Part 1 - Red District

Image created using ChatGPT

Amber hated red with a passion. She’d spent her life living in the red district, where all the buildings were red and its inhabitants were forced to wear red too, so everyone knew where they belonged.

Her mother had given her an aspirational name, in the hope that one day her daughter would make it out of red and into the orange district. She might as well have been called Violet, for all the hope she had of moving up in society. If you’re going to have delusions of grandeur, you might as well aim for the top.

The red district was home to the worst of society. That wasn’t because of its inhabitants. No, it was the people in orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet who visited the district to use and abuse the reds. Those who came to commit their crimes and blame it on the Reds, whose only crime was being poor.

After a lifetime of playing by the rules, keeping her head down, and working all the hours of the day for a pittance, she’d had enough. She was determined to break out or die trying.

That determination was why she was sitting in the tavern watching the Violet man come to pick up his take from the rampant drug trade that made life in the Red even worse.

For weeks, she’d been coming to the tavern to study his movements and make her plan. Her plan wasn’t complicated: create a distraction, swipe the money, then run like her life depended on it, because it would.

‘You bastard!’ yells Bruce, the man who’d been pursuing her aggressively, as he burst into the tavern. He marches up to the man in violet, hauls him out of his seat, and starts punching him, hitting him again and again in the face. Amber doesn’t feel guilty about the lies she told Bruce to get him to attack the man in violet, leeching off the misery of the Reds. Nor does she feel guilty about what will happen to Bruce for attacking a Violet, not after what he tried to do to her.

Amber waits until the Violet is left reeling on the floor and his two Red bodyguards wrestle Bruce away, then she pounces. She grabs the sack of money the Violet has secreted in his coat and bolts for the door.

She is in the street before anyone notices that the money is gone. Sprinting through the packed streets, she doesn’t slow down when there is no sound of pursuit. She races on.

Want to read more?

Subscribe to sarahgoldsmithwrites.com to keep reading this exclusive post.

Subscribe Now