Arcanoforge: Midnight Metropolis

//1

Palm Plaza was not as exotic as the name suggested. The people casually perusing the gated shop fronts and queuing to buy bean bowls and faux sushi looked wrung out and bored. Brax almost felt sorry for them.

He glared at the towering monstrosities marking the plaza’s entrance—arching glass palm trees flashing blue and headache-inducing fuchsia. The two trees bowed their mirrored leaves towards each other, creating a rainbow-hued archway that burned like a flare against the eternal night of Noctara City. Beneath the hard span of the rigid topiary, a holographic sign revolved.

Welcome to Palm Plaza! Strictly no liability will be accepted for maiming and/or deaths that occur on or surrounding the premises.

Brax sat on a bench beneath one of the palm trees and allowed himself a few minutes to rest. Sensuous tree light played across the waxy arms of his suede jacket. He had been walking the same network of streets for three hours, unable to pinpoint a precise destination with his antiquated plasma tracker. He knew he was in the right general area, but there his device failed him. He fingered the hard outline of the tracker in his jacket pocket, trying to quell a rising feeling of despair. He was running out of time. Tattie was here, somewhere. She might be waiting in line for a slice or standing with the crowd swelling around the plaza’s strangely empty fountain. If he happened to be glancing in the wrong direction, he could walk right past her. Perhaps he’d trawl these streets forever and never find her.

A sudden scuffling and an ensuing silence drew his attention. People were moving away from someone or something, backing into doorways and disappearing down side streets. Three figures emerged from the shadows pooling beyond the glowing palm trees. They walked shoulder to shoulder, each dressed in grey uniforms and ugly box caps. The figure at their centre, a tall, broad man with a well-trimmed goatee, was holding a scanning device. He swung it in Brax’s direction and strode towards him, his two companions pressed close on either side. Brax tried to remember his training, searching for escape routes as the three uniforms stopped before the bench. His rapid-fire thoughts crumbled.

“Come with us,” their leader said. His voice was almost robotic, devoid of accent or inflection.

“Excuse me?”

The man lowered his scanner and stared at Brax. He stared but did not see, as though he was looking through a screen. “Come with us. Now.”

Brax slid backwards on the bench, still piecing together an exit strategy. The uniforms fanned out to create a wall of stiff nylon.

“Do not create a disturbance,” the uniform on the right said. She was an older woman, dark hair threaded with silver pulled back into a severe tail beneath the cap.

Brax raised his hands. “I won’t create a disturbance. I just want to know why I have to come with you.”

If he were able to sigh, Brax was certain the third robotic uniform—a skinny blonde man with holes dotting his lobes where earrings used to be—certainly would have.

“We are working on behalf of the N.E.X.,” the man said. He talked in the same monotone, rattling off words like he was reading from a script. “In that official capacity, we are to be obeyed as enforcers of the laws of Noctara City. Our scans show that you are currently fitted with an outlawed or outdated chip. You must come with us.”

Brax got to his feet. Almost without thinking, he slid his knife from beneath the leather cuff on his right wrist and turned his hand, cupping its familiar and comforting edge against his palm.

The uniforms took a single step closer. They each moved in perfect sync, their faces blank as nighttime windows. The bench pressed against the back of Brax’s knees as the palm tree lights segued from violet to pale green, dappling the uniforms closing in on either side.

He wished he had more time. The ready-scored sigils he’d marked on his forearms before boarding the shuttle to Noctara were benign and useless beneath the stiff sleeves of his jacket. He wouldn’t be able to shrug the thing off and activate them before these idiots grabbed him. He needed a cheap and dirty trick, and he knew of only one that would work in such a tight space.

Flipping the thin Rakkonian knife from his palm and into his fingers, he grasped the scrollworked hilt and thrust it at the uniforms, threatening each one in turn.

“Give up your weapon and ready yourself for a full body search,” their leader intoned.

Brax lowered the knife, pretended to offer it hilt-first to the goateed uniform, then stabbed its needle point into the soft flesh of his own palm. Even this didn’t break their bizarre robotic composure. As blood rushed to fill the dark hole opening in his skin, Brax lifted his palm to his lips. He whispered over the glut of blood—already running into the sleeves of his jacket in glistening lines—and flung his hand towards them. A fine crimson spray marbled their bodies.

They didn’t react, didn’t even blink until the ruby splatter began to eat into their faces. The female caught a good-sized globule between her eyebrows. She stopped first, powering down like a malfunctioning computer as the stain at the centre of her face seethed and spat. She swiped at it, pulling away half an eyebrow on the back of her right hand. The skin beneath was raw and wet. Only a few droplets reached the blonde man. He gazed down at his chest with something almost like interest, following the curls of smoke rising from several holes blossoming across the tough fabric of his shirt.

Their leader got the worst of it. His left eye was a ruined mulch—a spreading red gape with sizzling white at its centre. He doubled over, a reeking hiss rolling from his melting flesh. Brax took his chance, pushed past the hideously silent uniforms, and ran.

//2

Ginx was bored. The familiar pizza, the buzzing lights radiating from the giant glass palm trees, the constant rumble of boards coasting the cracked bowl of the dry fountain—it was all so tedious, there wasn’t enough scalding water on the planet to wash it all away. Boredom clung to her like grit, caking the pores of her skin and parching her of oxygen. Then a trio of husks began melting down on the other side of the plaza, and the tedium was instantly shattered.

“Are you watching this?”

A short man in an ugly suede jacket was shouldering his way past a cadre of husks. They should have been pinning his arms behind his back in that way they had which meant you’d snap a bone if you struggled too hard. They should have been dragging him to the Voidspire for an intense round of questioning. That was how it went. If the husks picked you out of the crowd, you were going with them, no matter how hard you fought or how loud you cried. This guy was pushing past them, though. Pushing past and breaking into a run as the husks faltered. One of them pressed a hand to her face as though she were in pain. The tall, heavyset guy with the scanner in his hand was on his knees, sinking to the dark concrete like slowly melting plastic.

Ginx turned to kick the legs of Toni’s patched diner stool, wrenching her attention from the skaterats tearing across the basin.

“Are you seeing this?” she tried again.

Toni narrowed her eyes at the incapacitated husks, a smirk pulling up one corner of her perfectly made-up lips. “Shit. What happened to them?”

“Acid grenade,” Riven guessed, leaning against the counter. He was long and rangy as a hard-bodied stick insect, blue hair refracting navy constellations beneath the pulsing lights of the chrome food stall.

Flannigan’s Pizza - The spiciest slice in town!

“There was no flash,” Ginx said.

The heavyset man continued to crumple. He stretched out to lie flat on the ground, blanched face steadily leaking vapourised cheek fat onto the pavement. A crowd gathered to watch.

“Do you think they feel pain?” Toni wondered, speaking around a mouthful of melted cheese.

“I heard pain is stored when you’re husked,” Riven said. “It comes rushing back when your sentence is done. If you’ve had a rough time, you wake up screaming.”

“Bullshit,” Ginx argued. “How would they store pain?”

A N.E.X. van rolled around a corner and sidled into view, reinforced tyres whisper silent as they ground over the grainy street dirt. The crowd broke up, called onward towards more interesting business. The show was over. Two grimly disinterested husks exited the vehicle and began guiding their colleagues into the back of the van. The heavyset man was more difficult to cajole. The husks had to grab him beneath the armpits and wrench him to his knees before he capitulated. He staggered to his feet like a sweating drunk and disappeared into the blank white of the waiting van.

Ginx finished her slice, flipping the soggy crust into the gutter running behind Flannigan’s stall. A blue-eyed rat the size of her forearm appeared from a storm drain clogged with weepcaps. It scampered away with the wad of cheese-smeared carbs hanging from both sides of its mouth.

“Knock it off, would you?” Flannigan growled. He emerged from a hatch in the bowels of the tubular stall amid a haze of frying meat, wiping his hands on his apron and cocking a thumb towards an overflowing bin. It glistened with the fat bodies of busy bluebottles. “I’ve got a bin, don’t I? It’s people doing that attracts the rats.”

Ginx thought it was the little-emptied bin and the roiling stink of pizza grease that attracted the rats, but she kept her observations to herself. Instead, she took a small silver canister from an inside pocket of her worn leather jacket and popped it open beneath the counter. Her attempt to appear furtive was a somewhat empty effort. Flannigan no doubt knew what she was doing, but he didn’t care. Still, Ginx made sure to slip him some extra credits along with the bill. People who kept quiet in this town were people you wanted to keep on side. Not that the pizza was worth the extra credits. Wasn’t even worth the empty calories.

Ginx tapped a few dark granules from the bullet-sized canister into her cardboard coffee cup. The fat granules peppered the foam like gunshot splatter, sinking into the coffee and leaving brown-edged pockmarks in their wake. The stim made the coffee taste metallic, edged with dark spice. Ginx’s pulse leapt after the first sip.

“Don’t be greedy,” Toni said. “Share the wealth.”

She inched her cup towards Ginx under the counter, balancing it on her knee. Ginx topped the cheap coffee’s curdling foam with a few precious grams of stim and slipped the canister back into her pocket.

“You should be careful with that stuff,” Riven said in his languid drawl. “Someone in my building overdosed last week. Accidentally.”

Ginx lowered her cup, staring at Riven from beneath twilight-purple eyelashes. “You know you can’t overdose on stim, right? It’s barely chemical. They grow it in heat cubes.”

“Well, that’s what happened. They shat their insides out.”

Ginx had no desire to continue the conversation. Riven was obviously spoiling for a fight and she was in no mood for it. The air was too close, prickling with the soporific vapours of wall-climbing birchsprout. If Riven wanted to pick an argument, he could bloody well do it elsewhere.

She swung around on her stool and surveyed the plaza. It was surrounded by buildings so vast and high, they blocked all view of the sky save for a tight black square directly above their heads. The two crystalline palm trees cast peach and gold ripples across dank glass and soaring steel. They had been an early attempt to bring some class to the place, aping the glass palm walkways of Sapphire Springs or Benglass Beach. Now the gently undulating bases of the trees were emblazoned with graffiti and an array of peeling posters advertising tape sales and club nights.

Around the plaza were more food stalls. Lights and slogans swayed above them—guttering neon in smeared chrome surfaces. The raised central basin had been a fountain until the N.E.X. got tired of people shitting in it and removed the fixtures. Now it was a playground for skaterats. Stimheads and hardcore serotonin-chasers flew across the concrete on homebrew boards fitted with purloined drone motors and anti-collision tech. The light strips and holographic tails made the skaters’ hurricane turns blur and meld, filling the basin with quivering motion.

“Is that Luke?” Toni said.

Ginx took a long drink of coffee, keeping her gaze steady on the kaleidoscope of the basin. She wanted to kick Toni, simultaneously annoyed and impressed by her nonchalance. She summoned a nod and drained the cup, gripping the spent cardboard in an effort to calm the instant stim blast.

“I think he’s coming over.”

“Evening,” Riven greeted Luke.

The dark-eyed, soft-shouldered musician seemed out of place beneath the clinical brightness of Flannigan’s pizza signs.

“You playing the Bunker tonight?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m not booked ’til next week. Doing Chancy’s tomorrow, though.”

“Ugh, good luck.” Riven wrinkled his nose. “That place reeks of puke. The carpets are literally sticky. All-You-Can-Drink Thursdays was the worst idea they ever had.”

“Can’t say I disagree with you, but a paycheck’s a paycheck, you know?”

Riven didn’t know. He lived on a family stipend in a decently sized apartment willed to him by his late grandfather.

“You’ll have a family one day,” his grandfather had told him. “You’ll need a roof to keep them under. You’re the last of my line, I don’t want to give you any excuse to end it.”

When Riven relayed this story, he always stooped and affected a crackly old man’s voice. In reality, his grandfather had been a kickboxer who’d retained his intimidating physique and commanding, gravelly baritone until the day a disgruntled ex-opponent shoved him in front of a transit. He’d been killed instantly, but the speeding land vehicle had pulled fleshy smears along the tracks for five miles. Ginx sometimes wondered what Riven’s grandfather would think if he knew his grandson was using his insanely generous gift to entertain a revolving litany of lovers, with no plans whatsoever to start a family.

“What about you two?” Luke said, turning to Ginx and Toni. “You working tonight?”

“Tonight and every night, it feels like,” Toni sighed.

“I might come with you. Think you can swing me a stamp, Ginx?”

Ginx pretended to consider the question. “I can. But if Caggoty asks, you’re all square, okay? That little weasel wouldn’t let his own mother drink for free.”

“Thanks, Ginx. I swear I’ll take it to the grave.”

He flashed her a warm, lopsided smile. It was the sort of smile that would have incited impressionable groupies to press their port digits into his hands if he ever managed to pin down a recording contract.

A cheer went up from the echoing basin, followed by the loud crack of a flare gun. A red-orange orb arched into the air and disintegrated over the skaterats’ heads, trailing starry trails of blue and gold through the heat-lanced air.

“How exciting,” Riven said. He gave three sarcastic claps. “Well done, little skaterat, whoever you are. If only I had the skill required to roll around a concrete bowl on a glowing board with wheels.”

“I think you do want that,” Toni said. “You’re jealous.”

“Jealous of teenagers with nothing better to do and nowhere else to go? You’re goading me, Toni.”

Ginx ran a hand through the brittle mulberry stalks of her hair, wishing she had time for another cup of coffee. She kept one side of her head shaved and used the most expensive deep conditioner she could afford on the verdant half, yet it refused to thicken or soften beyond its permanent, dry-grass texture. Living on a planet with no natural sunlight could be a bitch. She collected the stories brought in by off-worlders with the grim determination of a comic book junkie. Sun-walkers never had to worry about their nails failing out or their gums receding before they were twenty-five.

Most people in Noctara didn’t bother with their hair. They shaved the whole bloody lot and curated a collection of shining wigs. Toni’s hair of choice was the rich, dark mane she was wearing tonight—a chestnut waterfall that fell halfway down her back. When she took the wig off at the end of the night, the stubble rolling across the scarred dome of her skull made her appear bug-eyed and alien. Riven’s hair was natural, a fact he crowed about often. He’d had it polymer-sprayed, but Ginx secretly thought it looked like a reflective hat glued to his head.

That was another reason why she respected Luke. He didn’t opt for polymers or wigs, just a simple strip of blunt hair running down the centre of his head. Two tasteful lotus flower tattoos span out into spiderwebs that curved behind his ears, meeting in an angular half-moon at the nape of his neck. People said eyes were the windows to the soul, but Ginx disagreed. To discern the flavour of a person’s soul, you had only to glance at their heads.

“You ready to go?” Toni said. She hopped down from her stool and straightened the lines of her angular tunic over her leggings.

“I was ready half an hour ago,” Ginx replied. She turned to wave at Flannigan. “Bye, Flannigan.”

The stall owner glared at her, but there was a resigned friendliness behind his tired eyes. “Perhaps you’ll eat more than just one slice next time, eh? Flannigan has ex-wives to pay off.”

They walked two abreast, Ginx and Toni in front, Luke and Riven behind, out beneath the dappled palms and into the velvet dark of the sweltering city.