Low Town at night was a graveyard of ambition. Neon smeared the streets in radioactive stripes, all the way down to the water, where a thin scum of oil floated in perpetual rainbow. The air was so thick with pheromones, engine grease, and fermenting human desperation that even Martha’s new, sanitized sinuses could barely keep up.

  She wasn’t sure why she was here. Correction: the HUD in her brainstem had supplied a half-dozen plausible explanations, each less convincing than the last, but the real answer was primal and unprintable. Hunger, but not for food, not even for the kind of violence she’d so recently threatened against Sylvester. She was hunting something she could neither name nor ignore.

  Her first target presented himself before she’d made it half a block down Conduit Avenue.

  The Chrome Dive was a bar that catered exclusively to men with enough testosterone to challenge a backhoe to a fistfight. The bouncer’s chest was tattooed with a grid of coordinates, each mapping to a kill in his past life as a border merc. He scanned Martha up and down, not for weapons (the clientele preferred to be surprised) but for weakness. He found none. Still, he grunted and waved her in.

  Inside, the world pulsed with blue light and feedback noise. The air was alive with the stink of cheap synthal, half-digested protein, and the barely sublimated rage of a hundred men staring down the barrel of another lost decade. Martha’s new body parsed it all in a heartbeat:

  [AGGRESSION LEVELS: 87%]

  [RISK OF ESCALATION: LOW]

  [BIOLOGICAL VIABILITY: HIGH]

  She slid onto a cracked barstool. The bartender, a cyborg with an origami face and eyes like glacial run-off, poured her a double of something brown and theoretically potable. She sipped it, out of habit. The taste registered as a rolling average: first, the synthetic caramel; then, a delayed uppercut of formaldehyde; then, a bass note of pure ethanol. Her new liver didn’t even blink.

  The men at the bar watched her through the dust cloud of their own psychic rot. Their glances were not the hopeful, puppyish kind she remembered from her old, organic life. These were predatory, but also devotional, as if her very presence had tripped a silent alarm in their collective subconscious. Martha watched their pupils dilate, watched the dopamine metrics scroll across their faces in real time, and felt nothing.

  Then, abruptly, she felt everything.

  It started with a low heat in her pelvis. This pulse radiated up her spine and out through her skin, like an electrical current searching for a ground. The HUD registered it as [PRIME DIRECTIVE: SATIATION], but the word was all wrong. What she wanted was to devour, to consume, to burn a hole through the world and fill it with herself.

  A man slid into the seat next to her. He was taller than most, neck corded with muscle, hands big enough to close around a human skull and pop it like a pomegranate. He wore the coveralls of a dockworker, arms tattooed with crude ASCII pinups and anchor chains.

  He leaned in, exuding salt and danger. “Never seen you in here,” he said, voice a stubbled growl.

  Martha turned to face him, meeting his gaze with a precision that bordered on hostile. “First time,” she said. Her voice was hers, but a new timbre had crept in—lower, more resonant, calculated to command attention.

  He grinned, showing off a gold incisor. “You come alone?”

  Martha smiled back, slow and hungry. “Not anymore.”

  His hand landed on her thigh, as bold as a chemical reaction. The heat spiked, so intense she nearly gasped. Her body catalogued every microtremor in his fingers, the tremble of anticipation, the way his blood pressure kicked up half a point every time she made eye contact. She reciprocated, squeezing his hand hard enough to elicit a wince.

  The HUD chimed:

  [POTENTIAL MATE IDENTIFIED]

  [COMPATIBILITY: 98%]

  Martha laughed, the sound so out of place that the bartender looked up, startled.

  She downed her drink in one motion, grabbed the man’s wrist, and pulled him toward the back hallway with a force that surprised even her. He resisted, but only for show. They stumbled into a maintenance closet, the door slamming behind them.

  The sex was nothing like she remembered.

  It was violent, raw, stripped of pretense. She tore his coveralls open at the seams, relished the way the fabric yielded under her grip. He fumbled at her zipper, but she was already naked beneath her clothes, skin prickling with electricity. She pushed him against the wall, straddled his thigh, and bit his neck so hard she drew blood.

  The HUD ran diagnostics throughout:

  [HEART RATE: 163 BPM]

  [ADRENALINE: MAXED]

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  [TARGET PHEROMONES: OFF THE CHARTS]

  Martha fucked him like a machine, piston-fast, her hips moving in time with some internal metronome. The sensation was both too much and not enough, a constant oscillation between pleasure and nothingness.

  At the moment of climax—his, not hers, she was nowhere near—her vision pixelated. The HUD overlaid a new status window:

  [SOULSTEALER SKILL ACTIVATED]

  [TRANSFER IN PROGRESS…]

  She felt it: the man’s strength, his confidence, his entire animal will draining into her, a torrent of light and noise and red static. For a split second, she thought she could see his memories—a childhood fight in a sun-bleached alley, a mother’s cigarette smile, the endless, crushing repetition of waking up with broken hands. She sucked all of it into herself, cell by cell.

  The man collapsed, eyes rolled back, a rictus of joy and terror fixed on his face. Martha caught him before he hit the floor, cradled him like a lover, then set him gently among the mop buckets.

  She zipped up, straightened her hair. The HUD updated:

  [HEALTH: 100%]

  [STAMINA: 142% (RESERVE TANK FULL)]

  A low, insistent hum vibrated through her, as if every molecule was now tuned to a different radio frequency. She felt alive—more alive than she’d ever been, more alive than any human had a right to be.

  Back in the bar, the dockworker’s absence was noted but unremarked upon. The bartender gave her a once-over, nodded, and poured another double. Martha drank it, let the burn sit in her stomach, and scanned the room for her next target.

  The urge was still there. It would never leave, she realized. She would always be hungry.

  She hit The Neon Pit next, a bar three blocks east and several social strata lower. This was the kind of place where people went to forget themselves, where the booths were upholstered with duct tape and the lighting was designed to conceal more than it revealed.

  Martha sat at the end of the bar, hands folded. A trio of middle managers from the vertical farm up the block slid into a booth across from her. She locked eyes with the least attractive of the three—a doughy, balding man with a comb-over and the nervous energy of a rat in a maze. His attention was evident; his need was an open wound.

  He approached her with the tentative confidence of a man who’d never once succeeded with a woman like her. “You waiting for someone?” he asked, voice pitched high to disguise the quaver.

  Martha smiled, soft and inviting. “Just thirsty,” she said.

  They talked for a few minutes—his name was Greg, he managed “resource allocation” at the farm, he’d just gotten divorced and was “reclaiming his agency.” Martha listened, feigning interest. All the while, her HUD tracked his heart rate, his cortisol spikes, the way his pupils quivered every time she touched his hand.

  She led him outside, to the alley behind the Pit. He hesitated, then followed.

  Against the wall, she pressed him close, her mouth on his, her hands everywhere at once. She felt the hunger rising in her, more urgent now, the need to draw something out of him, to absorb, to possess. The HUD counted down:

  [INITIATE FEED? Y/N]

  She pressed her lips to his neck and answered Yes.

  It was different this time—softer, almost gentle. Martha sucked the energy out of him slowly, savoring the slow melt of his resistance, the gradual dissolution of his anxiety into pure, animal surrender. At the peak, she saw flashes of his life: a father’s cruel hand, the humiliation of gym class, the sick pride of his first promotion. She took it all, every shame and triumph, and made it her own.

  Greg slumped in her arms, breathing shallow. He would wake up, eventually, but he’d never be the same.

  The HUD awarded her a new status:

  [RESERVE TANK: OVERFLOW. ABILITIES AUGMENTED]

  Martha stood in the alley, letting the new strength settle into her bones. The world looked different now—brighter, more fragile, as if the city were made of sugar and she was the first rain in a thousand years.

  She walked back toward the water, her stride a little longer, her smile a little sharper. The hunger was still there, but it had been modulated, transformed from a gnawing need into something almost aesthetic—a connoisseur’s craving, not a starving animal’s.

  The memory of her old life receded, replaced by this new, monstrous grace. She wondered, briefly, if Sylvester knew what he’d made. She wondered if he’d built in an off switch, or if he even remembered how to say No.

  She flexed her hands, feeling the power in them. If the old Martha had survived, she might have cried. The new Martha just laughed, a perfect, ringing sound that sent every man within earshot into a fit of trembling, reverent terror.