Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Twelve (5/5)
Autumn Dawn
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday! Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.
Autumn was wearing a wig of long, waxy-looking auburn curls. They bounced across her shoulders as she pushed herself from the wall she’d been leaning against.
“Are you fans?” she asked. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t have time for this. I’m next to go on.”
“You’re Autumn Riviera, right?” Brax said, his voice bright and artificial. “You’re a research scientist.”
Autumn shrank back against the wall, her eyes narrowing to darting slits. “Are you with Romlab Enterprises? I already told your lot I’m not interested. If you keep harassing me, I’ll have to take this to my superiors.”
“That’s a fantastically light touch, you’ve got there, Brax,” Tattie said. He moved aside with a dejected huff.
“I apologise for my pushy friend,” Tattie continued. She could practically feel Brax bristle at her back. “What he meant to say is, we’re not from any lab, but we would like a quick word.”
Autumn’s face began to colour, her expression shifting to one of indignant rage. Then Ginx segued into view and made her shrivel again, her attention fixed on the warping curves of the daemon host’s mouth-splits.
“We’re not asking,” Ginx said. She widened her splits the barest fraction, allowed the briefest flicker of tentacle to flash from the opening peel of her jaw. Autumn looked as though she was going to throw up.
“Let’s find somewhere a bit more private, shall we?” Tattie suggested.
As they moved towards the rear exit of the Screaming Cat, Tattie shot Ginx a warning glance. She responded with a misshapen smirk.
“Did you want to sit through more poetry?” Ginx said. “This was quicker.”
They hustled Autumn through the door and slipped into the gritty dark of the tight alley running behind the club, just as Bowler Hat began asking for her to join him on stage. Autumn stared back at him mournfully before being swept outside. Piles of rubbish sweated against greasy brick, providing a grandiose backdrop of oily mountains for three rats noisily fighting over a shredded pizza slice. Tattie thought it was ham and mushroom.
“What do you people want?” Autumn asked. She tried to stare them down, but the quaver in her voice betrayed her fear.
“It’s okay, love. Calm down,” Tattie said, holding her hands up in a gesture of peace. “Brax’s already shown our cards, so I might as well be straight with you.”
“Your name is Brax?” Autumn said. She studied Brax’s face as though committing every detail to memory.
“That’s great,” Brax said. “Why don’t we give Ms Riviera your home addresses while we’re at it?”
Tattie gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “She won’t remember any of this.”
“How do you know my real name?” Autumn said. Then she registered Tattie’s words and took a long step back towards the door. “What do you mean, I won’t remember?”
Ginx bumped up against her, halting her progress and upsetting the rats. They bounded down the alley amid a flurry of high-pitched squeals, their slimy pizza prize discarded in a puddle of something rank and steaming.
“Never mind that,” Tattie said, maintaining careful eye contact with Ginx. Ginx stuck a tentacle-wrapped tongue out at her. “We need to get into the Noctarum, and we know you have the keycodes. If you help us out, we could have you back inside in time to do your poetry thing. I’m a blood seer, I‘ll make you forget all of this as soon as you give us the codes. No fuss, no muss. I can even sweeten the pot if you like. I could remove the memory of a bitchy ex or instruct your subconscious to give you the best dreams of your life.”
Tattie had lost her at ‘we need to get into the Noctarum’. Autumn’s mouth dropped open, her eyes blazing with wild fear. As she drew in breath ready to release her first scream, Ginx clamped a hand firmly over her mouth.
“Being straight’s obviously not working,” she said, wrapping her free arm around Autumn’s waist when the woman began to buck and kick. “Do you have any other fabulous ideas?”
Tattie sighed. She turned to Brax, hoping he’d back her up even though she knew he’d hate what came next.
“Just get it done,” he said. “This has taken too long already.”
Tattie took out her knife and reached for Autumn’s hand. Autumn struggled harder, scrabbling against Ginx’s grip on her waist while attempting to launch herself into the alley. Trying not to look directly at her, Tattie fixed Autumn’s damp hand tight in hers and slid the tip of the knife into the pad of her shaking palm. A glossy bead of blood broke from the surface. Tattie immediately swiped it on her forefinger and pulled her coat aside to plug it into the silver disc nestled against her collarbone.
She exhaled a shaky breath as the blood sank into the syncing device, tried to focus on the new energy radiating from the disc to snake along the twitching roadmap of her nervous system. Autumn’s essence was honey-hued and sweet. This was a woman slow to anger, a curious soul carefully cradling a rare ember of empathy. Freaking her out made Tattie feel like solid crap. She tried to picture the sleek lines of the Void Ranger, imagined breaking sky with Brax at her side and a wedge of credits straining the storage capacity of her wrist chip. Then she placed a hand on Autumn’s forehead and drew up the power fused into her blood, meshed it with the energy she’d gleaned from Autumn’s until they commingled into a pulsing heat that she concentrated into her palm. Autumn stopped fighting and stared back at Tattie, blank and complacent. The perfect cooperative vessel. Tattie removed her hand and stuffed it into a pocket so no one would see how badly it was shaking.
“We didn’t have another choice,” Ginx said, either guessing Tattie’s scrambled thoughts or having them dictated by her daemon squatter. “She’s not an unwilling puppet, and you’re not using your gift to fuck decent people over. This is nothing like what happened to you on Rakkone because Autumn won’t remember it.”
Daemon squatter it was, then.
“You have no bloody idea what happened to me on Rakkone.” Tattie couldn’t squash her anger. It rose like metallic bile that frothed in her gut and scorched the back of her throat. “You have no idea and you have no right to know anything about it. What’s your little daemon friend been whispering about me, Ginx? You tell it to stay the fuck out of my head or Mervaroid help me, I will reach down your neck and drag the bastard out.”
A surge of panic flashed in Ginx’s eyes, made them bright and steely in the smoky yellow light of the alley. It only lasted a scant second, but it was enough to deflate Tattie. If a daemon-bonded person with the strength to crush a human head in one bloody-fisted tentacle was afraid of her, what did that mean? Was any part of her still human? After all, here she was in a rancid back alley slippery with rodents and piss, using the nano-infused hemo those bastards plugged into her veins to dope an innocent poet. They’d held her down and locked her away, but how was she any better than them? Tattie staggered backwards, leaving Autumn alone to lean against Ginx and gaze dumbly at the returning rats.
Brax turned her to face him, ran a warm thumb across her right temple. “It’s okay,” he said. “Breathe. We might have hijacked a part-time poet, but remember who that poet works for. Autumn’s a researcher with access to husk information. Doing this could help spring Toni.”
Tattie’s hands ceased trembling, hardened to comforting fists in the warm dark of her pockets. She offered Brax a small, lopsided smile. They’d spent so many long, grating years apart, she’d almost forgotten that he wasn’t all bleeding heart. Sometimes he was a practical little bugger.
“Let’s wrap this up.” Tattie unstrapped a compact port from her belt and thrust it before Autumn’s vacant face. “Input the keycodes.”
It took several attempts to nail the keycodes down. Autumn’s limp hand kept slipping from the port keys but finally, they had the full set of codes. Everything was in place. All they had to do was drug a small army of husks and sneak into the most tightly fortified building on the planet. Tattie only knew one thing for certain: she was going to take a long steam bath before any of that happened. Once they’d hatched their plan, there was no telling when she’d be able to get another one.
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Content Warnings
Brief description of blood/cutting, swearing