Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Fourteen (3/6)

Minimal Maiming

Apr 11, 2025

A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀

New chapters posted every Friday! Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.

Author’s note!: This author is off on her holidays next week, so there won’t be a new Midnight Metropolis chapter until the following Friday. I hope you all have a fantastic Easter 😎

Verna’s fat diskette ejected from the front panel of the X5 with a loud click. Tattie pulled it free and held it in both hands, her face hardening. “Verna was lying about this thing.”

“About the diskette?” Brax said.

Tattie tried her best to explain using the scant information she’d been able to gather. She told them about the diskette’s secret request to mine information on generation ships, about the neo-humans genetically designed to live close to forever. Describing the ships was hard. Tattie was no poet and finding the words to convey the sheer scale of the neo-humans’ vessels—the way the Ascendant, the last to be built on Digath, had undulated with molten colour beneath a weak sun—was almost beyond her.

“So Verna had no intention of destroying the husk programme?” Ginx said. “She just wanted to know about these stupid ships.” Her voice was thick, laced with threat. Her arching mouth-splits stretched and rippled.

“I don’t know about that,” Tattie admitted. “But she did code the diskette to copy husk information. I have no idea what she wants to do with it. Maybe she really does want to upend the N.E.X.’s slave army, like a parting gift before she leaves the planet. Her sister was husked, and the process did kill her; that part was true. Perhaps she’s out for revenge.”

Tattie conjured the data-vision of Aldria’s creased face, eyes the colour of curdled milk rolling in their sockets, fighting to find her sister’s face in the half-dark. She couldn’t imagine her death had been painless.

“So Verna’s a neo-human,” Brax said, still piecing the story together. “What does that even mean? I’ve never heard of them.”

“I think they were human-humans once,” Tattie said. “Just like you and me. Well, not so much like me. They were obsessed with immortality. By the time they’d finished buggering about with their genetics, they were almost super human. I got the feeling they left this system because they’d bled it dry. The generation ships were designed to take them to a new home.”

Brax raked a hand through his hair, eyes wide and unbelieving. “This is nuts. Somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, entire colonies of godlike, ancient humans have set up shop on some unsuspecting planet. They’re probably draining its resources as we speak.”

“Do you think Verna was supposed to be on that last ship?” Ginx said.

Tattie nodded. “Probably her sister, too. Then they got stuck here. It must have sucked being an ancient superhuman, forced to rub shoulders with Bhume Valley twats and Neko skaterats.” She swung her arms out to the sides, cracking her stiff shoulder blades and forcing the blood back into her aching wrist. “We should get out of here. Go have a little chat with Verna Shade.”

They walked past Malcolm with their eyes on the floor tiles, each unwilling to acknowledge the prostrate body stretched out against the wall in the corridor. As they plunged back into the maze-like belly of the Noctarum, shouldering through doors and clattering up stairs, Tattie’s gaze kept flicking to the oiled blue gloss of the walls. She expected the giantess to rear up at any moment and berate them for not using enough deodorant or failing to remove the fluff from between their toes, but the hideous floating face refused to make an appearance. Tattie was relieved, if slightly perplexed. Finally, they reached the reception area, the imposing entryway looming beyond.

Tattie paused to catch her breath. “Perhaps you should stay behind when we take the diskette to Verna,” she told Ginx. “She’s cagey, and she doesn’t know you from a pothole on Black Rock.”

Ginx stared past her, eyes dim, her ruptured mouth contorting as though straining to follow a conversation Tattie couldn’t hear.

“You having a little conflab with your daemon friend?”

Ginx glared at her and turned away. Tattie glanced at Brax, ushering him backwards until they bumped up against the reception cubicle.

“What do you think they’re planning?” she whispered. “I bet she’s pissed off because I said she shouldn’t meet Verna.”

Brax shrugged, seeming almost too relaxed. He pulled a hand out of his pocket and stroked Tattie’s forearm. Even through the stiff grey of the husk uniform, his touch raised the delicate hairs at the back of her neck.

“Don’t worry about them,” he said. He eyed the slight bulge where Tattie’s bag was lying flat beneath her shirt. “You’ve got the diskette, and Ginx hasn’t tried to take it. If she wanted to screw us over, she would have done it by now.”

Tattie nodded, smiling at him. They were dressed in stolen property, standing in a facility they could be shot for breaking into, but Brax had a way of making it feel like a mundane Tranq Tuesday in the Bunker. Everything was easier when she was with him. Her anxiety spiked lower. Her near-constant anger trembled further from the surface. She slid her thumbs along the soft planes of his face and brought his lips to hers, forgetting for a moment that they should be absconding with their pilfered N.E.X. data.

“I wish I’d never left you,” Brax said when they broke apart.

“Technically, I was the one who left you.”

“If you two are finished groping each other, we’ve got a problem,” Ginx said.

Tattie braced herself for an onslaught of accusations. When Ginx spoke again, she wished their only problem was the daemon’s paranoia about being cut out of the Verna deal.

“The husks have woken up,” Ginx said. “They’ve shaken off the stalk we slipped them, and they’re not acting funky anymore. They’re grouping outside, getting ready to take us down.”

“Shit,” Tattie said.

“Yes. Shit.”

“Maybe we can trick them,” Brax said. “We’re still wearing their uniforms.”

“Is there any other way out of here?” Tattie asked Ginx.

Ginx lowered her eyes, dark lashes fluttering as she listened to her daemonic flesh passenger. She raised them again and shook her head. “The rest of this place is locked up tight. We’re going to have to try and blend in if we want to get away.”

They filed out of the front doors in what they hoped was a robotic-looking formation, faces pulled taut, hands swinging at their sides. A small cadre of husks was waiting for them just beyond the entryway. There were only three of them, all looking vaguely dishevelled. The woman standing in the middle had what appeared to be part of a flamingo pink paper streamer wrapped around her head. It fluttered from beneath her cap, tattered and greasy.

Tattie took the lead and started to march past them, but was stopped by a firm hand on her shoulder. She looked up into the craggy face of a middle-aged man, his dead eyes pulled low by drooping bags.

“You have trespassed on private N.E.X. property. You must submit for processing.”

Tattie pushed the man’s hand away and fell back to join Brax and Ginx. They both stared at her, as if she had the first buggering clue what they should do.

“I think the game’s up, chickens,” she said, then pushed the latch on her Rakkonian bangle.

The lid clicked open, and she thrust her forefinger into the well of blood beneath. She thought about throwing it in the husks’ infuriatingly passive faces, imitating Brax when he’d been cornered in Palm Plaza. She wouldn’t need the hasty sigils he’d carved into his arms, she had power enough to summon a hemo blast. While pallid flesh melted into the husks’ skulls, they could make a run for it. But these were people, Tattie reminded herself. People who probably wouldn’t want to wake from their husking with an eye socket welded shut or half their jaw burnt raw. Instead, she lunged at them, daubing each of their foreheads in quick succession as she whispered the words of the Scarlet Kiss.

They fell against each other, then dropped, a slew of grey nylon piled on the gritty concrete. There was no time for celebration. Behind the grey pile, across the shadowed boulevard and advancing from opposite directions, were two units of granite-faced husks.

Tattie turned to Ginx. The woman’s eyes were wild, misted with a rising rage.

“Time to let the daemon out, Ginx.”

Ginx nodded. Her mouth-splits were already parting, rolling back from her jawbone as twin tentacles rose to taste air. They spilled from her face in a long, arching stream and shuddered before her, poised and reaching.

Tattie glanced left and right, calculating their best chance of escape. “Brax and I will cut across Mycil Bridge. You head towards Palm Plaza. We’ll meet you at the Bunker after Verna’s paid up.”

She wasn’t sure Ginx had heard her, but then the grasping tentacles swung towards the husks marching from the west, coiling into glistening fists.

“Just remember they’re still human beings,” Tattie called after her, voice rising as adrenaline tore through her body. “They’re like Toni. No killing, minimal maiming.”

Ginx charged the first line of husks, breaking their precise formation with a long tentacle sweep that sent most of them to the ground. The husks coming up behind stepped over the fallen and surrounded the raging Ginx-creature. The street became a blockade of silent, pressing husk bodies, a thrusting tentacle fountain leaping at their centre. Tattie gripped Brax’s hand and began to run in the opposite direction, confident Ginx would battle her way through the horde unscathed. No husk training implant existed that could tell the grey automatons how to bring down an incensed daemon flesh host.

If Tattie had stayed to watch, she would have seen the tentacles pause and waver, then disappear when the nearest husks laid hands on the fragile, human part of the Ginx-creature. Tattie might have started to worry until the tentacles rose again, longer this time, thrashing with a renewed intensity as they batted away the encroaching husks. If she had stayed longer, she would have spied one tentacle spiralling away from its twin to twine about the body of a Toni-shaped husk, reeling her in like a nylon-clad fish and holding her tight to its human host as they punched their way through to Palm Plaza.

But Tattie had not stayed to watch. She was running hard down the centre of Noctara Boulevard, a synchronised line of husks coming up quicker than she would have liked. Brax squeezed her hand so tightly, she could feel the sweating twitch of his pulse.

“What are we doing, Tat?” he said. “We don’t have a daemon handy.”

“No, we have me.”

Tattie slowed, then stopped, pulling Brax back with her. She yanked the collar of her shirt aside and reached for the disc embedded in her collarbone.

“It’s finally time to see how far I can push this thing.”

Tattie jabbed the central button, staggering when a rush of heat exploded from the disc and spun into her veins. Her flesh warmed and hummed, flushed with the steely roar of Arcanoforge blood jumping just beneath the surface. She grimaced as her eyes flooded scarlet, every blood vessel breaking at once. When she blinked, crimson tears carved two thick lines along the curve of her cheeks.

Brax took a step backwards, transfixed by the vivid ruby orbs of her eyes, by the thick runs of blood dripping onto her chest. She thought he would beg her to stop, but surprised her by ripping his shirt open and shrugging it to the ground. He stood before her, bare chest heaving with tension, a finely sharpened knife glinting in his fist.

“What are you planning?” she said. Her voice was husky and distorted, deepened by the inflamed blood vessels burning in her throat.

“I’m not the Arcanoforge,” Brax replied, “but I’m still a sodding Rakkonian.”

He bent the knife to his freshly healed forearm and began cutting a long, curving sigil.

Content Warnings

Description of blood, mild swearing, suggestion of cutting/self-mutilation

Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Fourteen (3/6)

Minimal Maiming

Content Warnings

Discussion about this post