Chapter 4
FOUR
EUN
“She didn’t recognize any of the languages on the list,” I told my neighbor Abby as I stood outside her open door.
I had heard her leaving her apartment and caught her in the hallway to ask for advice and to ask if I could have a pair of her old clothes.
She was an herbivore with silky, iridescent scales, around the same size as the woman who had slept in my bed last night.
She had been stopping me in the hallway for a chat ever since I moved in, which I had found strange, especially given the media about me, but now I was grateful for her determined friendliness.
It made her easier to approach with this problem.
She came back out into the hallway with a small stack of folded clothing and two worn sneakers on top. She handed them to me, and I took them from her.
“You used the galactic list?” Abby asked.
“Yes, with the sound samples,” I said. “She played through all of them and didn't recognize any.”
“She could be an abductee from an unknown species,” she said. “Though how they would have gotten her through the spaceport, I don’t know. They have scanners for living creatures to try to stop live imports for the blood market.”
She looked down and away from me, shifting from side to side as she mentioned that taboo topic.
It wasn't just the topic itself; it was who she was talking to. I wasn’t used to an herbivore bringing up the blood market, not that I talked to any of them much.
Still, the topic brought up so casually made me uncomfortable as well, and I lifted a hand to the back of my neck, scratching the base of one of my thick strands of hair.
It had been a while since I had cut them, and they were getting too long.
I kept putting them off because it felt like I was cutting off my limbs, not hair.
The wrongness of it had never gone away, no matter how many times I did it.
“I thought about taking her to the police station,” I said. I needed reassurance that I had done the right thing by not bringing her there, that I hadn't made that choice just to protect myself. Abby gave it to me.
“You can't do that! If she is an unregistered species, you don’t know what will happen to her.” Abby looked up at me sharply, her nose twitching. “They are here to protect citizens, not illegals.”
“But…” I wasn't going to argue, but Abby cut me off anyway.
“If she is an illegal herbivore, you can’t take her to the cops; she won't be safe there,” Abby insisted.
“You can't take her to any of the alien embassies either because they don’t have any responsibility towards aliens that aren't their kind, and several of them are just fronts to sell on the blood market. The only hope she has of getting any official help is if she is registered as a citizen.”
“She can't even speak the language,” I said, pointing out the obvious issue. Aliens could register as citizens if they passed the test, but there was no way she could do that without being able to read and speak.
Abby frowned.
"There is one option," Abby said.
At first, I had no idea what she was talking about, and then my mind caught up with her.
"No, that isn't an option," I said.
“Marriage is the only option,” she said, her tone growing in insistence. “As long as one person has their documentation in order, they don’t care about the other. My friend at the marriage registrar’s office said it happens pretty regularly.”
“Who is she going to marry?” I asked. "I'm the only person she knows. She can't even speak the language!"
A sudden rush of desire surged through me, the urgent need to possess what was mine.
My hair flared out suddenly, as if it wanted to reach out and grab something, and Abby craned her long neck to one side to look at it even as I shifted, trying to hide it.
She rattled her rounded nails against her scales, creating a clattering sound that her kind liked to make to indicate contemplation as her tongue flicked out to taste the air.
I was surprised she didn't signal disgust, but then again, she didn't know what I was feeling.
My hair was as strange and unknown to those around me as it was to me.
I was attracted to the prey that I had rescued.
It was obscene. Even though the law allowing it had passed recently, allowing the formal pairings, prey-predator couples out in public were the subject of whispers and, in some cases, outright harassment from both ends of the spectrum.
Everyone knew that relationships like that would end badly.
It was the subject of the most popular drama shows.
“You like her,” she said.
Maybe something had shown in my face?
“I can’t even talk to her,” I said. “And I met her yesterday. And she is a pre… an herbivore.”
I caught myself barely in time. No matter how I thought of them in my head, no matter how my family spoke about them, prey did not like to be called prey.
Prey was still used sometimes in the media, but its use was declining due to public pressure.
It was associated with a harshness inappropriate for one-on-one interactions with prey. The polite term was herbivore.
“What's wrong with being an herbivore?” Abby demanded, her tail slapping against the ground to indicate she had caught my slip-up, and it irritated her.
“You know what, never mind. This isn't my problem, and I have to go to work, Eun.
From what I can tell, you only have a few options.
You can take her to the police, and if you do, she's going to vanish, and you're going to get in trouble. You can kick her out to fend for herself and not deal with it. You can take care of her and teach her the language, and hope she doesn’t get into any trouble. Or, you can marry her and then do whatever you need to do as her legal advocate to help her get home.”
"I can't marry someone I don't know," I said. "She can't even agree to it."
Abby tapped her nails against her scales again.
"I can tell you any herbivore in her situation would much rather marry the first guy she meets than die, especially if that guy was someone like you," Abby said, putting it bluntly.
"I'm a nobody," I said.
Abby slapped her tail against the ground again and just stared at me.
"At least to her I'm a nobody," I amended. "She doesn't even speak the language. She can't possibly know who I am or who my family is. She isn't going to be happy about marrying some guy who lives in a tiny room. She probably just wants to go home."
"How is she going to do that, Eun? She is clearly an alien.
She can't even get into the spaceport without being a citizen.
How is she going to leave and go back home?
" Abby pointed out."If you marry her and legitimize her, you can take her there and find an offworlder who knows what she is.
You don't even have to ask your family for help.
You can get her out of here on your own, but to get through spaceport security, she has to be a citizen. "
I hated how much I liked that idea of marrying her. It was an awful idea.
But this world was idiotic in the fact that it didn't allow non-citizens to be here, and it also didn't allow them to leave.
“I have to go to work too,” I said, keeping my hair as stiff and still as possible. "I'm not going to marry some random woman I just met."
My family would hate it if I did that, which made it that much more appealing.
“It would be just like those dramas if someone like you married an illegal prey species,” Abby said, tapping her fingers on her scales again.
The nighttime dramas always had the most lurid and ridiculous plotlines, where wealthy predator billionaires would fall in love with prey species coffee shop workers and sweep them up off their feet into a life of luxury, only to devour them once they got them isolated from their families.
"Even so, you should take care of her. In her situation, she won't make it down the street without someone picking her off.
You should keep her and hire me. I work as a tutor, and I have space for a new student.
If you decide to keep her and you need to hire someone to work with her, keep me in mind. I'm not cheap, but I'm worth it."
"Those dramas are tragedies," I said.
"Not all of them," Abby said.
"I can't keep her," I said. "What if I..."
I couldn't say it.
When I first moved in, Abby introduced herself and made it clear she knew exactly who I was and why I was there, and that she wasn't afraid of me because she knew I was a good person, simply because I had left.
Nothing had ever been proven about the allegations against my family; they were always buried and dismissed if the media even bothered to report on them at all.
That didn't stop people from knowing the truth.
Most herbivores no longer believed anything the mainstream news reported.
Despite her reassurance, if there was anyone on this planet who wasn't safe to live with a prey animal, it was someone like me from a family like mine.
"I've known a lot of non-herbivores," Abby said, her voice soft. "Eun, you've never struck me as a dangerous one."
"My family is one of the worst there is," I said, acknowledging the truth that many knew, even if nothing had been done about it.
Abby flicked her fingertips at me rapidly, indicating disbelief. "You're here, aren't you? You left your family because you're different than them."
"I'm still not a..." I caught myself again, fixing my language to be less violence-driven. "I'm not an herbivore. I can't live with an herbivore. I can't marry her. I can't keep her."
That one word betrayed me, and the word mine played over and over again in my head.
Abby flicked her fingertips again, this time with more force and speed, ignoring my confession as if it wasn't even there. "Then she'll die. Someone else will eat her."
The thought of that flared with hot rage within me, every part of me screaming that I would never let that happen.
She was mine.
Abby flicked her tongue out in the air, her eyes narrowing. She said nothing else and walked towards the elevator, flicking her fingers a few more times over her shoulder.
I headed back towards my room, new clothing in hand.
When I stepped through the door into the room, Leija was standing at the window, looking out at the city.
The light coming through the window caught the soft curve of her hip, accenting her rounded features, and I sucked in a breath, suddenly stunned by her softness.
The sound caught her attention, and she looked back over her shoulder at me, her entire body following that motion until she had turned to face me, her arms uncrossing and falling down by her sides.
I set the clothes down on the chair.
“I have to go to work,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay here, but I’ll be gone all day.”
It was better that way. I could get some space from her, from her tantalizing scent and her soft movements.
I opened the drawer on my desk, took out my extra key, and set it on top of the clothing. I also got out a piece of paper and wrote down the code to the front door on it. On a second sheet of paper, I wrote the building's address and wrote: "Please help me get to this address."
“If you get lost, show someone this,” I told her. “But it would be better if you don’t go out.”
I set it down with the key. I knew she couldn't understand me, but I hoped that her species was intelligent enough to figure it out.
I couldn't stay with her. I wasn't going to lock her in.
I was the only one on shift at my work, and I couldn't just show up, not after all my Uncle had done for me.
Just giving me the job in the first place caused him no end of trouble.
Then I stepped back into the hallway and closed the door behind me.
The idea of just leaving her there made me feel uncomfortable.
The urge to just lock her up to keep her safe scraped its nails inside of my heart, a toxic desire that was fueled by my own view of her fragility.
But she wasn’t mine, no matter how much my possessive instincts screamed at me that she was.
I couldn't keep her. She wasn't mine.
Those instincts weren’t safe.