Page 10 of Fathom

“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 theobvious 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.