Want

The beautiful creatures are often the most dangerous," she murmured.

The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.

I knew my childhood had been rough, and many times I had felt so alone. Daiyu must have experienced a different kind of loneliness. But in the end, maybe lonely was lonely.

Books weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

Estranged and probably stubborn to a fault. I was my mother's son.

It was so easy to be you. And to lack and want were the complete opposite: hard, cold, unrelenting, and hollow.

This is what it meant to be a you, to have. To be genetically cultivated as a perfect human specimen before birth—vaccinated and fortified, calibrated and optimized.

In the end, she never did get to see me wear this jacket. She caught a cold that turned into a virulent strain of pneumonia. We couldn’t afford the medical care or medicines that might have saved her life. And at thirteen, I watched her die.

Truth is, reality always crushes your ideals,” the guy shouted at my back. “Just you wait and see.

She was pretty in a way I wasn’t used to. Not like most you girls bowing to the latest beauty trends, indulging in temporary body modifications from reshaping their noses to plumping their lips, or hips, or rears, depending on what was in. You boys kept pace with pec implants and by buying new, chiseled jawlines. But fads came and went, and the yous altered their looks as often as the seasons. The meis, lacking the funds for such drastic changes, resorted to painting their faces in bright colors, using semipermanent tattoos, and dyeing their hair.

My friends and I had decided the best way to gain info on Jin Corp was to get suited, infiltrating the yous by becoming one of them. Victor was perfect for the task—with his charm and good looks, he’d fit right in. But we needed funding. And who better to fund us than those who had a few hundred million to spare?