MOTHER I CRAVE FISHIES.
The words arrived like a boot through the ceiling — blunt, unavoidable, rattling her out of what had almost been sleep. Iris rolled over, blanket twisted around one ankle, and found herself nose to nose with a pair of eyes too wide to be decent at dawn.
The kitten blinked once, then repeated with all the solemnity of an unpaid landlord: MOTHER. I. CRAVE. FISHIES.
"Every other reject at the shelter just meows," she croaked, pushing hair out of her face. "Why'd I get the one that thinks in capital letters?"
Wulong headbutted her chin, paws kneading her chest with tiny pricks that promised scars later. His body purred like a cheap fan left running too long. He'd gotten heavier again — kittens weren't meant to put on weight overnight. Dragons maybe, but that wasn't her department before coffee.
The blinds let in a slice of Fortress Hill's insomnia: bruised pink neon across cracked plaster, drizzle silvering the scaffolds outside. Tram bells dinged two streets off, out of time with themselves. Someone below had already decided the day needed garlic and made the entire stairwell complicit.
Iris swung her legs to the floor. Cold concrete bit bare feet. The mirror by the sink caught her on the way to the kettle: dark circles dug under her eyes, mouth set like she'd lost an argument in her sleep. She ignored it, turned the tap. The kettle stuttered awake and immediately tried to show her a horoscope: AVOID TRAVEL. She smacked it once; it coughed, sulked, then decided to boil water instead.
Coffee gurgled through the filter, bitter smell drowning the garlic. Iris lit a stick, violet ember cutting the air, smoke curling metallic-sweet in the flat's corners. On the road she never smoked. At home it was ritual: light, exhale, remind herself there was still time to sit.
Wulong flopped across the counter, tail twitching, eyes half-closed. FISHIES, he pressed, the thunder gone from it now — just a low rumble of complaint.
"You'll live," Iris said, taking the first scalding sip of coffee. It tasted like wet metal and stubbornness. "Ugly kibble's all you're getting."
Her comm blinked with a new message: AUNTIE: COME DOWN. WE NEED YOU. BRING JACKET.
Iris barked a laugh, rough from sleep. "Still alive, thanks for asking." She ground the stick down, pulled on boots and a jacket that hadn't been new in years. Wulong tumbled into her backpack without invitation, claws clicking as he rearranged himself into smugness.
The hallway outside was already awake — incense from one door, frying oil from another, somebody's radio preaching racing odds. The lift opened with reluctance, jittered its numbers, then dropped her to ground level with a shudder that suggested it resented her aura. Wulong purred louder, as though that fixed anything.
DO NOT FALL OVER, he told her. WHO WILL BRING ME FISHIES.
"Ungrateful little tyrant," Iris muttered, stepping out into lobby light.
The Aunties had claimed their usual table near the entrance, mahjong tiles clattering like teeth, ashtrays crowded with half-dead cigarettes. One looked up, eyed her from boots to uncombed hair, and clucked sharp enough to sting.
"You look terrible," Auntie said. Which, in Fortress Hill dialect, was as close as anyone came to affection.
Iris managed a crooked grin. "Morning to you too."
"Sit," Auntie said, which meant don't sit, listen. She flipped a tile, smoke leaking from the corner of her mouth. With her free hand she shoved a folded slip across the table. Charm-ink had run where oil fingers had loved it too often.
"Ko Shing Street," she said. "Old herbal row in Sheung Wan. Bring these. The good kind, not the tourist tins."
Iris unfolded the paper. The characters were tidy and unforgiving: 川貝, 枇杷葉, 陳皮, 甘草...and below them, the kind of addendum that got you side-eyed on the MTR: 蛤蚧.
She raised a brow. "Chuan bei. Loquat leaf. Tangerine peel. Licorice. And—ah—dried gecko. Nothing like collecting reptiles before breakfast."
"It's noon," Auntie lied. "And gecko opens the chest." She rapped Iris's wrist with a knuckle. "Ho-sir's shop. Ask for the ones he hides under the counter. He'll pretend he forgot English."
Another Auntie snorted. "He did forget English. On purpose."
"Tell him it's for my cough," the first went on, steamrolling laughter. "He'll know which jar. If he gives you the dusty ones I'll beat him with his abacus."
Wulong pressed a thought into Iris's skull like a wet nose under a hand.
MOTHER. FISHIES. LIZARDS ARE FISHIES WITH LEGS.
"Absolutely not," she said, tucking the list into her jacket. "You're already a crime."
The table clattered self-importantly. Tiles clicked and smoked and muttered. Auntie lifted a tile, didn't look up. "Go. Come back fast. Rain's wrong today."
"Rain's wrong every day." Iris's grin showed teeth. "Back by lunch."
"Bring jacket," Auntie said again, like a prayer you had to repeat or it wouldn't stick.
She was already moving. Lobby light smeared on the concrete, the lift complaining itself open, the street shouldering her with garlic, incense, and wet-tin tram breath. Neon bled bruise-purple from a dumpling sign that had never learned daytime. A delivery truck argued with a trolley. Two schoolkids in counterfeit uniforms played slap-hands under a dripping awning and pretended she wasn't there when she passed; then one peeked, flinched, pretended harder.
Her bike sulked in the garage, chain damp, paint beaded with rain. She patted the seat anyway, like an apology, then swung a leg over. The starter coughed once, twice, then fell into silence. She tried again. Nothing but a dull click.
"Don't do this to me," she muttered, twisting the throttle as if encouragement might count for wiring. On the third try the engine caught, rough and uneven, coughing smoke before settling into a low, grudging growl.
"Good girl," Iris said, thumbing the visor down. The world narrowed to a slit of neon and rain.
No smoke on the road. She let the craving lift and vanish like steam.
Helmet sealed, the world went drum-tight—rain, bells, and then the first coil of throat-singing in her ears. Mongol bass threaded with 2038 grit, a voice like weather rolling across steppe. It always made her spine remember speed.
Wulong turtled deeper in the satchel, a purr-vibration against her ribs.
DO NOT FALL OVER, he commanded. WHO WILL BRING ME FISHIES.
"Bossy," she muttered, and rolled out.
King's Road spit her toward the tram tracks. Des Voeux's old wards had been lacquered under corporate blue long ago, but they bled through—faint glows under the rails like the city's veins remembering a different body. Her AR overlay hiccuped when she crossed them, flashed a horoscope she hadn't subscribed to—FIRE DRAGON: AVOID TRAVEL—then corrected, then fuzzed again when her aura leaned against it. She grinned at the warning and fed the bike a slow, mean throttle.
Traffic was a single animal wearing too many plates. Buses shouldered vans. Vans inhaled scooters. The rain stitched everything together into one wet hide. She slid between a double-decker and a tram, mirrors whispering past her jacket like a promise to scratch her if she misjudged. The boy at the tram window pressed his palms to the fogged glass the way kids touched aquarium walls. She didn't look back. The gap was a breath; she held it and slipped through.
Her aura tugged at the sensors around her. A police drone came in low to eyeball lane discipline, optics blooming blue as it calculated fines. The moment its field brushed hers, it stuttered, re-sorted threat matrices, and decided she was not for today. It rose, sulking, and went to harass a delivery bot that could be bullied.
"Good boy," she told nobody. "Tell your friends."
She took the inside line at Tin Hau, flirted with the slick white stripe on the asphalt, watched the rear end think about stepping and then decide she'd earned the trust. Wheels hummed; puddles spat sideways; the front fork talked in the honest language of metal.
Breeze, she thought. In and out. Back before the coffee cooled in the pot. She felt tall on the bike, taller than the buses, taller than the warded towers trying to teach the rain how to fall politely. Ko Shing Street was a dozen tram bells away—drop past the sugar warehouses, follow where the air started to smell of citrus peel and rot. She could do it blind.
The city tried to remind her she couldn't.
At Admiralty an AR billboard broke and went honest—code stripped to bones where her presence rubbed at it. The smiling bank god flickered into a block of hexagrams that rearranged themselves into nothing her grandmother would have admitted knowing, then snapped back to a man selling mortgages like salvation. A monk at a corner shrine looked up mid-sweep and pinched ash between two fingers, eyes narrowing in the direction she'd just been.
Wulong's voice turned small and round in her head.
RAIN IS WRONG, he admitted.
"Feels like a dare," she said. And fed the throttle again.
She rode the line where speed turned into quiet. Traffic smear, rain hiss, the motor a purr in her knees—she could feel the city's ribs under asphalt. Des Voeux Road West elbowed her toward Sheung Wan, past shops that stacked their language in jars: antlers over anchovies, dried plums beside scallops with the color of old coins. Rubber bands bit into bundles of twig that had once been alive and would be again if you believed hard enough.
She cut left between two vans that were pretending to be legally parked. A man stepped off the curb religiously, eyes on his feed, and almost put his torso where her mirrors lived. She saw his intention before he had it and was gone, a ghost that made his jacket flap a second later. He looked up, offended at physics.
FIRE DRAGON: AVOID TRAVEL, the AR whispered again, chagrined by its own persistence.
"Make me," she said into her visor, and laughed, and let the bike speak fluent rain.
She was not reckless. She was something worse: practiced. She knew exactly how far the front would track in a puddle born five minutes ago versus an hour. She knew the respectful distance you kept from tram rails when the lacquer of old wards made them greasy in certain humidity. She knew the way bus drivers telegraphed lane changes with a shoulder twitch you could see through steel. She knew how to cheat all of it and get away with it.
At a red light, the world stacked: steaming buns under plastic, a grandma counting coins like a rosary, a student glitching through AR flashcards that turned to static and scolded her for swearing under her breath. Iris planted one boot lightly, weight still forward, engine ticking its impatience.
A cop on the corner started to blow a whistle, saw her, and chose to cough instead. Her aura did that, she'd been told—made gangs, cops, ghosts decide trouble could take a number.
Green. She went.