Chapter 7: The Scarlet Chip
The girl's blonde hair looked like a dying white snake in the moonlight.
"Premature babies need formula." She unhooked her nursing bra, her festering mammary glands plastered with bulletproof glass, "You feel me, I can't even afford to treat puerperal fever..."
Luna's nails sink into her palms. Two hours ago, the girl who calls herself Clara was broadcasting a baby's cries over a loudspeaker, and when Luna pointed her camera at the source, all she saw was an old cell phone strapped to a tree branch in the rubble - the screen was playing a loop of "ASMR for newborns" on the tube.
Rule #18: All breast milk must be squeezed into a drug testing cup on site.
Clara's screams pierce the warehouse's steel door; Luna's syringe is lodged in her right breast, and the pale red milk is layered in a glass tube, with oily radiation floating on the top layer.
"Abbott's formula two years past its expiration date," Luna pushed out the tin box, "for all your hair."
The warehouse overhead lights suddenly flicker as the razor is applied to the back of the girl's neck. In the glass reflection, Clara's left hand was creeping up to her waistband-where a blowgun modified from a McDonald's straw was pinned.
"Add this." Luna's taser pressed against the glass, the arcing light reflecting the brand-new stitches behind the other girl's ear, "or I'll tell the East Enders you cheated them out of their insulin last month with a fake pregnancy."
The girl's pupils plummeted. The gesture convinced Luna that the security footage was correct: the sapphire studs bobbing in Clara's earlobes were the same lenses that had been scooped out of the eye sockets of the Glass Man's corpse.
The strands of hair fall to the ground like a dirty snowfall, and Luna picks up one of them with her tweezers when the back of her hand suddenly catches Clara's hot breath on the glass:
"You smell like a lump of moldy butter..." The tip of the girl's tongue trailed trails of water on the glass, "The powdered milk, it's actually laced with vole ashes, isn't it?"
The air froze into a ball.
Luna's heel grinds over the remote control button, and a giant projection slams down on the side of the warehouse-the very same night-vision footage of Clara at the sewage treatment plant three days ago, pushing a real woman in labor down a pool of sulfuric acid.
"Your hair," Luna sealed the DNA sample into a vacuum bag, "will fetch a good price on the black market."
The girl suddenly slammed into the glass, her gums tearing from the force, "You think you're clean? The priest you dealt with last week..." She spat out half a broken tooth, "... Said in confession that you had something nastier than a can buried under your warehouse!"
The alarm booms.
Luna activates the ventilation system and Clara's curses are winched by the exhaust fan. As the last locks of blonde hair are stowed away in the amber specimen box, she opens the inside of the powdered milk can and pulls out the photo sandwiched in aluminum foil-the group photo taken during her mother's last visit to the convenience store before it exploded.
Written on the back of the photo in menstrual blood was the new rule:
[Never let them see the milky odor on your handwashing].
A noise comes from the corner of the warehouse.
Luna turns around and sees the "baby wrap" Clara left behind writhing. The moment she cuts open the swaddling clothes, thirty radioactive cockroaches erupt, including one with a deformed mouthpiece that looks like a human tooth on its abdomen.
As she stomped on the last cockroach, she caught a glimpse of a treacherous reflection in the bottom of a powdered milk can. A closer look with a magnifying glass revealed that the yellowish powder was mixed with crushed glass human spine fragments, like ground cinnamon sprinkled on a cappuccino.
Rule #19 lights up on the cell phone screen:
"When the other person gives a chip, you take away the change from her soul."
Moonlight cuts through the barbed wire, casting Luna's hair-counting shadow on the wall like the Grim Reaper counting bills.