Page 11 of Fathom

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 whomy 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 towork 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'tkeepher."

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 andspeed, 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.”