The door stuck on its swollen frame, then gave with a wet groan and dumped Iris into her own stale air. She kicked it shut with her heel and let her back slide down the tape-scabbed wood until she was squatting on the grit of her own floor, helmet throbbing in her hands like a second skull.
"Why did I say yes," she asked the ceiling, which had never answered anything. The tram bell two streets over clanged a polite accusation. Wulong slinked out of the backpack and booped her knee, then climbed her thigh, shoulder, hair, perching at the hinge of her jaw like a pilgrim who'd reached the god and found the god smoking.
"Don't look at me like that," she told him. "You say no to a cop when he's tallying debts."
He purred. Sparks jittered off his whiskers. The lamp blinked, reconsidered its career, and steadied.
She dropped the helmet, curled forward over her knees, stuck a violet stick in the corner of her mouth with shaking fingers, and lit it. The ember flared the wrong color, sweet-metal filling the flat. It calmed her, which was the trick. It lied and said she had time.
"A plus-one," she said to the smoke. "In Macao. With the aquarium people and their teeth polished. Wear a dress. Use a fork on purpose. Smile without biting."
She laughed once. It wasn't nice.
Wulong butted her cheek. Not heavy. Never heavy. He should have been. He felt like a rumor on her skin.
"I don't own a dress," she said. "Best I have is riding suit."
The panic rose stupidly fast, fizzy as bad champagne. She cut it with gin. The first shot burned and told her she was alive; the second told her she'd regret it; the third stayed in the bottle. She blew smoke rings at the tape on the window and they stuck there like lazy halos.
"Okay," she said. "Inventory."
She slapped the floor with both hands and levered herself up. The cracked mirror threw a pale courier back at her: hair damp and mean, jacket patched like a sailor's sail, eyes tired enough to be honest. She peeled the jacket off, tossed it at the chair, and opened the closet.
It coughed up lies: courier leathers with storm scars burned into the seams; a corp blazer she'd bought drunk and never wore; a dress from a funeral two years ago, black and honest, cut wrong for a body that lived on a bike; a club top that belonged to a girl who had been trying too hard and didn't know it yet.
She held them to her, one by one, while Wulong judged.
Leather: he batted the zipper and sneezed a spark into it. The jacket hummed and died, her aura finishing the job it had started months ago.
Blazer: she shrugged it on, looked in the mirror, and watched the AR lapel pin glitch through three corporate logos and a horoscope before giving up and showing a lucky koi. The blazer stank of compromise. She peeled it off like it was damp.
Funeral dress: she tugged it over her head and felt the hem sit wrong, history heavy in the fabric. Wulong climbed her shin like a rope and sat on her knee, tail flicking disapproval. The mirror agreed, reflecting a girl who might attend, not a woman who would hunt.
The club top lasted four seconds before she barked a laugh sharp enough to skin it back off. It looked like a painkiller trying to be a personality.
She stood in her underwear and smoked and watched herself fail.
"High society," she told the moth beating itself against the tape. "Low society with better lighting."
The moth ignored her. It always did.
She dug deeper. The closet's back gave her two velvet boxes she'd forgotten: one held earrings stolen from a karaoke booth during a fight; the other held a thimble's worth of jade she'd found in a sewer grate the night before the storm, a disc the size of a coin, dull from time. She held the jade against her palm and felt nothing but cool. Good. No ghosts. Something she could wear that belonged to no one else.
Her comm blinked on the counter. She didn't check it. She didn't want to see Kwan's time stamp. She wanted to be someone else for three hours and still be herself when the door latched behind her again.
"Wardrobe," she said, pointing at Wulong with the cigarette like an indictment. "We need a miracle."
He licked her finger, purring hard enough to rattle the glass.
"Right," she muttered, and went next door.
Auntie Ping lived in a unit the same size as hers and somehow fit ten people's worth of furniture into it. The smell of fried shallot and Tiger Balm hit Iris before the door did. Tiles clacked on the table; the mahjong queens were three rounds deep and seven opinions in.
Auntie opened on the second knock, cigarette parked at the far corner of her mouth like a lighthouse. Her eyes raked Iris from wet hair to naked ankles and clicked her tongue hard enough to bend weather. "Aiya, you look like a broken umbrella."
"Compliment accepted," Iris said. "I need... clothes. For rich sharks in a glass tank. Also: can you watch the kid later?"
"You finally sell yourself to a banker?" Auntie asked, already shooing her inside. She batted a hand at the table. "Kolok! Shuffle yourself. I'm saving this girl from shame."
The other aunties hooted, because they lived for humiliation as a condiment. One made prayer hands at Iris. "Wear red. Red is protection."
"Protection from what," Iris asked, "boredom?"
Auntie was already rummaging through a wardrobe that had once been a coffin, judging by its size and stubbornness. She yanked free a black silk slip with a bias cut that implied it had known better nights. "Here. For a body that refuses to apologize. And—" she produced a box with the ceremony of an exorcism, "—shoes."
The shoes were weapons. Thin straps. Brutal heel. Ward-thread lace had been woven through the ankle ties in tiny brushstrokes. Auntie frowned. "This lace is from idiot cousin's wedding. Priest said it keeps girl upright. You?" She looked to the ceiling as if asking a god to sign off. "You don't obey anything, but maybe it helps."
"It'll hate me," Iris said, taking the shoe like it might bite. "Everything wired hates me."
"That's why we use thread, not wires," Auntie said. "Try."
Iris hesitated. "I can't bring the kid. He'll eat a chandelier."
Auntie's mouth softened by half a millimeter. "Leave cat. He and I play tiles. I teach him to cheat." She plucked the cigarette from her lip and jabbed it to make the bargain real. "You bring him by dinner time. I feed. No money."
"I have—"
"No," Auntie snapped. "You save your money for when the gods change their mind."
Iris bit back thanks and made a show of rolling her eyes instead. "I'll bring him after I figure out how to stand up in these."
"Stand up?" Auntie snorted. "You learn to float."