Mars Time: 19:15, March 25, 2295

  The Slumbering Mantis Inn, Lane 37, Alfalfa Street, Dragon District, Xing Hong

  Hotaru pulsed.

  Fuuka paused mid-bite, chopsticks hovering over a pte of raw horse mackerel that Shazmeen had sourced from the Inn's private supply. The Spirit Lantern sat dormant in her kimono sleeve, but it made a low, sick tremor, like a tuning fork struck against bone.

  She set the chopsticks down.

  "Something wrong?" Shazmeen asked from behind the counter, wiping a gss with seeming disinterest. The Slumbering Mantis was quiet at this hour, only a pair of Alliance Riggers just finishing their cheap rice wine in the far booth, preparing to leave. Artificial afternoon light filtered through grimy windows, casting the Inn's interior in a zy haze.

  Fuuka pressed her palm ft against her sleeve. Hotaru, her Spirit Lantern, pulsed again. The stored Aether inside the ntern was resonating with something distant, pulling at the traces of semen she'd collected from Jabari weeks ago. His essence, preserved in Hotaru's psionic amethyst core, was vibrating. "Distress. Jabari is in danger. A sustained, drowning signal. The kind that comes when someone's Aether is being surpassed by a stronger force—"

  "Intriguing. This I did not expect." Shazmeen's voice sharpened. The older woman had set down the gss.

  "Venus," Fuuka murmured. She closed her eyes, letting the Worm Witch senses reach through Hotaru's stored connection, like listening to a conversation through three walls. But she could taste it: Jabari's warm Lunar signature mixed with her Mirage, his semen preserved and mixed with her vaginal fluid after their sex and subsequent adventure in the Red Rabbit Warren st month, now tangled with something cold and predatory. "Something Fenris. Draugs threatening and seducing someone he knows."

  She opened her eyes.

  "They're in trouble," she said. "All of them, I think. Jabari's Aether is being crushed by someone far above his level."

  Shazmeen's expression didn't change, but her hand found the counter's edge and gripped it. "You intend to reach them?"

  "From Mars to Venus?" Fuuka almost ughed. "Hotaru carries enough of Jabari's essence for me to feel him across the Cosmos, but feeling and reaching are different."

  "Remember that lesson st autumn? A Semen Portal requires fresh material. Volumes of it. Mixed with the stored trace, it could lock onto this Jabari's signature like a compass finding north." Shazmeen ran her finger over the gss's stem. "Suffice to say, you'll need a donor. A mature man whose body has been primed for extreme output, gnds conditioned by sustained pheromonic exposure, living a sufficiently stressful life yet not bending."

  "A man with enough reasons to crave release. But I do not know such a one in this city." Fuuka rested her head on a palm, pondering.

  "Someone a Draug has already broken in could also serve. Their body and spirit have been—opened and improved just enough." Shazmeen set down the polished gss.

  Fuuka did not move, but her peal-like eyes widened.

  "I need to go out," she said, rising from the stool. She tucked the remaining mackerel into a napkin and slipped it into her sleeve, beside Hotaru. Waste not. "Can you check our network for transit records? Anyone who's survived the Red Rabbit Warren who's still local?"

  Shazmeen was already reaching beneath the counter for her encrypted terminal. "Only the men that Covenant boy rescued. Six of them or so?"

  "One in particur. Bo Ji. Imperial, mid-forties. Marcus and Jabari dragged him out." Fuuka adjusted her kimono's colr, checking her appearance in the bar mirror. "Struggling ones like him should be living in Silver Orchid Complex. If he's still there..."

  "Give me a minute, my little flower." Shazmeen raised a finger gently.

  Fuuka waited and savored the st piece of horse meat on her pte.

  "This Bo Ji did visit a few days ago. Gotten himself too drunk to be decent." Shazmeen slid a data chip across the counter without looking up. "Unit 4-7B, Silver Orchid Complex, Block Nine. Still registered. Wife's name was removed from the lease two weeks ago. Oxygen subscription downgraded to Economy. He's behind on payments."

  Fuuka pocketed the chip. "Thank you, mistress."

  "Be careful with this one." Shazmeen met her eyes. Behind the innkeeper's mask, a fellow Rakshasa agent stared back. "Broken men are unpredictable."

  "Ara, mistress." Fuuka smiled, adjusting her obi. "You say that as if broken men aren't my specialty."

  Silver Orchid Complex squatted at Dragon District's lowest point, where the recycled air tasted stale and the corridor lighting flickered between dim and dimmer. Block Nine was the worst of it. Fuuka counted three busted ventition grates on her walk from the autocab stop.

  Unit 4-7B had a door that didn't sit flush in its frame. The electronic lock's dispy was cracked, showing a perpetual error code. Through the thin walls, Fuuka could hear a media screen pying too loud for the size of the space. The way people turned up screens when they needed something to fill the silence.

  She knocked twice. Nothing. Knocked again, harder. "Bo Ji-san. Open the door, please."

  Shuffling inside. The media screen's volume dropped. A long pause, then the scrape of someone moving slowly toward the entrance.

  The door opened partway. The man behind it was barely recognizable from the sharp-jawed Imperial she'd glimpsed in the Warren weeks ago. Bo Ji had lost weight. Cheekbones jutting like tent poles under sallow skin, eyes bloodshot and ringed purple from too much sleep and too little rest. Stained undershirt, boxer shorts, unwashed hair hanging limp across his forehead.

  The apartment behind him was one room, partitioned by a curtain that had come loose on one side. Through the gap: a mattress on the floor, tangled sheets, empty instant noodle containers stacked by the wall. A media screen above the mattress was tuned to a Dragon District community channel.

  Bo Ji stared at her with the ft expression of someone who had stopped expecting visitors.

  "Who are you?"

  "A friend of the man who saved your life." Not quite true, but truth was a flexible instrument. "May I come in?"

  "You're that Worm Witch I saw in the Warren…d-d-did Marcus send you?" His pupils dited as he took her in. The way his breathing became shallow. How his shoulders shifted backward just slightly, spine straightening despite exhaustion.

  His undivided stare held that timid, palpable hunger.

  Good.

  "Marcus is off-world. Venus, fighting the same creatures that kept you in the Warren." Fuuka held his gaze. "In the Warren, I saw what you were. What you chose."

  Bo Ji's hand tightened on the door frame. "Then you know I didn't ask to be saved."

  "I know." She let the words sit. No judgment, no pity. Just acknowledgment. "And I know you're alone now. Your wife... she left?"

  Bo Ji's jaw worked, muscles bunching beneath the sallow skin, and for a moment Fuuka thought he'd sm the door. Instead, he stepped back and let the gap widen.

  "Mei-Ling found out." His voice was ft. "About the Warren. About Ysolde. About what I did down there. Someone from the clinic talked. Some nurse. Mei-Ling packed her things and took our son with her back to Dragon's Gate Station. Her mother's pce." He ughed, and it was the same hollow sound. "Forty-seven years old, and my wife left me because I let a monster fuck me in a tunnel. Can't bme her."

  Fuuka left her sandals at the door and stepped inside. The air was worse in here. Stale sweat, unwashed clothes, the chemical tang of Economy-grade oxygen. She noted the kitchen alcove: empty except for a half-finished bowl of instant noodles, gray protein paste and a pair of chopsticks.

  No sharp objects in view. The kitchen drawer was closed. Bathroom door, also closed.

  "Have you eaten today?" she asked.

  "What does it matter?" Bo Ji walked then sank onto the mattress. He didn't look at her. "You said Marcus is on Venus. So what? He saved me once. I told him I didn't want saving. Still don't."

  "I'm not here to save you, Bo Ji." Fuuka knelt, folding her legs beneath her with practiced grace, sitting on the bare floor across from him. Close enough to smell him now. Underneath the sourness, her Worm Witch senses picked up something else: residual pheromonic markers from weeks of Ysolde's exposure. His endocrine system was still running hot. Testosterone elevated. Seminal production abnormally high.

  Perfect. And tragic, in its way.

  "Then why are you here?" He finally looked at her. His eyes were red, but dry. Fuuka assumed he'd moved past tears some time ago.

  "Because my friends are suffering on Venus, and I need your help to reach them." Fuuka reached into her sleeve and took out Hotaru, setting the hexagonal Spirit Lantern on the floor between them. Its surface was dormant, but the violet light within pulsed faintly with Jabari's stored essence. "I am Fuuka Natsukawa. A Worm Witch of the Rakshasa Horde. And I need something from you that no one else on this pnet can give me right now."

  Bo Ji stared at the ntern. Then at her. "Rakshasa."

  "Hai."

  "You're one of those…things. Like the Fenris, but different."

  "Very different." Fuuka let a trace of her true self show. Just a flicker. The violet glow shifting in her pupils, a dition that went slightly too wide before snapping back to human normal. Enough to confirm what she was without scaring him. "I won't pretend otherwise."

  "So you need... what? Blood? Organs?" His ugh was bitter. "Take them. Not like I'm using this body for anything."

  "Semen."

  The word nded between them like a stone in still water.

  Bo Ji blinked. "What?"

  "I need your semen, Bo Ji. All of it. Every drop you can cum in a single session." Fuuka kept her voice level. "Your body was conditioned by Ysolde's pheromones to produce at extreme volumes. That conditioning hasn't fully faded. I can feel it in your Aether."

  He stared at her with those bloodshot eyes.

  "I will mix your essence with traces I carry from another man currently on Venus. The combination will open a portal between Mars and Venus, one that locks onto his location." She pced her hands on her knees. "In exchange, I will give you the one thing Ysolde gave you, but honestly."

  "Honestly…?"

  "Bliss. I will make love to you, and I will make it real."

  Silence.

  The media screen droned on about oxygen rates. Somewhere in the corridor outside, a pipe groaned.

  "You want us to fuck," Bo Ji said slowly, "to open a magic door."

  "In simplified terms, yes."

  "And you're telling me this upfront. No tricks? No pheromones? No mind control—"

  "No tricks." Fuuka held his gaze without blinking. "You will be fully conscious. Fully consenting. You will feel everything. And when it's over, you will sleep the deepest, most restful sleep you've had in weeks. I promise you that."

  Bo Ji's throat worked. His hands, resting on his thighs, had begun to tremble.

  "Why me?" The question came out cracked. "Why not find some…I don't know, rich or handsome spoiled prince? Why come to a broken man living in a shithole eating paste out of a bowl?"

  "Because your body can do what I need. Because you've already been touched by forces beyond human, and survived." Fuuka leaned forward slightly. "And because I think you deserve to feel good one more time before you decide whether to keep living."

  The trembling spread to his shoulders. Bo Ji pressed the back of his hands against his forehead, and his breath came ragged.

  "Mei-Ling hasn't answered my messages in six days," he whispered. "Our son Bao won't talk to me. My apartment's oxygen runs out next week." A wet sound from behind his hands. "I was going to walk out into the Moor after that. No suit. Just walk, let them take me. Can be karma, or some hungry Fiends, I don't care."

  Fuuka said nothing. She let him speak.

  "I just want it to stop hurting." He sighed.

  Fuuka reached out and took his wrists. Gently. Drew his hands away from his face. His eyes were wet now, tears finally breaking through.

  "Then let me help it stop," she said. "For one night. Let me take what I need, and give you what you need. And tomorrow, you decide what comes next. Ne?"

  Bo Ji looked at her. Looked at Hotaru, pulsing violet on the floor. Looked at the empty apartment, the cold protein paste, the cracked walls.

  "Okay," he said. "Okay."

  Fuuka nodded. She rose to her feet and began preparing the space. The mattress would do. She moved the noodle containers aside, straightened the sheets with efficient hands, and pced Hotaru at the head of the bed where the ntern could hover once activated. From her kimono, she drew out Kage, the amethyst Soma Dagger, and set it within arm's reach in case anyone or anything decide to barge in.

  She gnced down at her Nucleus Watch. The face was dark metal with a deep purple leather strap worn smooth from years of use. Beneath the crystal, twin oriental dragons coiled around each other in raised relief, their scaled bodies interlocking in a spiral. Amethyst light pulsed from the gaps between their jaws. The hour markers were small bdes of purple crystal, and the hands swept across the dragons' tangled bodies.

  Fuuka pressed two fingers against the crystal. The dragons' eyes fred.

  "Bīja? vahati setu kāma, kāma vahati setu ātman," she murmured, the Devavā?ī sylbles rolling off her tongue with ease of a prayer spoken over a hundred times. "Dvau dehau ekā nadī. Prā?a ucyate."

  A holographic bubble bloomed from the watch face, translucent violet script hovering in the stale air:

  {

  [The seed carries the bridge of desire, and desire carries the bridge of the soul. Two bodies, one river. Let this be the Breath.]

  — Sutra of the Flowing Root, Canto IX

  }

  The words hung for a moment, then dissolved. Fuuka closed her eyes and reached through Hotaru.

  The connection to Jabari's stored Aether was still live, still pulling. She followed it outward, letting her Worm Witch senses extend along the invisible thread that connected stored essence to living source. Mars to Venus. Millions of kilometers of void, but Aether didn't care about distance. It cared about connection.

  Fuuka turned back to Bo Ji, who sat on the mattress watching her. She uncsped her Nucleus Watch and set it face-down beside Kage, the twin dragons' violet glow pressing into the floor like a held breath.

  She then loosened her obi. The silk fell away from her waist, and her kimono parted to reveal pale skin underneath. Slim shoulders. Curvaceous breasts. The faint shadow of ribs beneath the porcein canvas that was her nudity. She let the kimono slide to the floor, pooling around her ankles.

  "Tell me your wife's name," she told him softly. "I want to know who loved you."

  "Mei-Ling." His voice broke on the second sylble. "Her name is Zhang Mei-Ling."

  Fuuka climbed onto the mattress, knees settling on either side of his hips. She cupped his face in both hands. His stubble was coarse against her palms.

  "Mei-Ling is a beautiful name," she said, and kissed him. When she pulled back, her thumb traced the line of his cheekbone. "Treat me like you would treat her. Tonight, I'll be your Mei-Ling."