Twilight, the time of wolves, seeps scarlet across the skyscraper skyline, and Carrion rambles about the rumored valley of wild beasts beyond our walled city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like the prisons,\u201d he\u2019s saying, cigarette smoke silvery as his whiskers, exhaled out past the balcony\u2019s discolored balustrade. \u201cThey don\u2019t force <\/em>you to Wildern through lashes and labor there. The valley, you can choose to run the way our ancestors did on all fours. You can Wildern for yourself, on your own terms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n My eyes fixate on my phone, the encrypted job ads popping up in neon-colored windows only to disappear just as quickly, someone else having claimed whatever illicit dealings appear on the Dog Eat Gig<\/em> app near nightfall. We are Civilized beasts now, and we must feed ourselves not by the laws of the forest, but of cement and steel and rainbowed pixels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides, with how often and in increasingly dangerous ways we\u2019ve been using the app lately, it\u2019s far more likely Carrion and I will be deemed irredeemable, irreparable. We\u2019ll end up howling in the labor prisons, building bigger cities for these so-called Civilized beasts, rather than the wild valley of his reveries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNightshade,\u201d Carrion whines, my name a high-pitched roll in my friend\u2019s mouth. \u201cAre you listening?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSorry, Carrion.\u201d I force myself to stop stress-browsing Dog Eat Gig for a job that will bring in money, but not bite off too many pieces of us in the process. \u201cYou were saying?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrion doesn\u2019t always possess the best focus or endurance, but he\u2019s been with me since childhood, loyally following me from gutter to bunk to ill-advised misadventure. His family treated him like the runt of the litter, no matter how old-fashioned a choice that is considered these days. Here, we had promised each other no hierarchy. So I make myself pay attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was saying, down in the valley, we can choose our pack.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I tap his sandy-furred head. \u201cWell, we\u2019ve chosen each other. So can we please focus on–\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A notification from both of our phones prickles our ears. To a passer-by down below our tiny apartment\u2019s tinier balcony, the sound would go unnoticed. But after so many jobs, our ears have grown accustomed to the specific frequency of the app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA private job?\u201d Carrion asks, brow furrowed. \u201cSo someone requested both of us for this task?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The posters are always anonymous, but the gig-takers must operate behind the same username: building credit, gaining underground notoriety. It\u2019s not unusual for a username to be requested specifically for a job, and yet my fur bristles with a subdermal itch. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t get this, should we? It\u2019s better to find the jobs than let the jobs find us. Less trouble that way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrion abandons his cracked screen to crowd over mine, our snouts pressed against the neon glow. The stylized icon of a dog, tongue lolling out of their mouth and two Xs for eyes, moves cartoonishly. It pulses with sparks and fluorescence, urging us to click<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Claim the job, get it done, sink deeper. Do it all over again tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLet\u2019s go to bed,\u201d I say, trying to convince Carrion, but also myself, that the job is not worth the high risk. \u201cWe\u2019ll figure something out about the money situation.\u201d The rent for our shitty apartment and the skyrocketing synthetic meat prices and ever climbing up from the bottom rung of Lykopolis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just as we\u2019re about to close the app, the pouch of cartoon coins next to the dog triples in size before our eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHoly hell,\u201d Carrion says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sigh. As one, we click on the dog icon. Watch the cartoon pulsate one final time, open a gaping canine maw, swallow a golden bone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the gig\u2019s details and deadline pending, there\u2019s no need to stress further for now. The worst is already done. Yet my fur prickles in uneasy precognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I steal Carrion\u2019s cigarette. Inhale the acrid smoke mixed with our city\u2019s smog. My phone burns a hole through the stained fabric of my jeans, my fur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across the darkened skyline of Lykopolis, city lights replace distant, dying stars. And yet the moon looms large enough to devour us all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n #<\/p>\n\n\n\n The small hours take over, howling their hunger. And music, a beat so hypnotic it slinks around us from claw to tail while we approach the squalid stairs leading down into Sirius. This nightclub–tucked between abandoned warehouses and steel peeking out naked and hazardous from the dusty ground–is not easy to find without encrypted coordinates. Most gigs start in Sirius\u2019s nucleus. The music kind, and the illicit business too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just like Lykopolis isn\u2019t the only city of Civilized animal species, but the first of many, Sirius too is the first of its kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrion and I duck through the door after the bouncer–a graywolf dwarfing me even at my full height–has stared us up and down. His eyes linger longer on Carrion\u2019s slimmer frame, more fox than wolf in appearance. I bare my teeth at the bouncer, then feel a frisson of embarrassment at my blunder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrion doesn\u2019t need my protection like that; we have vowed to look after each other<\/em>. Not because of some archaic pack hierarchy our kind has only semi-successfully shed from our genetic makeup. No, it\u2019s because for the longest time, we only had each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s not the dog with the biggest bite. Finding the app, taking those early gigs, provided him with freedom never allowed by his tradition-clinging family. While Carrion was treated like dirt at home, I was abandoned as a pup, then left alone by my peers at the orphanage, too big and intimidating for anyone to harm me. Yet cruel words lingered still, scarring my soft underbelly that only Carrion gets to see. To this day I swallow my tongue around people, preferring Carrion do the talking for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He groans in my ear over the cacophony of the live performance, amid the smoke and mirrors decor of the club. \u201cNightshade, I know I was waxing poetic about the valley of wild wolves earlier. But this is just a disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he\u2019s right. As we make our way to the hidden backroom where most dealings take place, we have a full view of the dancefloor. Sweat-drenched fur mingles with the chemical stench of perfume as it wafts above the crowd of our peers. They kick their legs and rub their bodies together on all fours, nipping or kissing one another with alcohol-induced mania under the strobe lights, silver as fake moonglow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This nightly display at Sirius is no true wildness, no sense of pack. These are rich kids rebelling against mom and dad. Once they get it out of their systems, they will wash in the shower rooms, steam-iron and spot-clean their clothes, and rise back on their hind legs to walk to mansions and penthouses. They will go to university lectures and office jobs in the morning, and not think about what happened here until next weekend. And all the while they will laugh at those who, due to poverty or illness, aren\u2019t seen as Civilized, as neat and well-spoken as the rest of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFucking hipster pests,\u201d I say, to make Carrion laugh as we finally weave our way past the band releasing over-practiced howls into their mics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019re late,\u201d a voice echoes melodious in the sharp silence once the hidden backroom door has closed behind us. I always feel a sense of doom the deeper we wade into Sirius\u2019 many-layered core.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLailah.\u201d Carrion curtsies at the club\u2019s proprietress. \u201cAlways a pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She rolls her yellow eyes, one half-missing ear twitching at his theatrics. We don\u2019t know whether she lost the tip in accident or fight, but the haggard look fits Sirius\u2019 leader all the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFollow me, boys,\u201d Lailah says, ignoring the way both Carrion and I wince at the word, boys<\/em>. Just another thing he and I have in common, an understanding in the safety of our cramped apartment: we\u2019re not boys, or men. We are Carrion and Nightshade of Lykopolis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lailah isn\u2019t the only broker in the city. But experience has taught us when it\u2019s her we\u2019re dealing with, the gig is too risky to complete with only the security layers provided by the app. The security put in place to protect the client, not us. My ears prickle again. Subtly, Carrion runs the back of his claw along my arm to calm me down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We never know what the jobs are about, is the thing. We just do what we\u2019re told, swift and stealthy, no questions asked or traces left behind. It does little to alleviate the guilt, the waking up in the middle of the night on the frameless mattress we share, sweaty and plagued by what if, what have we done?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s why watching the news to reverse engineer what bad deed or dirty job we have contributed to is inadvisable. Yet Carrion and I both do it, when we think the other isn\u2019t watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We follow Lailah, not into her office as usual, but toward the stairwell dark and dank, down into the twisting bowels of Sirius. It\u2019s where the liquor is kept: all the illegal moonshine, along with the wolfsbane absinthe Lailah and her people manufacture under the snouts of the militia patrolling other clubs. But not this one. Sirius, somehow, has always felt off-limits, a dirty oasis in the middle of Lykopolis\u2019 violently enforced Civility. Just like Dog Eat Gig, in a way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our package awaits us in the deepest part of the cellar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhy\u2019d you keep it in the liquor chiller?\u201d Carrion asks. He\u2019s smarter than to ask what the package contains. Who it\u2019s for. We need our fur and skin to stay on our bones, after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lailah smiles: a baring of teeth more in warning than in mirth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPick-up time is dawn,\u201d she instructs. \u201cClient can\u2019t be seen anywhere near Sirius. You will know the drop-off place for the drone to collect when it\u2019s time. Until then, keep the package in that hole you call an apartment–no need to freeze the box further. And do not, under any circumstances, open it. Am I clear, boys?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We gulp and nod, our discomfort for the word boys giving way to a chill up our spines. I knew this was more clandestine and dangerous than our usual picks-and-drops, hence the hefty price tag attached to it via the app. Once the built-in, closed-circuit tracker shows the drone has collected the object, money will transfer into our accounts anonymous, untraceable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We will finally have enough to visit the bodega past dawn, buy synthetic jerky and a can of beer, perhaps even some genetically modified bread to ease our hunger. This is the price we pay for Civility, all food tasteless yet expensive with how modified it must be to contain the necessary nutrients now that meat is banned. A trade for our evolution, our technology, our life in Lykopolis and all the other cities of once-prey and predators, now Civilized beasts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The package is a black box: medium-sized but heavy, and cold to the touch. Carrion hisses as he helps me load it into our pawprint-protected backpack we use for such operations. Lailah doesn\u2019t give another word, turning back to her work as if we were never there. Probably to prepare another pick-up for some rich client paired with a desperate app user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhy do you think it\u2019s so cold?\u201d asks Carrion once we\u2019re in the club\u2019s secret passageway, an underground warehouse sewer whose manhole will spit us out far from Sirius\u2019 grounds. \u201cWhat if it\u2019s the cryogenically frozen head of some dead politician or missing ambassador?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cStop it, you know asking questions only makes this harder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back above ground, a graffiti mural gives me pause. It must have been spray-painted during the night, the pigments still shiny-wet. Would explain how the patrolling militia and drones zooming periodically overhead haven\u2019t covered it up yet. The mural depicts a coven of wolves crouched on all fours and naked as the day they were born, fur agleam under a moon not veiled by smog and exhaust fumes, but low and bright in the sky, fat as a teardrop. A giant alien fruit you could bite into and sate a fathomless, hereditary hunger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wolves are howling in prayer, in praise. They are us and they are not. We\u2019re Civilized now, we worship concrete and steel and artificial, lab-grown meat; Sirius and Dog Eat Gig serve as an escape from our manufactured realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrion and I walk on, yet when I close my eyes, I can still see that white graffiti moon like an open wound behind my eyelids. It\u2019s not worth it, I think sometimes, being capital-C-civilized. Worrying about money and shelter and social norms. Being sent off to prison to build material for more cities if you misbehave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The backpack is heavy on my shoulders. None of it is worth it, and yet we walk on, together as one. I stumble a couple of times, weak and dizzy with hunger. When Carrion asks to wear the backpack the rest of the way home, my first instinct is to say no, to protect him, possess him. But it\u2019s instincts such as these that scare me, make me feel like I\u2019m as bad as his family was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His fangs flash a wry smile, because he knows my struggle. Then he shrugs on the backpack anyway and pats me gently on the shoulder. His touch lingers, as does his rising scent of cardamom and cloves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s moments like this–despite the danger and the hunger, or maybe because of it–that the air sparkles neon-bright between us. We feel it sizzle as we weave between darkened back streets and side entrances, to our apartment near the looming city walls where the dawn light won\u2019t reach and the rent is cheaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We don\u2019t own each other; in fact we haven\u2019t dated in a while, and even back then we were never exclusive, Carrion and I. And yet in some ways, we are a mated pair. With the package stored in our apartment and the canine cartoon of the app howling like a cuckoo clock with each passing hour toward dawn, we fall together in bed. We are a tangle of limbs and fur and twining tails, trying to keep each other warm, and awake until the delivery time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People wouldn\u2019t know just by looking at the two us, how well Carrion covers my body with his, pressing every part of me down with grounding firmness. How he lets me pretend I\u2019m a helpless sheep, a little lamb in wolf\u2019s clothing, a prey animal trusting his wolfish shepherd to guide him home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before my pleasure has crested, he bites into my shoulder from above and pants, \u201cThe package\u2026 What if there\u2019s a dead baby preserved inside, to be smuggled and buried outside the city undetected?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I roll away from Carrion, groaning. \u201cHey!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDead baby not appropriate pillow talk?\u201d he asks, only half-apologetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mood has vanished. We both sit up in bed, the covers slung loosely around us, and stare at the foreboding black box in the corner of our cramped living space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe can\u2019t grow a consciousness now,\u201d I say. Not when we\u2019re this close to getting triple the usual payment. Enough for us to eat and rest and stop drowning <\/em>for a week, then maybe look for a job, a legitimate paying gig this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut what if it\u2019s–\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I muffle his next words with a pillow. His muscles twitch paw to tail, eyes gleaming with a feverish sort of impatience. I imagine if we hadn\u2019t trained such things out of our DNA down the generations, by now he would be whimpering and scenting his frustration instead of using Civilized speech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLet it go, Carrion. It\u2019s probably just drugs smuggled from a different-species city so rich people can experience the placebo effects of, I don\u2019t know, catnip<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trade between different-species cities isn\u2019t prohibited, but it\u2019s heavily regulated by customs and searches. This is part of the reason Dog Eat Gig has so many low-profile jobs. Smuggling every-day objects free of hassle is an amateur\u2019s job. It\u2019s what we did for quick money back when Carrion and I first ran away. It was after he\u2019d beaten his ma and dad to a pulp, tired of their unrelenting oppression. After the police had blamed the assault on me, big, dumb, orphaned Nightshade. So we said, fuck all this and made our escape together, into the encrypted pixelated maze of Dog Eat Gig.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I look away from the sleek black icebox, my body throbbing like a bruise. I realize it has for a long time now. I\u2019m forgetting the last time I slept for more than a couple hours at a time. All the many small injuries accumulated during gigs always catch up to me afterwards, spreading poison-slow under skin and fur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHey, you. Go sleep,\u201d Carrion says, gentler than usual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut–\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ll keep watch. Wake you up closer to dawn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to protest, but my eyes are falling shut, a vertiginous darkness. In my dream, I cannot see the locked box guarded by Carrion and I panic, only to realize that I am inside <\/em>the box. It\u2019s undulating red like warning lights, like the inside of a heart. I push my paws against the box\u2019s sides, but instead of being freezer-cold, the walls are warm and wet, palpitating with some strange pulse that has my blood racing and my body shooting upright in our mattress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNightshade,\u201d a small voice quavers. It takes me a moment to realize it belongs to Carrion. \u201cI fucked up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat–\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe box, I opened it. It felt like it was calling out to me and I couldn\u2019t stop myself. Now I guess we know why<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like a nightmare where everything is slow and treacly, I untangle my tail from the sweat-soaked sheets, and stumble to the opened box. Carrion leans over it. In the dark, his eyes flash bone-white, and stranger than I\u2019ve ever seen them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I realize my dream sensation–that pulse of wet and warm and red–has followed me to the waking world. Only this time it\u2019s a scent, it sits under my aching tongue so heavy it grows tangible. Together we lean over the box and look. And inhale. And gasp in unison even as drool drips from our aghast mouths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMeat,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis doesn\u2019t smell like any meat we\u2019ve ever had,\u201d Carrion replies, breathless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The slabs are frozen, but still red beneath their layer of ice. The white marbling peeks coquettish through the rosy hue. A row of perfectly tenderized fillets, no uniform repetition like the cuts from the synthetic meat factory, but each one unique in shape, size, coloration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHerbivore meat.\u201d I feel sick to my stomach even as my mouth throbs for a bite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most forbidden substance of Lykopolis. Its possession, the most severely punishable one too. If trade is so heavily regulated with simple items–enough for Dog Eat Gig to be born–then the genuine meat market should be an impossibility. It is the belief of the Lykopolis leaders that consuming animal meat will send us back to being mindless wild beasts. A single taste will let nature rule over us, instead of us taming biology ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWho would be stupid enough to move herbivore meat through the app?\u201d Carrion whines through his teeth. He too is salivating, the front of his T-shirt stained dark with the leaked drops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone who thought they could get away with it through sheer audacity deflecting all suspicion. Everyone knows Dog Eat Gig users ferry petty drugs or fetish items between cities. But who would suspect genuine animal meat being moved by small-time dealers, without at least an established cartel behind them to support the whole mad endeavor?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis doesn\u2019t make any sense,\u201d I say again. \u201cSurely there must have been a fail-safe in place. This is dangerous wares, not to mention rare and expensive. And the box was just, what, unlocked the whole time?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrion opens his mouth in reply, then clasps a paw over his snout as his eyes widen into white pools of fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShh, can you hear it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stop talking, stop breathing, and listen. It\u2019s less sound, and more like a whoosh of displaced air. For a moment I move to check my Dog Eat Gig notifications on reflex, so similar are these not-sounds you only learn to hear through sufficient exposure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShit!\u201d I shout. \u201cThe failsafe. This is it. There was a digital seal and we broke it, Carrion. Now we\u2019re in big trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOkay, okay, we run then,\u201d Carrion says, reaching for the wardrobe where we keep our travel bag, always full in case of an emergency. We aren\u2019t stupid, we never planned to stick around long enough to end up in the labor prisons in case anything went wrong with the gigs. But this, this is different. Something tells me we wouldn\u2019t even make it to prison if we were discovered. Wouldn\u2019t stay alive long enough for that. Perhaps it would be our bones that would build the new Lykopolis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe emergency roof access,\u201d Carrion whispers. \u201cWe leave the box here and hope whoever comes to reclaim it doesn\u2019t bother to chase us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He and I hold hands as we bound up the grimy communal staircase. This isn\u2019t the first time we have run away. It worked before, when we escaped his family and the authorities. I have almost convinced myself we can pull it off a second time when boot-shod stomps echo up the stairwell from the sleeping building below. Broad shadows creep, belonging to beasts bigger and more brutal than us. Ohshitohshitohshit<\/em>, Carrion is muttering under his breath as we reach the gray expanse of roof and kick the door shut behind us. We block the roof access with a metal bar that won\u2019t hold off whoever is on the other side for long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOkay.\u201d Adrenaline has me dizzy, my body\u2019s aches forgotten. This is survival, this is teeth and nail if it comes down to it, this is keeping Carrion safe, not because of some extant biological urge, but because we\u2019re all each other has, and we need <\/em>to get out of this alive. \u201cFire escape stairs must be swarmed from below, too. But if we jump from roof to roof, we can make it out through another building unscathed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrion smirks despite the red-haze-urgency of our circumstances. \u201cRemember our parkour-obsessed days? Who knew that would come in handy, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We lean over the roof\u2019s raised edges, where the neighboring buildings are clustered close together, only a good, long leap away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlright,\u201d I say, stepping back to add to my momentum. \u201cOn the count of three?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One, two, and Carrion screams. Carrion doesn\u2019t jump forward, but falls<\/em>, and only thanks to my anxiety-quick reflexes do I grab him by his clothes, ripping a fistful of fur in the process. I manage to pull him back against my body until we are both pressed flat to the dusty concrete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat happened?\u201d I ask. In my head there is a cartoon dog like the one from the app, glitching with a corrupted neon light. I\u2019m too frantic worrying about Carrion to wonder if I\u2019ve finally lost my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He raises his torso a breath off the floor and laughs as blood blooms from his midsection. \u201cDrone,\u201d he rasps. \u201cThis was not a warning shot. We\u2019re fucked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I gather him in my arms, careful not to jostle his bullet wound, and look wildly around for the military-grade drone, and for shelter. A tiny neglected greenhouse stands in the middle of our building\u2019s roof, and I shoulder my way inside, laying me and Carrion both under the skylight. My lips tremble in prayer to some higher entity or force, let us not hear the sound of glass shattering, let the drone and its controllers fear to cause a racket, let the authorities not get involved in this deal gone wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In our glass house surrounded by withered vegetation, we pant covered in blood. How did everything turn this bad so fast? Just minutes earlier we thought we could finally take a break from the gigs, just being, just breathing. And now every breath feels like it could be our last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCarrion,\u201d I say his name like the biggest prayer of them all as I stroke his matted-fur cheek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI figured it out,\u201d he says, feverish and laughing still. \u201cDog Eat Gig, but see\u2026 gig eat dog, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through the dirty skylight, the stars are veiled by smog and the moon appears so distant, pale and immaterial like a slip of gauze. It feels a mockery to know our kind once howled its praise to the moon. I think about the labor prisons again, where fur falls off in clusters and gaunt faces become true animal with each stone laid to the towering behemoth of Lykopolis. The canine militia–those would-have-been alphas with their big boots and guns turned muscle-for-hire–are coming to drag us somewhere far worse than the prisons. Meanwhile, our secret gig clients will survive with impunity, will build and build their wealth and empire of meat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I realize then, why the app chose the two of us for this job. Carrion and I, we are easy to vanish without anyone there to look for us. No one to miss us but each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I howl then. My rage blooms at the unfairness of this world of artificial Civility our ancestors conceived and constructed for us. How the City failed Carrion and I since we were young pups, how it promised us a future bright as broken glass or glitching pixels. How our kind thought in its hubris that steel, concrete, and neon lights were good enough a replacement for our past of moon and pack and forest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere are rumors,\u201d Carrion says through blood-red lips and a smile meant just for me. \u201cAbout the valley of wolves far beyond the city.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I look at my friend, my Carrion, the last true wild creature in this city of smoke and mirrors. He laughs as he joins me weakly in a howl, and I squeeze his paws between mine and vow to him, \u201cThat\u2019s where we\u2019ll go, you and I,\u201d and dare the moon to call me a liar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Rhysling-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra\u2019s work haunts publications such as\u00a0Strange\u00a0Horizons, The Deadlands, F&SF, Podcastle, Asimov’s, Vastarien, and Reckoning.\u00a0You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twilight, the time of wolves, seeps scarlet across the skyscraper skyline, and Carrion rambles about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":100043008,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,3292],"tags":[6,3326,227,3296],"class_list":["post-100043005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-fiction","tag-cyberpunk","tag-dog","tag-fiction","tag-prose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100043005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100043005"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100043005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100043009,"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100043005\/revisions\/100043009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/100043008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100043005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100043005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.neondystopia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100043005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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