Poison: Street Heat by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Poison-Street-Heat-1277318029#image-1

Poison: Street Heat ANIMATION

Currents of Satin

They told me to wear red when I wanted to be noticed, black when I wanted to be forgotten, and something slippery when I wanted trouble to mistake me for prey. I chose satin, because satin catches light the way a lie catches truth — in glints and shirks, never quite revealing the whole thing at once.

The subway smelled like a confession: old metal, river-damp concrete, a faint sweetness like sugar left too long in the rain. Above ground, the city blinked neon and shrugged. Below, under a ceiling of iron ribs, the world had been stripped to its essentials — water, wire, hunger. That was where the eel-serpent lived, the thing that fed on the city's petty electric heart and left neighborhoods blinking into darkness like half-shut eyes.

"You're doing this alone?" Marlow asked, his voice flat as an unused ticket scanner. He had the pale hands of a man who had fixed too many fuses and seen too many unnatural blowouts. He smelled of machine oil and bad coffee. I could have flirted with him — turned the question into a slow, dangerous joke — but there are times when a girl needs a man who knows his breakers, not his compliments.

"I always prefer not to get in the way of the main attraction," I said, and watched the line on his jaw tighten like he wanted to laugh and couldn't. "Besides, it's a big, wet mouth. Too many bodies makes it meaner."

He adjusted the harness for me, his fingers surprising and steady. "You know it's not superstition—those arcs don't just fry circuits. People say things get into the wires." He didn't finish the sentence. Neither did I. Words in the dark pick at the holes in your courage until you're naked and blinking.

"You want me to flirt with the lightning for you?" I said. "Or would you rather I flirted with the idea of you?"

He snorted. "Get down there, Poison. Bring back whatever the hell's eating the city and leave the metaphors topside."

Marlow's mouth had closed a door. Then, with a final clack of the winch, it was just me and the rope and the tunnel. The stairwell had become a cataract — water moved slow and patient over the stone, tasting the air in tiny splashes. I slid my heels out of their satin prisons and felt the cold bite of subway water, indifferent and small at first but promising a long, careful possession.

The flashlight in my pocket hummed, useless against the thing that preferred its lights like a lover. The eel-fed on current, on the thin, furious thread of electricity that kept the city lucid. It lived where wires crossed like old lovers' hands and where insulation had rotted into memory. The thing was not myth and it was not a metaphor. It was an appetite remodeling physics.

I let the water swallow me to my knees, then to my thighs. The tunnel's mouth was a broken tooth; beyond it lay tracks gone soft and glowed now and then with arcs that seemed to come from the walls themselves — like veins made of mercury. Each spark was a tongue flicking the darkness, tasting for flavor. The air vibrated with a sound that was almost music — a high, electric thrumming that made the fillings in my teeth vibrate in sympathy.

"You ever wonder," I called into the dark, because there is a kind of courage in being conversational with monsters, "if monsters get bored? If they tire of eating cables and want a new pastime, like tap-dancing on a bus timetable?"

Something moved. Not in the way a human moves — no limbs, no shoulders — but in a pressure, a patience shifting through water and wire. The currents undulated like a belly beneath silk. Then, a voice, not through lips but through the razor-spray of a transformer, in a chorus of small electric shocks.

I stiffened because the voice knew my name and had no right to. "Poison."

It could call me anything it wanted. Names change hands. But the sound was a memory of rain on rooftops and of the hospital ward where I learned not to cry in public. It was a voice that had been shaped by coaxial cables and the loneliness of basements.

"Who are you?" I asked, because we women of my trade ask that of every shadow that bites for the thrill of hearing what it will say.

The voice laughed, a shiver along the rails. "I am the city that forgot to stay sweet. I am the bright and small and hungry. I am a thing that will not be caged."

"Then let's not pretend you're the only one who knows hunger," I said. Seduction is not always soft; sometimes it's a dare wrapped in a sm
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