A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday!
Ginx stood and moved towards the doors, not wanting to believe what she was seeing. Her body fought against her, every forced movement like clawing through thick, cloying mud. When she reached the cracked glass of the doors, her breath hitched in the back of her throat. Toni was standing with a husk patrol, helping to surround a teenager with a skateboard held tight beneath his arm.
“Operating a vehicle within a pedestrian space is a violation of the laws of Noctara City,” the trio’s leader was saying.
Ginx didn’t pay any attention to the other two husks; her eyes were fixed on Toni. It was her friend, but not her friend, her usual glorious wig replaced by a few limp strands of escaped hair hanging from the back of a boxy grey hat. A rational part of Ginx knew she could do nothing for Toni now. She had neither the power nor the resources required to free her friend. But Ginx wasn’t listening to that rational part. The world rushed back with the force and speed of a gun flare and suddenly she was running, bounding, through the doors and across the concourse. She stopped before the husk patrol.
“Toni, what have they done to you?”
The three husks turned as one.
“Please do not impede our investigations,” the lead husk said. “Go about your business.”
“Toni is my business.”
Ginx reached for Toni’s shoulders, gripped her hard, and shook. Toni’s body refused to move. She was steadfast and unyielding, as though they’d pumped liquid metal into her skeleton along with the nanotech currently tearing up her blood cells.
“Unhand me,” Husk-Toni said.
That wasn’t Toni’s voice. It was hollow, completely devoid of inflection.
“Toni, it’s Ginx. You know who I am.”
Ginx thought about slapping her, or pushing her, or doing anything that might bring the real Toni to the surface. Luke stopped her. He reached for her wrist and dragged her backwards, away from the husks.
“I’m so sorry,” he told them. “My friend’s had a cocktail. I’ll make sure she behaves herself.”
“Public intoxication is a violation,” Husk-Toni said.
“I know, I’ll see to it she doesn’t have anymore,” Luke promised.
The husks moved away with the trembling teenager held between them, their strides in perfect sync, their three waxy faces identically blank.
Luke’s hand was still wrapped around Ginx’s wrist. He pulled on it, silently urging her back towards the pub.
“Leave me alone,” she said. Her spiking adrenaline was fading and she began to shake, gullet burning with rising bile.
“You can’t do anything for her,” Luke said. “Come and have another drink. We’ll talk about it.”
He spoke softly, a smooth whisper coated with honeyed empathy, but Ginx detected impatience lurking beneath. She watched the husk trio fade into the pulsing background of the mall, then twisted her wrist from Luke’s slightly sweaty grip and glanced back at the Screaming Fox.
Everything felt different somehow. The Fox was no longer an eccentric haven, a private club where she could be alone with Luke and maybe get him drunk enough to kiss her. It was a dirty hole, a crumbling mockery of the sunlit planets she would never get to see. Without Toni, Bayside Mall was no longer the safe preserve of cap-hippies and skaterats. It was a husk stronghold, a dank prison overlaid with garish lights and objectionable odours. Just like the rest of Noctara City.
“I don’t want another drink,” she told Luke, fixing him with a stare bleak enough to make him take a step back. “I don’t want to be here. This whole place is fucked.”
“Shall I take you home?” he offered.
There was a tense expression playing around his overly wide eyes, suggesting that he didn’t actually want to leave yet. He was obviously hoping Ginx would refuse, but she nodded and immediately turned to follow the drunken path of the rancid river. Luke jogged to catch up with her.
“Being husked isn’t a death sentence,” he said when he reached her. “Toni will be returned when she’s served her time.”
Ginx stopped so suddenly, Luke narrowly avoided colliding with a woman perusing a jewellery stand. The woman readjusted a heavy felt hat on her sweating head and tutted at him before turning back to the hardened spore bracelets.
“Have you ever seen an ex-husk?” Ginx hissed at him. “They’re never the same when they’re returned. Husking takes something vital away, something that can never be replaced.”
Luke shook his head by way of a feeble apology, mouth opening and closing like a dying fish as he struggled to form a reply.
Ginx gritted her teeth and pushed past him, heading for a rusting trailer pushed up against a shuttered shopfront. A dented coffee machine was welded to the trailer’s base, surrounded by a scant collection of battered cardboard cups.
“Can I tempt you?” the trailer’s owner said, rodent-like eyes glittering as Ginx marched towards him. “How do you take your coffee? Lemon infusion? Extra protein shot?”
“Just make it strong and fast,” she said, thrusting her wrist in the rat-man’s face and urging him to scan out the necessary credits.
She snatched up her cup as soon as it was filled and walked away without a word of thanks or a backwards glance. The rat-man didn’t seem to care.
Luke had watched the icy exchange in silence. He dropped back into step beside her, his face pale and his hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was stupid.”
“It was,” Ginx agreed. She slowed her pace, took a breath. “Come and sit with me while I drink this thing.”
Luke followed her lead as they perched on the raised edge of the oil-slicked river. An unpleasant, earthy smell drifted across the slow-moving water.
“I should have got you a coffee,” Ginx said. “That was rude.”
“It’s okay. You’ve had a shock, I understand.”
Luke was finding it hard to meet her eyes. Ginx was vaguely aware that she must seem manic, and Luke had only ever seen her on her best behaviour. A week ago, that would have upset her. Now worrying about what some fickle musician thought of her seemed laughably juvenile.
As Ginx sat beside the noxious artificial river, the concourse's blue and fuchsia lights burning through to the back of her tired eyes, a nebulous idea began to solidify. She knew she should be questioning herself as she reached inside her bag for Traci-Lynn’s jar of powdered zaphite. She pretended to weigh the pros and numerous cons of encouraging her daemon squatter to come out and play, but her decision was already made. It had been made the moment she had to watch Husk-Toni stride away with her robotic colleagues.
Feeling numbly determined, Ginx dumped the entire contents of the jar out into her cup. She found a discarded cocktail stick in her pocket, fashioned into the shape of a pelican’s head, and stirred it slowly. The powder protested before finally dissolving into the black brew, frothing against the sides and emitting a disturbing hissing noise.
“What is that?” Luke said.
“Extra flavouring,” Ginx replied, lifting the cup to her mouth and drinking the steaming contents in one long, gulping swallow.
As they made their way out of the pulsing neon guts of Bayside Mall and pressed themselves into Noctara’s wall of black heat, Ginx’s insides were already beginning to stretch and twist. She silently blamed it on the scalding coffee. It was probably eating through her stomach lining, conspiring to make her vomit. But it didn’t feel like that; it felt like a molten fist was firmly wedged within her deepest parts. It was something remote and alien, and it was growing.