You’re nauseous, coming down from your earlier caffeine high. Early morning humidity whips you atop the landing platform, the chartered vessel birthing from the irradiated clouds. At this distance, the Little Thing is a miniscule mercury pill, shining, making you squint, your knock-off D’Valay’s unable to block the refracting light—as the mare chastised would be the case.

Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund Lowe, failed artist and muse, read your falsified immigration papers. Mystifying text that translates to “let us alone.” Purchased from the same sunglasses vendor, surprisingly enough.

On the ‘documents’—nothing but warped plastic sheets, once heated, stamped with pre-cut images and mismatched nonsense statistics—your faces are tired. Yours, sunburnt, the bags beneath your eyes may as well be designer, with all the credits you were forced to front. The mare’s, an oblong face unappealing from straight on, like a shark’s fin, bloodshot eyes uncanny and sanpaku crazed as always, but even moreso, from a lack of sleep.

Above, the Little Thing’s engines shriek. Six recently-installed Merrimack engines nearly blow you and Ø from the raised tungsten platform. Your full-body off-orange jiasha monk’s robe, which you eventually purchased from a religious-themed roadside boutique, protects you well enough from the uninterested looks of the spaceport’s security. Both your heads are hooded in the morning’s drizzling of acid rain.

First rain in a year, a one-eyed smush-faced porter panted off-hand.

In comparison to your garb, in the low-light, Ø’s rainbow saekdongot dress is pale. Her plastic electrical wire facial mask—jutting out below a look of tired annoyance—huffs inwards and outwards, the mare’s nostrils still visible, sucking down air as she, too, crash-lands from her previous high. At her ears, her auburn mane is tied back with a familiar gift; a length of hand-spun purple-dyed puresilk, embroidered with a simple stalk of bok choy. A gift to be returned to the original owner, you decide, at some to-be-determined date.

As is the polite thing to do.

Once the Little Thing hits the tarmac, which is an improperly sized fifty-by-fifty meter platform atop the unfamiliar skyscraper, one of hundreds on the arcology’s horizon, with railings nonexistent, metal-bamboo supports screeching under wind-whipped duress, luggage is stowed without a second’s waiting. Porters, hunched over and nearly drenched with acidic stinging rainfall, slap sopping loafers as they run to-and-fro, your luggage’s safety far more import than their own lives as they congregate too close to the nuclear-powered engines, or to the forty-story drop to the awoken streets below.

The few pairs of well-paying passengers, strangers in the early morning, hustle behind in their own gaudy disguises. Most look hungover, cheap sunglasses barely shielding from sunrise, while others fidget with carry-ons gripped with white knuckles, obvious indications of objects worth stealing. But—uniting you scumbags—all have unique reasons for vacating Tiangong as quickly as possible, whatever they may be.

Aboard the Little Thing, you investigate your small cabin. One of six, walls paneled with finely installed sorghum wood. Each cabin has enough beds for four passengers, and as you remove your blood-dust-acid soaked loafers, the creamy carpeting is warm between your toes. Finely coiled. Caressing your beaten feet, where you notice two toenails have been ripped clean off, blood coagulated beneath ripped socks with clear signs of infection.

For you and your mare, as the threatened tanuki promised, two bunks. One Above, one Below. Lamanon’s. Not the N-12 Deluxe models of Fontvieille, nor as good as the Mr. Memory’s N-8 Deluxe. Just your average N-6. Standard issue, less interpersonal sonar commingling, more indirect preference probing, but a luxury nonetheless.

Thankfully, the room’s empty. Your fellow guests have not yet arrived when the mare disrobes.

Unconsciously, crass as always, she sheds her outfit, the rainbow saekdongot, in clumps, kicking it into a pile, its poorly-sewn seams already ripping under her mannish frame’s duress, fast fashion quickly crumpling. Inside, where the cheap white fabric meets her fur, it’s already stained red-yellow, blood and clay the one-two punch where no launderer will be able to operate further, the blemishes permanent and not worth the cost of fixing.

Then comes the uncomfortable plastic push-up purple brassiere, a size too small around her scarred chest’s circumference, restricting breathing, which she angrily tears from shoulders. And the matching fundoshi loincloth, both purchased as a pair, chipped fingernails ripping at the knot near her tail, pulling off stray hair, shedding onto the floor. Lastly, the bok choy rag shakes from her mane. She balls it like used tissue, pitching it at the cabin’s window where it hits with a wet slap, the rain outside cascading across the glass in random, mesmerizing channels.

If you ignore the mare’s annoyed huffing, her impotent kicks at the pile of fabric, half-organizing but mostly from a place of anger, you can hear the hissing against the glass, liquid acid rain reacting in Tiangonh’s open air.

Ø assaults the lower bunk, making her choice before you can get in a word—as always.

Clambering to safety, skinned knees stamping blood like unintelligible hanko seals on the newly replaced sheets, she’s silent beneath the puresilk quilt covers, ones spackled with red-blue zig-zags, interspersed with agrarian hieroglyphics—heads of corn, radishes in bloom. The Lamanon bed already senses her weight, massaging her tortured shoulders, applying heat to sprained hocks. But, as you stare, too tired to move elsewhere, you know she’s still awake. Her snout is centimeters away from the wall, eyes avoiding yours, giving you the nonverbal command to vacate, to leave her alone, to let her play dead and stew in silence, remaining unhinged and unhappy until she’ll eventually pass out.

She snorts at last—the clear order for you to beat it.

It snaps you back to reality, your tired legs moving without your express consent. You, too, lose the clothes, taking advantage of the semi-privacy, to escape your newly purchased robes. They chafe against your sunburnt skin, and you’re glad to be rid of them, kicking them into a pile near the mare’s, but careful to remove that little box from Madame Soonyeong first, stowing it in a nearby compartment for further research.

There it sits, the last bit of Tiangong luxury—the only treasure you’ve successfully gotten away with.

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You muse about your hanten, its puresilk make somewhere in the Yugure Compound. If someone were to steal it—and your quarters were most certainly ransacked within a quarter-hour of your hasty retreat—you hope Ke got there first. It’d look good on him. Poor kid.

The shower you take is a pressure washing.

Jets of water—recycled from elsewhere in the Little Thing, sure, but not acidic—assault your bare skin. Spouts oscillate on a y-axis, their upwards-downwards massages coming from all four sides, partly bathing, mostly sanitizing. Hot water scrapes scabs, patches of hardened clay peeling like anemic skin. Only a square meter, the shower is almost nearly a safe, pressure-locked like one and fed its own oxygen. Closed off from the rest of the sleeping compartment, in case of turbulence or emergency depressurization.

Still, it doesn’t compare to the mineral water, if it even was mineral water—those baths at the Yugure Compound. Piped in from across the planet, claimed Ke, from below-ground waterfalls, whole mountain ranges and valleys hidden beneath the hulking wrecks and artificial flattening of semi-ancient history. On the house, for the Bossman’s guests.

And if Ke was wrong, he believed his Bossman’s misinformation without question, whether he thought it was true or not.

But the massages were real, you and your mare doted upon by prostitutes polite at a Yugure Consortium gunpoint. After Ø’s long hours of training, calves and shoulders wound tight, and your lounging, knees inflamed from sitting criss-cross at chabudai tables, droning on about nothing, it was a welcome change of pace. Months of a violent, gangbanging life your mare never reached in her entire piratical career, opium at wry lips alongside her forgotten stablemates, one you could only pine for in the past, targeted ads misfiring into your holo-net feeds while Dyle—your AI assistant—chided you for what was then a criminal lack of funds.

Your inflamed forehead presses against the wall, jets spraying directly into your eyes, squeezed shut.

Then, the knock at the reinforced door. You’d never hear it, if not for the Whisper from the other side. Multiple impatient raps from the mare, drawn instinctively by the nostalgic memories of onsen luxuries, realizing that the longer the radioactive dust sticks to her fur, the higher probability of costly medical treatments later.

“Scooch,” she demands.

The jets have paused at her entry. Once more, you both maneuver, reminding you of a certain capsule hotel stay, an uncomfortable palanquin getaway, certain yab-yum embarrassments. She huffs with indignation as you’re both trapped between pressurized water, stuck chest-to-chest-to-wall, barely enough room to breathe at the door’s lock, pressurizing with a hiss.

“Forget it,” she spits recycled water, “forget the whole damn place. I don’t want to hear you think about that onsen again. Those luxuries distracted you, you know that? Got you all soft. Timid. It’s like you learned nothing—squat—on Fontvieille. Getting caught up in jobs, trusting stooges you can’t, shouldn’t. Won’t? I don’t know. But look,” she swallows a dry tongue, “at the whole thing—now there’s probably two more bodies—three more, if you want to count that meat house clown, so maybe, I guess…”

Her tirade falters. Snout rests atop your skullcap with a tired sigh, blood along nostrils breaking coagulation, bleeding anew where home-made nasal packings once resided. Marred mustard fetlocks drip clean, returning to their sorrel-white and folding onto your still-bleeding toes, where her hooves carefully avoid stomping. A chest’s white diamond caresses your face, sternum’s barcode at the bridge of your nose, sopping wet, nearly drowning you.

“Still, would’ve been nice,” you muse, “staying in one place for a bit longer.”

“Sure,” she stutters, “but don’t you forget. For even a cycle—don’t you forget. This whole thing was your fault. Didn’t,” fresh blood snorts, “you didn’t stop me. So it’s your whole thing. Your mistake,” she lies with a pitiful sort of defiance, “you got it? If you’re up in that bunk thinking—even dreaming—anything different, I’m gonna, you’re so… Just, so fuckin’…”

She melts. You, too, wilt. The water’s too hot for your dehydrated bodies as you slump, interlocked, to the heated floors, half-standing, wall-sitting against one another. Perfect leverage, intertwined in mind and body, as you’ve been recently, cycles ticking to weeks to months—years of a familiar wild horse.

“Don’t want to say anything else?” you half-chide.

“No,” she huffs.

“Nothing?”

“Yeah,” she chokes, “and don’t fuckin’ ask me again, got it?”

“Then let me know when you change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

Your in-and-out of consciousness dance is performed to the beat of running water, jets intermittently bashing you both from either side, knocking together your skulls, necks rolling against the uncaring man-made storm.

By the time you wake up, your compartment has changed. Out the window, gone is acid rain in favor of space junk, packets of plastic-metal asteroids that knock against the Little Thing with worrying thunks. The blinds, too, have been shuttered. You’d assume it was the barcoded head of service, but there’s more to the room, a menacing puncture that disrupts your placidity:

Luggage.

Namely a set of three powder-periwinkle Lady Edo nesting pieces, ultralight with hyper-vinyl, blast-resistant steel zipper and tracks, part of their Springtime 2XXX collection, and the blood-red identification tags are verified—the whole set evidently purchased legally, not pawned, found fallen off the back of a transport vessel in otherworldly coincidence—with a nearby trunk nearly two meters in length, tempered falseleather with a dark coffee stain finish, brass latches antique, upon which are stacked a smattering of hatboxes, brands ranging from Levata to D’Inzeo.

Instinctively, you turn, wondering if your mare has already attempted to rob your fellow travelers.

But she’s already hit the hay, taken her place in your Above bunk and snoring atop the covers, evidently unwilling to sleep alone, but choosing the most dangerous possible way to express her locked-up emotion, as you’re unsure as to whether you’ll be able to scale the vertical leap at all.

Luckily, the smell of brewing black tea wafts through the thin sorghum wood door. You twitch at the thought of more caffeine, hoping it’ll at least take your mind off the cycle’s events. Donned in nothing but your complimentary puresilk black faux-kimono, the fabric embroidered with a cursive patch declaring Little Thing in gold font, you head towards the common area.

There, where two sets of purewood pulp tables, eight seats in total, lingers a cheerful barcoded stewardess with a silvered auto-translation collar. She pushes a cart of newly-unpackaged Keowees and drinks—pricier bourbons and vat-cultivated corn-based moonshine substitutes—inviting with a homely Echelon accent for you to mingle with the other travelers as the craft blasts from of Tiangong’s orbit, past the overbearing defense platforms and into the maws of open space.

“Might as well, ‘cause after all, we ain’t got nothin’ but time, don’t we?” her translator chips as she sashays back towards the bridge, a new pack of Keowees in your hand.

It’s only then, as you take a seat at an open chair, at a table already occupied with two others, that you hear a mewl. It’s a winded one, almost self-defeating. From a familiar, gaudy tigress, sat next to Teutonic suitor, the both of their faces drained of life yet on edge and paranoid.

Skipping off planet for their own reasons, no doubt.

You swallow, exchanging mutual faces of recognition, doing your best to flash a polite grin.

The smile is politely, forcefully returned, the tired eyes of your fellow passengers showing that, like you, they’re glad to leave Tiangong behind. Its filthy alleyways and luxury apartments dripping with blood from every orifice, cracked ribs and torn muscle mixed with false hospitality—lifestyle must not have suited them. Realizing this is your only chance to avoid further conflict and identification, you reach beneath your robes, producing a familiar pack of Keowees to obfuscate your suggestion, holding one to the tigress with a vain hope that wafts from gifted from bok choy sutras, embedded with a snoring mare’s wisdom gifted unconsciously through fate’s contorting yab-yum handcuffing.

“Now, we haven’t met before, have we?” you Whisper.