Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Three (2/2)
Foneline to Destiny
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Tuesday!
Available Chapters — Content Warnings
Sevi resumed her bartending duties and Ginx turned her back to the bar, her gaze drawn to the smoky dancefloor. A cage ran around the edge—an effort by Caggotty to keep the inevitable fights away from the valuable bar area. People launched themselves at the steel mesh, catapulting into a crowd herded together like roaches in a protein farm. Their teeth shone blue and ghostly in the blacklight. Ginx glanced down at her thin jacket and rubbed uselessly at the white crumbs scattered across the lapels. She had no idea what the crumbs were—could have been makeup, stim, or shroom spores for all she knew—but they always glistened bright as diamond dust in the UV-soaked womb of the Bunker.
Beyond the dancefloor was the alcove where Tattie plied her dubious trade. Ginx met the seer’s eyes, gave her a small half-wave. Tattie nodded in return. She looked tired. Her hair wasn’t backcombed as high as usual, and her expression was wan and distracted.
Tattie was always polite, but something about her gave Ginx the creeps. The legend, The Blue Bunker presents Tattiana the Blood Seer, was spelled out in strips of luminous green above her head. The chartreuse light fought with a small collection of artificial candles, creating a sinister pooling of light and shadow. Ginx was surprised Caggotty hadn’t gone as far as installing a smoke machine in there. Tattie presided over the table wedged at its crushed red velvet heart like a medium holding court at a seance—which Ginx supposed she was, if you believed the bull about hemo freaks.
Teeth and Leather Jacket were sitting on the bench in front of Tattie’s table, both goggling over some revolting piece of viscera ladled into an ashy glass bowl. Hemo magick promised many things. You could contact the dead. You could divine your future or manifest a wish, but Ginx’s problem with it was in the execution. It was all amphibian’s blood and donated sperm. It was gross, and when Tattie was working on the other side of the club, she usually tried to ignore her. Still, she couldn’t help wondering what Teeth and Leather Jacket had paid for. Tattie would never tell her, of course. Blood seers traded in secrets. If word spread that they snitched, they’d never find work again.
Ginx almost dropped her beer when Toni vaulted over the bar. She landed heavily at her side and sprinted towards the dancefloor, elbowing people out of her way. Ginx chugged a last mouthful of beer before following her into the crowd. Pushing past an aging caprattler who cursed her in several languages, she finally saw what had alerted Toni. A teenager was swaying at the center of the dancefloor, the whites of his eyes red and dank as freeze-dried liver. His mouth was stretched comically wide, frothing with a yellow, creamy substance. Someone had sold the kid bad caps.
“Grab him,” Toni yelled, reaching for a flailing arm.
Ginx ran to the teenager’s side and seized him around the waist, staggering beneath his weight when he slumped against her.
“How is he so heavy?” she said. “He looks like a ceiling fan could blow him away.”
“Just help me get him to the Hole.”
Moving awkwardly against the resistant horde of clubbers, Ginx and Toni manoeuvred the sweating teenager through the club and out into the corridor. Hidden beneath a poster advertising Gunny’s Self-Cleaning Wigs was the door to the Hole—a musty little room housing a single plastic bench and a first aid kit. It was another of Caggotty’s brainwaves. He refused to have husk patrols anywhere near the club, so everything had to be dealt with in-house—including underage clubbers tripping on bad caps.
Someone had actually died on the property once. A woman glassed a man in the face and he’d bled out on the dancefloor, surrounded by shrieking onlookers and belligerent dancers who refused to give up their hard-won spot just because a man was bleeding to death at their feet. Caggotty had hauled the body out himself, called for pick-up to take it away, and closed the Bunker early for the first time in twelve years. After that, he switched out glasses for plastic cups.
Ginx and Toni hauled the teenager—twitching now, his limbs loose and spasming—onto the bench. He flipped onto his side, staring at the pooling expanse of creamy foam that fell from his gaping mouth to splatter against the floor.
“Stupid sod,” Toni said. She reached for the first aid kit and rummaged inside. “This is the third in a week. Someone’s holding a bad batch.”
“It won’t be Traci. She’d slice the hands off any supplier who palmed her crap like this.”
The teenager began to gurgle. He lifted glossy liver eyes to the ceiling, his waxy face a study in rapture. Toni found a stim pen and stabbed it into his chest. His expression turned to angry shock as the foam cascading from his mouth slowed and the mad light in his eyes dimmed.
“Will he be alright?” Ginx said.
“He’ll sleep it off. He’ll have a bitch of a headache in the morning, though. Probably two swollen eyes and a facial twitch too. Serves him right.”
Toni went to inform Caggotty about the Hole’s latest occupant while Ginx drifted back into the club. She was considering a third beer when the laser projectors installed around the perimeter—usually blinking in blue and purple spars—shut down for the space of a breath. Then they whirred back to life, throwing out arms of shimmering red. Regulars knew this meant the caps were off, spiked, or generally shittier than usual. There would be no more customers for Traci-Lynn that evening. Several wall-leaners surreptitiously thumbed small packets back into their pockets.
Red the colour of a fresh wound blinked once, twice. The projectors turned towards the wall, rousing to throw a notice across the ceiling in blue and white: Blue Mamba 2 for 1 — Next 10 minutes only! Dancers’ heads winked azure beneath the reaching fingers of the flashing lights as a cheer rumbled through the building.
“Bloody Caggotty,” Toni said, reappearing beside her. “Now we’re gonna get rammed.”
She raced back to the bar as the first wave of eager takers crowded in. Ginx caught Sevi raising an eyebrow in Toni’s direction before they were both lost to view.
“You want a blue mamba?”
Luke had sought her out again. If Ginx didn’t know better, she’d have thought it was on purpose.
“You’ve got no chance getting to the bar,” she said, nodding towards the crowd swelling before Toni and Sevi. “I thought you’d gone home.”
“It’s early yet. You think that kid will be okay?”
“Yes, the little idiot will be fine.”
Luke glanced at Tattie’s alcove. “Shall we get our fortunes told?”
Ginx almost laughed at him. She bit the instinct back and shook her head. “I’m not into that hemo stuff.”
He looked disappointed. The projectors were back to hurling blue and purple strobes across the club and a long sapphire beam flashed across his face, casting his profile in silver relief and highlighting the firm angle of his jaw.
“We could do something else,” Ginx suggested. “There’s a prophecy phone upstairs.”
A dull metal staircase was curled like a rigid snake in the corner of the club. When Luke agreed to follow her up, Ginx had to grip the handrail tight to keep her stim-deprived fingers from shaking. She walked quickly, berating herself for not letting him go first. Now he had a face-first view of her ascending arse.
Bypassing the viewing platform that hung over the dancefloor, Ginx led Luke into a long room set back from the landing. It was a more relaxed space than the main club, furnished with sofas sagging with old rips and swathed in so much tape, they looked like misshapen mummies. Caggotty had installed a second bar up there but closed it when it failed to turn a profit.
“The phone’s over here,” she said.
The club’s upper level was quiet. Too quiet. Mustarian lute metal leaked from cheap speakers in the ceiling. Apart from a bearded man sleeping in a corner and a small group of inebriated blow-ins, the place was deserted.
The quiet didn’t seem to bother Luke. He grinned at the prophecy phone hooked up against the far wall.
“I love these things. I used one years ago. It said I was going to lose something I held dear. Came true, too. The week after that, a mushmute ate my first guitar.”
Ginx wanted to ask him more about the mushmute and the devoured guitar. She imagined it must have been a fairly traumatic experience, but Luke was already picking up the fat black receiver and listening for a dial tone. He ran a finger down the list of options printed on a sticker, already beginning to peel from the phone’s angular, green-chrome side. Scribbled across the top of the box were the words, “This fone, no shit!” The graffiti made an arresting contrast with the paper cup half full of chewed-up pumpkin seeds someone had dumped beside it.
“What should we ask it?” he said.
“I don’t know. I’ve never used one.”
Luke turned to her with an incredulous expression. “Really? You should definitely go first, then.”
He offered her the receiver. It was surprisingly heavy and when Ginx lifted it to her ear, the chirruping tone grated against her eardrum. She scanned the peeling options, unable to choose between, “First letter of your future lover’s name”, or, “Date of your death”. Finally, she scanned her wrist across the phone’s tiny screen, waited for the credits to transfer, and selected, “Next travel destination”. It seemed a safe enough choice. Luke pressed his ear to the back of the receiver, straining to hear what the phone would prophesy.
The tone cut short with a strangled squawk and a woman’s voice came on the line, robotic and soothing.
“Thank you for using Foneline to Destiny. We hope you have a pleasant experience. You wish to know what your next travel destination will be. Please stand by.”
A series of long beeps followed.
“Is is broken?” Ginx said.
“No, that’s the phone deciding your destiny. Give it a minute.”
Luke’s breath tickled the side of her face. With a jolt she tried very hard to conceal, Ginx realised she had never been this close to him before. His skin smelled like cool-mint soap.
“You don’t really believe a phone can tell the future, do you?” she said.
Luke shrugged against her shoulder. “I believe lots of things.”
The beeping faded away and the soothing robotic woman returned. “You will soon be embarking on a journey,” she said. “The road will be long. It will take you far from home. Thank you again for using Foneline to Destiny. Have a wonderful morning.“
Ginx replaced the reciever a little too forcefully. “Well, that was a load of crap. I’m never seeing those credits again, and I can barely make rent this month as it is.”
“Why do you think it’s crap?”
“Because I’m not going on a journey. I’ll be stuck here forever.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe I’ll get a gig playing Lobo or Mustara. You can join my crew.”
Luke was still standing extremely close to Ginx. So close that if she wanted to kiss him, she’d only have to incline her head. They stared at each other while she tried to decide if she should move away first, or if Luke was actually waiting for her to kiss him. She almost did it, almost leaned forward that further half an inch. Then Luke turned to the phone and lifted the receiver from its greasy cradle.
“I’m going to ask it how rich I’m going to be.”
Ginx slumped back against the wall and thought again about getting a third beer.
This week, I’m wondering, would you trust your credits with Tattiana the Blood Seer or the Foneline to Destiny?
Content Warnings
Alcohol use, description of death, description of drug overdose, mild swearing