10.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!
Club RED was a labor of love. A cyclopean eye of neon tubes stared down at the street from the facade of a beautiful temple to excess, bathing the darkening street in bloodred light which played through the mist kicked up by a nearby waterfall. The building was dark glass and darker stone, three stories tall and culminating in a domed roof. It wasn’t even 5 pm, but the line was pouring out the door and onto the sidewalk, foreign raincoats and umbrellas standing side by side with wet-haired Diluvian partygoers.
Shiv had never entered a nightclub through the front before. There’d been one club, the Magpie, that she’d frequented with her friends, but the owner was one of Ornarch’s devout and always let them skip the lines. Huh. She hadn’t been to the Magpie in years. She wasn’t even sure if it was still in business.
The line moved quickly, and before long, she was at the door. “Let’s see some ID.” There were two bouncers, identically dour and militaristic-looking men who loomed over her like a pair of sunglasses-clad statues, their suits custom-made to fit over the bulky structure of a mil-spec exocloak. Thin seams in the skin of their faces suggested the presence of subdermal armor plating to protect what the mechanized armor didn’t. One of them handled a scanner with the practiced care of a guy whose grip could crush a human skull.
Shiv showed them the card. “Kooler sent me.” The one with the scanner stared her down while the other barked a few quick words into a headset. If shit went south, the only viable exit was ducking the rope to the left, but Headset would make a grab for her and if those huge hands got a grip it was over. She’d need to distract him first, maybe blind him. Throw her coat in his face? She started to shrug it off her shoulder, just in case. Scanner continued to glower at her in a prolific display of disdain. He should be too far away to do anything, but just in case-
Headset spoke, snapping her out of her planning.
“Hm?” She’d missed what he’d actually said.
“Go on in. The boss is on the second floor.” Shiv pulled her coat back over her shoulder and brushed past the bouncers and into the club. She pushed her way past a heavy curtain of soundproof fabric and replaced the endless roar of the streets with the endless roar of Club RED’s speakers.
Water poured down gilded fountain walls and colored lights arced and scattered through thick smoke, produced by a mix of sweet-scented cigarettes and industrial fog machines. Waiters and waitresses wearing practically nothing served a very peculiar clientele: half of the patrons were exactly what she’d expected, the sort of wealthy-looking folks willing to spend fifteen credits on a can of beer; and the other half were all grizzled paramilitary types. The burning coal glow of their cybernetic eyes stared out at her through the fog, automatically seeking out her vital organs before flicking back to their drinks.
Shiv scaled the stairs to the second floor, taking a moment to look out on the dance floor from the balcony. The band’s frontwoman was more work of art than human, her limbs all formed from sweeping lines of carbon fiber and steel. Her guitar plugged into a port on the back of her neck, her quicksilver fingers dancing over the strings with surreal grace. She had a voice like an angel with a smoking habit.
“She’s quite something, ain’t she?” A woman’s voice came from behind Shiv. She turned to see Kurtz, for who else could it be? The owner of Club RED was maybe forty years old, a little shorter than Shiv, and built like a brick. Her head was clean-shaven, revealing dozens of tally mark tattoos, in sets of five, spreading from near her temple and across half of her head. Unlike everyone else, she was dressed simply and practically, in sturdy black pants and a tank top, and unlike everyone else, she had a gun at her hip, an antique revolver. Both of her eyes were red: one eye was flesh, with an iris that had either been dyed or transplanted. The other eye was metal, the iris glowing the exact same shade as the vast eye on the front of the building. She carried herself with an easy confidence, bordering on arrogance. “Are you the one Kooler mentioned?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Joan Kurtz, owner of Club RED and REDEYE PMSC. What brings you to my door?”
Talk.
"I'm looking for revenge."
"I need to find someone."
"I want to talk to Odie."
"I'm here on Ornarch's orders."
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