Chapter 7: The Siren of Glass and Hunger
The city hums like a throbbing wound, neon-blooded and asphalt-veined, its breath an exhaust-choked whisper down alleyways where the shadows yawn wider than the streetlights can hold. She moves through it, hips curving in the rhythm of old, primal algorithms, an economy of flesh and absence, the barter of want against the hunger of the void.
She is June tonight. Last night she was Lily, the week before, Scarlet. Names don’t stick in a place where the faces blur, where mouths speak but no one listens, where the bodies fold into each other like origami ghosts pressed into the pockets of men who will never remember them.
The signs flicker: GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, the G a broken, stuttering hieroglyph, trying to tell her something but choking on its own neon tongue.
She is waiting. She is always waiting. They come in suits and sweat, in cologne and regret, some with hands that shake, some with eyes that are already somewhere else. They don’t see her. They see a shape they can grasp for a moment, a brief anchor against the tide of their own dissolution.
But tonight. Tonight.
The man who finds her isn’t like the others.
His mouth moves, but the words don’t form in the air like they should. They slither, rearrange, become something else before they reach her ears. The sound isn’t sound. It’s a pressure in her bones, a static hiss at the edges of her skull.
“How much?“
She opens her mouth to answer, but the words twist inside her throat, writhing like things alive. The number, the price, the game— it doesn’t exist anymore.
The city flickers. The world shudders. She blinks, and in the space between, the streets fold like pages in a book no one was meant to read.
She is not standing in the alley anymore.
The man is watching her. His face is wrong, as though his features are a suggestion rather than a certainty, shifting between moments, flickering in and out of something almost-human.
“What are you willing to give?“
The words coil, burrow, nest in the space behind her eyes.
Her pulse stutters. There is no breath. No hunger. No skin.
She is becoming.
Becoming what?
The streetlights flicker, their glow unraveling into symbols she almost understands. The signs no longer sell flesh, but something deeper, something vast and waiting.
She looks down.
Her hands are still her hands.
But they are not her hands.
They are words.
They are letters spilling from the gaps between her knuckles, pouring onto the pavement in a tide of ink and meaning, disassembling, reconfiguring.
The man smiles.
His mouth stretches too wide.
“You were never real to begin with.“
And then she understands.
She was always waiting.
But not for them.
She was waiting for him.
And now the city hums without her.