The Arbiter
Copyright© 2025 by James Girvan
Chapter 28
Waking up after winning a fight feels a lot like waking up after losing one.
I glanced at my Health score, noting that it hadn’t risen by its customary +1 over night. Must not have slept enough to recover.
I then went through my morning ritual, lighting a small fire and checking off the other of my ‘reminder’ notes as I stretched and cleaned myself off. Mace was in my room with a cart full of food when I got out of the shower.
“Complements of the house, seems like they like having Weapons around ... at least when there’s a Breakout.” he growled. This province in particular had not been all that friendly towards the idea that some people (Weapons) walked around ‘armed’ at all times. Rumour was that the opinion of the ruling party was reflected in the Police, but wasn’t shared by the common man. Weapons had been leaving this province in droves nonetheless. The west coast was just as bad and so it was the middle provinces that they mostly settled in, and those provinces were the ones that weathered the storm better than the others; despite having more portals overall.
Eggs with a creamy sauce, crispy sausage and chewy bacon ... my personal version of heaven, and done so much better than the budget hotel’s versions I’d been living off of for the past few months.
Fortified with most of a second cup of coffee, I finally could focus on what Mace was saying.
“ ... and so we need to be there for Wednesday.”
“and today is?” I replied, the coffee not having hit me yet.
“Saturday ... afternoon.”
“Can you just go over that again? I didn’t get it all...”
“Yeah, chewing loudly and tuning me out will do that.” He huffed.
“I can ignore you just fine without the chewing, it’s just so much easier with it.” I smiled, trying not to breathe on him once I could see his expression. He might annoy me, but poking anyone in their weak spot is a bad move if you have to work with them.
“We’re going South, they’ve made a list of places to have us visit, mostly transfer and holding stations for new prisoners. Considering that their population is ten times the size of ours (and they just love locking people up) we should have our hands full. We get a handler too”. Mace recapped.
“Great, what are the terms?” I asked past the brim of my now mostly empty cup. The caffeine was working and I was starting to understand we’d just been whored-out as contractors by the faceless managers above us. “I mean, usually I get wined-and-dined before anal ... a little lube goes a long way”. I was looking right at him when I dropped that last part, just hoping to see the disgust on his face.
I wasn’t disappointed.
“We’ll just have to find out, those details were missing from my brief.” He paused a moment then added “Maybe the handler will offer you a reach-around?”
I actually laughed, Mace wasn’t known to sink to my level very often. Maybe I was having a positive effect on him?
We stayed the next two days in town, taking in the sights and sleeping in. The bar I’d been in the other night had plywood over the busted window but was otherwise open; music escaping the doors whenever they opened. I avoided it and the two spears I’d left behind were just another ‘Cost of doing business’. Mace wandered in another time and told me they were mounted above the bar with a picture, note, and signatures of all the survivors of that night. I’d bet he tried to store them but they would’t go for some reason. If anyone recognized us, they kept it to themselves there.
Another bar downtown had the remains of a few of the scorpion crabs collected up and boiled in salted water. A pound of flesh and a 1/4 cup of drawn butter for fifty bucks. Mace bought some and we both tried it. Wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever eaten. Let’s call that one ‘resiliency capitalism” in action.
I had mixed feelings leaving. The dead weighed heavily on my mind, but as a city, Halifax has a history of bouncing back after massive disasters. A large explosion (the largest manmade before atomic weapons) during WWI levelled much of the towns shoreline. WWII basically emptied the city of men, and later, the survivors and many of the victims of the Titanic landed here after the famous ship went down. Halifax has a history of healing; Remembering, but healing.
We landed at Bangor Maine, and I was wondering just how large a prison a town this size could have. We learned soon that the smaller towns often had prisons as their primary employer. The entire country had roughly %0.355 of its population in prisons. This was basically 3 times the rate we had at home.
Only 4% of these were in for a year or less, so they had us focus on short term (medium security, or 2-years-less-a-day) facilities. Still, there were over six thousand facilities and that wasn’t including psychiatric hospitals or military brigs. There was Way more than we could cover, even if we split up. Which is exactly what our handler wanted us to do, and our superiors had expressly told us not to do.
We tried compromising and split up within the prisons we went to, but I had to get much closer than Mace did, and he couldn’t take a weapon if he found one. All in all, it was a total clusterfuck. After two months of trying to ‘tour’ and ‘inspect’ these prisons, we’d finally had enough. Whomever it was who requested our assistance, they didn’t get enough buy-in from the Wardens, and we didn’t get enough access to ensure we swept every prisoner in every prison we went to.
Whatever it was that they wanted us to do, we weren’t managing to get it done to any level of confidence. In one case, even with Mace managing to sweep well beyond the range they knew we had, we left more than half the population ‘unaudited’. This wasn’t accomplishing anything useful, we were just ‘ticking the boxes’. In two months we found only 9 incarcerated men (and two women) who already had their weapons (all of whom had been sent to prison in the last year). I stole what I was supposed to, and Mace noted the ones who hadn’t gotten theirs yet. There wasn’t an official list per-se ... but I’m sure they were put onto a list.
Of my ‘spoils’ there was precious little I could actually use. Few of these Weapons had any real time to build an inventory and most had sold off their Silver for cash already. The toughest take was in a Women’s low security prison. I’m not sure if Healers are just chosen from a more solid group of folk, but it was the first (live) one I’d found in a prison. It was hard to imagine that she was a threat, as I found her bent over and healing another inmate.
Since she had her staff out, and her hand on the other woman’s groin it wasn’t hard to imagine what the problem was. The male CO’s here had a creepy vibe. I nudged Mace on this, but his response was ‘not our business’. Yes, it damn well was our business, we were here to protect and secure a safe place for the humans and we were failing!
“What is it you hope to accomplish? Neither of us are even citizens of this country, our opinions hold no weight. Just take your pieces of Silver and move on.” He grumbled. I’d thought he’d be as disgusted as I was over the serial rape of these detained women. I now wondered if this was even slightly true.
In any case, that Healers staff got ‘accidentally’ brought out of my inventory and laid in the floor that night. I may not have been able to help her and the other women, but I could do that. In the morning it was gone and I vowed I’d be gone soon too.