Addicted to Ruby and the Rix - Part 1

The itching creeps through his scalp again, crawling over his shoulders. His nails scrabble against his skin, trying to catch the sensation before it reaches his spine and spreads down his back.

His fingernails pulse, throbbing like he’s trapped them in a door. He did that once, as a kid. His dad slammed the car door just as Robbie reached out. The pain was so sharp and fast that for a moment he felt nothing. Then, he held up his fingers, twisted white and red like fleshy sweets, and all the hot agony raced up his arm. He screamed so loudly his own ears hurt.

Dad left a week after that. Robbie often wondered if his screams drove him away.

When Robbie looks at his fingers now, they aren’t red and yellow like a twister gummy. No, they’re golden like a sunrise. They look so delicious; sometimes when he’s really gurning he sucks them, dreaming of Rix. Last week, he sucked them so hard the skin around the nails bled.

He stuffs his hands into his pockets, and tugs open the metal side door. The building they are crashing in is huge, floors upon floors of abandoned rooms with paint and plaster peeling from the ceiling and damp crawling up the walls.

There are loads of these houses in the Indus sectors, once owned by rich folk and abandoned when the factories and warehouses were all moved into the area. Most have been taken over by the Mechs since the Switch, but they’d been gifted this one.

“Headquarters for the Central London Flesh Hunters,” Traps likes to call it. Makes them sound official, powerful.

What does Robbie care,as long as he can get another fix and have a place to crash out and lie in the beautiful golden haze that is Verixil.

He shuffles into the living room on the second floor where Traps and the rest like to mellow out. The air is thick with must. It smells like home, though his mum’s entire flat could have fit inside this room. He wonders if she is back there, but quickly pushes the thought away. She’s better off without him.

“Alright, Dreads?” Traps lifts a lazy hand from the sofa where he’s sprawled. Robbie’s long blond dreadlocks earned him the nickname. That or the fact that Traps doesn’t seem to care about learning anyone’s name. Maybe that’s a good thing—no one lasts long these days.

“Ruby or Twig around?” Robbie asks, eyes flickering over the inert bodies that are draped over couches, armchairs and an old, cubist rug. No sign of Ruby’s white-blond hair.

“They went out hunting with Forehead.”

Robbie nods and slopes off to the kitchen, trying to hide the way his heart thumps uncomfortably in his ribs. He reaches the sink and splashes water over his face, the cold slap shaking some of the lethargy from his bones.

He needs to think. He needs a hit. He needs Ruby. Should have asked how long she’d been gone, but if he asks now, Traps will notice.

Traps doesn’t like it when any of his crew get too close—‘split loyalties’ he calls it. “Don’t need no one thinking about their cock when we’re facing up against those THV bastards.”

But Robbie reckons Traps just doesn’t like the idea of anyone caring for someone more than him. He always has to be the centre, the thread that ties them all together. He likes to think he was the one who picked each one of them up, saved them from the chip, “brought them their great purpose.”

Robbie still remembers the first day he saw Ruby. Her silver hair was tucked up beneath a flat cap so that she could almost pass as a boy. But when she lifted her chin, those ice-blue eyes gave her away. No guy could have eyes like that. Bambi round, and set either side of a perfect button nose, framed by thick dark eye-lashes that bobbed like fans when she blinked. He dreams about those eyes every night. She’d been sitting, hunched on a bench overlooking the Thames, a golden vial twirling beneath her fingers. A slight tremor shook her shoulders so that at first Robbie thought she was cold.

“Hey, sorry, I don’t wanna scare you, like. But it’s not safe sitting out here in the open with the Mechs takin’ people off the streets.”

She let out a little thrilled giggle and shook her head. “I’m all good, thanks. Got protection,” and she waved the little gold vial in his face. “You take this, and you’re golden.” Another giggle.

“What is it?”

She shrugged. “A guy called Traps gave it to me once before, and man, it tastes like heaven, like honey sunshine pouring through your veins.”

“Then what’s stopping you now?” Robbie asked, sitting next to her.

“I want it, and I don’t like that I want it. Not decided yet if I want to keep wanting it. You get me?”

He did. Sort of.

Before the Switch, he’d tried puffs of Loot behind his block of flats with the boy from three doors down. He remembered its soporific pull, the way it made the world soft around the edges. How lovely it would be to stay in that blurred out space so that you didn’t have to feel all the sharp stuff. But the next morning there was still his mum to look after and a headache, and a mouth that tasted like rot. Still, he’d felt the pull of Loot, often lingered in the hallway to see if the boy from three doors down would offer up another puff.

“Will you take it with me?” She’d asked, holding up the vial. “If you take it, the Mechs leave you alone. You don’t have to have the chip, you just help them out with finding people is all.”

Robbie’s never paused to think if Ruby was a lure, and he was the mark. He’s never wondered if Ruby really was teetering on the edge of Rix and if he’d said no, he might have pulled her back from the brink too. Robbie took a sip, gazing into ice blue eyes, and felt Ruby and the Rix dig their golden talons into his blood and bones. He was hooked.

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