Chapter 10
URSAK
The envelope arrives with the morning mail, crisp and official beneath a stack of grocery circulars and coffee shop coupons. My name is printed in block letters: URSAK IRONTONGUE. The return address makes my stomach clench, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Not now. Not when everything finally...
I set down my coffee cup with deliberate precision. Three sugars today, just how Maya showed me. The ceramic clinks against the saucer, the sound sharp in my too-quiet kitchen.
The seal tears with a whisper. Inside, legal jargon marches across government letterhead in neat formations. Words like review, status, and appearance required blur together until one phrase crystallizes with brutal clarity:
Failure to appear will result in immediate deportation proceedings.
My hands don't shake. They wouldn't dare. But the paper crumples slightly at the edges where my grip tightens.
Fourteen days. They're giving me fourteen days to prove I belong here.
The coffee tastes like ash now. I push the cup away and read the letter again, slower this time, parsing each syllable for hidden meaning.
Standard procedure, they claim. Routine verification of academic visa status.
But nothing about immigration feels routine when you're the one standing in the crosshairs.
I fold the letter along its original creases and place it beside my breakfast plate. The eggs have gone cold, yolk congealing into yellow rubber. My appetite has vanished anyway.
Focus. There must be precedent. Protocol. A solution.
I rise from the table and move to my study corner, where six notebooks wait in their morning arrangement.
Hungarian, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and English, each representing years of careful study, linguistic precision, the kind of methodical progress that builds careers and justifies visa renewals.
The Hungarian notebook falls open to yesterday's entry: szerelem. Love. I'd been practicing the pronunciation, rolling the unfamiliar vowels around my tongue while thinking of Maya's laugh.
Maya.
Her name hits like a physical blow. Last night changed everything, her skin against mine, her breath catching as I—
No. I slam the notebook shut. Romance is a luxury I can't afford now. Not when my entire future hangs by bureaucratic threads.
The phone slides against the table. Maya's name lights up the screen, probably wondering why I slipped out before dawn. I've never been good at morning-after conversations in any language.
I let it ring.
The second call comes an hour later while I'm pacing between my bookshelves, pulling down immigration law texts I'd hoped never to need again. Maya's voice drifts through voicemail, concern creeping into her tone.
"Hey, it's me. Just wanted to make sure you're okay? Last night was..." A pause. "Call me back."
I delete the message without finishing it.
By noon, I've filled three pages with frantic notes. Hungarian immigration precedents from the 1990s. German academic visa extensions. A Portuguese case study involving a linguistics professor, though his situation involved marriage fraud, hardly applicable.
Marriage.
The word stops me cold. In some countries, it's still a path to residency. But Maya and I have known each other for what… weeks? The idea is absurd. Impractical. The kind of desperate measure that only works in the romance novels I hide beneath my academic journals.
The phone goes off again. This time it's a text: Starting to worry. Please just let me know you're alive?
I type and delete a dozen responses. How do you explain that everything you've built is crumbling? That the night that meant everything to you might have been the last normal moment before your world implodes?
Finally, I settle on: Fine. Busy with work.
The response comes immediately: Bullshit. I'm coming over.
No. I type back. Need space to think.
Three dots appear and disappear several times. When her reply finally comes, it's just one word: Okay.
The silence feels heavier than her anger would have.
I spend the afternoon rehearsing. Not poetry this time, legal arguments. I pace the length of my apartment, voice echoing off the walls as I practice explaining my value to immigration officers who see only numbers and check boxes.
"My research contributes significantly to cross-cultural communication studies," I tell the empty room, hands gesturing to an invisible panel. "The University of Chicago has expressed continued interest in my work on orcish dialectical variations."
The words sound hollow even to me. What's one orc professor when they could hire three human linguists for the same cost?
By evening, I've worn a path in the carpet between my desk and the window. The notebooks lie scattered across every surface, their careful organization abandoned in favor of desperate note-taking. Fragments of legal text mixed with linguistic observations mixed with half-formed contingency plans.
Could return to the Iron Mountains. Resume clan duties.
The thought makes me sick. Six years of careful assimilation, of proving orcs can contribute to human society, reduced to nothing. All because some bureaucrat decided my paperwork needed "additional review."
Maya's footsteps echo in the hallway outside. I recognize her gait with quick, purposeful, I stare at with that slight hesitation before she reaches my door. She stops, and I imagine her raising her hand to knock, then lowering it again.
Minutes pass. Finally, I hear her retreat to her own apartment. The door closes with a soft click that sounds like defeat.
This is for the best. She deserves better than someone whose future is measured in fourteen-day increments.
But knowing something is right doesn't make it easier. I've spent so long building walls that tearing them down for Maya felt like a revolution. Now I'm rebuilding them twice as high, brick by brick, legal precedent by legal precedent.
The German notebook provides a temporary distraction.
A case study from Munich involving an orcish engineer whose visa was challenged after he married a human woman.
The marriage was investigated for two years before being deemed legitimate.
Two years of scrutiny, interviews, and invasive questions about their relationship.
Even if Maya agreed, which she wouldn't, it would only complicate things.
I close the notebook and lean back in my chair. The apartment feels smaller than usual, walls pressing in like the jaws of some bureaucratic trap. Everything I've worked for my research, my reputation, my carefully constructed life, reduced to a stack of forms and a fourteen-day deadline.
My phone alerts one more time. Another text from Maya: I don't know what's wrong, but I'm here when you're ready to talk.
I stare at the message until the screen goes dark. Then I set the phone aside and return to my pacing.
Outside, the city hums with evening traffic. Humans heading home to partners who share their citizenship, their certainty, their unquestioned right to exist in this space. Inside, I measure my remaining time in increasingly desperate calculations.
Fourteen days to find a solution. Fourteen days to prove I belong here. Fourteen days to to fight for a life I never realized how much I wanted until it was threatened.
The notebooks mock me from their scattered positions. All that careful study, all those dialectical variations and linguistic theories, and none of it matters now. What matters is paperwork and precedent and the whims of immigration officers who've never heard an orc recite Shakespearean sonnets.
I pause by the window, looking down at the street where Maya and I shared coffee just days ago. The café glows warm against the gathering darkness, full of people whose biggest worry is probably whether to order extra foam.
Stone warms slow, I told her once. An orcish idiom about patience, about gradual change. But some stones don't get the luxury of time. Some stones get thrown into bureaucratic furnaces and emerge as nothing but ash.
Every minute that passes is one less minute to find a solution, one step closer to the end of everything I've built here.
I resume pacing, the worn carpet soft beneath my feet. Somewhere in these notebooks, in these legal precedents and linguistic studies, there has to be an answer. There has to be a way to prove that one orc professor is worth keeping.
There has to be.
Because the alternative, returning to the Iron Mountains, abandoning my research, leaving Maya, is unthinkable. I've tasted what belonging feels like. I won't give it up without a fight.
Even if that fight is against an entire immigration system designed to keep people like me out.