Midnight Metropolis: Chapter One

Welcome to Palm Plaza

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

New chapters posted every Tuesday!

Available Chapters — Content Warnings

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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!, it declared. Then, in slightly smaller letters, 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 brief minutes to rest. Sensuous tree light played across the waxy arms of his worn suede jacket. He had been walking the same small 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. Worse than that, he wanted to see Tattie again so badly it was crushing him. She 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 greasy, back-lit streets forever and never find her.

A sudden scuffling and an ensuing silence among the milling crowd drew his attention. People were moving away from someone or something, backing against shop fronts and disappearing down side streets. Three figures emerged from the shadows pooling beyond the glowing palm trees. They walked shoulder to shoulder, each dressed identically 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 began walking towards him, his two companions pressed close on either side. Brax breathed hard through his nose and tried to remember his training, surreptitiously searching for escape routes or weapons. The three uniforms stopped before him, towering over the bench with blank, grey-dust eyes. His rapid train of thought crumbled.

“Come with us.”

The man’s voice was almost robotic, devoid of accent or inflection.

“Excuse me?”

The man finally 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 backward on the bench, trying again to piece together an exit strategy. The uniforms fanned out, creating a wall of stiff grey nylon. The hard glass of a palm tree pressed against his back. Short of scaling its trunk like a neon-edged monkey, Brax was trapped.

“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 grey nylon 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 was 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, unsure how he was going to escape this situation but certain that he had to. 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 night-time windows. The bench pressed against the back of Brax’s knees as the palm tree lights segued from violet to pale green, dappling the grey nylon uniforms closing in on either side.

He wished he had more time. The ready-scored sigils he’d carefully 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 goons 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 towards 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 the uniforms’ bizarre robotic composure. Blood rushed to fill the dark hole opening in his skin and, leaning so far away from the uniforms he almost fell backwards over the bench, Brax lifted his palm to his lips. He whispered over the glut of blood—already running into the sleeves of his jacket in glistening red lines—and flung his hand towards the uniforms, splattering each one with fine droplets of shining crimson.

They didn’t react, didn’t even blink until the ruby splatter began to eat into their faces. The female uniform had caught a good-sized globule between her eyebrows and she stopped first, powering down like a malfunctioning computer as the stain at the centre of her face began to spit and hiss. She swiped at it, pulling away half an eyebrow on the back of her right hand. The skin beneath was raw and wet. A smell like frying pork fat bubbled up. Only a few droplets had sprayed across the blonde man. He gazed down at his chest with something that was almost interest as curls of smoke drifted from the blackening holes eating through the tough nylon of his uniform.

Their leader got the worst of it. A long streak of blood had flown across his face and into his hair. His mouth opened in a silent gape as he doubled over, a rich, reeking hiss of melting flesh rolling from his face. With some effort, he managed to look back up at Brax. His left eye was a ruined mulch—a spreading red gape with sizzling white at its centre like a fried egg from hell. Brax took his chance, pushed past the hideously silent uniforms, and ran.

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Ginx was bored. The familiar pizza, the softly 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, she was sure 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 that 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 was doubled over, one hand pressed to her face as though she was 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 said 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, turning to lean 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!

“But 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 vaporised cheek fat into the dirty concrete. 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 up. 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 N.E.X. officers exited the vehicle and began guiding the husks into the back of the van. The heavyset man—still spilling the insides of his face over the pavement—was more difficult to cajole. The officers had to grab him beneath the armpits and wrench him to his knees before he finally 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, thick fur slicked grey with grease, 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 like a comedy mustache.

"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 rubbish bin. It glistened with the soft, 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 probably the little-emptied bin and the roiling reek 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 curdling foam of the cheap coffee 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 and stared at Riven from beneath twilight-purple eyelashes. “You know you can’t overdose on stim, right? It’s barely chemical; it’s grown 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 on all four sides 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, but class was made crass in Noctara City. Now the gently undulating bases of the trees were emblazoned with graffiti and the peeling posters that advertised tape sales and club nights.

Around the plaza were more food stalls. Lights and slogans swayed above them—guttering neon in smeared grease chrome surfaces. The raised central basin had been a fountain until the city elders 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, pulsing 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. Instead, she summoned a tight nod and drained the cup, gripping the spent cardboard in an effort to quell 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, like a piece of polished sea glass lodged in the mouldering flesh of a weepcap.

“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 pushed 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 currently using his insanely generous gift to entertain a constantly 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 throw their underwear at him 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 heads of the skaterats, trailing starry trails of green and blue 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 else to do and nowhere else to go? You’re just 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. Still, 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 same grim determination as a comic book junkie. Stories about not having to scarf down a grainy cocktail of horsehair nettle and fenugreek to make coarse, reluctant hair grow. 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 even 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 day, the stubble rolling across the scarred dome of her skull was shocking. She appeared alien, like a bug-eyed marmoset with running eyeliner.

Riven’s hair was natural, a fact he crowed about loudly and often. He’d had it polymer-sprayed and Ginx secretly thought it looked like a hat glued to his head, reflective and unmoving. That was another reason why she respected the hell out of Luke. He didn’t opt for polymers or wigs, just a simple strip of blunt hair that ran down the centre of his head. Two tasteful lotus flowers were tattooed on either side, spinning out into spiderwebs that curved behind his ears to meet in an angular half-moon at the nape of his neck. People said eyes were the windows to the soul, but Ginx had always 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 long lines of her angular tunic over her leggings.

“I was ready half an hour ago,” Ginx replied. She turned to wave at Flannigan before discarding her own stool. “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 each 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.

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If you’ve got this far, thank you so much for reading. This is the start of a new experiment for me (more information here), and I’d love to know what you think!

I’ll be posting a new chapter every Tuesday.

Content Warnings

Body horror and descriptions of gore, descriptions of cutting/bleeding, drug use, mild swearing.