The copper foundries and noodle factories have vanished. The dockyards have been torn down; now the Kwun Tong waterfront shimmers with glass-fronted blockchain startups and AI treasuries. The Horsepaint Chemicals Building and its conurbation of dripping air conditioners and tinted windows will soon have its turn. This isn’t a city that waits.

The freight lift shudders at the eighteenth floor and Wing steps out.

Wing had failed to get together with anyone in her Catholic all-girls’ school, a limewashed colonial-era bastion designed to tame the heat and the female soul. These days she wears Oxford shirts from the men’s section that drape awkwardly over her narrow, rounded shoulders. They make her feel like a counterfeit man. Unfortunately, the girls she’s into prefer the boyish, broad-shouldered type who wave their watch magnanimously over the payment reader when it comes. It makes them feel like a normal couple, at least from afar.

Unit 1805 is empty and dimly-lit. Wing’s alone. The windows are boarded up, the walls painted in the color of the polyester fog that hangs above Hong Kong at the start of spring.

The floor is a soft red, upholstered like a gigantic mattress. Wing snaps the QR code printed on the wall and taps SEED at the top of the list of services. It sounds the least intimidating. 

She puts her phone down and waits.

A thump in the dark and then a click. A girl, unfolding herself from an invisible corner of the room. Flesh and bone. She looks like an amalgamation of three girls Wing had pined for in school and done nothing about.

Wing suddenly feels the acne terrain of her own face, her deplorable shoulders curving inwards. She can’t do this. 

She takes the lift back down. The app doesn’t charge her.

She returns a week later, determined to see this through. The same girl comes out and Wing shuts her eyes, willing herself across the room. 

After, Wing will remember little of the experience. The app charges her when she totters back out to the freight lift. She hadn’t expected her first time to be as terrifying as it was un-transformative. She suspects it’s because the girl wasn’t pretty enough.

Wing returns the next day. She taps PHOENIX this time because it sounds more glamorous. 

The woman who comes out of the dark is stunning. She’s beautiful in a severe way, like a concert pianist. She can’t be fully human. She’s been plucked out of Wing’s imagination to look like someone she’d worship. The Phoenix isn’t real the way girls in school were, girls who would have recoiled from Wing’s attempts to woo them, if she had tried. 

The Phoenix’s smile is star-hot.

Later, the Phoenix bites Wing below the belly button and Wing responds by sucking air through her teeth. The app charges her.

Months later, Wing swaggers into university in her button-downs and baggy jeans, here to study law. She lands a vacation scheme at an international firm during the summer feeding frenzy. Her acne has disappeared. Her shoulders are still rounded but she’s learned to toss her head and let her hair fall on her eyes to distract people from them. She watches herself being watched by other girls.

The university library is a brutalist hive of grey hexagons and LED screens. Someone sits in the carrel next to Wing, who’s been here all morning and nearly bolts out of her chair when she realizes who it is: the Phoenix, who looks at her blankly now, unaware they’ve met elsewhere. 

How to explain it? Wing isn’t concerned. Deep in her belly where the Phoenix had bitten her that time, Wing feels a thin, lurid note of proprietariness. Now she’s talking to the Phoenix as if her mouth’s possessed. Wing knows this will happen. They’ve done it before.

They’re together on and off for six years, into Wing’s first foray as junior legal counsel for a genomics company stationed uncannily at the Kwun Tong waterfront. Wing never visits Horsepaint Chemicals. She looks handsomer by the day. She drinks at the waterfront patios with her male colleagues, who show off their girlfriends’ pictures on their phones.

Wing doesn’t show them the Phoenix. The boys would laugh with more than a thin vein of insecurity and call her little brother. She smokes quietly with them and watches the small pleasure boats go past the breakwaters, knowing her on-and-off girlfriend is far more beautiful than theirs. 

Then the Phoenix, who is now twenty-seven and has begun to take a good, hard look at her own future, tells Wing she’s certain she doesn’t love her anymore and wants to get back together with an old boyfriend. Wing waits a few weeks for her to return but it sticks. Predictable, Wing thinks. Such a cliché. 

Wing feels like she’s been thrown off a cliff. At work her supervisor calls her into the one-on-one room and dangles the idea of taking a break. Having drinks with the boys now feels unbearable. She doesn’t want them to see her outside of work, where she might crumple and not know how to explain herself to them, and so she tells them she isn’t feeling too well.

Wing’s acne returns with a vengeance. 

Unit 1805 is as empty as before, the mattress a little more worn.

Wing has no intention of choosing the Phoenix again. She misses her, but greater than the hole where her guts had been is the same shame that had propelled her to Horsepaint Chemicals years ago. This time, she taps NPC.

The NPC’s hair is in braids. She wears tie-dyed linen clothing and looks like she volunteers for ecofarms in Fanling and joins art jams in town where she paints vases of flowers on small, square canvases balanced on tiny easels. 

She’s not Wing’s type at all. But Wing is desperate.

The NPC’s job is to listen to Wing’s woes and ask her how she feels. Wing feels unburdened but not as triumphant as she did the first time around with the Phoenix. 

Two weeks later, Wing meets the NPC at an art park. The woman is at the curb, waiting for the pedestrian lights to turn, when Wing spots her and feels that same proprietary flicker.

They’re together for a year. The sex is subpar, but her girlfriend makes for a good listener. The boys at work are getting married; the NPC convincingly reassures Wing she’s got her own path to take and doesn’t have to feel left behind. Wing’s face clears up. She looks dashing in Oxford shirts again. She’s made proper counsel now, with a parking spot occupied by her new dual-motor sports sedan. 

At the end of the year, the NPC cheats on her with a woman she meets at pottery club. 

Overnight, pustules and cysts cluster on Wing’s face like barnacles on a boat hull. Someone has gripped her shoulders in a vice, winching them across her chest.

Wing asks to work from home.

She searches for her first girlfriend online. Wing had deleted all traces of the Phoenix from her phone and social media when they broke up. Wing regrets it now. She can’t find anything about her.

Wing goes to her old university and visits her first girlfriend’s former economics professor: a dapper man with greying hair, who winces openly at Wing’s appearance. He doesn’t know who she’s talking about when she mentions her old girlfriend’s name. When Wing asks if they can go through his old records on the university’s learning management system to find her, he asks her to leave. 

On a hunch, she searches online for the NPC and is faced with the same disappearance. Wing might very well have been blocked by the NPC—but the twist in her gut knows better. There’s nothing left.

Rezoning notices paper the lampposts at Horsepaint Chemicals. The lift interior smells of solvents and cigarette smoke. 

The door to Unit 1805 is ajar. A careless clump of rubber boots, hard hats, and half-empty water bottles is piled up against the wall. Inside, the ceiling is gutted, the mattress gone, and the floor tiles have been jackhammered up. Stacked everywhere are broken breeze blocks and twisted rebar. The wall where the QR code used to be is smashed in.

Wing vaguely considers taking the lift back down and walking into traffic.

There’s a cluster of halogen work lamps at the back of the room. One of them has been left on. Behind it is a short squib of a corridor Wing never noticed before. It seems to go on forever as she follows it, like she’s drunk in the hallways of a karaoke joint.

It ends at a janitor’s closet. Wing twists the doorknob and it gives way. 

The closet is lined with cheap empty shelves and a single, bare bulb. A small humidifier runs in the corner. On the middle of the floor is a yellow polyurethane storage tub. It’s seen better days. The plastic is scuffed and dented, plastered with small stickers advertising electrical services. 

Inside the tub, lined with thick, damp towels, is a pinkish, gelatinous sac of human organs and veins. Its limbs pool at the bottom like limp ribbons. On one end of its mass is a smooth, featureless bulge. 

As soon as the bulge senses Wing hovering over it, it molds itself, with great alacrity, into the shape and color of the NPC’s head. 

Its face is flawless. Wing’s breath grows sharp and ragged. Then the bulge reshapes itself into the Phoenix’s face. 

It’s impossible to tell if the sick feeling deep in Wing’s belly is fear or relief. There’s nothing behind the Phoenix’s beautifully-cut eyes. Wing bends over and cups the Phoenix’s cheek in her palm. It’s warm and comforting, just as before.

The Phoenix’s head dissolves back into the gelatinous mass. A giant QR code lights up below the sac’s membrane, bright as neon.

Her hands trembling, heart thumping away, Wing takes her phone out and snaps the code.

There’s only one option called SIX LITTLE FRIENDS. It’s a subscription. Wing will receive a steady drip of women over the course of a year. Each one is expected to last two months before Wing will have to return for a refresh. 

She tries to pay, but it won’t let her. The server’s down. She’s encouraged to try again later.

Wing reloads desperately a few more times. 

The sac’s QR code glistens under the light. Wing bends over the storage bin and kneels. She hauls the sac up like a heavy, dripping bag; it spills over her forearms, its organs shifting, limbs dangling underneath. 

Wing sits on the floor, cradling it, feeling its heart pulse through the membrane. 

Years later, the area surrounding Kwun Tong Horsepaint Chemicals has been turned into a smart residential compound with towers of anodized aluminum and elevated greenery. Horsepaint Chemicals has been razed.

There’s a small museum where the building used to be, housed in an exterior made to mimic the original paint factory shell.

Wing comes here often, though she hasn’t worked at the waterfront for years. She is married to an American woman who had introduced herself as a burnt-out brand strategist desperate for reinvention. The wedding had been in New York, in a flower-filled bower at a private estate in the heart of a historic valley whose name Wing likes repeating to anyone who will listen. Wing put the pictures all over social media. She had no qualms advertising it. It’s different with a Western woman around your arm; the chatter about how you’ve gone up a rung on the ladder overshadows the fact that you’re both women. 

Her wife has begun talking about divorce. They’ve drifted apart, she says. And Wing still isn’t out to her parents. 

Wing is dressed impeccably today in a pinstripe suit and a raspberry sorbet tie. A trickle of people passes through the museum’s doors. A man is deeply engrossed in a display of old paint shakers and canvas aprons.

The main gallery ends at a salvaged rolling steel loading bay door. A pedestrian pass door is cut into one of the steel slats. Wing reaches for the handle. 

Behind it is an empty gallery in unfinished concrete. A spotlit QR code on the floor. 

She snaps it with her phone and pays for another year with her wife. 

Then Wing straightens herself, rolls her shoulders outwards, and steps out.