Ridgeway is the last place on Earth, and the Matsumotos are one of the billionaire families that dominate the city. That was until the government stormed their estate and assassinated their lineage, except Takara, who escaped with her brother Riku. But time has run out. Years as an exiled fugitive have depleted Takara's resources, and mere days separate her from starvation. Her last hope is joining Ridgeway’s most elite criminals, who promise her all she needs in exchange for her help in three daring heists.
What begins as a desperate attempt to survive becomes an opportunity for Takara to make the life she stole from death worth living. But the past is close behind as the team’s crimes reveal her family’s dark legacy. Her father left countless sins in his wake, and as Takara searches for the truth behind her family’s elimination, she finds that the consequences of his most vile act are alive and slowly reaching for her. Will Takara have the strength to release the trauma of her past and accept the reality she is creating for herself, or will she remain an afterimage bound to her father, and learn how much blood is on the family tree?
Ridgeway is the last place on Earth, and the Matsumotos are one of the billionaire families that dominate the city. That was until the government stormed their estate and assassinated their lineage, except Takara, who escaped with her brother Riku. But time has run out. Years as an exiled fugitive have depleted Takara's resources, and mere days separate her from starvation. Her last hope is joining Ridgeway’s most elite criminals, who promise her all she needs in exchange for her help in three daring heists.
What begins as a desperate attempt to survive becomes an opportunity for Takara to make the life she stole from death worth living. But the past is close behind as the team’s crimes reveal her family’s dark legacy. Her father left countless sins in his wake, and as Takara searches for the truth behind her family’s elimination, she finds that the consequences of his most vile act are alive and slowly reaching for her. Will Takara have the strength to release the trauma of her past and accept the reality she is creating for herself, or will she remain an afterimage bound to her father, and learn how much blood is on the family tree?
Takara trudges through a howling storm of black ash clouds. Thunder cracks and the storm spits a spear of ruby lightning at the ground inches from her feet. She doesn’t flinch. Between each flash of crimson, Takara thinks of her death, not because she’s afraid, but because dying implies that she’s been living and not merely existing this whole time.
It’s been three years. That was the last time Takara held a definition of herself. Her father dictated it. You live to protect your brother. You are nothing else.
That world ended when the government murdered her family, and she narrowly escaped with her baby brother, Riku. She still isn’t sure if she’s grateful she survived. Her second chance meant exposure to the hole her old life left in her soul. Who is she? Who has she ever been beside an afterimage living in someone else’s world? How can she make anything of herself when she only has the shadows of bricks to build with? Deep down, she knows that escaping the reality instilled in her is a futile fantasy, but it calls her all the same, the sweetest yet furthest sound in her mind.
A shockwave of thunder loud enough to shake the air in her chest dismisses Takara’s stray thoughts.
Just focus on the job.
She raises her forearm to misdirect the dust and increases her pace.
Takara set out on today’s expedition because Riku’s birthday is coming up–by that, it’s months away, but he won’t stop prattling about it–and she wanted to get him a battery for his handheld console. It takes another fifteen minutes of marching, navigating by memory since the swirling clouds are too dense to see through, but the wind finally settles to where the burning particles aren’t pelting her.
Takara emerges from the dark clouds. She’s wearing a black cloak that falls just above her boots and has scarves around her head to conceal her face. She sets her goggles around her neck and catches her breath.
This is the only part of the journey Takara enjoys.
After her eyes adjust, she takes in the sky, a slow-moving, gaseous ocean of celestial clouds burning with every red, yellow, pink, and orange the eye can see.
A second, energized atmosphere comprised of nearly all the water that was once on Earth gives the sky its spectral, nebula-like features. What light makes it from the sun and breaks through the water surrounding the planet gains a gentle red hue, staining everything left in the world.
Takara almost finds half a reason to smile. If only she could be as unbothered as those clouds, steadily wending along her path, radiating her colors, and not yearning for anything that’s beyond herself and her nature. It’s a nice moment, hopeful even. But like a lurid sore someone would only reveal after the pain is too much to bear, she lowers her eyes onto the towering, concrete outer walls of Ridgeway, the last place on Earth.
All five million humans left on Earth call this city home. For some, it’s paradise. It was close to that for Takara, lacking no material comfort as the heiress to her father’s monopoly on the city’s food industry. But for most, it’s an ungodly, segregated hellhole devoid of all compassion and grace.
The city has four sectors. They are first categorized by an obtuse racial description (Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic), then by economic status (Poor, Middle-class, and Rich), and finally, each sector has generalized subdivisions that attempt to segregate people by country of origin. As one goes up the economic scale, they can move further into the city. But it hardly ever happens because this isn’t a place where advancement comes to the meek, and no matter how much despair arises, it’s best not to stray from the path of obedience.
Typically, no one can get in or out of the city; there’s nowhere else to go anyway, but there’s a locked hatch embedded in the ground a few yards from the wall that Takara has the key for. Her father was an inordinately paranoid man–probably because he had his hand in God knows what while he was alive–and had an escape tunnel built from the deepest part of the city to where Takara is.
Rolling over in your grave yet?
Takara grabs the key from her pocket, looking at the ground and to Hell, where her father should be. The tunnel is one of the few things she can thank that slimy roach for. And Riku, of course.
After she unlocks the hatch, she drops into the tunnel that’s only big enough to crawl through. She drags herself forward. It still amazes her how her father was worth billions but couldn’t commission something that didn’t have the dimensions of a sewage line. Some A/C would have been nice, too, and maybe even lights.
Cheap bastard.
She rolls her eyes when the first sting of pain shoots through her knees and elbows. If her father is watching, perhaps he’s having a good laugh–he truly didn’t mind Takara’s suffering–but thinking of him brings her back to the night she and Riku escaped their old life.
They made the grueling crawl then, their clothes splattered with thick layers of blood. Takara’s heart quaked with the knowledge that she would have to tell Riku that this was the end of everything they knew and life would be surviving one day to the next.
She can’t decide which was worse, telling Riku what it was or not being able to explain why it happened in the first place. She always figured her father had something to do with it and thought best to leave it at that. This is the only time she ever thinks about the reason behind her family’s dismantlement. Maybe it’s because the darkness and how close the walls are gives her the same sensations she felt growing up. A part of her wants to thank whatever caused all this discord for freeing her.
Face blanketed with sweat and her elbow and knees buckling, Takara finally arrives at one of the tunnel’s checkpoints. She gives one last effort to drag herself into the ladder shaft. A few beams of the sky’s strawberry light trickle through the sewer cover above her, and she bellows an exultant sigh when she stands and cracks her back. A satisfying crunch reverberates through the tunnel, tracing its length as the sound ebbs quieter and quieter and quieter.
Jesus. That’s never going to get easier.
Takara rubs her sore elbows and waits for the feeling to return to her legs before climbing up the ladder. She can hear sounds from above, muffled at first, but when she lifts the sewer cover, the indescribable hustle and chatter of hundreds of people rush her.
Takara squints at the return of the sky’s afternoon flare and climbs out of the hole into an alley in the Poor Japanese Sector.
The alley is redolent with the musk of rotting meat, piles of rubbish, and rat feces. Dark shadows cascade off the towers of rusty shacks at either side of her. The stacks of repurposed shipping containers–called columns–go no higher than four units, and each container houses a family or two – or three, depending on how unfortunate you are. The derelict structures are the Poor Sectors’ most common sight, arranged into tightly-packed jungles of depravity and the wrong end of political corruption. Even though Takara lives in a beaten-down hut in the middle of nowhere, it’s better than being anywhere near this place for too long.
Takara dusts herself off and follows the commotion she’s hearing until she arrives at what this sector’s people call the Shadow Strip. It’s the third of several wide, sandy roads that make up this sector’s market block and gets its name because the vendors often sell goods you’d keep in the back, as the lingo goes.
At the alley’s exit, Takara peeks out, staying mostly in the shadows, and listens. Makeshift shoes crunching against the musty sand, clanging and clinking from people bumping into the columns, yelling and screaming, the familiar sounds put her into a state of focus.
She notes the condition of the tattered rags and cloaks the people cover themselves with. Her nose becomes a dredge searching for any holes in the cloud of odors, the fetid collaboration between vinegar, oil, and sweat all those never-washed bodies emit. The closeness of the gunshots and desperate pleas finalize her map of the area.
The police in the Poor Sectors don’t wear uniforms. Instead, they dress like everyone else, walk with a certain sluggishness, and look like they’re just another one of the dammed, all to blend in and increase their chances of catching someone committing a crime. For what Takara’s time in school was worth, it taught her that none of this is particularly legal, but most of the uneducated, poor civilians are but sheep following the hand of those far above them.
Takara hears screaming a few shops down from her location.
Two of them.
Her muscles tense as her odds take a sharp fall. She watches the altercation, knowing it’s going to end poorly.
The emaciated man the cops detained drops to his knees, crying and begging. “Please, my family hasn’t eaten in days!” A trail of snot slides from his nose as his groveling overtakes him.
The two officers in front of him, dressed in long, floaty cloaks, ignore his pleading, having no sympathy for vagrants. One of them marches to the man and kicks him onto his back. He draws the plasma pistol under his cloak and puts a ball of green fire between the scoundrel’s eyes, exploding his head into a charred, red mist.
They grimly nod at another job well done and slip back into the crowd.
Takara shakes her head despairingly, feeling far from the wholly different culture of the Rich Sectors where she lived most of her life.
They caught that man stealing a picked-through AFP–an Artificial Food Package, Takara’s ancestor’s invention, and the source of her family’s wealth–from one of the vendor’s shelves. As his crime cost him his life, no one in the crowd stopped or reacted. Everything kept moving, sellers kept selling, buyers kept haggling, people going as far as stepping over the body with a fussy attitude as if they were the ones having the bad day.
All crime in Ridgeway means death, no matter how small, that or the auction block–life’s gone either way–and with the near-quarter-billion-gallon bounty the government placed on Takara’s head for having the audacity to survive their hit, she’s dead on sight.
She takes a deep breath, reassuring herself that it’s just a short walk across the street, and keeps her head low as she joins the sea of people. Bumped between foul-smelling person after person, she protects the money in her pockets by pressing her hands against them and navigates by memory and her feet’s movement. When she makes her way out of the crowd, she arrives in front of Azumi’s shop. She’s one of the few people Takara trusts to some degree and is a short, ambitious young woman with a sleeve of tattoos on her left arm and a purple headband to offset her black and silver-highlighted ponytail.
Like the others who decided to open a business here, Azumi transformed the front of her house to look like an Old-World (21st-century) newspaper stand, where her wares are on display for all to see.
“Thanks, come again!” Azumi finalizes her sale with a smile.
She spots Takara climbing up the ramp and coming onto the walkway. “Well, if it isn’t my mystery customer! Glad to see those beautiful eyes of yours again.”
Takara smiles behind her facial coverings. “Hey, Azumi. I’m looking for something you’d keep in the back.”
Azumi smirks. “What’s your flavor this time?”
“I need a Xeos-Cell,” Takara says.
“Sure thing! It’s going to be,” Azumi switches to a gentle whisper, “twelve hundred gallons. Sorry that prices had to go up.” She shrugs and flashes another smile.
Takara hesitates. Before she left, her stash–money she took from her penthouse the night she escaped–was embarrassingly low. The little money left is the difference between comfortably eating if her Fabricator goes out and doing risky thieving runs for supplies. She shouldn’t be doing this. But she thinks of Riku smiling at her, his nose scrunching up when he’s excited, and him running off to play his game for hours, for a moment, forgetting how hard life has become.
Don’t ever say I don’t love you.
Rolling her eyes, she reaches into her pocket and carefully pulls out twelve orange 100-galllon-bills, its absence already weighing on the side of her that wants to be responsible.
Azumi takes the money. “Cool, just give me a sec.” She walks inside her house for a moment, then returns with a small, black pouch.
Azumi hands Takara the bag. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
Before Takara can put the battery away, a man leaps from the roof. He lands in front of her and snatches the bag. Then he dashes off the platform, rolling to break his fall, and disappears into the alley.
Takara’s eyes burst with shock–the bag left her hand before she could even figure out what happened–but she doesn’t waste any time and follows the thief into the narrow alley system.
She runs after him at top speed, but he’s only getting further out of her sight, effortlessly cutting corners and hopping over debris with a light step. The air Takara’s heaving through her blistering lungs and the heat of her reddening face tells her she won’t be able to keep up for much longer. But she can’t let him get away. It’ll mean money wasted, hunger and the curses of poverty a step closer, and, perhaps worse, Riku’s special day being a bust and him wearing the most pitiful, sullen face she’s ever seen anyone make. There’s no other option.
“Get back here, you piece of shit!” she shouts, pushing past the pain to keep up.
The thief turns another corner, which leads to the next main street of the market block. Two cops are wrapping up the murder of another crook at the end of the alley. One tosses the criminal’s bloody corpse into a pile of trash, and the other looks up, spotting Takara and the thief running at them. The cops reach for their guns, but the thief is a step ahead. Before the cops can target him, he darts to the column on his left and scales it like a spider on its web. He slings himself onto the roof, leaving Takara with the two cops.
Dammit!
Takara focuses on the two officers as they aim for her head. She thought her days of hurting people were behind her, but she’ll be dammed if she’s robbed and shot to death on the same day.
She dashes forward and disarms the cop on the left by swiveling to his right side and grabbing his wrist. She breaks it by swiftly pulling it down and back. The second he flinches, Takara strikes him twice in the throat with her left hand and pivots, using the momentum to carry her left elbow into the cop’s temple, knocking him out. She grabs the cop’s body as it goes limp and throws it into his partner’s, thrusting him into the alley’s right wall. The impact loosens the cop’s gun from his hand, and Takara charges him, crashing her knee into his groin and laying him out with a strong right hook to the face.
Adrenaline courses through Takara’s blood. She can still hear that bastard’s boots hammering into the columns. She snarls with frustration and hurries after him by scaling to the rooftops.
The thief regains his place in the lead, but Takara is closer than ever, gaining on him as they leap between the columns on their path. Just as Takara comes close to grabbing him, he drops down a gap between two columns and lands in another alley. Takara, nearing her limit, takes her time scaling down, losing sight of him. She keeps running until she enters a rectangular clearing boxed in by more homes.
It’s a dead-end, and the thief is nowhere in sight.
“No!” Takara exclaims and crashes to her knee, desperate for breath.
She had him at her fingertips, and she let him get away. The dark emptiness she felt in the storm strangles her. It’s been nothing but failures and that lingering question of what it’s all worth. Would it have been better to share her father’s fate?
Takara hears metal thudding and looks up to see the thief sitting on the roof of a two-shack column.
“I’m impressed. Not too many people can keep up with me.” The thief’s voice comes out as flat, mechanical speech amplified through a speaker.
Takara gets a good look at the man, only seeing the back of his head until now, and freezes. He’s wearing a mask, the same kind the soldiers who stripped her from her old life wore.
The matte silver helmet has five metallic horns splayed across the top, one of them engraved with the number two. The forehead has CHAOS written across it in deep red, and the eyes are black outlines of curved arrowheads standing on their sides and facing each other. A red X sits between the eyes, and the mouth is a thick, black line broken into three segments. Two more horns poke out from the chin. Each feature of the helmet reminds Takara of the blood and the screams.
How’d they find me?!
Takara frantically thinks of any mistakes she could have made. Coming up empty, she stands up, keeping a straight face and unmoving eyes. “You Rashiki?” she asks, slowly reaching behind her back for her pistol.
The man responds, his mechanical voice projecting from his static helmet, “Well, I shouldn’t be if the ointment I got is worth anything,” he jokes, and Takara worriedly pats her empty holster, startled to find her gun missing.
“Looking for this?” the man interrupts, waving Takara’s pistol around.
Shit.
“I grabbed this back at the shop. You have a one-track mind, a very dangerous trait.”
Takara narrows her eyes. “Hand over my things, and maybe I won’t kill you slowly,” she barks, trying to seem tough, but her heart is slamming in her chest, the thumping flooding her ears. She knows people with these helmets are beyond lethal.
“Whoa, slow down, big dog.” He makes a stopping gesture with both his hands. “First, tell me what someone in this sector is doing buying a Xeos-Cell.” The man digs in the bag and retrieves the battery to inspect it. It’s a small glass cylinder that holds a glowing, viscous fluid that burns with orange, red, and yellow hues, like the sky above.
“These bad boys are a couple hundred gallons,” the man says. “I know people who would sell their children for that much.”
Why isn’t he going for the kill?
“What’s it to you?” Takara says, unsure if she needs to run or hear this guy out.
“Let’s just say I’m the owner of that store, and I like keeping customer relations strong,” he suggests with a mechanical chuckle.
He’s too goofy to be government, right?
Takara isn’t sure, so draws the knife strapped to her leg.
The man sighs. “Classy.” He tosses down Takara’s battery.
“And my gun.”
“Before you shoot me in the back of the ass, I’m Vex, and I have an opportunity for you.”
“I’m fine as is.”
“Your eyes say otherwise. You’re either longing for answers or looking for peace.”
Takara retreats to her thoughts. What gives him the right to tell her anything about herself? But those words echo in her head, and she thinks of Riku and her younger self. Life used to be raising a spry, bubble-faced little boy, and although her father was more cancerous darkness than a parent, she didn’t have to worry about her next meal. She knew the safety of solid walls, and her biggest concern was finding herself.
She holsters her knife.
“That’s more like it,” Vex says, and Takara studies him as he jumps down from the roof and walks in front of her. “You know I’m not desperate like everyone else here, and that has to spark your interest.”
Takara leaves her hand hovering near her knife in case this guy tries something. “That means you’re either a cop or a crook,” she says.
Vex holds Takara’s gun out in front of himself. “I like to call myself a re-positioner of goods.”
Takara takes her gun. “So, a thief. How can you get me anything but shot in the streets?”
The man crosses his arms. “I’d rather show you. But you being concerned means you have something to lose, and that makes you all the rarer. Meet me here at seven p.m. tomorrow.” He begins to walk off.
“You think I trust you?”
“I think you’re curious,” Vex responds and effortlessly runs up the column in front of him and front flips onto the roof.
“Wait,” Takara says, and Vex looks down at her. “How’d you get that helmet?”
“Repositioned it.” Vex chuckles and takes the rooftops out of her sight.
He stole it?
Takara holsters her pistol and puts the battery away. She’s incredulous but plays with the idea of him telling the truth. Anyone that good has to be an outlet to something worthwhile.
He did smell clean.
Takara paints a picture in her head of Vex being an accomplished thief and him introducing her to some of the spoils, but her anxiety isn’t far behind. Thinking of her past, she lifts her facial coverings and feels the back of her neck. Her fingers circle the rectangular, metallic port implanted near her nape.
This can easily be a ploy. Vex could be a government agent meant to lure her to a fate worse than death. But if he knew who Takara was, why not just kill her now? This is all very strange.
I need to play this carefully.
“I think they’re down this way!”
Takara hears shouts in the distance and tucks away her thoughts. She escapes the alley the way Vex did.
One side of Takara knows that trusting anyone in Ridgeway eventually leads to a bad ending, and she vowed long ago to keep Riku safe no matter what. This is a liability. But the other side is hungry to know more. That wasn’t an ordinary civilian, not if he stole that helmet. Hearing what he has to say may be a risk more wildly worth it than she can even imagine.
Venality by Vontae Jones is a dark and brooding yet riveting vision of a dying, dystopian future Earth, where the powerful few are protected, and the rest of humanity are only pawns in their efforts to get more of whatever they want. The story follows the exploits of a small group of these others, hiding in the shadowed fringes of society, who have decided to grab a piece of the pie by whatever means necessary. The results are explosive beyond their wildest dreams and kept me enthralled every step of their journey.
The main characters, Takara Matsumoto and her younger brother, Riku, are living on borrowed time, having narrowly escaped the soldiers who executed their parents. Takara loves Riku and has devoted her life to keeping him safe. When the money she grabbed as they fled their home ran out, she reluctantly joined a band of talented thieves led by a mysterious masked leader known as Ace. The author sets up a moral dilemma for Takara as the group’s actions go against everything she stands for. However, a week of watching Riku go hungry breaks her commitment and forces her to compromise. The author doesn’t allow her doubts to just magically disappear either, as this character continues to struggle with what is expected of her as part of the team until she experiences a moral point of no return.
Young Riku is in awe of his sister and completely enamored of their new circumstances. I thought he and Jester made an adorable couple; their scenes together were fun and heartwarming. Vex was charming but weak, damaged by his past. Icarus is much the same, seething with constant anger. Ace is an enigma, and I had difficulty warming up to this character. I also had trouble finding any redemptive support for the group’s various plots and plans. But an incredibly surprising twist to the story later explains all.
Despite my unease over their motives, methods, and the resulting mayhem, the plans, when in motion, are riveting reading. The author has a flair for crafting exciting action scenes with well-choreographed, vivid, and easily visualized fight sequences. The story is well-paced and absorbing, and I was compelled to keep reading as long as my time allowed. The ending is nothing like anything I’ve encountered before; I never saw that coming.
Although this is the author’s debut novel, it felt much more polished than that. There is room for additional editing to work out a few awkward or incorrect word choices and usage, repetition, and mistakes involving homophones.
I recommend VENALITY to readers of young adult dystopian fiction.