Chương 34: Exotic animals community

Tools have always been humanity's greatest weapon. We were never the strongest, nor the fastest, nor did we have natural weapons like claws and poisons. What differentiated us, and enabled us to take on creatures faster, stronger and more dangerous than us, was our use of tools. - Guru Adivashi, Master of Dual Weaponry The new Arts classroom announced itself before you walked in. The walls looked like surfaces that had opinions.

Painted, carved, inlaid with patterns that shifted depending on the angle of the light, the whole room operating at a level of visual noise that Kara suspected was either deliberate pedagogy or Professor Carbon having strong feelings about what his students should feel upon arrival. Carbon opened without preamble. The course would cover the full range - painting, music, dance, literature and what he called the martial and weapons arts, the phrase weighted, every word ordered on purpose.

All of it mandatory through the first half of semester. After that, specialisation. Kara already knew his answer. What he did not know, and was only now being made aware of, was the distribution of mandatory classes. Two per discipline. Which meant two music classes, and two dance classes, before he could leave that particular stretch of his life behind and never speak of it again. He had a functional relationship with most of his limitations. He knew he was not fast to trust.

He knew he waited where others rushed to act. He had made peace with the slightly pointed ears and the broader nose and the eyes that now tracked things at angles that occasionally startled people. These were things he had accepted. His singing voice was a different category of problem entirely. It had been described, on the one occasion it had been evaluated, as "committed." The evaluator had not meant it as a compliment.

And dancing - he had the body control of someone trained for years in environments that would kill the unprepared, and somehow this translated to absolutely nothing useful the moment music started and someone expected him to move in a way that was pleasing rather than functional. Pranky would have found this very funny. Kara did not find it very funny. Two classes. He would survive two classes. He filed the rest.

Theory exam covering everything, practical only on chosen specialisation, and let Carbon's voice settle into background while he confirmed his decision. The combat track. He had chosen Arts for a reason, and the reason had not changed. The class ended. Kara packed up and headed back to check on Waggy. Waggy was asleep in the wardrobe, curled into the compact shape he defaulted to when fully comfortable, which was, increasingly, most of the time. Visibly larger than a week ago.

The sharp stub caught the light when he shifted. Kara watched him for a moment, running the quiet mental accounting that had become habit. Breathing was regular, and the bond was steady and warm at the edge of awareness. He closed the wardrobe carefully. The meeting with Vixen was in an hour. He had been turning the question over since he decided to tell her. Not whether to, that was settled, but how much. She knew animals.

She was useful in a way that went beyond goodwill, and Kara had learned that useful and trustworthy were not mutually exclusive if you were careful about what you shared. The nursery sat near the back of A-block, dome-shaped, built from something transparent that caught the ambient light and scattered it softly. Kara had been expecting animals. What he found through the walls was plants, orderly rows of them, and somewhere the suggestion of insects. He stood outside and waited.

Vixen arrived at a pace that suggested she had been doing something else until slightly too recently. Her city-painted mask was at a slight angle. She corrected it without breaking stride.

"Heya. Pretty little nursery, don't you think?"

"Generally," Kara said, "when someone arrives late, they begin with an apology."

"Huh. So you did have friends at some point." She tilted her head.

"Who'd have thought." Ouch. He decided not to try a counter.

"I'd rather somewhere more private for this," he said, nodding toward the nursery entrance. Vixen's expression shifted into something that was doing a great deal of work to appear innocent.

"Oh? More private? I see how it is. No need to be shy, tusk boy, just say the word-""For the conversation," Kara said.

"Mm." She did not seem fully convinced that she had misunderstood him.

"Stadium grounds then. Open space, you can see who's near you, no corners for anyone to stand behind. Better than anywhere indoors that calls itself private." Moghli's lesson, arriving from a different mouth. Kara nodded and fell into step beside her. The stadium grounds were largely empty at this hour. The University's outer corals gave everything a faint amber tint. Kara checked the perimeter once out of habit, found nothing, and turned to Vixen.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"You seem to know a lot about exotic species," he started.

"Do you know about rearing them as well?" She studied him carefully.

"To some extent. Why?"

"Well, you might have guessed right earlier about me having an exotic partner. It's mostly feline, but unlike anything I've seen or read about. Mix of two things that shouldn't mix." He kept his voice level.

"Born from an egg." Her expression moved through several states too quickly to track, landing on excited.

"Oh thank God. I thought you'd somehow found out for a second there." She paused, regaining her composure.

"I can see you're not lying. Anyway, what does it look like exactly?" Found out what?

"Body of a snow leopard. Snout of a hyena. Some unusual features I haven't fully understood yet." He paused.

"Does your reaction to the question about rearing exotic species have a personal dimension to it?" She made a decision he could see happening in real time.

"Come with me." B-block was quieter than his own. Vixen's room was a single occupancy, the surfaces layered with equipment and materials, the organised chaos of someone who put everything she owned to use.

"Don't judge," she warned, already moving to the sofa. The base of it opened to reveal a compartment - one large section flanked by two smaller ones. Inside the larger section, asleep in a padded crib, was a tiger cub. Vixen lifted it with the ease of long practice. The cub stirred, stretched, opened its eyes, found Kara, assessed him as unimportant, and went back to sleep.

"She," Vixen said.

"You can call her Vitaly."

"She's beautiful," Kara said honestly. Then he caught what Vixen was indicating. The stubs running along the ridge. The shape of them tugged at something.

"Mine has those too," he said.

"And another pair of stubs too. One of them is sharp enough to draw blood." Vixen placed Vitaly carefully back and straightened.

"So we have two animals, with overlapping features and no matching records anywhere." She looked at him.

"What's his name?"

"Waghoba. Waggy." She accepted this without comment, though the look she gave him conveyed everything she didn't need to say aloud. They walked back without much conversation. Glasses was in the room when they arrived. He looked up from whatever he was working on and registered Vixen with mild surprise.

"Hey, sorry about this. Just kinda happened. Glasses, this is Vixen. Vixen - this is, uh, Glasses."

"Haha, Glasses." Vixen extended her hand.

"We've met. I think most anyone who took classes with Glasses knows him as the nerd who does super cool projects. Huh. Classes with Glasses. I like that""Yeah, and pretty much anyone in the University knows Vixen," Glasses smiled. Kara looked between them. He had not known they shared a class. He also realised, belatedly, that Vixen clearly knew Glasses' alias and had chosen to use the nickname instead. He filed this silently under things people did that he would never fully understand.

"You do know you're fairly famous yourself, right?" Vixen said, turning back to him. Kara stared at her.

"What?" Glasses made the quiet sound that meant he was suppressing something. Vixen raised both eyebrows above the painted skyline of her mask, plainly content to wait for the penny to drop.

"What," Kara tried again. Vixen glanced at Glasses. Glasses glanced back at her. A full conversation passed between them in approximately one second, conducted entirely without words, in a language Kara had apparently not been issued.

"The SDC demonstration," Vixen said finally.

"A skill strong enough to completely neuter four different poisons from a tribe pretty much famous for poisons confirmed publicly in front of a full room including two council members."

"And Mink backing down in the corridor after Miss Treehugger declared you an honored guest of the tribe," Glasses added, like a man contributing supporting evidence.

"People talk," Vixen said simply. Kara processed this. He had known the demonstration would draw attention. He had not quite mapped what that attention would look like from the outside, among people who had not been in the room but had heard about it afterward.

"How much talking," he asked, already dreading the answer.

"Enough," Vixen said, which answered nothing.

"The point is - you're not invisible. Which means that what you're carrying," she nodded toward the wardrobe, meaning Waggy without saying it, "is something you need to think carefully about. Who knows, and what happens after they know. There are people who would very much like to get their hands on an exotic animal."

"Poachers," Kara thought out loud.

"Among others." She settled into the chair at his desk without asking, which he was beginning to understand was simply how she operated.

"Which brings me to what I should have said earlier before you saw Vitaly. There is a community. People with exotic partners, and by that I mean partners with no close matches anywhere in the solar system. It exists across every planet, every race, every faction. Those distinctions don't apply inside it." Kara leaned against the wall.

"How many people?"

"Not many here on Earth. Elsewhere - more than you'd think. Some of the most powerful people in the universe are members. That part is not a coincidence." She paused.

"The community doesn't offer knowledge. If your partner is genuinely unique, there is nothing to offer on that front - no records, no prior experience, no one who has raised one before. What it offers is protection. Everyone is tagged. If someone takes your partner, the entire community across the solar system will help you find them. Most organisations won't touch a tagged animal. The cost is too high." Kara thought about the wardrobe.

About Waggy's weight against his chest on the night he hatched, and the bond settling into place like something that had always been missing and was now simply there.

"How does the tagging work?"

"Interface to interface. Any member can do it. It takes a few minutes." She looked at him steadily.

"The University is one of the safest places you'll have access to for the next few years. After that, you'll need either the community, a strong group, or both. I'd recommend not waiting." Kara looked at Glasses, who had been listening without comment. Glasses offered nothing, which meant he had no objection, which was its own kind of endorsement.

"Alright," Kara said.

"Let's do it." Vixen stood, and the three of them moved toward the wardrobe. Somewhere inside it, entirely unconcerned with any of this, Waggy slept blissfully.