Post Soundtrack
The beat of the music pulsed in her very veins. As far as Daiya was concerned, it was the rhythm of the city itself. It kept time to the slow footfalls of lunar pedestrians, the flow of trams that
mostly —save for some Corpo diversion— ran on time, the split-second calculations of the currency exchanges that powered the city’s operations. Money into Mohs, time into Mohs, music into…no. No matter how much she paid for a new album, or monthly access to her tunes, the teen never could put a price on the music itself.
It was the music that drove her to seek it out in different places, or at least that’s what Daiya told herself. She didn’t know for certain what brought her to this club tonight, or whether that mattered. The crowd pressed tight against her bare shoulders, her hips clad in synthetic fabric, keeping her moving with them. This was what she loved most about music, its movement, its life. Sometimes music felt like a living thing that used her to breathe. It was quiet during those times, inside her head that is, and Daiya gladly could gladly oblige the music.
As her hand raised up above her head, her breathe and body following the demands of the music, just as her eyes lifted to the sky. Or to the ceiling, rather. There was no sky down here, not kilometers beneath the moon’s surface. No sun reached its gaze down to the lava tubes, nor stars to guide any dreams. Daiya remembered now how the stars looked on that night, one that felt so long ago now. It was the night that changed her life and brought her to now, one that felt much like this moment did now.
Bittersweet.
The sensation began in her stomach, where Daiya could feel it the most keenly. A pang at the bottom, the beginning of a pit that could open deeper than the mohole. Then she felt it in her hips, swaying freely in the way they shouldn’t be. Untethered, in the way the teen sometimes knew she shouldn’t be. Her eyes slowly drifted down, unfocused at first, only to finally register that the music had changed and the dance floor had emptied out. With only a few people dancing now, couples mainly, Daiya let her arms and body slowly drift back to the center as she drifted out from the dance floor.
A sudden thirst gripped her just as her hand gripped around the polycarbonate container. “Thanks!” Daiya told him, and it was a him, she was sure of it. She didn’t think to look again until her thirst was quenched, the liquor bubbling down her throat with an ebbing fire that soothed the remains of what pulsed in her limbs. Her eyes came up from the liquid’s dark surface, scanning him through the neon gaze of the club’s lighting. Potent, but could do with some refinements. As for the man, what there was underneath the vivid paint and the pallor colored by cyberware, what the sidelined dancer saw drew a sharp breath that tightened at her sides.
Daiya let it out, her defemsive instincts just a reflex that would pass in a moment. She didn’t really think all the city’s cyborgs were out to get her, just the few that dominated the Unimatrix One gang. Who definitely didn’t dominate the club scene, that was for sure. Her next breath was easier, as was the grin that could light up her face even without the strobing neon. “Aren’t you a tall drink of,” she glanced down at her hand, giving it an experimental slosh as if it wasn’t already half gone, “whatever this is.”
