They were able to board the bus with no issues, thanks to Jey's seemingly limitless knowledge of the Arcadian security system. Kai didn't bother questioning it. He was more than happy to peel off his white suit and collapse into bed without saying anything.
Sleep didn't feel as long as it should have. It was a bleary-eyed wink that ended too soon.
"Up and at 'em," Yulia called, brushing through the aisles.
Kai blinked back the grogginess, forcing the morning light into his eyes. It was still pretty early, he could tell by the softness of the world around him. The faint sun had to fight even harder to break through the haze of a thin layer of grey clouds overhead, and so far, the clouds were winning out.
He popped up, transitioning immediately into his morning routine.
"Heard anything from Baz?" Kai asked, zipping up his suit as he made his way to the driver's seat.
"Not much," Deon answered, settling into the controls after a night of tech-less rest. "I think they're meeting us back here to see if there's anyone to pick up. We'll take one last drive south for more recon before we catch up with the Arc for our next assignment."
"Sounds like a plan," he nodded, like he had any choice in the matter. "Any word from the Arc, either?"
Deon shook his head. "We usually don't hear from them unless it's urgent. We probably won't until we reach out to them first, either. There aren't a lot of ears around these parts. That's why we're going recon."
Kai hummed in response. He understood why a place like this would fly under the radar. It sat in the perfect neutral zone between wealth and waste where no one would be monitoring their decline, but no one would be seeking their prosperity, either. The people of Purkans and the towns surrounding it were the perfect shade of invisible.
Kai kept his thoughts to himself as he finished cleaning his area. He tried to catch a couple glances at Jey who didn't bother to return the eye contact. The former raider was unfazed, nothing indicating that he was up to anything nefarious with Kai the night before. It almost made Kai wonder what else he had gotten himself up to when everyone was asleep.
On second thought, best not to think about it.
When everyone was set, Deon started the ignition. It was a quiet motor, at least quiet for a vehicle as large as a double-decker bus. Only the slightest vibration rumbled through the floor as he shifted into drive.
Kai didn't bother the second in command this time. He hung back, eyes glued to the window, observing every faint detail of the city outside.
It was quiet, which made sense for the hour. The citizens of Purkans should be waking up soon, and when they did, Kai wasn't sure if they were going to like the news they were about to hear.
They heard it before they saw it.
Even from behind the thick glass of the windows and the dull whir of an engine, the sound was present, much louder than the casual chatter of the crowd the day before. The only indication of a sight to be seen was Deon's muffled, "Uh oh."
Kai peeled himself from the side window to catch a glimpse at the upcoming scene from the front windshield. He got up from his seat to get closer.
It was the community center.
Kai should have known not to expect anything else, but the sight still made his stomach drop. A crowd gathered around the same entrance as yesterday.
Except today they were bigger.
Today they were louder.
From the squad's distance, they couldn't see any action. There was no violence yet, but the aggravation in the cacophony was palpable.
"Okay y'all," Deon spoke up. "Helmets on. Let's go see what's changed."
They parked the bus and hurriedly filtered out onto the street. The noise was louder here. Kai could make out individual voices and sounds that weren't chatter.
A few people elevated the noise above their voices, banging together old pots and pans like a New Years that started sour.
The closer they approached, the more the image came into focus. Someone stood up in front of the crowd, propped up on something obscured by the swarm of people. Kai recognized him instantly.
"Alright," called the man with the hoodie and heavy eyes, voice hoarse around the edges from continued use. "Listen up!"
Someone banged their pots together in rapid succession, urging the crowd to simmer.
They obeyed.
The man stroked his chin before speaking. "I want you all to know--I want you all to know that they don't have food for us. They never had food for all of us. What Mayor Klein said yesterday? They didn't even sell nothing to the stores. The place they got keeping us fed is only trying to keep half of us full. They said first come, first serve. They don't care about the rest of us."
The noise picked up.
"What about the parents who couldn't get their kids ready in time? What about your aunts, your grandmas? Are we supposed to say too slow, too bad? We told Mayor Klein we don't have the money to get our own food and he said 'Don't worry about it'. Well, what now? What are we supposed to do now?"
Yells of agreement, cries of frustration.
"We're trying our best to take care of each other, who's gonna take care of us?"
The volume crescendoed until the man's voice was only a reverb underscoring the chorus.
"We bust our ass making money for this town. How long are we gonna wait for us to get something back? This isn't their food. This is ours. We're the ones that earned it."
More agreement now, there was a rallying cry on the brink, ready to crest at any moment.
The anonymous peacekeeper banged the pots again, dialing back the volume by nearly half a turn.
"I say we give the mayor a chance to speak for himself--" a handful of boos "--but if he doesn't show, we find him and make him answer."
A chaotic choir erupted in song, shouting their yeses and grievances louder than any morning dove could top. They coalesced over time, forming one singular, piercing chant, MAYOR KLEIN, WHERE'S OUR FOOD?
"What's happening?" Kai asked, trying to feign some level of ignorance.
Deon crossed his arms. "That is a good old-fashioned food riot."
Sounds of another vehicle making its way down the street interrupted the voyeuristic watch party. It parked behind the bus, passengers wasting no time to jump into the action.
Alayna Baz hopped out first. "What the hell happened since I was here yesterday?" she called, having clearly caught the action up ahead.
Deon shrugged. "They want food. They figured out that the gov' was shirking out and now they're ready to let 'em have it."
She sighed. "And even after that, no one's batting an eye at us?"
"Not even acknowledging us."
"Well, you hung around here longer than I did. What do you want to do?"
Deon straightened his back. "I suggest we make one last pass at them and then we hit the road. Maybe we can pick up some more intel about the area that we can take back to the Arc.
Kai spoke up. "I talked to that guy yesterday," he motioned with his chin to the man standing above the rest. "Let me go see what he thinks."
"When did you talk to him?" Yulia frowned.
He sped up his words, squeezing out any room for suspicion. "You know, when you and Kirk were talking to that old couple? The one that kept sharing stories of their kids even though you didn't ask? Keo saw me. Right, Keo?"
Jey's eyes narrowed, contempt alight within them. He only shrugged in a haphazard, yeah, I guess.
"You shouldn't waltz into the middle of an angry mob," Deon warned.
But Kai was already walking. "Eh, it'll be fine. Not my first time."
Before he was out of earshot he could hear a frustrated Deon grumble, "Should we stop him?"
"No," Alayna replied. "I want to see what he does here. If he breaks a nose, he breaks a nose."
Kai was off into the mob. He was just skinny and strange enough looking to worm his way through the crowd with relative ease. He wasn't without a couple close calls to an elbow in the face, but at least on his way in his nose remained unbroken.
Once he knew he was in a comfortable range of view, he lifted a hand, waving until he caught the man's attention. Being dressed in all white with a helmet on helped.
The man's face lit up in recognition. He hopped off his makeshift platform he was standing on--one of the plastic tables from inside the grand entrance--until he was eye level with Kai.
They spoke between chants.
"What's good, man?" the man spoke up, holding his hand out for a handshake.
Kai reached out to return it. "Hey, I knew I was right about you."
"You got lucky," he corrected. "You here to give us a hand?"
"Yes and no. We're just sticking around to pick up anyone who wants a ride out of here, then we gotta leave. We work in rescuing, not revolutions."
"Yeah, well, that's a shame."
"Yeah, I know." Kai felt his voice straining to keep up with the raucousness around him. "What do you say? Got anyone around here looking for a way out?"
The man shook his head. "I appreciate it, but nah. I know we got problems in this town but we've all been here for a long, long time. This is our home. We gotta make it better ourselves."
"Are you sure? This is a one time offer. I don't know when or if we'll ever be around these parts again."
He nodded. "Y'all made your case yesterday. If anyone's coming they would've already jumped on by now. Everyone else in it for the long haul."
Kai exhaled. He took a look around at all the people still here, all the people who had no guarantees of food or shelter or tomorrow. All people who had made their peace with it or couldn't fathom the world without that uncertainty. "If that's it, then I gotta go. I wish I could do more to help." He put out his hand again.
The man returned it with a firm grip and a reassuring grasp on Kai's shoulder. "You've already done more than you realize. We appreciate it."
He only nodded.
"What's your name, man?"
"Kai. Kai Gilling. What's yours?"
"Kai. I'm Trey, good to know you. You get out of here. We got this now, alright?"
"Yeah. Yeah, okay. Good luck."
With a tremor in his step, Kai peeled off, making his way back through the crowd. The return trip was even rougher. He felt like a bumper car, clumsily redirecting his weight after colliding with each person along the way.
When he finally broke free, the waiting white silhouettes of the rest of his team burrowed a hole in his stomach. He walked back, not exactly eager to share the news.
"So?" Alayna prompted.
Kai hesitated before the words finally formed. "He said either they all go or none of 'em go. And I think the consensus has elected to stay."
She nodded once. "Yeah, that's what we figured. Don't beat yourself up about it. You see that more often than you don't."
Kai felt something on his skin, the slightest sensation tickling the hair on the back of his hand. He looked up. The grey skies had had their fill, spilling over until a drizzle. He couldn't feel the raindrops on his helmet or the ones that skimmed the weather proof material of the white jumpsuit.
But Alayna noticed immediately. "I think that's our signal to leave." She turned her attention to the rest of the squad. "Okay, everyone get back on board. We're gonna start back south, see what we can find."
The squad complied, retreating to their assigned buses and wasting no time to get back on the road. Kai's bus followed Baz's as the latter retraced their steps from the day before.
Kai watched from the passenger window as they drove away. The crescendo of the ensuing rainstorm wasn't enough to quench the crowd's desires. If anything they grew louder, birth of a revolution now rightly baptized by the sky above. He tried to follow Trey with his eyes, but the bus soon turned, blocking his view of him completely.
There was no conclusion to the story of Purkans--not one Kai would ever know. There would be no confirmation of a happy ending or a sad ending or the most logical ending--one that always wound up with tiny conciliatory victories but an overall cavernous loss.
The odds were that the name Arcadia would leave their heads before it was ever once spoken by their tongues. Help was too good to be true. Help came in the form of something a white bus and a moving city couldn't provide, not really. There was a weight to the realization. One that weighed heavy on his chest until it put a bitter taste in his mouth.
Kai didn't bother the driver for this leg of the trip. He chose reflection, a ride of staring at the rain as it hovered over them for miles on end. No one seemed to mind the quiet trip.
He lost track of how much time had passed before the walkie talkie above the dashboard awoke with the sound of Baz's voice. The rain muddied the edges of her voice, but he could still make out her words from his seat. "You read me, Kirk?"
Deon reached up and unhooked the walkie from its resting place, holding it close to his face. "Loud and clear. What's up?"
"Good. I'm not liking how these skies are looking."
Kai instinctively checked out the window, taking time to study the details in the sky. The rain had been picking up for some time and the wind had followed. He hadn't locked on to the severity of it. Bad weather seemed so much less dire when you had doors, a roof, and a solid couple tons of metal and rubber between you and the elements. But there was something uncontrolled about it. The grays in the clouds were morphing into a seasick green with rapid motion.
"Noted," Deon replied, obviously seeing the same. "Do we think the birds are gonna be grounded once we get there?"
"I'm worried the trees will be uprooted by the time we get there."
He frowned. "I don't like the sound of that."
"No," she admitted with an equal amount of worry in her voice. "But it'll be great conditions for catching any strays."
"You know, sometimes I just like bird watching and want nothing to do with catching them. That's a big part of what we do, too."
"Yeah, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
He hesitated before holding down the talk button. "I'm not sure if we want to apply that to our situation."
"Stay vigilant," she said, cadence eminent. "Keep following the road. I'll let you know if I see anything."
"Roger that," Deon responded before hanging up.
They pressed on in silence. The rain kept picking up, creating enough noise inside the cabin to prove conversation wasn't necessary. The water streamed against the windows like the surface of a lake across the glass. Kai tried to make out the shapes on the other side, deciphering trees from old petrol stations with increasing difficulty.
An occasional rumble reverberated throughout the sky, mere echoes breaking through to the other side of the glass. There was rarely a crash, no bright bursts of light that spelled out big trouble, but the wind provided ample harmony, anyway.
It got bad. Bad enough where the visibility was shot and the pressures of the wind rocked the sides of the vehicle, but after only a minute long tantrum--
It stopped.
The windshield cleared up. The bowling game above the cloudscape ceased. The rain reduced to a steady drizzle.
Whatever the storm was, it said its piece and left without complaint.
Deon was the first to reach for the walkie. "You good, Baz?"
She took a minute to respond. "In one piece," she finally decided. "But that's just me. I'm still not liking how the outside looks."
"So you're saying we shouldn't expect to see any flight anytime soon?"
"Precisely. You best lay low, too."
That was the last word from Baz for a while.
The two buses pushed on, braving the uncertainty around them.
It was still a ways before they reached civilization.
Or what was left of it.