Neon Rush {M/M} ❀

Ch. 1.1 Crispy BBQ

There's blood on the concrete floor outside Zef's apartment.

It's fresh. Scarlet. Hasn't had time to go rusty brown. Not a lot—just a round splat of it, and a smear beneath that. Like a semicolon.

A nice bit of punctuation to his day. Super considerate of someone to have a fist fight outside his apartment on his second day in Neorleans. His excitement is already fever-cold, sweat slicking his palms. He'd layered on the anti-perspirant, but under a binder, two tops and the baking sun he'll have pit stains in seconds. Should have put maxi pads in his shirt.

What are the chances his interview for this frankly life-changing job gets cut short before they ask him a single question? This guy. Can't even handle a mild summer's day. He'll be crispy BBQ after one day at Bionic Capital.

Now, there's blood outside his apartment, too.

Puts him on edge. Most things in this city do. He needs to be careful. Cautious. The interview is in forty minutes, and he needs to arrive early. That way, he can sweat in the receptionist's office instead of sweating over the fear of being late. He pulls up the navigator app on his HUD, his cybernetics overlaying his vision with a blinking red line leading the way to the subway station. He follows that line to the elevator of his apartment tower—a city in its own right. As the grated doors of the lift rattle shut and it skyrockets the sixty floors upward, Zef looks out the smog-stained glass to the sub-city beyond.

He moved to Neorleans two days ago. Used to live here in his uni days. Still never got used to the claustrophobic crowd of buildings hunkered over each other or the noise, everything draped in oxidised copper and neon miasma. When the elevator emerges above ground, the light filters in slats. So many buildings sprawl up and overhead with rare gaps. Squares of acid yellow sky quilted into the city's belly.

It gives him a thrill of excitement and nerves. Here, he can start fresh. Build himself. Build his life. The city buzzes with risky promises, but Zef won't listen to the pushers of performance enhancing drugs or pyramid schemes. He's gonna earn his way up the old-fashioned way. Hard work.

You're smart, his dad had told him. If anyone can make it, you can. Just stay safe.

The lift stops. Zef gets out, following his navigator to the monorail station. He knows the way. Charted it yesterday. But the navigator settles his jitters a little.

On the train car, a man wearing a cardboard sign begs for cash. Says he needs it to subvert the heat death of the universe. The other passengers stare into their HUDs, visible only to them, stolidly ignoring the man as if he's one of the talking adverts for anti-aging implants.

They ignore each other too. No one says hello. Or makes eye contact. Zef passes thousands of people on the street and, okay, so none of them stare at the shape of his chest or raise eyebrows when his voice breaks like he's a teenager at twenty-nine, but that's 'cause nearly every time he speaks at all it's to a computer. The automated turnstile takes his rail fare with a falsely chipper, Thanks for riding Neorleans Transit Commission.

Zef gets out at his stop and follows the red line into the open air of the capital district. Unlike the sub-city he crawled out from under, the buildings here don't hunch horizontally to block out the sky. They reach for that sky and nearly touch it. Tall, glass daggers cutting up the clouds. Green things grow. Palm trees, elephant ears and birds of paradise. Not a speck of anything close to verdant in the sub-city, but that's how it goes in a place without sunlight.

At the centre of the ring road stretches a tightly winding building like a DNA strand. Zef crosses the street towards it, the pavement glowing like coals under the shoes he scrimped to buy. Men and women, glossy as magazine models, march through those doors. All cartographically tailored suits and mercury shine. Implants wink silver and gold from temples, bared wrists, the back of a neck.