Ira shoulders open the familiar door to her apartment, soaked to the bone and craving nothing but a hot shower. Water runs off her, pooling on her floor; her hoodie clings like seaweed. She toes off her shoes and beelines to the bathroom, each step leaving a dark print on the cracked linoleum. She flicks the light switch on. The old yellow bulb takes a breath, then blooms.
She yanks back the tired curtain and throws the faucet full to hot. Pipes cough awake; then the water comes—hard and steady. She peels off more wet layers that slap the tile and glances at herself in the old mirror. Scratches bloom across her face, arms, legs, hands; her hair is a matted sheet; and the half-moons under her eyes are deeper than she remembers. But her lips are flushed with life, and her cheeks burn with cold and exertion. She smells like rain and crushed fern. She looks—she decides—like someone who walked herself home. She feels beautiful, and she feels proud.
Turning her attention to the task at hand, she steps over the tub lip and lets the hot stream hammer her scalp, her neck, her sore limbs. Pollen and river-silt spool off of her in brown ribbons. She scrubs until the skin along her shoulders goes raw, shampooing and rinsing and shampooing again until she loses count, until the forest loosens its hold on her and swirls down the drain.
Then she notices a comforting blue pulsing in the water. Her ring is on her finger.
She doesn't remember putting it back on. In the steam it pulses a soft cobalt, as if breathing with her. She slides it off, soaking her floor as she leans out of the shower to set it on the sink counter, It hums against the tile—soft, almost apologetic. "Not tonight," she says, and climbs out of the shower to shove it into the top drawer of her bathroom cabinet. The humming sound disappears.
She hops back into the shower and lingers under the water until the ache in her calves unwinds, then kills the tap and burritos herself in a frayed, generous towel. Breath by breath, the bathroom fog thins. The mirror ghosts her outline.
She pads into the the main room where the heater clanks away like a grumpy dragon. The apartment smells faintly of tea and damp. Her pothos droops theatrically from the bookshelf, a new leaf unfurling pale and brave. "So dramatic," she tells it. The leaf seems to perk in response.
She dresses in familiar soft blacks: an oversized hoodie, smoke-gray drawstring pants, socks that don't match. The fabric knows her. It brings her back into her body.
In the kitchenette she lines up her allies: the kettle, her chipped mug, the last jasmine tea, a dented pot for broth. She turns on the stovetop. The coil glows. Eventually, steam ghosts up. She drops miso and mushrooms into water; the room begins to smell of the Soup District. Her shoulders let go one vertebra at a time.
"Cozy," she declares, to herself and to the walls. The walls seem to hum back in recognition.
She pulls the silverware drawer open for a spoon and it jams—the cheap track buckling. She tugs harder. The face panel promptly snaps off and clatters on the floor; the flimsy screws pinging merrily under the table.
"Of course." She groans, kneeling down to fit the panel back on. She fights a bent screw, and tries to convince the chewed threads back into a stripped hole. Her thumbnail slips. Pain flares. "Not tonight," she mutters again, flexing her hand.
A glint of black in her nail bed gives her pause. Heat gathers along her forearms—familiar and new—and for once she doesn't push it down. She invites it.
It spills through her like warm mercury. The tips of her fingers tingle. Dark keratin pushes forward and out. Before her eyes, her sharp nails are replaced by talons: black, curved, glossy as obsidian. Longer. Stronger.
"Whoa," she breathes.
She steadies the screw again, the metal lip cold against her palm. The talon of her index finger taps the head. The sound is clean and ringing, and she feels it in her teeth.
She presses, patient. The talon kisses the screw and skates. A hairline groove appears—precise, deep—replacing the stripped metal with a new divot.
Her heart gives a single, heavy beat. "No way."
"I can cut through metal now?"
An idea strikes her and she reaches to the back of the cupboard to pull out an old gym-lock, cold and weighty. She braces it on the counter.
"Here goes nothing."
She holds the pad steady and pushes her pointer talon to the shackle with a slow and even pressure.
At first, refusal. Then—grain. The steel yields with a crystalline give like packed sugar, and she can feel its structure through the talon as if it were nerve. She leans in, breath shallow, and draws cleanly through. The resistance becomes surrender and her talon glides neatly through.
She lifts her hand. The lock body spins uselessly. The cut lock gleams, mirror-clean.
"Whoa," again, smaller.
The room narrows to quiet. Water ticks in the pipes. Broth bubbles softly. Somewhere in the building a neighbor coughs his sleep. Ira sits back on her heels on the kitchen floor, staring at what her hand just did. Her talons gleam—scalpels she can feel all the way to the root of her bones.
"Oh," she whispers. Heat climbs her chest—fear braided with elation. "Oh my."
She waits, letting adrenaline crest. Then, she begins to put it to the test. She reaches for a bent fork. Her talon passes through with a faint hiss, like thread through silk. She flips a spoon and draws a crescent on its back: a thin silver moon easily catching the kitchen's tired yellow light.
She moves through the apartment like an organized tornado. A key she never uses—bisected. An old can lid—sliced. A dead bolt—tested at the thinnest seam and refused; she listens, adjusts angle, and it yields. Not mindless cutting—listening with her hands, learning the language of metal, how it wants to part.
Each time the same: a steadying breath; the line; the glide. Thick or thin, it doesn't seem to matter. The only variable is her patience.
Back in the kitchen after her testing she stands very still and looks at her hands. With a thought she retracts the talons a notch; with another, slides them back out. Again. Again. The motion becomes a switch—reachable even in the dark. She can control them now.
She washes her hands in warm water and soap; the faint scent of hot metal lingers, clean and almost sweet. She wipes down the counter, setting each tampered object in a small, guilty pile, as if it might disappear.
She pockets the cut lock without thinking. Warm against her thigh, it becomes an anchor, proof.
She carries her finished soup to the window, mushrooms gone silky, steam fogging the glass. Outside, Noctreign hums its night music: a tram wire's insect whine, a far siren, rain tatting along a rusted gutter. The world outside feels strangely ordinary in contrast to what she's just discovered about herself.
Only when her bowl is rinsed and tipped to dry does the thought open fully:
If I can do this, what else can I do? Then, And what could I use it for?
She digs a dead pen out of her junk drawer, slaps it against her palm until ink sputters back to life, and writes on the inside flap of a ramen box:
My talons can cut through steel.
Through locks.
Through doors.
She stops, breathing. Her mind teases a perimeter and then steps over it as she writes the next line:
The Glass Orchard — my first target?
The letters look too casual for what they mean. She caps the pen. Enough for tonight. She tucks the cardboard under the pothos pot for tomorrow.
In the bathroom she brushes her teeth, practicing the extend/retract motion of her nails while the toothbrush foams. It's easier already—as simple as flexing a hand she'd been pretending wasn't hers.
Then, pressure ghosts along her shoulder blades—a memory of pain, of something trying to pry itself free—and she breathes through it. "Not yet," she tells the ache beneath her skin. "I'll learn you too."
She spits out the toothpaste and rinses her mouth, accidentally eying the top drawer in the cabinet. The ring rests mute in the drawer. She doesn't reach for it.
She exits the bathroom and flops down on her mattress, staring at her ceiling until her eyes adjust to its cracks. Her brain replays the river, Drum, and then the lapis eyes she refuses to give airtime. She reroutes the loop like a stubborn tram.
She slides the cut lock from her pocket and turns it in her palm. The seam catches moonlight, a silver vein. The weight steadies her; reassures her that her new ability is here to stay. She closes her fist around it until her tendons ache.
"Tomorrow," she tells the ceiling. Not specifying what.
But the plan spreads as she drifts. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she will begin.
She sleeps. The city keeps watch. In her dreams, metal parts like paper beneath her claws.