RideQuest: Now Serving Airspace
Morgana had been driving for RideQuest for three years, protecting her 4.97-star rating with the intensity of a medieval dragon guarding a hoard of gold. She had mastered the gig economy gospel: vegan leather seat covers for the algorithm, spring water after learning that lesson the hard way, charger cables in every format known to humankind, and an aux cord that now served mostly as an ancient relic.
She was thirty-seven. Her silver hair came early, a family tradition, and tonight it was twisted into a bun that had given up hours ago. Her teal RideQuest windbreaker looked like revenge from a bullied design student, layered over a Fleetwood Mac shirt that had survived three breakups and one misguided essential oils phase.
It was Halloween night, which meant the city had gone temporarily insane. Every third person on the sidewalk was a nurse, a cat, or a very committed inflatable dinosaur. The air smelled like a brewery and a fog machine had gotten into a brawl. Morgana sat outside CVS, double-parked, watching her app earnings tick upward at the speed of spiritual decay. Another Friday night, and it happened to be the one night a year she didn’t need a costume. Another $4.32 after the 40 percent “service fee.”
She sighed into her reflection. “I am literally a witch. With a broom. That flies. And tonight of all nights, nobody would even blink. Why am I paying insurance on a car that’s one oil change away from being a metaphor?”
Her broom, ash wood handle and night-birch bristles, was a family heirloom older than most governments. It was stuffed in her trunk, humming with faint judgment. She had not flown it in years. Too conspicuous. Too “how do I explain this to the Department of Transportation?” But tonight, conspicuous was the whole point of the holiday.
Then her phone pinged: Lacy. Downtown to Marina District. 4.92 rating.
She looked at her car, then at the sky, then back at her car’s glowing check-engine light. Decision made. Five minutes later, she was airborne.
The broom thrummed under her like an old friend saying, finally. She landed outside Harvest & Rye, a gastropub where Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood were conspiring to bankrupt millennials, tonight strung with cheap plastic bats that spun lazily in the wind. Lacy appeared, scrolling through her phone like it was keeping her alive, dressed as a vampire in a velvet cape that had clearly cost more than the rest of her outfit combined, her skin powder-pale even under the string lights. She looked for a silver Honda Civic and instead found Morgana, broom hovering a few feet off the ground, hair whipping like a music video filmed in minor weather conditions.
“Lacy?”
She blinked, fangs and all. “Is this, like, performance art?”
“Nope. RideQuest. Air edition. You’re late.”
Lacy laughed, delighted. “Okay, this is genuinely the best costume I’ve seen all night, and I judged the contest at Harvest & Rye an hour ago.”
“It’s not a costume.”
“Sure, and I’m actually undead.” She hesitated, weighing potential death against potential clout. “You’re serious?”
“As a 1099 tax form.”
“Do you have, uh, seatbelts?”
“No, but I don’t mind if you hold on.”
Against all known safety instincts, Lacy climbed on, cape and all, her hands closing around Morgana’s waist cold as a doorknob in January despite the muggy air. Morgana filed it under costume commitment and left it there. The broom rose smoothly, slicing through the damp night air. Below, the city glittered like spilled sequins, jack-o’-lanterns flickering on porches like a second, warmer constellation.
Lacy screamed for the first few blocks, then started filming. “Oh my god, this is insane! What’s your insta?”
“I’m not doing content,” Morgana yelled back over the wind.
“Everyone’s doing content!”
“I’m doing rent!”
Somewhere over the water the wind picked up, and Lacy tucked her face in against the curve of Morgana’s neck to escape the worst of it, breathing there a beat longer than the wind really required. Morgana felt the huff of it against her pulse and told herself that was just altitude making her shiver.
The city stretched below like a living circuit board, red lights and chaos glowing against the dark, and every few blocks another cluster of trick-or-treaters looked up and pointed, certain they were seeing things. Lacy went from terrified to euphoric to something close to reverent.
“This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said breathlessly when they touched down by the marina, “and I once fainted at a midnight screening of a horror movie because the lead actress looked right at me.”
“Leave a review,” Morgana replied, deadpan.
Lacy didn’t move to get off. “Wait. Can I get your number instead? For, like, emergencies. Witch emergencies.”
Morgana raised an eyebrow. “That’s not a category RideQuest supports.”
“I’m inventing the category.”
Something about the velvet cape, or the sheer nerve of the request, made Morgana laugh for the first time in weeks. She pulled a marker from her jacket pocket, the same one she used to write cancellation codes on her palm, and wrote her number on the back of Lacy’s hand instead.
“Happy Halloween,” Morgana said.
Lacy leaned in before she lost her nerve, and kissed her, quick and warm and tasting faintly of pumpkin spice. It was sweet for exactly one second. Then Morgana felt the graze of something sharp against her lower lip, careful and deliberate, the way a person tests a blade they already know is real, and realized she couldn’t feel a pulse anywhere Lacy’s hands were touching her.
She pulled back half an inch. “Your fangs aren’t stage glue.”
Lacy went very still, the kind of stillness that didn’t involve breathing. “…New to town. Guess the cape didn’t sell it.”
“Sweetheart, I fly a broom for a rideshare app. I’ve seen a hundred fake fangs tonight alone. Yours don’t wobble.”
A beat, and then Lacy grinned, delighted rather than caught. “Well. Happy Halloween to both of us, I guess.”
Morgana just sat there a second, hand still raised where the marker had been, feeling far more outmatched than she had any right to feel while hovering four feet off a marina dock, and considerably more interested in that fact than alarmed by it.
Five minutes later, she was airborne again, and for the first time in years, smiling the whole way up, wondering exactly what else the night still had left to reveal.
By sunrise, she had done forty-three rides. She had learned that rooftops were full of hidden gardens, that silence above the clouds could cure headaches, and that no one spoke for the first thirty seconds in the air, some mix of awe, fear, and Wi-Fi loss.
Her stats glowed:
- $680 earned
- 37 five-star reviews
- 4 party requests
- 17 complaints (“Driver may have been a witch”)
Then came the corporate email:
Dear Driver, Our records indicate your registered vehicle is a 2019 Honda Civic, not a “flying broomstick.” Please update your vehicle information or face suspension.
Regards, The RideQuest Compliance Team
PS. We hate this too.
Morgana replied: Per your policy, I provide safe, clean, reliable transport. My broom seats two, averages 60 mph, and gets infinite MPG. Please advise which agency licenses magical air travel, as the DMV hung up twice.
An hour later, an email arrived from a frazzled man named Derek:
Morgana, you’re trending. Marketing loves you. Legal is having a stroke. Can you do an interview? We can’t pay much, but we can pay.
Also: cupholder, real or enchanted?
She grinned, and glanced at the number written back on her own hand where Lacy had insisted on writing hers too, just in case.
Within weeks, the skies filled with witches. Portland had three. Tacoma had one who flew with a therapy cat. The Bellingham witch ran an Etsy store mid-flight. RideQuest’s CEO, who wore $400 “minimalist” T-shirts, gave an interview about “leveraging legacy magic in next-gen transit ecosystems.”
By November, broomsticks had their own Premium tier: “elevated experiences for discerning clientele.” Prices went up. Morgana’s cut went down. Naturally.
But she did not care. She had altitude now. While the ground crowd complained about surge pricing, she was above it all, quite literally.
She flew past fireworks, seagulls, and one guy proposing with a drone. She started giving sky tours to kids, taking tips in candy bars and crumpled bills. People waved from rooftops. A man in a suit shouted, “You’re an icon!” and she yelled back, “File your taxes on time!”
She wasn’t just a gig worker anymore. She was an urban legend with a 4.98 rating and a phone number on her hand that she’d caught herself checking was still legible more than once.
One night, she hovered over the river, silver hair streaming in the wind. The water below caught the city’s neon glow and turned it into something almost holy. Her phone buzzed, not the app this time, but a text from a number saved under Lacy (actual vampire, apparently, 10/10 flight):
Still thinking about that ride. Free next weekend?
She laughed. Because now, it wasn’t just about the flight.
“Let’s go, girl,” she said to the broom.
The broom hummed like a purring cat.
They rose together into the dark, leaving behind the smell of exhaust, sage air freshener, and other people’s rules.
And for once, the sky didn’t feel rented.
