Fortress Hill still wore the storm like a bruise. Tape charms flapped from balcony cages, their ink bled thin and pink by drizzle. Neon ran in the gutters with the rain, smearing signs into illegible gods. The air tasted of plaster dust and soy, copper at the back of the throat where the city's wires had sparked themselves raw the night before.
Iris shouldered through it with her helmet clipped to the pack. The pack twitched, zipped seam bulging, and a black wedge of a head shoved out against her shoulder. Whiskers flashed tiny forks of light when drops struck them.
"Back in," she said without heat.
Wulong ignored her and climbed. Claws ticked up the strap—never digging, never heavy—until he was perched along her collarbone like a smug scarf. He should have bent her neck. He didn't. He rode the line of her shoulder as if gravity didn't care about him, tail curling against the hinge of her jaw, eyes violet where lantern reflections lived too long.
"Show-off," Iris muttered. "You steal a fishball and he'll boil you."
Steam rolled from the tarp ahead. The stall's enchanted burner guttered a thumb-high green, then flared stubbornly back as Uncle thumped the wok like percussion. Garlic and hot metal wrapped the alley. A string of paper koi hung limp above the counter, their AR skins trying to mimic life and failing every third frame where the nearest tram pylon's fresh ward paint bled interference into the feed.
She ducked under plastic. The cheap light buzzed twice and steadied. Stools were lined in two rows like a prayer someone had given up finishing. Iris had a favorite—one leg shorter, the wobble predictable. It was taken.
Inspector Kwan sat on it like the city had assigned him there.
No badge on display, no helmet. Shirt sleeves rolled past his elbows, rain darkening the fabric. A bowl cooled under his hands. A holo-strip floated at one side of his face, its newsfeed flinching into horoscope glyphs whenever the wind shouldered ward smell through the tarp. He looked up when her boots squeaked and blinked just late enough to pretend surprise.
"What a small world," Iris said around the violet stick in her mouth. The ember painted her cheek with a mean little glow.
"Even smaller kitchens," he said. He shut the holo-strip with a finger and the stall seemed to breathe easier.
She slid onto the next wobbling stool, set her helmet down. Wulong stepped off her shoulder with priestly dignity, planted both front paws on the counter, sniffed steam like a critique. He sneezed; sparks jumped and died on a chopsticks tin.
Uncle swore without looking up. "No animals."
"He's emotional support" Iris said. "One fishball tithe."
Uncle made a show of hearing nothing, then slung noodles into a bowl with the bored violence of long habit. The flame hiccuped, smacked tall, threw light across Wulong's eyes until the violet went white for a blink.
Kwan watched the cat, then the ember at Iris's lip, then her boots. He didn't look past her shoulder toward the alley's gray. He had the patience of men whose work taught them to sit in weather without checking the time. "You live close," he said, meaning: I know where.
"Or I like good broth," she said. "Coincidence? You and me?"
Kwan moved a knuckle against the bowl's rim, pushing a wave of chili oil around until it read as aimlessness. "Today was a mess. I was hungry."
"Lot of that going around," Iris said. She leaned into the steam, felt her sinuses complain and then forgive her. Outside, a tram chided the slope with its bell wrapped in ribbon to keep storms from stealing its voice. "Something I will see on the news?"
"Yeah. Inevitable."
Uncle dropped her bowl. Broth lapped the edge, coppery-red. He flicked her a look and got a banknote under a damp glove for it. The burner coughed. The lamp hummed like an insect trapped in glass.
Wulong batted the first fishball Iris flicked him with two fingers. He drew it in with a satisfied hook of claw and burned the tip of his tongue on it. He made no sound about the pain, only blinked once and ate faster. The lamp over the counter dipped and brightened again as if agreeing with him about the taste.
Kwan watched none of that with his eyes and all of it with his face. "You ride when the wards are still hot," he said, almost conversational. "Most riders know better."
"Most riders don't make rent," Iris said through noodles. She burned her tongue and grinned so he wouldn't have the satisfaction. "Don't worry. I don't do your checkpoints for sport."
"No?" He didn't touch his chopsticks. He had the posture of a man who didn't mind letting food cool to say a thing right. "Looked like sport on Stonecutters."
"That was work. Looks different when you're on the right side of it." She tipped the bowl to lift the noodles into the light, watched chili oil sheet and ripple like lacquer. "I'm not your Lotus brats racing for shits and giggles. I'm a courier."
The word sat. Steam moved around it. Uncle shifted the wok and the flame hissed: a sibilant amen.
Kwan's attention settled without weight. "Courier."
"Some things won't go by drone," she said, as if listing weather. "Some things can't be folded into paper cranes and wished over the harbor. Ward-lines chew signals, ghosts get touchy about automated feet. You want something carried—past numbers and prayers and the small stupid laws the city invents every morning—you put it in my hands." She shrugged, and Wulong absorbed the movement like a boat on gentle chop. "I don't do laps for cameras, Inspector. I deliver."
His mouth did a small, involuntary thing—a muscle that wanted to smile and had been trained out of it. He let it be nothing. "You deliver," he said, not mocking it.
"Glad we agree."
"Do we?"
She slurped. The stall's tarp gutters spat rain, a dull waterfall. Out by the curb a fortune-teller under plastic slapped a soaked charm onto a client's palm and pronounced their week survivable. Every second word fizzed into static where her booth's AR caught the fresh ward ink across the street and decided it was a personal attack.
Kwan tapped the table twice with a knuckle. "Your account got fat," he said. "Then thin. Repeatedly."
"Cop eyes," Iris said. "Peeking into a lady's purse over noodles? Bad manners."
He ignored it. "You don't spend on the flat."
"Don't fix what the next storm will rip," she said. She blew smoke sideways, away from the wok. "Tape's cheaper than optimism."
"Clothes," he said, as if ticking a list. "Gear."
"I have a jacket that keeps out most of the weather, boots that bite paint lines, a helmet that's worth more than your car. I'm not naked out there." She let the stick ride the corner of her mouth and smiled with only one side of her face. "What would I buy that doesn't drown? A rug? A bigger couch to not sit on? I already own everything that makes me happy."
"And what's that?"
She touched the bowl with two fingers. "Heat." She thumbed her shoulder so Wulong's tail flicked. "Company that doesn't ask for receipts." She nodded toward the street, where a tram ground itself up into the fog with the patience of old animals. "A city that tries to kill me honest. The rest is furniture."
The lamp above them buzzed a weak disagreement and steadied. Kwan watched her say it without interruption the way men do when they recognize the argument isn't for them. He picked up his chopsticks at last and ate like a man measuring his hunger against whatever it was he'd come to say.
Wulong returned from the fishball's bones to Iris's shoulder. His breath vibrated her jaw through the leather. Heat bled through the jacket where his paws kneaded once, like a reflex that belonged to something older than cats. He wasn't heavy. He'd never been heavy. When he stepped from collar to collar his weight felt like a hand closing and opening; the rest of him might as well have been smoke.
Uncle dumped a plate of dumplings with the grace of artillery. "No fighting," he warned the fishball thief with a glance.
Wulong blinked as if he had already negotiated peace.
"You could leave," Kwan said, as if offering a weather report she'd missed. "Take your money. Quit this." He stirred the broth once. Chili oil drew a red eye, then collapsed into placid orange. "People do."
"Tourists do," Iris said. She plucked a dumpling before Wulong made a second career choice. "Locals pay the water bill and keep a small god happy. Anyway—" she bit in, broth scalding, whispered a curse she didn't let him enjoy, "—you asking because you care, or because it complicates your paperwork if I don't die where you can file it?"
"Both," he said, to his credit.
That almost got a laugh.
He watched her finish with a patience that was either professional or personal and, either way, too practiced to parse. Outside, monks in orange slickers coiled their ladders and moved down the block, leaving wet talisman strokes that would bite at traffic for a week. A city drone drifted low with joss paper taped to its belly like a child's charm, lens smearing and unsmearing as it crossed the invisible line between tech and belief. It chose not to see the stall. Iris chose to see it choosing.
She slurped the last of the broth, set the bowl down with a thud, and lit another stick. Violet ember flared, smoke curling up to stain the tarp.
"Alright," she said. "That's the dinner debt paid. You stalk me, I humor you, we eat. Square."
Kwan didn't move.
Iris narrowed her eyes. "We are square, right?"
He wiped his chopsticks clean, laid them neat on the counter. Then:
"There's a function tomorrow night. Cotai Strip. Gala. High society."
She barked a laugh sharp enough to make Uncle flinch. "What, you need me to valet your car? Sorry, fierce competition in Macao."
"Plus one," Kwan said flat. "Uniform doesn't get me through the door. I need a partner." His gaze stayed steady, unreadable. "You owe me dinner. This counts."
Iris exhaled smoke, slow, amused. "That's your play? Drag a courier into a room full of sharks and chandeliers? You know I'll spill soy sauce on their marble."
"You'll look like you belong," Kwan said. "More than I do."
She grinned crooked around the ember. "Cute. Fine, Inspector. I'll wear something clean. But this time—" she jabbed her chopsticks at him like a blade, "—you'll owe me."
The wok flame snapped tall at that, sparks skittering across chili oil. Wulong sneezed, sparks dancing from his whiskers.
Kwan only nodded, like debts and favors were just another report to file.
Outside, a tram bell dinged twice through the drizzle, polite as fate clearing its throat.