Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
JEX
People always ask me, “Jex, how’d you get so… festive?”
They want a sob story. They want to hear about the mommy who didn’t hug me or the daddy who used me as a cigarette butt for his unfiltered Camels. They want a neat little psychological bow to tie around my neck so they can tuck me into a file folder and feel safe.
But life isn’t a tragedy, babe. It’s a comedy. It’s just that most people have a really shitty sense of humour.
I’m sitting in my “office”—which is actually a condemned funhouse in an abandoned pier district.
The air smells like wet salt, rusted gears, and the faint, sweet rot of dead things under the boardwalk.
A giant, cracked fibreglass clown head hangs from the ceiling, its jaw missing, staring at me with one bulbous, flickering eye.
“Don’t look at me like that, Giggles,” I mutter, throwing a dart at a map of the Hillside Sanitarium pinned to his nose. Thwack. Bullseye. Right on the laundry intake.
Do I have friends?
Depends on your definition. If you mean people I share a beer with and talk about the weather, then fuck no. People are boring. They’re predictable. They’re meat with opinions. But if you mean “The Choir”? Well, they’re a different story.
They’re the ones the city spat out. The ones who realised that the law is just a suggestion written by guys in suits who pay for their sins in instalments.
There’s Knuckles, a seven-foot-tall wall of scar tissue who hasn’t spoken a word since he was ten; and Pip, a twelve-year-old girl who can pick a lock with a piece of gum and a prayer.
They don’t help me because they love me. They help me because I’m the only one who doesn’t try to “fix” them. I just give them a match and tell them which way the wind is blowing.
I wasn’t always the Dealer.
I remember being a suit. Can you imagine it?
Jex in a tie. Jex with a briefcase. Jex worrying about the interest rate on a mortgage.
I worked for the city. I was one of the guys who processed the “Section 8” detentions.
I was the one who signed the papers that sent girls like Hallow to places like Hillside.
I thought I was helping. I thought I was part of the “clean hands” brigade.
Then I saw the ledger. Not the official one, but the real one. The one where Aris’s name appeared next to “Research Grants” that looked an awful lot like bribes. I saw the photos of what happened to the girls who didn’t “recover.” I saw the way the system didn’t just break people—it harvested them.
I tried to be a hero. I went to my boss. I went to the cops.
They laughed at me. Then they took me into a back room and showed me what happens to heroes. They didn’t kill me. They just broke my jaw and left me in the gutter.
I remember laying in the rain, tasting my own blood, looking up at the neon signs of the city. And that’s when it hit me. The Big Joke.
The world isn’t a court. It’s a casino. And the house always wins—unless you’re the one who burns the casino down.
I stopped being Jex the Clerk. I died in that alley. When I stood up, I was the Dealer. I realised that if the world wanted me to be a monster, I’d be the best fucking monster they’d ever seen. I’d be the one who makes the “gods” in their white walls scream for the very mercy they never gave.
“Boss?”
I spin around, my purple coat snapping. Knuckles is standing in the doorway of the funhouse, holding a heavy crate. His face is a roadmap of old fights, and his eyes are as empty as a Sunday morning.
“Is it ready, Knuckles? Did Pip get the blueprints?”
He nods once, dropping the crate. It hits the floor with a metallic clank that makes my heart skip a beat.
“Good. Good, good, good.” I hop over to the crate, my boots clicking on the floor.
I pry it open with a crowbar. Inside, nestled in straw, are a dozen canisters of “The Punchline”—a customised nerve gas I’ve been cooking in the basement.
It doesn’t kill you. It just makes you see things.
It turns your worst memories into a 4D IMAX movie you can’t turn off.
I pick up a canister, cradling it like a baby.
“Aris thinks he’s the only one who knows how to play with brains,” I whisper, a wide, jagged grin splitting my face. “Wait until he gets a load of my ‘bedside manner.’ We’re going to give Hillside a night they’ll never forget.”
I turn back to the giant clown head, my eyes burning with a manic, obsessive light.
“Two hundred and fourteen days, Hallow,” I murmur. “I haven’t forgotten the promise. The Dealer is coming. And I’ve got a full house.”
I let out a laugh that starts in my gut and turns into a jagged, high-pitched howl that echoes through the empty funhouse. Outside, the tide comes in, the waves slamming against the pier like a countdown.
The joke is almost over. And the punchline?
The punchline is going to be bloody.
I sit back on the floor, leaning against the cold crate of gas, and pull a crumpled, sweat-stained photograph from my inner pocket. It’s the only thing in this world I don’t treat like a joke.
I don’t know the sound of her laugh. I don’t know if she likes her coffee black or if she’s the kind of girl who cries at movies.
We’ve never shared a breath in the same room.
But I’ve lived inside her file for six months.
I’ve memorised the topography of her soul through the ink Aris spilled on those pages.
“Look at her, Knuckles,” I whisper, holding the photo up into the flickering green light of the funhouse. “Tell me she doesn’t look like a riot waiting for a place to happen.”
In the photo—the one I snatched from the ‘Deleted’ archives before I burned my old office to the ground—she isn’t the ghost she is now. She’s standing backstage, leaning against a brick wall, covered in the beautiful, chaotic mess of her own making.
She has this hair—this wild, platinum-blonde mane that she’d dipped into jars of ink.
One side is a shocking, electric blue, the other a bruised, cinematic red.
It’s tied up in these jagged, messy pigtails that look like they were chopped with a combat knife.
She’s wearing a tattered tutu that’s more thread than fabric, paired with heavy, scuffed combat boots that have ‘KISS ME’ scrawled across the toes in silver sharpie.
She looks like a porcelain doll that someone took a sledgehammer to and then decided was better that way.
Her face… God, her face. She’s got this pale, moonlight skin, and eyes that are framed by smeared, kohl-heavy makeup.
She looks like she’s been crying neon, or maybe she just doesn’t give a fuck if the world sees her mess.
She’s smirking at the camera—a lopsided, “fuck you” grin that shows a hint of a chipped front tooth.
She’s perfect. She’s the punchline I’ve been looking for my entire life.
“They think she’s a dancer,” I mutter, my thumb tracing the line of her jaw in the photo. “They think she’s just a collection of graceful movements. They don’t see the violence in the way she points her toes. They don’t see the way she wears her trauma like a badge of honour.”
I remember the day I found her file. It was tucked at the bottom of a ‘Total Loss’ pile.
Most of the girls in that pile were just numbers.
But Hallow? Her file was thick with ‘Non-Compliance’ reports.
She’d bitten a guard’s ear off. She’d set fire to the laundry room using nothing but a battery and a gum wrapper.
She’d looked Aris in the eye and told him his mother was a whore while he was prepping her for a lumbar puncture.
I fell in love with the defiance. I fell in love with the way she refused to be a victim, even when they had her pinned.
“She’s the other half of the deck, Knuckles,” I say, my voice cracking with a manic, desperate kind of tenderness. “I’m the chaos, and she’s the cage-break. She’s been living in the dark, waiting for someone to show her that the madness isn’t something to be cured. It’s something to be unleashed.”
I stand up, the photo held tight in my hand. I can see her in my mind, even now, bolted to that floor in Hillside. I see her with the blue and red hair matted with blood, her tutu shredded, her combat boots silent.
It hurts. It’s a sharp, jagged pain in the centre of my chest that makes me want to rip the world’s throat out.
“Aris thinks he’s making her quiet,” I growl, the ‘Joker’ mask slipping for a second, revealing the raw, bleeding engine of the man beneath.
“He thinks he’s smoothing out the edges.
But I’m going to give her back her colours.
I’m going to give her back her teeth. And then…
and then we’re going to show this city what happens when the King and Queen of the gutter finally take their thrones. ”
I press the photo to my lips, the taste of old ink and dust filling my mouth.
“Two hundred and fourteen days, Hallow,” I whisper against the paper. “Hang on to that madness. Don’t let him take the blue and red. The Dealer is coming to play, and I’m bringing the whole fucking circus with me.”
I turn to the Choir, my eyes wide and shimmering with a terrifying, beautiful insanity.
“Load the van. We’ve got a girl to wake up.”