Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Thirteen (3/4)

Street Dancing

Caroline Barnard-Smith

Feb 07, 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.

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Ginx guessed the delivery driver had been working this gig a long time. It took her barely fifteen minutes to back the van into the Noctarum’s delivery hatch and unload the bricks. They watched from the shuttered entrance of a Mustarian deli as she sped away, coasting on a short blast of angry orange sparks.

Brax pushed his hands into his pockets in a parody of nonchalance. “How long will we have to wait?”

“I have no idea,” Tattie said, pulling out a captube. She glared at it when she saw it was spent, then began flipping it in her fingers in the orange-hued dark. “I don’t know the husks’ schedule.”

Maybe that’s something she should have thought about.

Ginx leaned against the grimy deli tiles and closed her eyes. Barely ten minutes passed before Tattie was elbowing her in the ribs, needling her to attention.

“They’re coming out,” she said. “Shit, that was fast.”

A trail of husks were staggering from the Noctarum’s entrance, scattered at first, then growing in number until they became a lumbering horde. They were clearly doped. Most of them walked with their heads bent low, as though studying something interesting on the greasy pavement. Some of them were wide-eyed and gurning, faces turned to the sky and hands clenched into spasming fists they held tight to their chests like glitching holofighters.

“Does anyone see Toni?” Ginx said. When no one answered, she gave voice to the sliver of guilt beginning to tremble in the deepest whorl of her guts. “Do you think they’re in pain? Did eating those mushroom bricks hurt them?”

“I thought husks didn’t feel pain,” Brax said.

Push that thought from your mind. Toni will be unharmed.

Tattie was concentrating on the horde, her eyes flicking from one hobbling grey-clad body to the next.

“I’ll take that one.”

She pointed at a female husk standing in the middle of the road. A maintenance drone flew overhead, aged motors clanking methodically. The husk followed its path, loopy-eyed and slack-jawed.

“That one over there looks about your size, Brax,” Tattie said, pointing again. “Ginx, you okay picking one out on your own?”

How incredibly patronising. The perfect candidate is seven metres away, on your left. The pale woman with the large hands. She’s banging her forehead against that shop window.

“I’m good,” Ginx said.

She jogged up the street, skirting other rogue husks who had broken from the drunken pack. They were becoming more erratic by the minute. One portly, middle-aged husk grasped a street lamp pole in both hands and slowly swung around it, his face pulled into an unnaturally beatific mask. A woman walking with a stiff limp sat down on the floor, legs stuck out in front of her like an oversized doll. She began slapping a discordant beat on the pavement, both hands rising and falling in jerky motions. Ginx was more disturbed by the fact that none of them spoke. The entire scene was a nightmare play conducted in silence. A monotone dance with no soundtrack.

Ginx reached the pale woman and watched her for a moment. The husk was gently knocking her face against the brightly lit window of a tatty market. Every time she bounced back to see she still hadn’t managed to morph right through the glass and into the gaudy display of cheese spray and wine boxes, she seemed surprised and frustrated.

“Hey,” Ginx tried, placing a hesitant hand on the woman’s arm. “You’ll hurt yourself if you break the glass. Perhaps we should take you away from here?” The woman didn’t even register her presence.

She can’t understand you. Not in this state. Just grab her arm, and she’ll follow you.

Ginx wasn’t sure if she believed that, but when she gripped the husk’s wrist, the woman abandoned the window and allowed Ginx to tug her back to where Tattie and Brax were waiting with their own husk body doubles. They were attempting to undress them. Tattie had already peeled the boxy, oversized shirt from her husk and was working on the trousers, but Brax seemed to be having trouble with his.

“My one keeps sticking his tongue out,” he said. “It’s freaking me out.”

“Just ignore it,” Tattie said.

“We’re dressing them in our clothes, right?” Ginx said, eying the bland grey-nylon tube wrapped around the chest of Tattie’s husk. It flattened every hint of breasts, made every husk perfectly uniform. “We can’t just let them walk around in their pants.”

“Don’t start with this,” Tattie said. She paused in the middle of sliding her husk’s trousers down and turned to Ginx, leaving her body double half-naked and swaying against the wall of the deli. “Brax has already been on at me about it. We can’t dress them in our clothes because they might identify us, and it’s not like they’re going to freeze to death in this bloody swelter.”

As if being husked isn’t dehumanising enough.

“They’re still people though,” Ginx argued. “They’ve already been violated by the N.E.X. We don’t have to make it worse.”

Tattie wrangled the last trouser leg from the husk’s booted foot and stood, sighing. “I don’t like it, Ginx. Try to remind yourself this will help them in the long run. If we can yank the husk data from the N.E.X. systems, we could free them.”

She’s almost convinced herself that’s why she’s doing this. Not more than two days ago it was all about the credits and escaping the planet. You flesh bags are incredibly fickle.

Ginx turned to her husk, an apology on her split lips. She stashed it when she remembered it would mean nothing to her, wouldn’t put even a slight dent in that black void of a stare. Slowly, Ginx reached for the first shirt button.

Once they were each dressed in the grey nylon uniforms, they contemplated each other with competing sneers of distaste. The boxy hat was too big for Brax, made his head appear shrunken and childlike, and the pouchy shirt made Tattie look ten pounds heavier. They were all hideously uncomfortable, scratching and pulling at fabric that itched like an abrasive bitch.

“How do they stand this?” Brax said.

“It’s not like they have a choice,” Ginx replied.

She was thinking of Toni, forced to wear this crap against skin made sensitive by the dodgy vits she was given as a child. She wanted more than data, she realised. She wanted to destroy the N.E.X. She wanted to annihilate them. She wanted to wrap a sinewy tentacle around Governor Fleishot’s neck and squeeze until her eyes broke and leaked. The daemon turned in her chest, thrumming with a steady, building heat.

“Let’s move,” Tattie said. “Before Brax loses his nerve.”

She grinned at Brax before he could protest and he laughed, giving her an affectionate shove in the shoulder.

Nauseating.

They crossed the street in lockstep, trying to appear as husk-like as possible. A sudden vision flashed across Ginx’s tired brain—an image of them marching in these ridiculous, ill-fitting clothes, staring straight ahead, attempting to smooth their faces into the approximation of a blank automaton. She stifled a fleeting and highly inappropriate urge to laugh.

These emotional swings are starting to grate.

“Should we worry about the surveillance cams picking up the state of these husks?” Brax whispered.

“Not this time of night,” Tattie said. “The husks are the surveillance. The N.E.X. would never see this coming, that’s what makes this plan so bloody brilliant.” She was fighting to keep her voice steady, flushed with adrenaline and primed for imminent action.

The Noctarum reared before them, doors flung open to the night. The husk patrols had disappeared into Noctara’s rabbit-warren streets and Ginx was wearing a flammable irritant as a disguise. Still, when they entered the building, she couldn’t help glancing at the brace of cameras mounted around the entranceway. Then they were in, the doors shut fast behind them.

Content Warnings

Mild swearing

Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Thirteen (3/4)

Street Dancing

Content Warnings

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