The bar is a scarified wound carved into the underbelly of the city, a place that insists on being wet, warm, and human. Meat hooks rust in the corner. Someone is always bleeding somewhere. The air smells like iron and sugar rot. They call it the last honest place, though nothing here is honest.

The city above pulses like a living god—arteries of mag-rails, of fibre optic veins, thought streaming faster than blood ever could. Up there, bodies are optional. Skin is a relic. People shed themselves for cleaner things: code, light, permanence.

Down here, flesh still rules.

He doesn’t remember deciding to look at her again. But he does, and now her eyes are on him.

She sits three stools down, luminous in a way that says she belongs here. Pale gold dust freckles her shoulders, catching the jaundiced light. Her dress is something soft, gauzy—ruined lace that clings like it remembers a better life. Her eyes are the colour of old honey, viscous and patient, and they hold you the way a web holds a fly.

She smiles. It is small. Careful. Predatory, in the way of plants he remembers reading about, the prehistoric ones that dissolved flies in their green, gaping maws.

“First time?” she asks.

Her voice is warm. It slides into and settles behind his ribs.

“Upstairs got too… clean?” she continues.

He laughs, because that’s easier than explaining the creeping horror of a world that no longer needs your body but still keeps it, humming uselessly beneath layers of augmentation.

“Something like that.”She tilts her head, studying him. There’s a flicker of something behind her gaze. Approval, he thinks.

There is a scent about her he can't name.

In the back room, the lights are dim enough to forgive anything. She turns to him fully now, and up close, the softness fractures. Her skin is too fine, almost translucent. Beneath it, faint branching lines shimmer; not veins, not quite, but something more intricate, like wing patterns pressed under flesh. When she inhales, her ribs flutter.

They used to say butterflies drank nectar. Delicate things, harmless, ornamental. That was before the Collapse. Before the blooms died and the waste rose and the world learned to rot in new ways. Now swarms gather in the crevices—latrines, corpses, open wounds. Blood. Urine. Decay. The scent he cannot place floods back to him with a name he cannot bear to speak, lest he spoil the illusion. He wants to believe this is seduction in the old sense. That she is a relic of something romantic: a siren in silk, a vampire in lace.

“Tell me,” she says, stepping closer, “what do you miss?”

It’s an odd question. It lands somewhere deep, somewhere unguarded. He thinks of things he hasn’t touched in years. Rain that wasn’t falsified. Skin that wasn’t cold. The messy, inconvenient reality of being alive in a body that could bruise, bleed, ache.

“Feeling,” he says finally.

Her smile deepens.

“Yes,” she murmurs. “That’s what they all say.”

She reaches out, and her fingers brushes his wrist. His pulse stutters, then surges.

She watches, fascinated. “There you are,” she whispers.