects in Anon.

      
Just when he was getting frustrated with
the search, Alyssa from his own gang ran up to him and told him that she knew
what had happened to the Heart of Trid gang.

      
One Official had been killed in the
struggle—adding another criminal count to the gang’s sentence—and seven members
of the large Trid gang had died as well. The rest had been taken into custody
and were being held at Uren Correctional Facility, the roughest, deadliest
prison on the entire planet.

      
“What about Theo?” he pressed.

      
“He’s alive,” Alyssa assured. “He’s at
Uren with the rest.”

      
Raphael rushed to tell Kailynn the news.
He found her in the bathroom, naked, treating her wounds with old antiseptic
that she had found under the sink. Raphael explained the situation to Kailynn
and gave her the clothes he had picked up at her place.

      
“Viv said she would dye your hair darker.
We can find contacts to change your eye color. We’ll have to find a way to keep
you hidden.”

      
“For how long?” Kailynn murmured. “And what
about Theo? He’s on death row. And you know they don’t wait to execute Trids.”

      
“I know, but
you
are not on death row, so don’t do anything stupid enough to
put you there,” Raphael said strongly. “You are the one that got away. They
will be searching high n’ low for you. Stay hidden.”

      
Kailynn lowered her eyes. She could not
leave her brother in prison to be killed. He was the only family she had left.
She had heard horror stories about Uren. Uren did not waste their lethal serums
on Trids. They took them out back and shot them. Kailynn shivered at the
thought. It was the same way both her parents died—one by Official fire, the
other by Trid fire. She could not risk her brother, her only living family,
being killed by a bullet to the head.

      
Raphael embraced her tightly, trying to
convey his worry. For all he said to her, he knew that she would not listen. He
just had to keep an eye on her and make sure she did not do anything stupid
while trying to save Theo.

      
“I’ll help you however I can. Just tell
me what you need.”

Chapter
Four

      
Kailynn was bound and determined to help
her brother get out of Uren. She had helped Theo get one man in the Heart of
Trid gang out of the same prison years before and knew that the guards were
willing to look the other way on escapees if they were compensated well.
Kailynn never knew where Theo had gotten the money from to pay for the escape,
but she never asked. She knew the Heart of Trid gang had some nefarious
dealings within Trid. Her own gang, the Cobalt Leopards, never dealt in drugs
or weapons. They were a small group, more concerned with each other’s safety
than with gaining money and prestige among those in Trid. Each member did what
was necessary to survive and stayed together for protection.

      
For that reason, Kailynn was a little out
of practice in dealing with career criminals in Trid.

      
She had gone to her brother’s contact in
Uren and asked what it took to release those in the Heart of Trid gang. The
answer was twenty-thousand credits a head with her brother being fifty-five
thousand credits. He had not even blinked when he told her the numbers.

      
Kailynn had almost choked on her tongue.
Twenty-two members—the surviving members of the Heart of Trid—were imprisoned,
one of which was her brother. That was four-hundred-twenty thousand credits for
the basic members of the gang. The grand total was four-hundred, seventy-five
thousand credits. Kailynn felt as if the words had physically struck her in the
chest, causing her to bleed all over the ground.

      
However, she put on a brave face, hiding
her shock.
    

      
“How long before they start executing
them?” Kailynn pressed.

      
“A year, maybe,” the patrol officer had
said with a shrug. “Apparently, your boys did something that has drawn
attention from Venus. Everyone’s waitin’ for her to make an announcement on
their fates.”

      
The fear in Kailynn’s belly turned cold.

      
She left, feeling discouraged.

      
Viv was trimming Kailynn’s hair and
preparing the dye when she finally asked how much money was needed to free the
Heart of Trid. When Kailynn whispered the amount, Viv’s hands stilled and her
eyes went wide.

      
“What?”

      
“Yeah…”

      
Slowly, Viv resumed trimming Kailynn’s
hair, trying to get over her shock at the large number.

      
“Is…can we…I mean, do you have a way to
get that money?”

      
Kailynn sighed and closed her eyes.

      
“I’m sure there are ways…” Kailynn
murmured. “But even if I were to steal as many credits as I could from the
Walking District, I couldn’t come close. We’d have to take up the Heart of Trid
drug ring and traffic at a higher price. I might have to work at one of the
clubs and whore a bit to get some more money. I don’t think there is enough
money in all of Trid to free them.”

      
“You could free only Theo.”

      
“I could,” Kailynn agreed. “But he will
need the gang with him. The other gangs are pissed that they brought the
Officials down on Trid with this stunt. I saw a bunch of Officials just walking
here—thankful they didn’t see me. Theo will need to be protected when everyone
comes after him.”

      
Viv continued snipping the ends of
Kailynn’s hair, thoughtful.

      
“But…what happens if you get him out? The
Officials will come looking for him again.”

      
“I doubt it,” Kailynn said. “I mean, what
do they care? They don’t want to warehouse him and they have to wait for Venus
to tell them what to do. If he disappears, problem solved.”

      
Viv went silent, running her hands over
Kailynn’s hair before grabbing the dye, setting it on the makeshift table next
to her and putting on gloves. She started to move Kailynn’s hair around,
preparing to dye it.

      
“Kailynn,” she started slowly.

      
“Yeah?”

      
“Why not get work in Anon?”

      
Kailynn snorted.

      
“You need papers to work in Anon.”

      
“I know someone who can get you papers.”

      
Kailynn turned to Viv, her eyes narrow.

      
“You’ve looked into getting papers?”

      
“Why the hell not?” Viv asked sharply.
“You wanna stay in this shithole all your life?”

      
“What the fuck are we qualified to do in
Anon?” Kailynn challenged.

      
“Will you turn around?” Viv said,
exasperated, pushing Kailynn’s shoulders. She started applying the dye, hoping
that Kailynn would stay still as she spoke. “I know, we’re not really
qualified.”

      
“Not
really
?”
Kailynn repeated, incredulous. “When the fuck did you learn how to read?”

      
“Shut up, Kailynn. You can’t read,
either,” Viv snapped. “But there are ways.”

      
“Enough to get nearly five-hundred
thousand?”

      
“Maybe,” Viv said. “As a Significant.”

      
Kailynn groaned, closing her eyes.

      
“Oh no, Viv. Don’t tell me that you’re
thinking of becoming a Significant.”

      
“Why the hell not? They make a lot more
money than those who whore themselves in the Walking District,” Viv defended.
“They make a lot of money. And most of the time, all they do is talk to
people.”

      
“That’s what they want you to believe,”
Kailynn said. “Significants are asked to do all sorts of sick things for those
nobleman assholes.”

      
“For seven grand a pop, I’d do some sick
shit, too.”

      
Kailynn was about to snap at Viv again
about considering the work, but the number stilled her tongue immediately.

      
“Seven grand? How do you know?”

      
“One of the guys I chatted up a few weeks
ago,” Viv said, continuing to apply the dye to Kailynn’s hair, watching the
light brown color darken almost immediately. “He was talking about how much
money he had lost because he had a partnership with a Significant and he lost
seven-thousand credits three times a week to spend a night with her.”

      
“For sex?” Kailynn said, blinking in
shock.

      
“That’s the thing. The sex cost extra,
like, five-thousand extra.”

      
Kailynn turned around and stared at Viv,
her eyes wide with disbelief.

      
“You’re making this shit up.”

      
“No,” Viv said. “The guy was slobbering
drunk and was whining about how his wife would divorce him for spending so much
of their money on a Significant. He was really upset about it.”

      
“All that over a
Significant
?”

      
“Guess so.”

      
Even though everything inside Kailynn
told her that becoming a Significant was not an option, the prospect of the
money to be earned gave her pause. Viv walked to one side of Kailynn,
continuing to apply the dye.

      
“It’s not a bad way to make money, you
know,” she said. “I mean, don’t you think that most who work as Significants
just need the money? It’s something to think about.”

      
“The idea of prostituting fake company to
the nobles is more sickening than whoring,” Kailynn said slowly, lowering her
gaze.

      
“Kailynn,” Viv started, standing in front
of her. “Who cares if it’s fake company they want? They’re willing to pay for
it. There is no reason for you to not exploit that.”

      
Kailynn stared at Viv. The older Trid
woman could see that Kailynn was nervous about going against her beliefs for
the sake of money. However, Kailynn was also in a situation where leaving her
brother in a prison cell, waiting to be shot and forgotten with the rest of the
Trids, was unimaginable.

      
The thought disturbed Kailynn, but at
seven-thousand a visit, she was sure she could raise the money to free her
brother and most of the others in the Heart of Trid gang working as a
Significant. She would have to be smart about how she dealt with her affairs,
since her papers would be fake, and she would have to continue working even
after getting the gang out of Uren to ensure suspicions remained low.

      
But it was the first time that Kailynn
believed she
could
make the money to
save her brother’s life.

      
“Who was the guy you said could get me
papers?”

      
Kailynn had asked for the five hundred
credits from Raphael to pay the man who would provide her with forged papers.
Raphael immediately demanded to know what she was planning to do, and she
explained truthfully. Raphael was strongly against the idea at first. He did
not think of the money Kailynn could make at first—he thought only about the
steep punishment of life in prison or death for forging papers to get into the
capital city. He had told Kailynn not to do anything that would get her in
trouble, but she had already concocted her plan that could easily lead her to
death row.

      
However, Kailynn continued to explain the
money that Viv had said she could make. Eventually, the words pushed past
Raphael’s initial worry.

      
He gave her the money and went with her
to the programmer who had been kicked into Trid after losing all his money to
his drug addiction. He still had citizenship, which still allowed him to access
to duplicate the template for electronic citizenship.

      
When Raphael and Kailynn met with him, he
was thin and sickly, still twitching from his high the previous night.

      
They sat with him as he shakily discussed
all the information she would need to know for her fake citizenship, showing
her what her documentation looked like before giving her a fake name.

      
Jacyleen Lynden.

      
He then warned her that she needed to
carry the papers on her at all times and to avoid getting sick or hurt while in
Anon. He explained that everyone in Anon had a PIM chip implanted behind their
right ear and he could not give her one because they could only be programmed
by a hospital computer connected to Venus directly. If she was found not to
have a PIM chip, she could be immediately arrested.

      
Once she had her papers, copied onto a
small drive that she held tightly, terrified she would lose it due to its small
size, Kailynn went to a shop in the Walking District, buying clothes that would
help her blend into Anon. She only bought one outfit, unable to afford anything
else.

      
She then went back to Raphael’s place,
showered, shaved, and tried to make herself look as least-Trid-like as
possible.

      
The following day, she dressed in her new
clothes and, holding her faked citizenship, cautiously crossed the border into
Anon.

      
Once there, she walked out of the older
part of Anon into the clean, bright streets of Tiao’s capital. There were
towering buildings, clean and bright, made of glass and metal, reflecting light
from the sun. The streets were clean as well, which was easy to maintain since
there were never people on the walkways. Kailynn knew that there were extensive
roadways under the surface of the city where the self-driven cars could move
about without detection, but she could not hear noise under her feet.

      
The city was surprisingly quiet, apart
from the dull humming that seemed omnipresent on the planet.

      
Kailynn wandered around the city, feeling
small and out of place among the towering structures. She was starting to get
nervous about being caught or lost when she finally saw the round building of
sweeping glass with the word “Companion” along the top.

      
Taking a deep breath, she began walking
toward Companion.

      
She walked around the building twice,
trying to find the entrance, not sure if she should walk in where she saw the
road raise up in front of the building or not.

      
Taking a chance, Kailynn walked through
the black glass doors that opened for her immediately, leading her to another
set of black doors.