Chapter 002
From the moment she stepped off the train at the Bluegate railway station, Maria Chetty gasped, overwhelmed by the returning sense of tension.
The day was clear, allowing her to see the hill where the Mon Deplano Casino stood far in the distance, even from the station.
In Bluegate, which lacked mountains, this flat hill was a uniquely prominent feature. Since the Middle Ages, the nobles of this region had all established their residences there.
As she disembarked, an impromptu checkpoint verified Maria’s identity.
Before checking the ID card, the staff member scrutinized Maria from head to toe, but upon realizing she belonged to the Chetty family, he hurriedly stood up and bowed deeply.
“I apologize, you didn’t look like a resident of Bluegate.”
Maria took the verified ID card carefully without a word and greeted him with a smile.
Pressing her hand against her heart, she set foot in Bluegate. It felt as if her heart was intoxicated, and she couldn’t steady her body by her own will, even though she hadn’t had a drink.
A thirty-minute carriage ride. Bluegate, which she observed during the slow journey, had not changed at all.
The only places in all of Bluegate that had electricity were the Mon Deplano Casino and the streetlights along the road leading up to it. Elsewhere, at night, everything went dark—a land of death where nothing could be seen or known.
Maria nervously checked the curtains. Then, about halfway through the journey, she heard a gunshot close by.
Following that, she felt the carriage being deliberately shaken. The goal was to tear off the carriage door, which could be locked from the inside.
Terrified, Maria’s trembling hand fumbled into her bag.
Just as she was gripping her silver pistol with both hands, the lock broke, and the carriage door swung open with a bang. An intoxicated outlaw thrust his face inside.
The smell of Hoppins, the narcotic derived from the sap of a mutant cactus, was strong.
Maria knew the smell of this drug well—the one that ruined Bluegate and addicted even her mother and brother.
Maria immediately pulled out her gun but couldn’t fire right away. Death didn’t become easier in her hands just because she wasn’t personally stabbing or clubbing someone to death.
As Maria trembled and struggled to pull the trigger, a gunshot rang out, and the outlaw fell with a thud. His eyes wide open, he was instantly dead, clutching Maria’s leg.
Because of the frequent looting, all carriages in Bluegate were designed to allow the doors to be opened from the opposite side as well.
Maria pushed the man’s hand away and frantically opened the door on the opposite side, climbing out of the carriage.
Gasping, her breath mixed with tears, Maria’s legs gave out, and she sank onto the road. Then she turned her head toward where the gunshot had come from.
In the glow of the streetlight, she could barely make out the silhouette of a man. He was walking slowly toward Maria.
“Bluegate is the same as ever, isn’t it?”
Only after hearing his voice did Maria recognize him as Benedict Ivy.
She didn’t recognize Benedict—who had been like a brother to her since she was fourteen—immediately because he had grown dramatically into a man over the past year.
Maria looked up at Benedict, breathing heavily and unsteadily.
The streetlight poured down onto his head, which felt impossibly tall. His shadowed expression was unreadable.
She tried to get up alone but had no strength, so she held out her hand as if asking him to help her up first. Benedict finally took her hand but released it almost immediately once Maria stood up.
His action wasn’t offensive, but it certainly lacked affection. For Maria, who had received boundless affection from Benedict since childhood, the difference felt particularly stark.
She hoped it was just because they hadn’t seen each other in a while. In the end, he truly had been unconditionally on her side.
Maria looked back at the carriage, from which both the coachman and the horses had fled, and asked Benedict:
“Shall we walk?”
“It’s not far.”
“Okay.”
It wasn’t just his appearance that had matured. His voice was lower, his cigarettes had changed, and he wore perfume. Whose taste in women was it this time?
She assumed he was dating. He was generally always in a relationship, and she rarely saw him alone, even if his relationships occasionally overlapped.
The women of Bluegate simply wouldn’t leave him alone. He knew how to disguise his danger, and the women were fooled by the disguise because the shell was beautiful.
His hair was neatly styled, even the back, leaving his nape cleanly exposed. His pale skin was smooth.
His eyes and mouth were long, and because of this, whenever he smiled—which was incredibly rare—it stirred a clown’s desire in her to make him smile forever.
It was that refreshing, that astonishingly beautiful; one would think nothing in the world could be more beautiful than his smile. Though she hadn’t seen him cry, she imagined it would be the same. He would surely turn people into psychological slaves.
Fortunately, he didn’t smile much out of pleasure. Furthermore, knowing that Maria had just returned from her mother’s funeral, he was even less likely to smile.
As they were nearly at the Mon Deplano Casino, Maria lifted her head to look at the infinitely beautiful building built on the hill.
When Geppel split into East and West, Republic and Monarchy, after the revolution, both sides rejected this land.
However, since Cohas Chetty—the father of Maria and her brother Alexander—had killed Camilo Scala, the original lord of Bluegate, and annihilated his family, the territory nominally belonged to the Republic.
A perfunctory barrier was placed between the Western Geppel Monarchy and the Eastern Geppel Republic.
However, after fourteen years, neither side took responsibility for its maintenance, so most of it was cracked, and some sections were completely torn down.
The first mayor of Bluegate, which remained in chaos even after the revolution, was the contributor to the Citizen’s Revolution and Maria’s father, Cohas Chetty. And it was still the case fourteen years later.
Cohas monopolized the mayoral office and intended to do so for decades to come.
Bluegate was maintained under the clear dictatorship of the Chetty family. Only the owner of the Mon Deplano Casino had changed; Bluegate had not truly changed.
Still a lawless zone.
Still a hell.
The Mon Deplano Casino was situated on the hill overlooking Bluegate Bay, in the easternmost part of Eastern Geppel.
The original owner of the casino, the Scala family, was a noble house and intended to only accept upper-class patrons like themselves when they first built it.
Fourteen years ago, however, it was seized by ruffians who were merely smugglers on the Bluegate Bay docks.
In the age of revolution, when most nobles were either killed or emigrated to Western Geppel, the Scala family, who held out until the end, were ultimately killed by the Chetty family and lost everything.
As a result, the exterior, built by the nobility, was excessively splendid, while the interior, maintained by ruffians, was utterly vulgar. This was the contradiction of the Mon Deplano Casino.
The people of Geppel usually started dinner around 8 o’clock.
Maria wanted to skip this dinner, which her father was hosting right before the mayoral election, but she could not.
She walked toward the dining area with a heavy heart.
Sitting down to eat in that moderately dressed-up setting was humiliating for Maria.
Around the single dining table sat only those known for their muscle.
They controlled Bluegate by dividing it into several districts, all while loyal to Cohas. These ruffians dressed up nicely and drank fine liquor, imitating the nobles.
Every piece of food that passed her throat was repulsive to Maria, but she could only use that disgust to remind herself of her origin.
She had never been taught etiquette at school. The best marriage prospects in Geppel, who enrolled at St. Teresa’s Women’s University, learned etiquette from the time they crawled on all fours.
To avoid becoming an anomaly among such ladies, Maria had to steal etiquette with her eyes, detail by detail.
When she performed the actions she had thus guessed and stolen, the ruffians at the table learned from her. If she had mistakenly learned something, even that would become the bandits’ etiquette.
Thinking this way, she sometimes felt a vulgar urge to gorge herself indiscriminately.
Let them learn, then.
It was while Maria was soothing her uneasy mind with such thoughts that Alexander, Cohas Chetty’s son and Maria’s brother, the owner of the Mon Deplano Casino, spoke to their father.
“Father, what happened to those terrorists?”
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Notes:
1. Geppel (게펠): The name of the fictional country/region, which was split into East (Republic/공화정) and West (Monarchy/왕정) after the Citizen’s Revolution.
2. Hoppins (호핀스): The name of the fictional narcotic drug.
3. St. Teresa’s Women’s University (성 테레사 여자 대학교): The university Maria attends, implying a high social standard for its students.
