Chapter 00
𝘚𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 17𝘵𝘩, 𝘛𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘈𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘰𝘰𝘯
Lennox’s mother was leaving. Again.
Each time, he wished that it would be her last excursion. That she wouldn’t come back.
“Lennox, dear,” his mother’s clipped voice called out from the entrance of the flower shop. Autumn’s afternoon sunlight poured through the glass door, casting her figure in a featureless silhouette. “Run the shop for a bit. I have some friends to meet, I’ll be back before dinner.”
He sighed as his calm, empty eyes landed on a neglected pot. Its flaking glaze was coated in dust, and its many cracks allowed dry soil to spill through. Once, it hosted a fine flower bush. Now, it had long since dried up, leaving nothing but a dead stick in its wake. It was among the many messes he cleaned up whenever his mother condemned him to their botanical graveyard. Lennox was stuck at the shop, while she was out having dalliances with others who, too, taunted fate.
"Fine, Mother.” Not like he had a choice.
Emily Kendrick’s heels clicked and clacked against the tiled floor. She turned to face her eldest son, raising an eyebrow at his derisive tone. “Lennox, can you help me fasten this necklace? I don’t want to damage my nails by messing with the small clasp,” she said stiffly, reluctant to admit she needed help from her son.
Without a word, he approached to complete her request, stepping back when he finished. Deft on his feet, the echoes of his brutal dance lessons lingered from when the family was still a part of high society. When Lennox was forced to play ‘the perfect son’.
His mother snatched back his attention. “How do I look?” She pirouetted in the shop’s foyer, her silver-plated jewellery swinging about. The shine contrasted with the humble feel of the shop’s interior, the wallpaper drab and unappealing in comparison.
“You look quite dapper, Mum,” Lennox murmured, saying exactly what was expected of him. His mother only strutted away into the madness outside, offering him nothing more—as if she were dying to get away from it all. The door closed and a bell chimed, signalling her departure.
In mid-conflict London, social gatherings were few and far between. The war zone was expanding to every corner of the British Isles, leaving no place untouched by violence. Bomb craters burrowed into the road like freshly dug graves, and no one dared to cross streets at night lest they be ransacked of their belongings. His mother was one of the few remaining socialites, leaving it to her eldest son to manage her family’s run-down shop while she ran around playing the ‘perfect’ wife and partygoer. In London, one either had to be a good liar or have connections to survive. His mother was one with the latter. This was her reality, and Lennox and his family had made it their own.
They knew how to avoid the Syndicate, and they were already safeguarded from the Veritas. His mother was, by an extremely small margin, smart enough not to get herself killed. If she wore the right colours, she would live to see another day.
With his head propped up by his arm, Lennox looked around the shop. The once pristine wooden shelves were littered with petals and empty pots. The shop’s seed display was dwindling both in quality and quantity. Grimy windows let in what little light they could. Outside, a tarnished little greenhouse could be seen from far away, as only crumbling commercial buildings lay beyond it. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
Unfortunately.
Until he peered out the window, noticing that another skirmish was commencing on Hewler Street. A cluster of troops marched through the avenue Lennox called home, sending any pedestrians brave enough to be out scuttling for cover. Metal rained down from the sky, striking each soldier as they dropped by the hands of an experienced marksman. This had become the haunting melody he grew used to with each passing day—a symphony of bullets ringing out, clouding his ears, and causing his body to stiffen to the sound despite his brain’s familiarity with violence.
The blood-curdling commands and screams would horrify anyone perched above this world drenched in hell, and yet he found his core had grown numb to it. His heart no longer leapt out of his chest, and his skin no longer crawled with despair. It was only his buzzing nerves and tense muscles that reacted, equipping him to flee should a stray bullet fly through the window.
Great, hulking machines covered in cogs pummelled the men that remained, their metal limbs swooping downwards with each punch. The sound nearly deafened the human ear as they battered through metal and bone at random. The only thing Lennox could do was close his eyes, waiting for the noise to pass. Lennox thought he was thoroughly distanced from the gruesome battles by shutting himself in the shop, and yet, like the shrouds in and around his heart, they had come to find him.
Through the smoke and smell of gunfire, a lone figure in blue limping towards the store became the focus of his gaze. Scarlet blood oozed down the soldier’s leg, leaving a ghastly trail in its wake. A hand reached up to brace himself, wiping the glass of the shop in with a print of red before it ran to the knob, staining it. The man ripped open the door to the store, doubling over and falling onto his knees as he could no longer hold up his weight. His breaths were hard, and the need to speak became his only purpose.
“Please... help me.” His voice choked, desperate for assistance.
Lennox didn’t move, only watching the struggle from behind the counter. An emptiness took over his frame, sympathy had been a feeling he lacked long ago.
The trooper could say no more as a bullet struck him in the neck. A large amount of blood splattered into the air, droplets reaching far out to tap at the counter. Lennox’s eyes quickly travelled down, making sure none had reached his skin. The now lifeless figure plummeted to the ground in a pool of his blood. Mortally wounded, the man wouldn’t have survived the night even if someone had helped him.
He never had a chance. Yet he had asked for it anyway.
Lennox sighed, bringing up a hand to course through his short, dirty blonde hair, fingers brushing past his undercut and pushing the locks behind his ear before he finally decided to move. Slow taps of his feet echoed through the shop, his far too expensive shoes smearing droplets into the tiles. He narrowed his eyes a bit when a gust of wind blew in, stirring some of the gathered dust around the room as he kneeled to inspect the body and the fight raging beyond it.
Since the last blue fighter had fallen, the snipers and mechs—all cloaked in red—left the battlefield littered with bodies.
It was a rule of the Thames Treaty that civilians were tasked with cleaning up the remains. The act ensured the fighting would be limited to the boulevards and everything past them would be preserved, although nothing referenced the bloodstains present on nearly every house. Nonetheless, the day was a landslide win for the Crimson Syndicate, the faction known for its sadism, brutality, and automatons—the faction that Lennox wasn’t a part of.
That fact alone was enough to instil survival instincts into his very soul. He wouldn’t be safe, not ever. Not when the strict surveillance on Tower Bridge wasn’t enough to stop the Crimsons from seeping across the border that divided London between the Crimson Syndicate and the Verita Aser.
An hour or so after the battle subsided, a new presence dashed in and slapped twenty euros on the counter. They stared him down and asked, dead serious, “How do I passive-aggressively say ‘fuck you’ to my ex with flowers?”
Lennox, at the time, was still wiping up the blood from the previous incident. His attention wandered from his guest back to the cloth in his hands. Along with the tile, it was stained with crimson, its edges drying a deep reddish-brown. The blood had made its way through the fabric, contouring the lines of Lennox’s palms, now dripping from his wrists. Like it had when he cleaned his head from the damage a china plate had inflicted upon him a year prior.
The florist stifled his nausea as he got up to swipe the money off the metal counter, scanning the customer up and down. Fiery red hair, fatigues, combat boots caked with blood and a sniper rifle adorned their person, while gold-rimmed goggles rested atop their head. One of the Crimson Syndicate’s assassins.
“Such information will cost you twenty euros and a little help with this body here.” Lennox gestured to the pool. “It’s too cumbersome for compost.”
“That’s fine by me, flower boy.”
He watched as the sniper dragged the body outside. They were on the wrong side of the Bridge, yet they acted like they owned the place. Lennox wouldn’t argue, though. The shop needed all the business it could get.
He waited until his customer returned to speak again. “Well, you would need a bouquet of geraniums—for stupidity—as well as meadowsweet for uselessness, and last but not least: orange lilies to symbolise hatred. Will that be all?”
The newcomer, who appeared to be male, nodded impatiently, casting a side-eye at his bloody footprints every so often. And so, Lennox danced around the room, grabbing the necessary flowers without missing a step. When finished, he expertly bound them in a blue ribbon and held it out to his customer within seconds.
The shopper looked on in awe. “Wicked. Thanks, mate. I’ll be sure to give these to my ex-girlfriend.” He snickered, taking the bouquet, but not after ripping a thin blue cloth off it, barely within the florist’s field of vision. It fluttered into the blood puddle, soaking up the ichor with ease.
Lennox let loose a string of swear words. How could he have forgotten? Wearing the colours of the opposing faction was a death sentence, even if the redhead was well and truly loyal to the Syndicate. He knew not to worry, since his guest tore the ribbon off. However, he couldn’t help but think about his carelessness. The customer compensated for his mistake, but had he not, Lennox would have been the death of him. Literally.
The redhead left, leaving Lennox to his laments—and cleaning. Even the shop’s pale olive walls seemed to taunt him as he prepared for closing time at five o’clock sharp.
As he took stock of the remaining inventory, Lennox wondered how long the shop would last with the prolonged humidity from the summer. He gathered fewer and fewer flowers each day, and only a sprinkle of customers trickled in per week. The bills were piling up, and his secret job as an herbalist only took care of so much. Even now, the prices and taxes of almost everything had increased to fund either the war or those trying to escape it, depending on where he went—to either the Verita Aser or the neutral establishments scattered throughout London.
In an attempt to calm himself, he walked outside and swept the pavement. There he watched the brown, yellow, and red leaves fall onto the shop’s large orange and sage sign, where the once-brilliant black calligraphy of Kendrick’s Flowers had faded to grey. The air grew colder after each day; slowly but surely, winter was approaching.
He exhaled heavily and the smells of war, angst, and black coffee invaded his senses.
The building was the modest start of a chain of flower shops from his mother’s side. It caused her rise to aristocracy, and she wanted nothing to do with her humble roots. Despite that, it used to be a rather fancy building with white paint and black trim, and the luxurious second floor was nothing to sneeze at, with its bay window that overlooked the park across the street. A park slowly returning to its natural, wild state, like the outskirts of London. Like the bodies buried there.
“Heya, Lenn. Whatcha doing out here?” a new voice chimed, startling him.
The florist looked down. It was Chase, his younger brother, who was a fourteen-year-old mirror image of their father. Fluffy, pale-blond hair and icy blue eyes. Sometimes the sight made him shiver. Lennox concluded that school must have just let out.It was a miracle the institution was still standing after all the turmoil that the war had wrought.
“Just... taking a breather, I suppose.”
“Okay, but if you’re done can we go inside? You locked us out, and it’s windy,” Chase grumbled.
“Ah, sorry about that.” Lennox unlocked the door, and the pair went inside. “Where did they put you this time?”
“A bunker near the warehouse district. But we got to skip the bloody maths paper, at least.”
After bolting the door behind him, Lennox left the main level for the lower recess of the building, delving into the basement in which he lived—far away from his parents’ squabbles. His feet pounded against the rickety steel stairs, leaving Chase on his own upstairs.
He was greeted by the familiar wafts of eucalyptus and calming lavender. Lennox breathed them in gladly, swiping a few books off his battered wooden desk to work in solemn peace.
Aside from running the flower shop, he had a few other hobbies that helped bring in income for his family, however ungrateful. Even though his father was a recently promoted Verita Aser commander, and his mother a ‘wealthy’ socialite, they didn’t have as much as the family let on, due to his parents’ reckless spending. All to maintain their image as a rich, happy family.
He knew it to be a bunch of rubbish.
Lennox had the clothes, shoes, cologne, and obscenely expensive watches, but it was never enough for his parents. Their son just wasn’t perfect enough. Chase, however, was the ideal age to be swept away in their lies. Like the fallen soldiers in the park: mere pawns sacrificed for someone else’s gain. Both were being consumed by forces beyond their control.
It was a mere pipe dream to think that could save his younger brother from their extremities before it was too late. Despite the odds, though, Lennox would fight for Chase with everything he had.
He could only hope that they could escape long before the earth—or a bullet—claimed them.
