Hakim hated the poor.

By the time he was twelve, Hakim understood that nothing in his house actually belonged to them.

The plates were from a charity drive.
The couch had been left on the curb by a richer family.
The television only worked if you smacked it twice on the side.
The only thing that was truly theirs were the emotional debts.

His mother came home smelling of solder and burnt plastic, fingers raw from assembly line work at a neural chip plant in Bukit Jalil Industrial Arc. She would drop her bag, sit at their wobbly dining table and stare at the wall like she was trying to remember who she had been before factory shifts carved pieces out of her.
On the wall above the table glowed a cheap JoyMeter, the kind you got when the government first partnered with ChronoNet. It pulsed in patient blue.
Current household joy balance: 1.4 units. Debt: 72.9 units.

Whenever Hakim cried, his mother would glance at the JoyMeter as if it were a deity.
“No use,” she muttered once, gently but without softness. “Sadness pays nothing. Only joy can buy us food.”
So, he learned to swallow his tears.
He learned to laugh when she needed to see it.
He learned that smiles were currency, not comfort.

At school he watched richer kids with subscription-grade JoyCredits in their ocular implants. Their ChronoNet bracelets shimmered in pastel colors. He watched the way teachers smiled at them, the way doors opened, the way problems resolved themselves.

Hakim began to steal.

First it was pens and erasers. Then pocket snack packs. Then test answers. If someone left their tablet unattended, he sold its access code to a classmate for a few credits.
When he was caught, he did not cry. He pointed at another boy and lied without blinking.
“They asked me to do it. I thought it was a joke.”
The boy stuttered and failed to defend himself. The teacher believed Hakim. Detention flowed in the other direction.
The first time Hakim saw that look on someone’s face, the look that said, ‘you betrayed me’, he felt something loosen inside his chest.
It was not guilt.
It was excitement and possibility.

He realised he could move through life by making other people pay the cost.
By sixteen, he stood in front of a mirror and decided he would never be poor again, at least not in a way anyone could see.
He slicked back his hair with petrol-station gel, wore counterfeit sneakers that looked like designer limited editions, and carried himself with the posture of someone who expected a table to be available, a door to be opened, a favour to be given.
Kids in the neighbourhood called him arrogant.
Mothers warned their daughters.
His own mother stared at him like she did not know where he had come from.
He shrugged off all of it. Respect did not pay rent. Fear and need did.
When the ChronoNet recruiter came to his school looking for “high potential youth for client-facing roles,” Hakim smiled his most polished grin and lied on every aptitude question. He lied about his empathy levels, about his collaborative nature, about his desire to “help connect people to emotional wellness.”
The recruiter’s scanner flickered on his ChronoTag. Personality metrics scrolled. The man’s smile sharpened.
“You are good at making people commit,” he said. “We can use that.”
That night, Hakim’s mother cried quietly in the kitchen. For once, he did not feel tempted to comfort.
He was too busy counting his imagined future commissions.
________________________________________
ChronoNet’s call centre in Chan Sow Lin looked like a meditation retreat for the emotionally exhausted.
Soft walls pulsed with calming gradients. Aromatic diffusers breathed out laboratory serenity. Screens floated over desks, displaying customer profiles with neat little charts of happiness histories and emotional asset ratings.
Hakim sat at a narrow station among dozens of others, headset hugging his ears, ChronoTag fused at his wrist. Every morning a supervisor in a slate-grey tunic walked past them with smile drills.
“Remember, we are not taking anything,” she reminded the room. “We are helping clients unlock trapped value.”
Hakim smirked. He knew a script when he heard one.
His screen flashed, connecting him to his first call of the day.
“Encik Razali, thank you for contacting ChronoNet. I see that you have twenty-three joy events eligible for conversion.”
On the right hand of the screen, digital snapshots of Razali’s happiest memories hovered in a grid. Wedding day. Birth of his daughter. The time he won an amateur futsal tournament and his friends poured soda over his head.
An algorithm had rated the intensity and rarity of each event. A neat number in the corner suggested their potential market value.
Razali hesitated. “If I sell this one,” he asked, voice quavering as he hovered over his daughter’s first birthday, “does that mean I will forget it?”
Hakim watched the commission estimate tick higher.
“Not forget,” he lied smoothly. “It will feel more… distant. Like watching a favourite movie instead of living it. The warmth will dim, but you will still know it happened. And in return, you can pay off your rent arrears this month.”
Silence crackled on the line.
He heard a child’s voice in the background asking for milk. Razali exhaled.
“Alright,” he said. “Take it.”
The memory vanished from the grid. The JoyMeter in the corner of the screen updated. On another part of town, Razali would feel something slide out of him and not have the words to name it.
Hakim’s commission bar grew.
He did this all day.
First timers who hesitated. Regular donators who spoke in monotone, their lives slowly flattening. Old women who said they did not need their youth, not really.
He never thought about what happened to the harvested joy once it left the system. He knew, technically. Elite clients ordered custom blends. Emotional cocktails curated from the poor. A simulation of a full life on demand.
He did not care.
On his lunch breaks, he sat outside on the concrete steps, watching the flooded city shimmer. Parts of the central Kuala Lumpur had been raised on concrete stilts after the last major storm surge, but the old Sungai Besi area and southern lowlands had been quietly abandoned, left to rot under shallow tidal water.
Neon mosques in the distance blinked adverts for neural recharge stations. A tram rolled past with a digital banner that said:
Upgrade your soul.
Emotion is energy.
Do not waste it.
Hakim looked at his payslip on his phone. It was more than his mother made in a month. Less than the executives made on one deal.
Close, he thought. Closer.
At night, he went home through the narrower streets, detouring into less regulated zones where enforcement drones did not bother to patrol. There he slipped into a different job.
He knew the ecosystem of desperation better than anyone. The women who lost too much joy and wanted chemical shortcuts to feel again. The men whose anxiety had been scraped away so often they needed pharmaceutical fear to get any thrill. The teenagers who did not have enough credits but still wanted to glow on social feeds.
Illegal upgrades were everywhere. Neural amplifiers grown from unregistered stem cultures. Bootleg firmware patches. Black market implants that promised heightened pleasure or reduced remorse.
Hakim became a middleman.
He learned faces, needs, price points. He took cuts. He believed that he was not like the users. He was the one stepping on the hands, not the one drowning.
People in his block began to cross the street when they saw him.
Some out of fear.
Most out of disgust.
He laughed it off as he had no interest in being loved.
He wanted to be indispensable.
________________________________________
It rained the night he met her, the heavy coastal kind of rain that melted the sky and turned alleys into rivers.
Hakim sat under the plastic awning of a hawker stall along the darker stretch of Jalan Ipoh, stirring lukewarm coffee in a chipped mug. The stall’s owner knew him and knew not to ask too many questions.
Streetlights threw pale halos into the mist. Farther out, where the sea pressed against the flood barriers, thunder grumbled like something resentful in the deep.
She appeared out of the rain as if the night exhaled her.
A woman in a simple dark dress, soaked through, fabric clinging to every line of her body. Raindrops slid down her neck and into the hollow at her collarbone. Her hair, long and black, dripped onto the pavement in slow, deliberate lines.
She walked straight to his table without hesitating, like she had traced his scent through the entire city.
“You are Hakim,” she said.
Her voice was thick, like warm honey poured over ice.
He frowned, assessing.
Beautiful, yes, but he had seen beauty before. It was something else that unsettled him. She did not look unsure in this place. Most people in these alleys moved with watchful tension, shoulders tight, eyes darting. She moved as if the world belonged to her.
“And you are wet,” he said, leaning back, letting his gaze travel lazily up and down her. “What do you want?”
Her lips curved, not offended.
“To make you rich,” she said.
She slid into the chair opposite. The hawker uncle glanced at them, then hurriedly shuffled into the back. Something in her presence sent his old instincts trembling into hiding.
Up close, her beauty was almost painful. Her eyes were a deep dark brown, but in the streetlight, they seemed to carry a thin ring of red, as if something behind them glowed faintly.
“You help people feel good,” she went on, resting her elbows on the table so that the dress pulled and revealed a hint more skin. “At a price.”
He smirked. “They choose to buy. I just give them access.”
Her laughter wrapped around him. It was low and intimate, like she knew every excuse he had ever made for himself.
“You are honest about your dishonesty,” she said. “I like that.”
She reached into her bag and drew out a small vial.
The glass was frosted, beaded with condensation even in the humid air. Inside the liquid was clear with a faint swirling strand of deeper red that seemed to move of its own accord.
Hakim felt something in his stomach tilt. He hid it behind a bored expression.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Premium Vitality,” she replied, rolling the vial between her fingers. “Developed off-grid. For women, mostly. Beauty that feels like a revelation. Desire that clings. Energy that does not fade.”
He snorted. “There are a hundred illegal boosters on the market.”
“None like this,” she said simply. “This does not just stimulate. It transforms. It makes the body remember what it has forgotten: how to be wanted, how to be powerful in hunger.”
She leaned forward. Her scent hit him then. A strange mix of frangipani sweetness and something sour under it, like vinegar that had been left in the sun.
Hakim pushed away the instinct to wrinkle his nose.
“What do I get?” he asked.
Her eyes did that ringed gleam again.
“You get exclusivity,” she said. “And you get a cut large enough that you never need to sit in a ChronoNet cubicle again listening to people sell their birthdays.”
His jaw tensed.
She should not have known that. A flicker of instinct told him to walk away before this turned into a story someone else would tell about him.
“You know a lot for a stranger,” he said, leaning back, chin tilted like armour. “People who open with promises usually close with trouble.”
She only smiled.
He hated how calm she looked. How sure.
He tapped the table, knuckles a little too hard. “So,” he said, forcing his voice into bored confidence, “what’s the catch?”
Her smile widened, a slow unfurling.
“The catch is simple,” she said. “Some people will not be able to handle what it makes them into. They will suffer. They may die. You, Hakim, must decide whether that matters to you.”
Rain drummed around them. The hawker uncle’s TV crackled from inside with some muted drama. In the distance, a tram glided past, ChronoNet logo glowing on its side.
Hakim thought of his mother’s JoyMeter.
He thought of the debt number that never seemed to drop, only change shape.
He thought of his coworkers, their grey faces lit by monitors that traded other people’s happiness.
He thought of himself in a sharper jacket, in a nicer apartment, looking down at this stall from a balcony far above.
“It does not matter to me,” he said.
He reached for the vial.
Her fingers brushed his. They were cold. Not cool from rain, cold in a way that felt wrong for living flesh.
For a moment she held his hand, her thumb drawing a lazy circle over his knuckles.
“Good,” she murmured. “Then we understand each other.”
________________________________________
He started small.
First was Aida, who lived three floors below him in the housing block they shared. Single mother, thin as cheap wire, always smelling faintly of formula and stale cooking oil. She had once been pretty, people said. Hakim did not remember. He had never looked at her long enough.
He found her one afternoon sitting on the stairwell, staring at a flaking poster that advertised credit consolidation.
“Your boyfriend left?” he asked without greeting.
She flinched, then scowled.
“How you know?” she snapped.
“Your eyes look like an empty bank account,” he said. “And the baby has new clothes. He wanted to play daddy, then he remembered he likes his money."
She swore under her breath. He sat beside her.
“There is a way,” he said, “to remind him that you are more valuable than he thinks. Or to make someone else see it.”
Suspicion warred with desperation in her gaze.
“He already said I look old,” she whispered. “He is twenty-six, I am thirty-one. Men cannot stand the idea that their friends will laugh.”
Hakim clucked his tongue.
“Age is a story people tell you,” he said smoothly. “Your body can be given a different story.”
He showed her the vial. He had diluted Nisa’s original into several doses, as instructed.
“It will make you feel alive again,” he promised. “Like every nerve in your skin woke up. Like the mirror finally remembers how to be kind."
"Is it legal?" she asked, voice small.
"Of course not," he said. "That is why it works."
Her laugh was more like a sob. She did not ask more questions. People like Aida rarely did. They were too tired to do anything but hope in the direction someone pointed.
In her cramped bathroom, tiles stained by years of humidity, she stood in front of the mirror. The baby slept in the other room.
“Where do I inject?” she asked.
He pointed to the soft flesh just above her hip.
“There,” he said. “Close to where your body remembers pregnancy. It amplifies the effect.”
It sounded clinical and convincing. It was mostly a guess.
She pushed the needle in. Pressed the plunger.
At first, nothing.
Then she gasped, grabbing the sink with both hands.
Colour flushed up her chest and neck. Her pupils dilated. She looked at herself like she had not seen herself in a decade.
“I feel…” she whispered, voice shaking. “I feel…”
Hakim watched, arms folded. He felt a faint unease at the intensity in her eyes. It did not look like joy. It looked like hunger waking.
“Powerful?” he suggested.
She nodded, breathless.
He took his payment. A crumpled stack of bills, a transfer of what little credits she had left. He left her there, still staring at herself.
He slept badly that night.
Sometime before dawn, screams woke him.
They came from below. A hoarse, ripping sound. Shouts. A baby crying. Feet pounding in the stairwell.
Hakim opened his door, peered over the railing.
Aida was on her bathroom floor, knees pulled to her chest, shirt soaked in blood. Her belly writhed under the skin like something alive.
“Do not touch me,” she shrieked at the neighbors who tried to approach. “If I move, everything will come out, everything, everything.”
Her eyes found Hakim’s for a fraction of a second. There was accusation there, and terror, and something else, something like gratitude twisted inside misdirected hope.
He stepped back into his flat. Closed the door quietly. Turned up the volume on the cheap entertainment feed that flickered static over his wall.
Over the next week, he heard she was taken to a clinic in the drowned district, the kind that operated mostly in cash and silence. After that, people muttered that her skin looked paler, that she did not come out in daylight, that babies in neighbouring blocks cried when she walked past.
He did not ask her for a testimonial.
He told himself he had warned her. He told himself she had chosen.
He sold the next vial to a club hostess from the waterfront. Then an older office administrator who had been passed over for a promotion in favour of a younger woman. Then a small-time influencer whose followers were slipping.
They all came to him with the same desire: to be chosen.
He gave them the same pitch, took their money and left before the echo of any consequences reached him.
He saw stories in the feeds about strange fevers, unexplained anaemia in newborns, women complaining of phantom pains along their intestines. The news never connected them. Why should it? The city was full of unexplained suffering.
He added a second fake watch to his wrist and laughed louder when people called him heartless.
Inside, nothing knocked on the door of his conscience.
There was only the ticking of a bank account.
________________________________________
The city changed in ways most people did not notice at first.
In the night markets, whispers began. Someone’s aunt had seen a glowing thing outside her window, like fireflies, almost every night. A nurse at a maternal ward woke one night to find the curtains dripping blood and a smell of vinegar hanging heavy in the air.
In certain neighbourhoods, thorny vines appeared around window frames. Broken glass was scattered under cribs. Old superstitions reactivated themselves like dormant viruses.
“Penanggal,” old women muttered, making signs with their fingers. “They are back.”
Younger people rolled their eyes. Folklore belonged to grandparents and ghost story anthologies, not to a future with neural implants and liminal ports.
Still, some of them moved their beds away from windows.
In the ChronoNet building, glitches appeared in background metrics. Emotional consumption charts stuttered in regions where Hakim’s vials had spread.
Joy flows dropped unexpectedly after births. Fear metrics spiked at odd hours. Recovery curves did not behave the way the models had predicted.
Analysts in polished offices frowned at the anomalies.
“It is probably just climate stress,” one suggested, looking at the rising flood line projections. “Or generated content fatigue. People are tired.”
They filed a ticket. They scheduled a review.
No one thought to ask if something in the city’s belly had begun to feed.
________________________________________
Hakim continued his double life.
In the day he sat in the call centre, telling mothers that selling their happiest memories of their children would help those same children eat. At night he sold vials that turned some of those mothers into predators of other women and newborns.
Sometimes the overlap pressed in on him. A client on the phone would mention strange pains in her abdomen and he would remember the way Aida’s skin had bulged and wriggled.
He pushed it away.
He started to dream of Nisa.
In the dreams she stood in doorways, hair wet, her dark dress dripping. She would walk through his flat without touching the floor, her toes barely skimming the linoleum. She would sit on his bed and lean in until her lips brushed his ear.
“You are doing well,” she whispered. “My children grow because of you.”
He would wake drenched in sweat, the smell of frangipani and sour metal lingering in his nose.
He told himself it was stress, or maybe it was his brain mixing guilt and lust in messy combinations.
He never considered stopping.
He was finally making the kind of money that could move his mother out of their block if he wanted. He did not want to, not yet. Some petty part of him liked knowing he could and choosing not to.
He bought real leather shoes. He bought a new coat that was not a counterfeit, just second-hand. He went to bars where he could tip enough to be noticed.
When his coworkers asked how he afforded it, he winked.
“Premium side clients,” he said. “You just have to know how to close.”
Some of them looked at him with envy. Some with wary disgust.
He liked both expressions equally.
________________________________________
It was late when he finally went home the night she decided to collect.
The corridors of his block smelled of damp concrete and cheap disinfectant. A baby cried somewhere distant. Someone’s television blared a cooking show.
As he reached his door, he felt a prickle run along his spine. The hair on his arms lifted.
His lock responded to his ChronoTag with a soft click. He pushed the door open.
The air inside was wrong.
It felt thicker, as if someone had been boiling vinegar on the stove. The scent of frangipani climbed over it, sickly sweet.
She reclined across his couch as though it were a throne she had deigned to occupy, one leg crossed high over the other, the posture drawing every curve into a single, deliberate line of summons. The dark violet dress moulded itself to her with shameless devotion, moving as if the silk itself were infatuated.
Her hair, still wet, poured in glossy black ribbons over her breasts and clung to the hollows above her collarbones; yet Hakim had heard no shower, no click of a door. She had simply arrived, trailing water and temptation across his floorboards like a tide that had chosen his living room to break.
She studied him with the unhurried certainty of a predator deciding which cut would taste best.
Then she smiled: slow, sacramental, the sort of smile that makes you realize you are starving only after your mouth is already on hers.
“You did not tell me you had a key,” he said, every muscle tensing.
“I do not need one,” she replied.
She tilted her head, studying him. The living room’s one working light bulb illuminated her face in soft gold. Her eyes seemed darker than before, the faint red ring more pronounced.
“How many vials have you sold?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Enough.”
Her smile sharpened.
“Enough for rumours to root themselves,” she said. “Enough for hunger to find new mouths. You have been very busy."
He bristled at her tone. “You wanted distribution. I delivered. You said people would suffer. I did not pretend otherwise.”
Her gaze flowed over him, amused.
“You remind me of the men who fed us to monsters in the old stories,” she said conversationally. “They told themselves they were only doing what was necessary to survive. They never imagined the monsters might remember their names.”
Hakim snorted. “I am not afraid of stories.”
“Good,” she said.
What happened next destroyed his ability to pretend the world was made only of money and logic.
Her body did not blur. It did not dissolve. It split.
Her jaw opened in a wide grin, then wider, then over wide, stretching far past what bone should allow. Her neck elongated, veins bulging. The skin around her throat tore with a wet rip.
He heard vertebrae crack.
He heard something thick and wet slide.
Her head rose from her shoulders, separating cleanly with a burst of blood that splattered dark across his couch. Below her severed neck, ropes of glistening organs unfurled. Stomach, liver, intestines, all hanging down in a grotesque bouquet.
Her now-empty body remained seated, dress slumped, arms still resting politely.
Her head hovered above it, trailing her insides. She turned in the air to face him.
Her eyes were bright, fevered. Her lips, still red and perfect despite the tear at her throat, curved.
She looked more beautiful than she ever had, and it made his skin crawl.
“Nisa,” he whispered, voice raw.
“Names are for when I wear my skin,” she replied. Her voice seemed to come from everywhere in the room, reverberating in the walls. “This is what I am when the polite world sleeps.”
The vinegar smell hit him fully now, sharp and choking. It mixed with the iron scent of blood, with the floral trace of her earlier perfume, turning his stomach.
He stumbled back, knocking over a small table. A glass fell and shattered, water spreading across the floor.
“What are you?” he rasped.
She floated closer, entrails swaying gently, dripping clear fluid that hissed when it dropped onto the cheap rug.
She spoke softly, almost amused, as if recounting someone else’s bedtime story.
“When I was small, the elders whispered of creatures they called Penanggal. Beautiful women, they said, who bargained for more than a single lifetime. At night they steeped themselves in vinegar so the flesh would shrink and slip away cleanly from the bone. Then the head would rise alone, trailing wet lanterns of light where the body used to be, drifting over rooftops in search of warm blood just beginning to pulse on its own.”
She paused, tilting her own head as though listening for distant wings.
“They insisted those creatures adored the scent of women heavy with child, and the first faint cry of something newly born.”
A small smile, tender and terrible, curved her mouth.
“Old people will believe anything to explain why the dark feels hungry.”
The corner of her mouth lifted, slow and knowing.
“In your new world, you call us something else. Side effects. Systemic failures. Unforeseen outcomes.”
She smiled wider.
“We are very old. Your city has just given us better cover.”
He shook his head, panting.
“This is some hack,” he muttered, searching for an explanation that made sense. “Some biotech body mod. You are not… that. You are…”
She cut him off with a laugh that made his bones feel hollow.
“Oh Hakim,” she said, drifting close enough that one of her hanging intestines almost brushed his shoulder. “You work for a company that rips joy out of people’s minds. You sell illegal serums that twist flesh. You think the old monsters could not slip through cracks like that?”
She straightened, hovering in front of him like a grotesque lantern.
“You helped open doors,” she said. “We stepped through.”
He realised his hands were shaking.
Instinct told him to run. Pride told him not to show fear. Greed told him there might still be a way to salvage this, to leverage it, to survive.
He chose the voice that had always guided him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
She smiled as if he had finally asked the right question.
“What I promised from the start,” she said. “To make you part of something bigger.”
________________________________________
He tried to back toward the kitchen, eyes darting for anything that could be a weapon.
His foot hit something small and cylindrical. It rolled under his heel. He looked down.
One of his vials lay there, the glass catching the light. He had been planning to test it, to see if there was a version of the product that could benefit men.
He slipped.
The vial cracked. The needle at its tip pierced his palm. The fluid shot under his skin, and pain bloomed.
Not the sharp sting of a cut, but a deep, spreading burn that raced up his arm, into his chest, down his spine. Every nerve lit in a sudden neon of agony.
He fell to his knees, clutching his hand. His breath came out in ragged bursts.
Nisa watched, suspend in the air, entrails swaying in a slow, eager rhythm.
“You bartered yourself away long before I ever looked at you,” she murmured, the words arriving like smoke from a fire that had burned for centuries. “A sliver of conscience to one bidder, a drop of mercy to another, scattered across lifetimes the way rice is scattered for the dead. What remains is only the last husk, ripening at last for harvest.”
Her voice carried the hush of temple stones at midnight; tender the way a blade is tender when it kisses the throat it has already decided to open.
“Now even the flesh remembers the bargain.”
His bones felt wrong. They itched from the inside, as if something was trying to push out.
His ribs creaked. His spine arched sharply, vertebrae grinding. He screamed. The sound broke on itself.
The room tilted. His vision went white at the edges.
He clawed at his throat, which felt too tight, too small. The skin there bulged and pulsed.
His jaw dislocated with a wet crack. His mouth stretched in a grotesque O. Flesh split under his ears. Blood spilled down his chest.
He tried to close his mouth but he could not. His head felt heavy and light all at once.
The burning in his spine intensified, then shifted. Something inside him pulled upward with animal determination.
He felt his own vertebrae slide. He felt muscle detach in strands.
His head lifted.
He heard his own scream turn wet and distant.
The room shrank below him. His body fell from underneath, a collapsing puppet. His neck tore. His own organs followed, dragged up through the opening. The sensation was unbearable and yet, within it, another feeling threaded.
Hunger.
His heart hung beneath his chin. His intestines uncoiled, glistening, dripping fluids that hissed like acid when they hit the floor.
He hovered above his own corpse, feeling oddly light.
His vision sharpened. The dim apartment was suddenly full of detail. He saw individual cracks in the paint, the fine tremor in the curtain string, the dust motes moving like tiny planets.
And beyond the wall, beyond the building, he felt other things.
Warmth pockets.
Heartbeat clusters.
Fear. Milk-scent.
Soft crying.
Newborns.
Every instinct in him roared.
He turned to Nisa, eyes wide.
“What have you done?” he managed, though his voice now sounded like it came from both his mouth and the air.
She drifted close, her own entrails swaying in a mirror dance.
“Upgraded you,” she said with a pleased little shrug. “You wanted more than what ChronoNet gave you. You wanted to be above the people you were feeding on. You wanted to never be weak again.”
She tilted her head again, entrails brushing lightly against his. The sensation made something inside him shudder in awful delight.
“You have a new economy now,” she murmured. “Blood. Fear. Life at its most fragile. You can feed on what you have always traded. Only now, you cannot pretend it is only numbers."
He looked down at his body.
It lay twisted on the floor, a useless shell with limbs bent at impossible angles. It looked small. Pathetic. Easily forgotten.
He did not feel sorry for it.
He felt free of it.
That realisation hit him with cold clarity. He had always thought he was someone who still had the option to choose differently, choose better, one day. A man could tell himself that. A floating head with dangling organs had no such illusions.
He laughed.
The sound curdled the air.
“Will I die?” he asked.
“Eventually,” she said. “Everything does. It will just take you longer, and you will be very fed by then."
She drifted toward the window. It had been left slightly open for ventilation. She pushed her face through the gap. Her entrails squeezed after, in slow, obscene procession.
Outside, the city glowed. Floodlights along the levee cast pale ribbons over dark water. Apartment blocks rose like weary teeth. Somewhere, a distant siren wailed.
Nisa looked back at him, hovering by the glass.
“Come,” she said. “There are so many who think they have already given everything. Show them what more can be taken.”
Hakim floated forward.
His entrails scraped the windowsill, leaving streaks that fizzed. The open night air washed over his face, cool and electric. The smell of the city filled him.
He could taste it.
He could taste the thin walls between womb and storm, between lullaby and scream.
His last human thought, if it could be called that, slithered through him.
I can monetise this.
Then hunger rose, a dark tide, and thinking became something small in the corner of a room with no walls.
________________________________________
The first time he hunted, he told himself it was just to see if he could.
He followed Nisa over the flooded streets. From below, if any insomniac had looked up, they might have seen what looked like drifting lanterns. Two glowing orbs with trailing, jellyfish-like tendrils.
From up here, the city looked almost peaceful. The worst of its misery hid behind walls and public phrases.
But he could feel it. He sensed fear like heat. Despair like static. Hope like a faint golden buzz.
She led him to an older part of the district, where houses still squatted low, their foundations reinforced in vain attempts to outlast the tides.
They hovered above one particular roof. Inside, he could feel three heartbeats. One old. One middle-aged. One small and rapid.
“A grandmother, a mother, and an infant,” Nisa murmured, her voice vibrating through the air. “Traditional, tight knit. They have sold no joy, ever. Their happiness is still theirs. Untouched, ripe.”
He felt saliva that did not exist flood a mouth that no longer needed it.
“Why not the mother?” he asked, surprised at the question falling from his lips.
Nisa’s entrails twitched in amusement.
“She will hurt more if you start with the weakest,” she said.
He did not hesitate after that.
They slipped through a small gap in the roof where repairs had been delayed. Inside, the room was dark, lit only by the faint glow of a standby screen in the corner.
The baby lay in a cot, cheeks plump, fingers twitching in sleep. The mother slept on a thin mattress nearby, hand flung out toward the cot as if proximity alone could protect.
The grandmother snored softly on a mat by the door.
Hakim hovered over the child.
Up close, the heat of that tiny life bathed his dangling organs in warmth. It was intoxicating.
He had always thought of children as liabilities. Expenses that cried. Now, they were something else.
He lowered himself.
He did not bite. There was no need. His own hanging innards knew what to do. A thin filament of tissue stretched, seeking, connecting with the soft flesh of the child.
The baby whimpered once.
A taste hit him.
Joy, raw and unfiltered, joy from being loved without having had to earn it. Joy of potential. Joy of firsts that had not yet happened but already shimmered in the air like promises.
He drank.
The baby’s whimper faded into a faint sigh.
On the mattress, the mother stirred, frowning in her sleep, some part of her soul registering a theft her body could not name.
He pulled away after a moment, more out of curiosity than mercy. He wanted to see what happened if he did not take it all.
The baby still breathed. Its chest rose and fell. But some light in its tiny features seemed dimmer. The room felt colder.
He drifted back, organs swaying, drenched in stolen warmth.
He expected guilt.
He found none.
In his old life, he had convinced people to hand over memories for money. The only difference here was that the transaction had no formal consent. The imbalance was the same.
He glanced at the mother. She slept on, one hand now clutching at her chest as if something inside hurt.
He felt impatient. “Next,” he said.
Nisa’s laugh was a soft purr.
Outside, as they lifted into the night again, Hakim felt fuller than he had ever felt after any fancy meal, any sex, any successful commission.
The city stretched beneath them like an endless marketplace.
He was not special. He was not cursed. He was simply what came out the other end of the choices he had always made.
For the first time, the thought did not feel like a threat.
It felt like belonging.
________________________________________
The city would tell stories again, in time, about flying heads with trailing organs, about vinegar and blood and crying babies whose eyes turned dull. Folklore channels would make content. ChronoNet analysts would stare at new anomalies. Priests would mutter that the old sins had grown digital skins.
Somewhere along those stories, someone might mention a man named Hakim who loved to sell things he never had to pay for.
If they did, the night would listen.
And the night would smile.