A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Tuesday!
Available Chapters — Content Warnings
She pressed the entry button and moved back into the room as the door swung inward a half-inch, back to the window and the gently steaming, flickering slice of Noctara City visible beyond the glass. Standing with her arms flopping about at her sides felt stupid, so Tattie plugged her hands into the tight pockets of her jeans. Soon, she could hear Brax's shoes on the worn hall tiles, then the intake of breath before he spoke. The small mustering of his own courage. She hoped he was alone.
“Tattie, are you in there?”
Denial had officially left the building. “Yeah, I’m here.”
Brax shut the door behind him. He turned to face her. He looked the same, but not the same. There were faint creases across his forehead and a smattering of early white in his beard, but his eyes hadn’t changed—kind and intelligent, framed by the same ridiculously long lashes. Tattie took her hands from her pockets and reached for a captube, flicking it to life in one deft move and inhaling deeply. When she addressed him, her words fell around a long, fragrant tail of smoke.
“How did you find me?”
He seemed taken aback by her question and faltered, blinking rapidly as he formed an answer. “We, ah, I mean I, managed to put a tracker together.”
She almost laughed, but that would have been deeply inappropriate. “You kept it then? My necklace. I thought you would have destroyed it, or buried it or something.”
“No, of course not.”
No. Of fucking course not. Silence. Horrible, aching silence only punctuated by Tattie’s rapid inhalations on the captube and the street sounds filtering through the window. Somewhere far away, the drone rose and fell in a whining concerto.
“Tattie, I’m really sorry about this. About all of this. I didn’t want to barge in on you, but it’s not like you left a forwarding address.” He rushed on, the words becoming a blur in his determination to purge them as quickly as possible. “I think I’m in trouble. I arrived with a Mustarian chip and I patched through immigration fine, but then I got stopped by these robot guys in grey suits.”
Tattie stiffened, hands clenching in the purple dark. She knew she should be booting his sorry arse right back out the door, but she let him continue.
“They said they wanted me to go with them. I knew I couldn’t, so I—” He raised a hand to the back of his head and Tattie saw his fingers were trembling.
“What did you do, Brax?”
“I had to get away from that place. Shitty place. Giant glass palm trees lit up like a nova. They were giving me a headache.”
“Brax, what the bloody hell did you do?”
He took a breath, lowered his hand, and lifted his gaze to hers. “Hemo blast.”
Tattie didn’t waste a beat. She ran to the window and punched a button that brought down the titanium shutter. It fell from a recess and fitted into place against the glass with a heavy clunk, cutting off the outside light and throwing darkness across the room like a grenade. Then she crossed to the terminal and keyed in her passcode, fingers flying deftly across the number pad.
“What are you doing?” Brax said.
“Securing the apartment. That drone was probably searching for you. If you’ve led husks to my door I swear I’ll leach you myself and serve you to them in a bag.”
“Husks?”
“Yes, the charming robot people you met in the Plaza. There’s always more of them.”
Finally satisfied her private space could not be penetrated by trackers, Tattie powered down the console and turned to Brax.
“Are you here to drag me back home? You’ll break every one of your limbs trying.”
Paul flickered against the wall beside her, a faint line of angry luminescence. She flashed him a warning look and he sank back into the plum-coloured paintwork.
“I didn’t come to drag you anywhere.” Brax scanned the sparsely furnished room for a seat and came up short. “Things are bad on Rakkone, Tattie. Really bad. The sigils are failing, the food supply’s running out and—” When he paused, a slow beat rolled up from Tattie’s chest and lodged itself in her throat. She thought he was going to cry. “—a lot of people are dead.”
Tattie could see the pain hiding in his face now, the wan agonised blanch he’d tried so carefully to conceal. She hated it. She wanted him to leave and never come back, just so she‘d never have to see it again.
“I’m sorry, Brax.” That’s what people said in these situations, wasn’t it? The words sounded empty and ridiculous.
Brax’s kind eyes crinkled at the corners and she could see he was working hard to pull himself together, to get back to business.
“We need you, Tattie. We won’t survive much longer without you.”
“No.”
Her reaction was immediate, edged with long-held anger. It shocked them both. They stared at each other across the apartment, closer than they’d been for years but so far apart they might as well have been in separate solar systems. Paul erupted from the pooling shadows of the kitchen arch and saved Tattie from having to explain herself.
“You’re going to be late,” he wailed. “Caggoty will fire you and you’ll blame me and I’m not having that on my conscience.”
“Bloody hell, Paul, calm down,” Tattie said. “You’re scaring Brax.”
“What is that?”
Brax had instinctively ducked when Paul appeared. He straightened with some embarrassment, eyes fixed on the softly undulating form standing between him and Tattie. Paul blazed brighter, sending tendrils of smoky light to the ratty ends of his long spectral hair. He was showing off.
“So rude,” he said, turning eyes that flared like pluming ice in Brax’s direction. “I prefer to be addressed as he or they. I’m not an object.”
“What are you then?”
Tattie had to stop herself from smiling. “You won’t scare Brax, Paul. He’s seen more weird shit than you have, and you’re dead.”
“He’s a ghost?”
“Ghosts aren’t real, you know that. Paul just got caught here somehow.”
“I’m a spectral event,” Paul said.
Tattie flicked a switch on the wall and the overhead light dulled Paul to an ashy outline. “I’ve never been able to figure out why Paul’s meshed with my apartment, or he knows and refuses to tell me.”
“Be as cruel as you like,” Paul said. “You’re still going to be late.”
“He’s right,” Tattie told Brax. “I have to get ready.” Paul flickered triumphantly as Brax stared at him.
Brax followed her into the bedroom and sat on her bed, made asinine small talk about siege tactics and weaponry as she teased out the short clumps of her dark hair with polymer and drew elaborate patterns in black around her eyes.
“They all look like this here,” she said when she caught him staring at her in the mirror. “You’d think the lack of sunlight would make them crave colour, but they’re happiest hiding in the shadows.”
“You look so different. I don’t think I would have recognised you.”
“Well, that’s sort of the point.”
The small twist of hurt that passed across Brax’s face, even played out in reverse in the scratched surface of her thrift store mirror, dragged Tattie back to the utterly impossible situation at hand. Brax had found her. He was sitting on her bed the way he had so many times before, many light years and what felt like several lifetimes ago. She could almost pretend she was back on Rakkone and they’d been talking all night again, bodies warm and sleepy, guts full of contraband wine.
Tattie's fingers tightened around the comb she was holding. She had her real life to get back to. She couldn’t get sucked into this, couldn’t stay here talking to ghosts. She also couldn’t leave Brax alone. If he decided to follow her, he would certainly get rolled into the back of a N.E.X. van. She glanced towards the shuttered alcove that served as her wardrobe, a mean little plan forming.
“It’s been years, hasn’t it?” she said, striving to keep her tone level. She stood and moved in front of the wardrobe. “Come here, I want to get a better look at you.”
He rose without question, his expression placid and trusting. Tattie’s nerve almost buckled.
“I probably look about a hundred years old,” he said. He laughed, but it was a false, hollow sound.
Tattie decided the only way to get through this was to do it quickly. “You‘re not so different. But you don’t understand everything.”
Brax tried to interrupt but she lifted a hand to his face to silence him, instantly regretting it when her fingers touched warm, familiar skin. Her stomach rolled over, threatening nausea. She snatched a short breath, then pushed Brax hard in the chest. He staggered backwards into the wardrobe and fell over a box full of mismatched socks, his face a sad-clown picture of confusion.
Tattie reached for the shutter and slammed it closed before he had time to scramble to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice finally threatening to break. “I don’t want this, but I can’t let you wander off and get husked.”
Tattie had no intention of ever returning to Rakkone, but she hadn’t discarded all the old ways. She concentrated on the power that ran like slippery mercury through her veins, drawing it up and into her core until the thick bangle on her left wrist began to vibrate. There was a squat, round ornament fitted to the bangle, subtly etched with twisting Rakkonian sigils. Tattie pushed a discreet latch and it popped open, revealing the small well of blood she’d stored there the previous night. Life in Noctara could be unpredictable, and Tattie never left the apartment without her bangle and a personal supply of fresh hemo.
Dipping her forefinger into the glistening red blot, she drew a messy sigil on the shutter—a square projecting four wavering lines. The sigil glimmered before shooting hair-thin lines of ruby light along the shutter’s edges, sealing it fast. Brax scrabbled at the other side, but Tattie knew his efforts were pointless. Not even Mervaroid the Divine Regurgitator could break her sigil and prise the door open.
“I promise I won’t be gone long.”
Brax’s reply was muffled behind the heavy shutter, but the outrage in his tone was unmistakable. Tattie left the apartment quickly, unable to listen to his plaintive shouts and useless pounding.
Content Warnings
Description of blood, smoking, swearing.