A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday!
It had been raining for hours. The grime-trodden streets of downtown Noctara were steaming, but the downpour had also swept in a bone-deep chill. Tattie stood before her apartment’s open window, enjoying the brief respite from the stranglehold of Digath’s sunless heat. It was a shame about the smell.
The birchsprout crawling across the city’s brickwork, already made ripe and soft by the season’s humidity, hissed and shook angrily in the rain, emitting great gouts of foul odour—part slimy, vegetative reek, part briny decay. The stink didn’t bother Tattie, but Brax had refused to go anywhere near the window, choosing instead to slump in a corner of the sagging sofa. He was wearing one of Tattie’s old cardigans, a marled, black and grey affair with oddly shaped azure buttons. The muted colours seemed to match his greying hair and beard. He’d pulled it closed across his chest, huddled into its synthetic warmth.
“We should try to get a look at that diskette,” he said, “before we give it back to Verna.”
Tattie turned from the window. “Why? I’m not interested in the inner workings of the husk programme; I just want the old bag’s credits. When I’ve got my own bucket, we can get away from this pissy rock and never have to think about the N.E.X. again.”
“Aren’t you curious though? Most of what she told us was obviously bullshit.”
“You’ve always been too bloody nosy for your own good, Brax.” Tattie finally closed the window and joined him on the sofa. “Why should we care if some of her story was bullshit?”
“You’re not serious?”
Brax’s face darkened, on the verge of anger. Tattie was surprised at the hurt the expression spiked in her chest.
“She’s asking you to do something dangerous and probably very stupid,” he explained. “If you truly believe any part of her story is questionable, you shouldn’t take the job. It’s too risky.”
“She did seem to know almost too much, didn’t she?” Paul said, seeping from the ceiling like dripping fungus. He curled himself around a stalled ceiling fan and gazed at them from upside down, his long hair dripping soft blue smoulder onto the floor.
“How long have you been there?” Tattie demanded.
“I never left, naturally. I’m confined to an apartment with the square footage of a weevil trap. Where would you have me go?”
Mr Meow mewed from his position beside Brax on the arm of the sofa, stretching his front legs out before him, claws reaching. Brax lifted a hand to scratch his head, then snatched it back when the cat tried to bite it.
“You see?” Paul said. “Mr Meow agrees, and he and I are always on the same page. This Verna sounds like a dodgy character.”
“Exactly.” Brax sat up straighter on the sofa. “Where did she get her information from? How does she know all the secrets of the N.E.X. universe are in the research facility?”
“Those credits she’s offering are very tempting though, Brax.”
Tattie already knew which ship she was going to buy. She’d been eyeing up a secondhand Void Ranger, styled with blue chrome accents. It was over twenty years old and would have to be retrofitted, but it was a compact classic. A place she could make into a home. Solidifying the thought in her mind made the prospect of giving it up seem that much more cruel.
“Why are you so desperate to leave, anyway?” Brax said. “I thought you’d made a life here.”
“What sort of life can a lie build? Coming here was the best I could do in a messed up situation, but I can never be myself in Noctara. I’ll always be Tattiana the Blood Seer, a low-rent witch working for a petty tyrant in a backstreet club. And now Tattiana’s out of work, which really puts the shitty icing on the whole rancid cake.”
“I appreciate that,” Brax said. “But we should still look at the diskette. If we manage to pull this off, that is. We should know exactly what we’ve gotten ourselves into before we hand the thing over.”
Paul interrupted before Tattie could reply. “Good, now that’s all settled, do you think I could have a private word with you, Tattie?”
“About what?”
“Well, as I said, it’s private—”
The apartment buzzer sounded. Paul disappeared back into the ceiling amid a grating flurry of static while Brax shrank further into his cardigan.
“Husks don’t ring buzzers,” Tattie said, guessing his fear. “They would have kicked down the door.” She stood and pressed the intercom button. “Yes?”
“It’s Ginx.”
It was unusual but not unheard of for a member of the Bunker crew to call on Tattie. Ginx had come with Riven once, begging Tattie to cast some foolish hex on one of his ex-lovers. They’d both pouted when she refused but stayed long enough to drink several whiskeys and demolish a good wedge of her black Lobonian cheese. Tattie didn’t need to ask why Ginx was here this time. She hadn’t heard any news about Toni, and she feared the worst. She buzzed her in.
“Hey Tattie, what you up to?” Ginx leaned against the door frame, her speech slurred.
“Have you been drinking?”
“Yes, yes I have.”
Ginx pushed past Tattie and gazed around the apartment as though seeing it for the first time. “You have such a nice place, Tattie. Hello, who are you?”
She stopped before Brax still hunkered on the sofa and extended her hand. He shook it with a bemused look on his face.
“Brax,” he said. “I’m staying with Tattie for a while.”
“So you are.” Ginx swung back towards Tattie and attempted to give her a wink. In her inebriated state, she looked as though she was having a small stroke. “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend, Tat. At least someone around here is getting some.”
Tattie clicked the apartment door shut and shooed Mr Meow from the sofa arm. He fixed her with a venomous stare before skulking into the bedroom, tail held high.
“I’m going to get you some water, Ginx,” she said. “You’re pissed as a Mervanian fart.”
By the time Tattie returned with the water, Ginx had made her way onto the sofa and was sitting far too close to Brax for his comfort. He disappeared back inside the cardigan while Tattie gave Ginx the glass and sat down on her other side.
“Why are you here?” she asked, as gently as she could manage.
“I was bored. I wasn’t ready to go home yet.”
“Because of Toni?”
Ginx’s entire body stiffened. She hunched her shoulders and summoned a murderous glare that made Tattie wonder if she was about to hurl the glass at her head.
“They got her,” Ginx said. “I saw her yesterday. She was all grey and—” she lowered her voice. “Lifeless. Like she was dead.”
“I’m so sorry, Ginx.”
“There must be something you can do.”
“Is that why you came, to ask me to help Toni? You know that’s impossible.”
A hard shell inside Tattie was breaking and she raged against it. She didn’t want to care about these stupid kids. When she glanced at Brax across the top of Ginx’s bowed head, there was a warning in his eyes.
“I hate being at my place now,” Ginx said, her voice small and hollow. “It’s too quiet. Even Riven won’t come around. It’s like he feels guilty or something. I don’t know why, bloody idiot.”
Tattie slid from the sofa and knelt in front of her. “You should drink that water.”
Face to face like this, Tattie could see something strange in Ginx’s eyes. Something beyond intoxication and grief. A light like a fitful flame played at the centre of her pupils. When Ginx met her stare, those flames sparked and roared with brittle malice. Tattie had no idea what she was seeing, but a finger of clammy ice was creeping up her spine, and that was never a good sign.
“You need to sober up,” she said. “You got any of that stim stuff on you?”
Ginx fumbled in a pocket, pulled out her bullet-shaped canister. Tattie took the glass back while she fumbled the thing open and shakily tipped a few granules into the water. They fizzed briefly before sinking to the bottom where they sullenly dissolved.
“Drink it all,” Tattie said.
Ginx drained the glass and when she spoke again, her words no longer ran together, but the strange luminescence still writhed in her eyes, casting sallow planes of shadow across her cheeks.
“You’re not just here about Toni,” Tattie said.
Ginx shook her head.
“If you’re in some sort of trouble, I need to hear it. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”
“Maybe I just wanted to see you. Maybe I wanted to make sure you were okay after what happened at the Bunker.”
“That’s bullshit. What’s going on, Ginx?”
Ginx cocked her head towards Brax, her pursed lips forming a silent question.
“You can trust him,” Tattie reassured her.
Ginx told her about the game, the nightmares, and the powder Traci-Lynn had given her. She didn’t have to explain what a daemonbond was; Tattie was already familiar with it. Bonding with daemons and other base entities had once been fashionable on Rakkone. It was only after the daemons had torn each bonded bearer apart from the inside, reducing their minds to black, screaming voids and their bodies to shredded pulp, that the practice was outlawed.
“So you had a choice,” Tattie said, slotting the last parts of Ginx’s faltering story together. “You could have taken Traci-Lynn’s bonding powder, or kicked the thing out with Rose-Marie’s slug goo.”
Ginx nodded slowly. She was sober and miserable now, her face damp with perspiration.
“What choice did you make?”
Tattie already knew the answer but for some twisted reason, she had to hear Ginx spell it out. She gripped Ginx’s hands hard in her own, forcing her to look at her. Her palms felt slick and oily.
“Did you expel this daemon, or embrace it?”
Deciding to answer for itself, the daemon squatting inside Ginx’s body chose that moment to rouse.