The best type of infestation, dear reader, happens slowly.

Slow enough that it has time to morph by an inch, evolve by a tone, change by a hair, until eventually, no one realises that this new world has even come into existence. Humans took advantage of this finding, long ago. The slow creep of their own destruction was to our utter despair. Our extinction, scientists predicted, was kicked off in the 1920s, with their coal, factories, smog. Innovation, they called it, even as metal became flimsier, became plastic, and leached itself into the very waters humans had become so reliant on -- not in the way we were, but in the way humans always are, greedy, in need of those little screens, and servers and processing centers they razed our grounds for. Always thirsting after new ways to process cloth, and garments, denim luxuries at the price of their brothers and sisters in countries with less wealth than them.

The drought was thought to be the destruction of our last bastion of survival. In their eyes, we had gone extinct.

We were, from that point on, emblems, forgotten symbols of a world not saved, failed innocents on jewelled wings. there were people who tried, of course, shiny-eyed scientists with hope and naivete inequal measure. They dreamed up wild fantasies of peaceful co-existence, of shiny white high-rises with flowering plants, void of anything that made us who we were, void of our unsavoury brethren with too many legs and irritating chirpings, void of excrement and sex, wiped clean to appease shareholders and those who thought the luxury apartments of the elite would ever be open to them.

They were shut down quick enough by those who looked at an open green and saw only wasted retail space.

I will tell you this now, dear reader: butterflies do not solely subsist on the nectar of delicate-petaled blooms, and soft-scented shrubbery. We subsist on sweat and blood, piss and shit, liquid expressions of sickness and squats. And in a slum crammed full of those unable to pay their way through a society that drains you of all you have, there's a hell of a lot of it to go around.

The rain came oily in District Nine.

Runoff condensed from the city’s filtration stacks, heavy with that grey chemical sheen and the smell of rust glazed the alleys in a perfect gloss. Neon signs reflected in puddles like open wounds. Cecily stood beneath a flickering pharmacy cross and watched the men stumble out of the betting den across the street.

Drunk ones were easiest.

A delivery tram screamed overhead. The sound vibrated through her antennae, hidden now beneath the hood wrapped around her head. Gene-splicing had become fashionable among the rich decades ago. Her too-large eyes glossed black in certain light, the delicate scaling around her throat, the strange elegance of her movements–no one looked at her twice anymore. Sometimes, someone might cast her a glance, fleeting, as if the sight of what they thought to be a once rich woman reduced to a slum girl was a shameful sight, and, Cecily suspected, a secret source of pleasure.

Her wings remained folded beneath her coat, cramped and aching. They were translucent amber, veined like old leaves.

A man emerged from the building beside her, laughing to himself. Mid-fifties. Soft stomach. Corporate lanyard still hanging from his neck like a leash dropped just long enough to allow him a smoke break, before tightening again in a way so soft, he wouldn’t ever notice the collar. He paused beneath the awning to light a cigarette, cursing at the dampness.

Cecily smelled him immediately. Stress-sweat, working the kind of job to work a sickness into him bone-deep, and sterile enough to keep him asymptomatic.

Her stomach cramped as the thing inside her shifted eagerly.

The professors in the old documentaries had called it mutualism. Symbiotic adaptation between surviving insect species and human hosts. The butterflies received shelter, mobility, higher cognition through neurochemical linking. Humans received survival: and what a beautiful word that was. Survival.

As though it had ever belonged equally to everyone.

Cecily crossed the street, and the man noticed her instantly. Men always did. The city had starved everyone into sharpness, but Cecily possessed the fragile look poverty carved into women like her especially well: narrow wrists, hollow cheeks, exhaustion weaved into the very fabric of her posture.

“You lost?” he asked.

His gaze lingered too long on her mouth.

Cecily smiled softly.

“No,” she said. “But maybe you could help me.”

***

The apartment reeked of mould and synthetic lavender.

The man locked the door behind them with shaking eagerness. “I don’t normally do this,” he lied.

“Of course not,” Cecily replied.

His flat was small but private, and privacy was as good as wealth. A fan whirred overhead, and somewhere beyond the paper-thin walls, someone coughed wetly for nearly a minute straight.

The man reached for her waist.

Cecily let him.

His hands slid beneath her coat—then stopped.

“Jesus Christ.”

Cecily’s wings slowly unfolded behind her, amber membrane shimmering in the apartment’s jaundiced light. Powder drifted from them like golden ash. The man stumbled backward, hitting the kitchen counter hard enough to rattle old dishes.

“What the fuck are you?”

Cecily tilted her head, proboscis sliding from beneath her tongue in one elegant motion. The feeding tube slipped into the soft flesh beneath his jaw and warmth flooded her instantly. By the end, he barely twitched. The body collapsed sideways onto the peeling linoleum, desiccated, hollowed out from the inside like a shrivelled up orange peel.

Desiccated.