Devour (title too short)

When the inheritance tax demanded a third of their family's total mass, mother simply folded her youngest directly into her own collarbone. Now they save on wardrobe by sharing the same black silk sleeve, their joint anatomy a monument to domestic thrift in a world that counts pounds of flesh as currency. Beneath the heavy fabric, their ribs interlaced like fingers, a tight and calcified architecture meant to keep their genetic profiles from leaking into the high-pressure scarlet atmosphere outside. The child adjusted quickly to the new arrangement, her wide, frantic eyes staring out from beneath her mother’s chin while her own needle-teeth clicked a rhythm of absolute safety against the maternal jaw. Whenever the ambient panic of the sector grew too dense to process, an auxiliary eye would unzip from the mother's forearm, calmly auditing the room to ensure no tax collectors were lurking in the flat red shadows to claim whatever marrow they had left.

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Background info:

The world they inhabit is a flat, hyper-compressed expanse known to the registries as the Scarlet Basin—a monolithic colony where geography has ceased to be landscape and has instead become an oppressive, ambient climate of pure scarlet paint. In this sector, space is a luxury the administration cannot afford, and the environment itself exerts a relentless atmospheric pressure that forces distinct shapes, structures, and bodies to constantly leak, smear, and fuse into one another just to survive.

It is an ecosystem governed entirely by a cold, meticulous carnivorous bureaucracy. Every shred of existence is audited, indexed, and cataloged; even human anatomy is treated as raw material and property of the state. Because the administrative departments count pounds of living flesh as a taxable currency, families are forced into grotesque displays of domestic resourcefulness. When the inheritance tax or structural quotas demand a percentage of a household's total mass, standard human boundaries are discarded for survival. Loving mothers quite literally prune away redundant facial features, compress their children against their torsos until their ribs interlace like fingers, and fold their youngest directly into their own collarbones to hide them from the ledger books.

Life in the basin is a quiet, rhythmic horror of biological adaptation. Fabric is rarely woven; instead, the corporate dress code utilizes heavy black silk and organic excretions designed to neutralize acidic bodily secretions and keep leaking marrow from staining the pristine floorboards of the workplaces. Human senses have been drastically retrofitted to match this frantic anxiety: main eyes dilate with the constant stress of the red air, prompting auxiliary eyes to unzip from forearms to calmly audit the surroundings for tax collectors lurking in the flat shadows. Jaws routinely unhinge along their tracks to vent the intense communal heat of a bloodline, and vocal cords tangle together like wet yarn during the night. It is a world where intimacy is synonymous with friction, where the family unit is the only architecture keeping your skeleton from dissolving into the state's red background, and where a proper sisterly greeting is the wet, grinding noise of two skulls friction-welding their thoughts together to share a single childhood memory without a government receipt.