Chapter 11

The orders are neatly stacked in thermally sealed cartons, their heat misting faintly through insulated bags. Ira double-checks the labels, her fingers deft from repetition. The soft hiss of sealing tabs and the clack of lids sliding into place soothe her—a quiet rhythm she's come to rely on. Even J, who's notoriously hard to impress, nods in approval.

"You're in a groove today," he says. "Like a well-oiled machine."

Ira shrugs, smiling faintly. She knows exactly what's behind her renewed vigor.

She lingers longer than usual to help J restock sauces, wipe down the prep station, and input last-minute menu updates into the system. Once the board is cleared, she slings the delivery bag over her shoulder and taps her watch. A cool interface spirals to life against her skin, luminous against the eternal dusk of Noctreign. The algorithm begins its familiar dance, calculating optimal routes through the tangle of alleys and aerial lanes.

"I'm heading out," she calls. "Ring if you need me."

"Will do," J replies, already elbow-deep in the next batch of orders.

Outside, the scent of rain and exhaust washes over her, priming her for the long ride ahead. Her scooter waits—sturdy, black, beaded with rain. She mounts it and slips the GPS module into its cradle. The screen flickers to life, casting a soft blue glow across the wet street.

Her stomach drops when she sees her first destination.

"The Pouuer District," she mutters. "Figures."

She accelerates, tires humming against slick asphalt. The roads coil between dilapidated towers like veins—living, glowing, ever shifting. Neon signs flicker in blue and pink. Steam curls from vents and soup stalls, wrapping the street in aromatic fog.

The Soup District is alive tonight.

The deeper she rides, the more it pulls her in.

The Soup District isn't just a place—it's a feeling. A convergence of warmth, taste, and neon. Soup shops cluster shoulder to shoulder in narrow corridors, windows fogged and glowing, each one fragrant with its own signature broth. The air is thick with star anise, garlic, soy, and simmered vegetables. Overhead, glass skywalks weave between buildings like veins of light, filtering drizzle into jeweled streaks. Music spills from lamppost speakers—traditional strings braided with slow, nostalgic beats.

Hand-painted signs swing lazily in the wind. Bowls of miso, ramen, congee, pho, borscht, harira, gumbo, bouillabaisse, and egusi bubble behind street-facing counters, perfuming the air with steam and spice. Customers gather under awnings, shoulder to shoulder, eating with the ease of ritual.

They're all shapes and sizes—hooves, horns, fur, feathers glimpsed between coats. A kelp-haired nereid slurps udon beside a hulking minotaur in officewear. Winged and antlered hybrids duck beneath canopies, their laughter rising like steam. A dryad unfurls leafy fingers to pass exact change to a vendor. No one stares. It's just Noctreign—everyone mixed, everyone working under the same aching system. But still, there's joy. In each other. In the sharing of food.

Above, stacked terraces of the district unfold: vertical farms, mushroom columns, spirals of nutrient fog. The whole place breathes.

Though she dreads the anxiety of her shifts, Ira always forgets how much she loves it here until she's back inside its belly.

She drives on, catching vignettes through steamed-up windows: an old harpy slurping soup alone with the TV; a chimera couple dancing in their kitchen, foreheads almost touching; a satyr child tracing hearts into fogged glass. These tiny moments glow brighter than the neon. Most of her life, Ira has watched them from outside—uninvited to the warmth. But tonight feels different. She fidgets with her ring. Its sapphire warmth is subtle, but grounding.

She finally has something to look forward to.

Someone.

But first, she has to get through this shift. And that means the Pouuer District.

She hates the Pouuer District.

Even the name grates—a garbled echo of its history. A dumping ground for failed prototypes and rogue biotech. A place where victims scream in the vents while corporations gorge on profit. Failed gene farms, meat-labs, rogue splice projects—all hidden behind sterile branding and gleaming chrome.

The air is thick with bleach and something sweeter, rottener. Here, shadows don't just move—they twitch. Flinch. Remember.

Rain steams as it hits the pavement, rising in greasy spirals that creep under her hood. It reeks of burnt ozone and oxidized iron. Somewhere below, something groans against restraints. The bones of the city are grinding.

Ira shudders. Every time she's here, she wishes she could fix it. Liberate the ones still trapped beneath those labs.

Slaughterhouses line the alleys, ribbed with vents coughing pink mist. Inside: bone meets metal. Tissue is parsed. Rendered. Pulped. No one talks about it. Everyone knows.

Above, towers rise—red-lit labs, fogged glass, neural rigs, meat-printers. None of it built to last. Only to extract.

She rolls to a stop outside a steel-shuttered storefront, hood pulled tight. The smell of beef tallow hits her like a slap.

The door hisses open.

A minotaur steps out, backlit by golden light. Seven feet tall. Built like a vault. His apron is stained—freshly. Brightly.

But his eyes are kind.

"You're early," he says, voice like gravel soaked in honey. "That's rare."

Ira hands him the order in silence. He nods, careful not to get too close.

"Get home safe," he says quietly. "Pouuer's not safe for someone like you."

She pauses—wants to ask what he means. But she nods and turns back to her scooter.

He smells of smoke and cinnamon. It's pleasant and unexpected. Perhaps she judges the residents of this district too harshly.

That thought is quickly erased during Ira's second stop in Pouuer. It's four blocks away and three levels underground—beneath a collapsed biotech warehouse now marked condemned. The coordinates blink against her visor, flickering, as if ashamed this place still exists.

A tunnel slopes into blackness. A rusted maintenance catwalk, slick with condensation, leads to a service hatch. She knocks.

A slit opens. Two glassy, pale eyes appear. Then vanish. The hatch creaks open, revealing a waterlogged chamber lit by rows of humming jars—jars full of living things.

A fae hybrid floats in the center, half-submerged in a milky tank behind plastic sheeting. Her skin is translucent blue; her hair drifts like kelp. Her mouth is stitched at the corners. Something pulses beneath her ribs.

"Ira," a voice rasps—not from the hybrid, but through a speaker, flat and delayed. "You're late."

"I'm four minutes early," she replies.

"Time moves faster down here, I suppose."

Ira exhales through her nose and passes the package through the gap. It vanishes into the dark.

A jar of what looks like pickled ears hums beside her. She tries not to look.

"Tell the kitchen I want more cartilage next time," the voice says, fading. "Tell them I'm growing teeth again."

Ira ignores it and addresses the fae hybrid directly. "Do you need help? Are you okay? Blink if you want me to call someone."

A snarl cuts through the speaker, and the hatch slams shut, plunging her into darkness.

She turns and trudges back, blinking away hot, angry tears.

It's always like this in Pouuer. Always some new horror that makes imagination feel inadequate.

Her boots slosh along the slick tunnel as she climbs back to the surface. Filtered district light warps against damp plastic walls. A mechanical shriek echoes upward—metal on bone, maybe. Or maybe just wind through the vents.

She forces herself not to wonder which.

Back on the street, her scooter waits, a black outline in the oily dark. Ira steps aboard and thumbs the ignition. The engine hums—a low, familiar sound that drowns out the district's whispers.

She pulls onto a service road lined with flickering ad boards and half-erased slogans for failed gene therapies:

"Be What You Were Meant To Be!"

Faces glitch in loops—smiles stretched wide, frozen.

Lies. Bait for the vulnerable. Lures for the desperate to be poked, prodded, burned, discarded.

A pack of limping were-dogs crosses the road ahead. Their skin is translucent, bones showing through like bad renders. None of them look at her.

Rain blurs her visor. More tears join it. She pulls her hoodie tighter, scanning for the silhouette of the vent-tower—her final stop in Pouuer.

The ride isn't long. But here, even short distances feel endless.

As she passes a loading bay, a crate bursts open with a wet, sickening crack. Something inside scrabbles, breathes wrong. Ira doesn't stop. She guns the scooter, tires spitting mist.

At a stoplight, she pauses beneath a canopy of pulsing cable-vines. Her hands are shaking—not from fear, but from fury. Fury at everything this district allows. Everything it justifies.

She should stop it.

Her teeth lengthen slightly. Her talons grow. It happens sometimes—especially when she's angry. Another piece of the mystery that is her.

Just one more stop.

Then she can breathe again.

The vent-tower looms ahead now, its red-lit apex piercing the dark like a broken needle.

The Bone Collector.

She doesn't know his real name. Doesn't want to. To her, he is the architect of Pouuer's horrors. The profiteer. The smiling rot.

His penthouse rises above the decay—immune, exempt. A fortress of biotech and glass perched atop a condemned tower's bones. Synthetic marble glints underfoot. Gold-threaded moss lines the walkways, engineered to shimmer faintly. God knew what had suffered for that aesthetic.

He is waiting.

Tall. Immaculate. Dressed in a coat of triple-woven smart silk, fibers adjusting subtly to the temperature. His boots shine—not from polish, but from self-repairing nanoglass. His skin is poreless, cheeks and lips augmented with someone else's fat. A jawline reinforced by subdermal titanium mesh. He smells faintly of engineered pheromones—confidence, precision, psychopathy.

His eyes are his own design—optical implants running a constant HUD, flickering faintly with graphs, patents, protein futures. One flicks toward her.

"You're new," he says, voice like a neural assistant: warm, modulated, false.

"We've met three times," she replies.

He smiles—or simulates it. "Still new. Deliveries here have a churn rate."

"I wonder why," she says dryly.

Behind him: the collection.

Cages stacked in clean, symmetrical rows. Most are empty. Some are not. A fetus floats in nutrient gel, gently breathing. A fox hybrid lies still, organs glowing through translucent skin. Others are arranged like art: skulls wired with copper filigree, limbs caught mid-growth, teeth mounted like jewelry.

A drone descends silently and scans her. The Bone Collector steps aside to let it work.

"I love the Soup District," he muses. "So pure. So ethical. Or so they say."

He watches her closely. As if expecting her to agree.

Ira says nothing. She hands him the marrow bars.

He receives them like relics. "Excellent packaging," he murmurs. "Good batch. I invested in the tendon supplier last quarter. Tripled my shares. Funny, isn't it? How something as humble as cartilage can shape an empire."

Ira scoffs despite herself.

Empire. That's what he thinks this is.

Light shifts subtly, sunlamps casting a halo behind him. No flicker. No shadow. Everything curated. Even the scar beneath his cheekbone—silver, symmetrical—feels like branding.

She glances again at the cages. She shouldn't. But she does.

He notices. "Unsettling, isn't it?" he says. "But necessary. No innovation without sacrifice. Do you know how many lungs I tested before the implant stabilized? Do you know how many lives I've saved?"

He doesn't wait for an answer.

Above and behind, among the spires and scanners, perch his watchers—faint, feminine figures. Clones of fae women. Red light flickers in their glassy eyes. They track her movements with robotic precision.

Ira shudders to think what he programs them to do.

"I should go," she says tightly.

"Of course. But before you do—" he plucks a wafer-thin card from a dish beside him. "A referral pass. Should you ever wish to... upgrade. I could use someone with your fire."

"I'm good."

"I assumed as much." Another smile. "But good doesn't last long in Pouuer."

She says nothing. Doesn't look back. Just turns and walks away, boots echoing against seamless floors.

Behind her, a fountain of liquid light burbles beside a full-scale statue of himself—shirtless, smiling. A grotesque monument. Living vines curl around its base, spelling out a motto overhead:

Progress Isn't Pretty.

Ira feels like she's going to puke.