This Town Will Never Let Us Go

From up here you can see it all, hear it all, taste most of it and feel the rest when the electric lights and the satellite signals prickle against your skin. The town, from midnight to six, marked out in headlights and the flash-fire of a culture in War-time. Séance-messages written in the patterns of the road signs, and ghost-transmissions scrambled into the background noise of the traffic. Animal scent-signals from the fried food stands. All describing something, buried under the tarmac and the street-geometry. Down there, a girl in a fake-bone mask is working on a ritual to bring it to the surface. A popular performing artiste with a navel stud and serious identity problems is finding herself stalked – literally – by her own image. An ambulance crewman is about to find his own way of getting involved in the War. And bringing them all together, in one neat little urban mythology, there’s Faction Paradox – part cult, part subculture, part pop phenomenon, and part criminal syndicate, either watching-without-being-seen or simply not existing at all (at least until someone invents it). Assuming they’re not wholly imaginary, the archons of the Faction seem like the only ones who know what this town really is – what every town really is – and what’s bound to happen when it wakes up.