With the examination of the “statues”

The music was a low, pulsing beat that vibrated through the pedestals and settled into Magi's bones. Under the spotlights, every fiber of her body screamed to move, to adjust the leather strap digging into her thigh, to scratch the spot where the mask's metal pressed against her skin. But she remained motionless, breathing shallowly through the narrow slits, her world reduced to a tunnel of vision encompassing the gloom and flashes of black light.

The first clients approached cautiously, drinks in hand, forming a semicircle of curiosity. They whispered, pointed, chuckled. Magi felt their gazes like ants crawling over her skin.

"Look at this one, she looks real," said a male voice, too close.

A man, with a loosened tie and whiskey breath, approached her pedestal. His gaze traveled up and down her body with obscene slowness.

"Do you think she feels?" he asked his companion, without taking his eyes off her.

"Only one way to find out," the other replied, with a mocking laugh.

The first man reached out. Magi held her breath, her whole body tensed in a silent prayer. His fingers, damp from the glass's condensation, did not touch her skin, but the net cape covering her shoulder. He pinched and rubbed it between thumb and index finger, as if evaluating the quality of a fabric.

"Plastic," he declared, disappointed, and walked away.

Magi exhaled, a trembling rush of adrenaline running through her. She wasn't safe; she had only been evaluated and found wanting.

Not all interactions were so innocuous. A group of elegantly dressed women stopped in front of Lara. Her green and blue feather mask and shiny latex torso made her the royalty of the show.

"What exquisite details," commented one, sipping her cocktail. "Look at the scale work."

"Do you think she's uncomfortable?" asked another, with feigned compassion.

"For God's sake, Susan, she's a statue. She doesn't feel," said the first, and before anyone could react, she extended her long manicured nail and gently scratched one of the acrylic "scales" of Lara's skirt, making a crunching sound. Lara didn't flinch, but Magi, from her pedestal, saw her companion's fingers twitch slightly against her thigh.

The establishment's special currency—a heavy brass token with Neptune's trident—was the key to interaction. A young man, with an air of fake shyness, tossed one at the feet of Chloe's pedestal, dressed in seaweed.

"Dance," he ordered, with a voice pretending to be authoritative.

Chloe, whose viscose silk outfit barely covered her, froze. The rule was to move only with the coin, but there was no choreography. With clumsy movements, **** by panic, she swayed her hips, making the strips of fabric coil and uncoil over her body, revealing and hiding flashes of skin in a pathetic spectacle. The man laughed, recording with his phone, before disappearing into the crowd. Chloe stopped, visibly trembling.

But it was Sofia who attracted the worst attention. Her cracked porcelain mask and broken white corset seemed like an invitation for some. A burly guy, with tattooed knuckles, threw a token that hit her stomach.

"Come on, broken one!" he shouted. "Break more!"

Sofia remained motionless, her eyes shining with terror behind the cracks of the mask. The man, enraged by the lack of response, spat toward the pedestal. The spit landed on her leg, glowing under the black light. A wave of disgust and rage ran through Magi, but she couldn't move either.

Julia, with her flesh-colored gauze mask and almost invisible outfit, was the one who mesmerized the most. People stopped in front of her, squinting, trying to decipher if she really had a face or not. A man got so close that his breath fogged the gauze.

"There's nothing there," he muttered, fascinated and disturbed. "It's like a ghost."

He reached out and, with an audacity no one else had shown, ran his finger where her cheek should be. The gauze sank under the touch, giving the illusion of touching real skin while still touching nothing. Julia didn't blink, didn't take a deep breath. She was the perfect statue, and that perfection was the most terrifying of all.

Magi saw everything. She saw Chloe's humiliation, Sofia's disgust, the object of fascination Julia had become, Lara's violated elegance. And she knew the masks didn't protect them. They turned them into blank screens where every client could project their own fantasies, cruelties, and curiosities. Anonymity was not a shield; it was an invitation to be anyone and, therefore, no one.

A new group stopped in front of her. One of them, a middle-aged man with a calm smile, studied her steampunk metal mask with genuine interest. He tossed a token at her feet.

"I don't want you to move," he said, with a calm voice that cut through the party noise. "I just want to see how you breathe. I want to see the effort to not move."

Magi felt panic **** her. Her breathing, controlled until now, suddenly became a public event, something to be measured and observed. She tried to contain it, to make it shallow, but every inhalation felt like a scream, every exhalation like a surrender. The man watched, smiling slightly, enjoying not the exposed body, but the broken will revealed in the slightest and most involuntary of movements: the simple act of breathing.

In that moment, she understood the true nature of her role. She wasn't a statue. She was a stuffed animal, nailed to a pedestal, and the client was a collector who enjoyed not the animal, but the taxidermist's precision.