To tell the truth, Foxy never believed in anything long-term. Relationships? Just gilded illusions. Love? A biochemical scam. Sex? A function. A neural reward response. Strip away all the mythology, and it’s just another way for the body to check a box. Mechanical. Predictable.

Foxy himself looked like he’d been yanked out of a dream woven from static and smoke: a young man with sharp, angular features, shadows under his eyes from sleepless nights, and long, ash-toned hair falling in strands over a black hoodie. His eyes always reflected the flickering glow of screens, giving his gaze an unnatural, digital sheэen—as if even in sleep, he was half-connected to some server. No one knew exactly how old he was. Twenty? Twenty-five? Didn’t matter. What mattered was that he could make the network tremble.

Lou, on the other hand, was the kind of person who didn’t draw attention unless she wanted to. Short black hair, a simple jacket from some army surplus, no makeup. Her body was wiry, taut, as if she’d spent too long tensed up and forgotten how to relax. Her gaze, flat and unreadable, always seemed to be assessing escape routes. She smoked too much, spoke too little, and the scars on her skin looked older than her twenty-one years. Born in Les Loges, raised on concrete and silence. Boarding school hardened her. The genetic storm finished the job.

Foxy pegged her as a ghost. Just another second-rate telekinetic with a quiet face and sharp cheekbones, someone he’d once crossed paths with in Nitro amid a web of surveillance and whispered names like Ezgi. She worked for the AAS—or something adjacent to the Inquisition. Didn’t matter. He should’ve forgotten her the moment she walked away.

And yet.

After that incident with the flash drive—after the cold data passed from hand to hand like contraband between warring cells—the hacker and the psionic reached an understanding: fleeting, mostly meaningless encounters weren’t so bad. Sometimes they were necessary. Clean. No emotions.

He liked Lou because she didn’t fray his nerves. Didn’t ask questions she already knew the answers to. Didn’t poke around infected places. Just existed on the same damaged frequency, unapologetically. They understood each other without words.

Later, she’d admit in her flat, impassive tone that Foxy wasn’t bad in bed. In fact, exceptionally good. And in a world warped by genetic decay, crumbling alliances, and cities strangled by surveillance, that kind of contact—visceral, immediate—was the only relief left.

Tonight, Lou smiles again. The same faint, barely-there smile as the first time. Her fingers trace his bare chest, calloused from god-knows-what—probably combat training—and her touch is clinical but warm. Precise. As if she’s running her hands over a weapon she’s already memorized.

And Foxy—who always considered himself cold, detached, watching the world burn through layers of encryption—realizes with disgust that something about this is starting to melt him.

Lou kisses brilliantly. Not technically, not rehearsed—but instinctively, as if it’s etched into her bones, as if her mouth knows things she’s never spoken aloud. Every kiss hits him like a system reboot. No pretense.