//: 2105, City of San Iadras. Perking Centre's Function Hall.

"Uhm. There's a Report from Lake North, which was written to summarize research operations in Twenty-Ninety for the auditors. " Troy blinked against the blinding lights, and cleared his throat awkwardly. "It was written just before the Emancipation. The part I want to tell you about tonight, is, uhm. It's just one line out of a list. 'Model organism group eighty, B.L.M. revision three. Population of twenty-four. Three individuals were dissected over the course of research.'"
He could get through this. The lights helped, it made it hard to see just how many people were sitting and staring at him. "Uhm. That's what it says." Troy cleared his throat again, reaching up to cover his eyes for a moment, eyes watering, and maybe not just from the light. "That's all it says. That's the only public information available, and unless you followed the documentaries you wouldn't have heard about it anyway. Uh. So they say model organism. Y'know, like lab mice?"
Nervous laughter fluttered up from the audience. He smiled awkwardly. It didn't look right, all stretched out across his snout. "Uhm. What you do with model organisms, is, uhm. You dissect them, and afterwards what's left is medical waste, and that goes into an incinerator. " He ducked his face away from the light. The audience were quiet, now. Very quiet.
"And, uhm. When these three individuals went into the incinerator shafts, well the shafts just weren't built for that. Nobody, uhm. Nobody thought they'd be putting children down those shafts and their bodies just, just kind of..." He bit down on his lip, hard, weaving his hand back and forth, bouncing from one invisible wall to the other, back again. "Bounced. And that made the shafts rattle for like, five, ten minutes, and, uhm... uhm. But, uhm. The, the thing, uh..."
The audience was whispering now, the hundreds of them turning each syllable into a meaningless flutter of human voices.
Jim Bragdon had come up from almost nowhere, clamping a reassuring hand down on Troy's shoulder. Turned him away from the microphone. But it didn't feel reassuring. "It's okay, you don't have to-" 
Troy took a shuddering breath, eyes squeezed shut, and jerked his shoulder out from under Jim's hand. "Yeah, you're right. It's okay. Uhm. I'm fine."
"You're sure? It's not too much?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." Jim glanced out at the audience, put on that reassuring smile again until they quietened back down and backed up just a step. Just a step.
"Sorry about that." Troy took hold of the podium, swashing his naked tail out of Jim's way, and dry swallowed. He kept his eyes shut. That was easier. "Uhm. But uhm." He blew out a long breath. "But it's all okay. Because they didn't actually put any children into that incinerator shaft. Children are people. They put three model organisms out of research group eighty down the incinerator shaft, and they were not people."
He opened his eyes and looked up at the spotlights, eyes still watering. At least that's what he told himself. "They were just cloned lab animals. Three out of a batch of twenty-four. All official documents referring to these three individuals have been sealed by the courts because of the Emancipation, except for that one line in the summary." Troy clamped his eyes shut, trying to force away the shuddering in his breath. "'Model organism group eighty, B.L.M. revision three. Population of twenty four.'"
He swallowed down another breath. "'Three individuals were dissected over the course of research.' And they were my brothers Springfield, Kiev, and Berlin."

Troy tugged at his black dress shirt's collar, grimacing. The speech had gone just fine, up in the presentation auditorium, with people staring at him and harsh lights burning his eyes. He'd been unable to see the audience, and that had probably been his saving grace. No such luck out here in the meeting hall, where socialites browsed for dainty things to eat along with their choice of tea or coffee, all beneath a distressingly wide and open ceiling.
Thankfully, the walls were rather welcoming. The crowds were focused around the food tables, and he could pretend to ignore the stares he attracted, examining the same stretch of wall three times over. Stucco, painted a delicate shade of green, machine-manipulated into artful crests and waves which seemed to have an endless variation. It took a few minutes for Troy to figure out the trick, a four meter by four meter texture applied at an oblique angle, making it difficult for the eye to pick out.
He felt eyes on him, glanced back. So many shades of flesh; brown, pinkish-white, tanned olive brown, gene-resequenced patterns of light and dark. He turned his face aside, feeling all too alien, his own skin hidden under ebony black fur.
Troy breathed deep, looking over the wall again. Maybe he could distract himself with the stucco for a few more minutes. He tugged at the collar of his shirt again, grimacing vaguely. Maybe he could slip away early, call a cab, go check into a hotel and just sit and wait through the rest of tonight and Saturday for his flight out of San Iadras on Sunday.
The fingers of his left hand curled numbly around the phone in his pocket. At some level he was already trying to figure out the search criteria to look up a cab company with. He'd gotten so far as two steps away from the wall and towards the door before he spotted someone angling for him through the melange of faces. Two someones. He swallowed down his gorge. At least one of the two wasn't human.
Led by an older human woman with heavyset features, hair greying but skin still smooth, Troy saw her companion's mouse-like features twisted into an awkward smile of embarrassment. That face, that quirk of the lips was intimately familiar to Troy. He saw it in the mirror often enough.
Troy licked his lips nervously, not sure which of his brothers this was. His gaze dropped to the lapel pin, a crucifix. He should've spotted his brother's eye. "Hi Turin."
"Uhh, Mrs Rutherman, let me introduce, uhm..." Turin took a moment to stare at Troy's lapel, looking for the pin, a stylized Grecian horse's head. Turin pinched at the bridge of his snout, over his nostrils. "My brother, Troy Salcedo. Troy, this is Mrs Rutherman, one of the Fund patrons. She thought I might be you."
Troy smiled, mirroring Turin's earlier smile, and felt a tremble building in his jaw. "Delighted, Mrs Rutherman. So glad to meet a donator, the Furry Rehabilitation Fund is obviously a charity close to my heart." 
"Wonderful to meet you Mr Salcedo! Aahh, Troy, may I call you Troy? Jimmy said he'd lost track of you, I suppose I'll keep you out of trouble for him, shall I? Really, though, your speech was very stirring. How you and your brothers survived those awful labs-"
Troy watched Mrs Rutherman's lips move, feeling his resolve start to crumble. Yes, the labs... she looked a little familiar, in the way all humans did. Flat face. Pair of eyes, nose, mouth.
"-is quite beyond me! You boys must have a great deal of strength. I am absolutely shocked by what one thinking being can do to another thinking being, it is utterly barbaric."
Cover the nose and mouth with a surgical mask, give her protective eye wear, put her into a surgical gown... Troy felt spots of pain down his spine, an itching in his left hand. His eyes were drawn to Turin's face, the slight difference between Turin's two eyes. You really had to look for it. Unless you knew the pale grey line around one iris were manufacturer's markings you'd never guess they'd stuck needles into Turin's eye until, in the end, they'd had to rip it out.
Troy tried to keep the quivering out of his tail.
"I dearly wish the past could be undone, but at least we can try to right the wrongs now, hmm?" she concluded, with a smile.
Behind her, Turin lifted a hand to his mouth and bit down on his fingernails. Even though the Fund paid for it, giving Turin a new eye seemed just a little unlikely to right the wrongs that mattered.
Troy clenched and unclenched his hands slowly. At least Troy wasn't alone in his discomfort. Not with one of his brothers around. He opened his mouth to speak-
"Please excuse me, Mrs Rutherman, I must be going."
What Troy heard was his own voice, sure enough. Except he was going to say 'We' instead of 'I'. That was the problem with being one of two dozen genetically engineered clones. Other people shared your voice, and they thought the way you did. Turin had beaten him to the punch, but had forgotten all about him. 
"It has been a pleasure to meet you, Turin," Mrs Rutherman replied cheerily. "I do hope to meet you again."
Turin nodded and smiled, more from relief than anything else, and glanced to Troy suddenly. He offered a weak smile. Guilty as sin. " I'll give you a call before your flight out, Troy," he offered meekly.
"It's alright," Troy replied, trying to keep the accusation out of his voice. "I'll keep an ear open." He watched his brother retreat. Turin already had his phone out, was already punching in search criteria.
He could say 'me too.' He could do it now. But every second he waited the story would look less likely, he'd given the damn speech and it just wouldn't look right for him to disappear and people would blame him and talk and know and... and it wasn't as though he had anything to do.
Troy buried his envy and turned back to Mrs Rutherman weakly.
Mrs Rutherman smiled broadly, almost as if trying to force her cheery mood onto him. "Troy, you simply must come and meet some of my adoptive children. They would be pleased as punch to meet you, I'm sure!"
He smiled back helplessly and let himself be led away. Somewhere nearby, Troy heard the clink of china, teacups and saucers being put down. People were finishing their drinks. Pretty soon, he prayed, they'd finish their conversations and start leaving. Then he could escape too.
Mrs Rutherman kept up her line of discussion with a remarkable level of precision. It was all meaningless twaddle, going on and on like some kind of engineered script for small-talk that someone had thought would be apologetic and uplifting all in one non-threatening package. Just so long as the subtle reminders of how terrible the horrors he'd had to endure could be taken as reassurances that it would never happen again, rather than reminders of exactly what had happened and how, anyway.
The crowd was pressing in on all sides, and soon he was following Mrs Rutherman's voice less out of obligation and more out of need, it was the only familiar thing in that crowd of babble, people watching him, staring at his fur and ears and snout and everything that made him inhuman, watching him like a mouse trapped in a maze.
"Florence!" cried another of his brothers nearby, "Do excuse me, I'm terribly sorry, I need to go and..." 
Troy willed his brother to run, get out of this threatening place, find an exit and run.
His mirror image nervously elbowed his way out from between two guests, his eyes wide. "Florence? I- Troy, I'm sorry, have you seen Florence?"
Troy swept one arm around his brother's shoulders protectively, almost by reflex. "It's alright, Dallas. Where'd you leave him?"
Mrs Rutherman's smile didn't waver for a moment, even while Dallas hunched up, eyes squeezed shut. It didn't help that it only made those nearby stare all the more.
"Oh, I'm sure we'll find your brother on the way," Mrs Rutherman announced cheerily, ushering the two of them away through the crowd. "How do you tell who's who? My sons never settled on a satisfactory method."
Troy halfway dragged his brother away, shielding him from the worst. He tried to dampen his dry mouth, swallowing down spittle. "We found lapel pins. Uhh, Mrs Rutherman, this is my brother Dallas."
"Oh, I see! " She didn't pause in her step, dragging the two of them away, finally they were free of the crowd proper. "I'm delighted to meet you, Dallas," she added kindly when they were away from the crush. 
Dallas tried to return the smile with trembling lips. "Um. Thank you Mrs Rutherman."
"Are you all named after cities?"
"Uhm." Dallas nodded, eyes clenched shut. The last nod left him hunched up. He didn't straighten.
Troy grimaced inwardly. He always had to be the strong one. And it was alright, but there was never anyone there for him. He reached into Dallas's breast pocket and pulled free the white handkerchief, which he pressed to his brother's face.
Dallas responded only gradually, finally taking the handkerchief and blowing his nose awkwardly, hands pressed around his snout.
Troy looked up to find Mrs Rutherman smiling down, as though ignoring it would somehow make it all better. "I very much like your lapel pin. A steer for Dallas and a Trojan horse for Troy. That's very clever!" Ignoring it didn't make it worse, at any rate.
The smile helped. Dallas managed to smile back, eventually. "Thanks, Mrs Rutherman. Florence picked out mine for me."
"Oh, do call me Elaine!" Mrs Rutherman replied, still smiling broadly. 
She tried to be nice. That helped, in a way. It would've helped more if she'd left them alone.
"Uh. Thank you, Elaine," Dallas floundered.
A few moments passed, evidently until Mrs Rutherman - Elaine - decided the pair of them were ready to move on. She took the both of them by a hand, naturally she held Troy's left, and led them forward.
Dallas stared wide-eyed at Mrs Rutherman holding onto Troy's hand. "Um, Elaine, you can't, uhm..."
"Yes, Dallas?" 
Troy clenched his jaw. Maybe she wouldn't notice how rubbery and cold his left hand was.
"Troy's hand, uh... that's where they..." 
Mrs Rutherman's smile increased in voltage. Warm, understanding, motherly. Slightly terrifying in its force. "It's quite alright, isn't it Troy?" She squeezed his left hand so hard he almost imagined he could hear plastic scraping.
No, not really. It wasn't alright. "Yes, Mrs Rutherman. It's alright." It wasn't even his real hand. They took it away and it'd tumbled into the incinerator, and there'd never been enough painkiller and when there was he'd stumble around off balance, and. And Christ. He found his jaw clamping down, tight, until his teeth clicked against one another, rasping and grinding.
"Good! Now, do come and meet my dear children." She smiled, even as she drew them towards another group.
Troy's heart stood still for a moment, but the group weren't human like Mrs Rutherman. Not brown and pink, but brown and gray and white and black and yellow, covered in fur.
"Scott, Andrew, Paul." Mrs Rutherman waved at a trio of young men, all mirror images of each other. Each was grey furred, cat ears rising to a point over their short-clipped hair, three pairs of greenish slitted eyes looking up lazily. "These two are Troy and Dallas Salcedo. Troy, Dallas, these are my three grown up boys, Scott, Andrew and Paul."
Begrudgingly, flinching at the contact, hands were shaken.
A tall girl, no more than fifteen or sixteen, smiled pleasantly and waited to be introduced, her hair running with the same zebra-stripe pattern that wound down her bare arms, her equine face drawn into a polite smile. 
"Oh, and my youngest daughter, Susan-Mae," Mrs Rutherman added, with the warm smile of a mother. "She still lives at home. Most of my other children have moved out into the big wide world."
Troy realized that Susan-Mae must have only been born - decanted, really - just before the laws changed fifteen years ago, and furs were made 'free' with the emancipation. Spared the years before people came to their senses. She wasn't wearing shoes. Or at least, not the usual sort. She had elongated and reshaped hooves with heavy rubber soles attached like horse-shoes.
"Pleased to meet you," he murmured.
Mrs Rutherman turned to her sons. "Do get everyone introduced, won't you? I'm sure Dallas will get along famously with that sister of Thomas's girlfriend."
"Which one?" enquired one of the boys sarcastically.
"Oh hush. Her sister in the ballet, you know the one."
"I meant which girlfriend, actually..." 
"Andrew! That isn't very nice!"
"Uh, that was Paul, mom. I'm Andrew. You're going to give us issues." The furthermost left fur sheepishly pointed out, while Susan-Mae sniggered.
It was a regular old happy family, Troy reflected, keeping his head down much of the time. The kind you got with money and force of will and some kind of mad devotion to family life. It almost looked pleasant, inviting.
He and Dallas stayed out of it, nodding and smiling through introductions to the various other family members and hangers on. There was Mr Rutherman, a tall old human gentleman. This was Jonie Stevens, a very thin fur with a distinctly otter-like look to her, and those two sandy-coloured canid-looking women, one redhead and one blonde, were Jeane and Jasmine Dixon. Not quite canid, though, they explained. Marsupial, though it was hardly obvious from a glance. There was young Iggy, the only human child of the bunch, eight years old and wearing a Halloween costume tail hanging from his belt as a childish kind of solidarity with his inhuman foster-brothers and foster-sisters.
It didn't take long for Dallas to be introduced to Thomas's girlfriend's sister, whichever girlfriend it was. Nadine Andrews, a striking feline woman, a female clone-run like Mrs. Rutherman's boys, the Edwards clone-run. She was tabby, gray, thin-limbed and graceful, socially awkward as she played the wallflower.
Troy sighed in relief, watching as Dallas joined her, the pair turned up to the wall, backs to the crowd. Dallas would be okay without Florence or Troy's guidance. For the rest of tonight, at least.
"I don't know what mom was thinking." One of the three cat-like brothers cleaned his claws beside him. "I mean. You guys' genotypes are what, mice? Cats and mice."
Troy flinched slightly. Even in dress shoes these brothers could walk silently. "Lab mice," he quietly confirmed. "Uh... which one are you?" he asked, embarrassment quivering his voice.
"Scott. Still, though," Scott continued, staring after Dallas and Nadine, cat and mouse hesitantly exchanging a few quiet words at a time, "Hardly seems logical. No offence, but you and Dallas just smell... jumpy."
Troy rubbed his hands together nervously, ignoring the texture of the left one beneath all the fur. "We're ah... always jumpy in crowds. I don't think the predator-prey dynamic comes into it." Even so, he avoided making eye contact with Scott.
Scott shrugged, eventually. "Maybe," he allowed, not willing to press the issue.
"Your batch manage to stick together?" Troy asked, shoving his hands into his pockets.
"Ahh, we got out of the dorms and were adopted in little groups." Scott shrugged again. "Twos and threes and fours. Yours?"
"We got held back in a single orphanage while the, uhh, damage was repaired." Troy gestured reflexively, with his left hand. Just as reflexively he tucked it back into a pocket. "Medical rehabilitation."
"Ah." Scott nodded, reaching up to scratch behind one feline ear. He shrugged slowly. What the hell did you say to that, anyway? Nothing, apparently. He shrugged again, said, "Nice meeting you," and slapped Troy's back chummily. With that, he walked off. "Hey Paul!"
Troy watched Scott walk off with mixed emotion. The dismissal had been abrupt. But now, thank God, he could have a quiet moment alone. Should he be insulted, or relieved? Sagging against the green stucco wall, now all the way across the function hall from where he'd started, he let out a breath. Relieved. He had plenty of time to be insulted later.
He checked his wristwatch. Just how long could people stand to hang around and make conversation? Maybe it was a corporate thing. Most of the humans here were corporate employees showing their faces in the name of PR. At times like this they'd be passing around business cards, building contacts. Smiling, talking, pretending to give a damn long enough to gain the moral high ground. 
Dallas and the feline woman, Nadine, seemed happy enough further along beside the wall. Troy could see that Dallas had opened up a little now. The hand-waving gave it away. He couldn't hear the words, but the gestures seemed to say that Dallas had found some reassuring topic to ramble on and on about. Astronomy, maybe. Judging by Nadine's quiet smile, she was all too happy to stand back and listen, only having to contribute a supportive ear.
"So, uhm, Mister..."
Troy glanced down. The little human, the child, had a ruddy face and a miserable frown. His shirt was all untucked near the back, where the kid'd had trouble with the fake toy tail. He wiped at his nose and sniffled.
The usual reflexive shiver travelled down Troy's spine. But something in him recoiled against it, made him at least try to smile. "Yeah? You're Iggy, huh? You okay?" Troy asked, forcing the brief surge of panic down. The child didn't deserve it.
The child nodded, had second thoughts and shook his head. He held up his hands, cupped and full of pieces of electronics. Plastic covers, the green of printed circuit boards, a loose screen, a plastic mat of buttons, pale pink organic wafers. "Jeane's sister said you could help." He sniffled messily.
"Who? Jasmine?"
"No, uhm." Iggy blinked away tears. "Her."
Troy glanced up, looking around at the group of furs, blinking a little as he spotted the two canid sisters he'd been introduced to, Jeane and Jasmine Dixon, had now been joined by a third copy. This time another redhead, carefully and dutifully inserting hairpins into a weepy looking Jeane's hair. 
"Oh. Her big sister?"
"Yeah."
Big sister. As if mass manufactured clones could have differing ages. But sometimes you didn't have to be older to be the big brother, as Troy very well knew. Dutifully he knelt down, ignoring the errant stares of the other partygoers. "Alright. So, uh, what happened, Iggy?"
"Well Jeane's staying at home 'cause her boyfriend's a big meanie, and she gave me her phone to hang onto for her, an' I just wanted to see how it worked... but it just doesn't fit back together, and she thinks he's gonna call, and now it's broken."
The drama surrounding Jeane's life, that Troy couldn't handle. The phone, on the other hand...
"It'll all be just fine, Iggy. Jeane's big sister is right. I can help. Alright." Troy began picking through the bits and pieces of the disassembled phone in the boy's cupped hands. "All that's broken are these little plastic clips, see? Everything else just fits together like a tiny little electric puzzle... Don't suppose you have any tape or glue or rubber bands?"
"... No."
Troy bit his lip. "We'll sort something out."

The elder Dixon was pretty, in a weird and predatory way. Prettier than her sisters, anyway. It wasn't just her well styled red hair, a little too bright and red to be auburn, too fiery to be scarlet. He could tell the difference between her and Jeane by the tint. Faint, but recognisable after a little observation. Jasmine, with her blonde hair, was much simpler to recognise.
On the one hand, Troy found it interesting from a social dynamics point of view. Some batches of furs didn't seem to want to differentiate all that much, like the grey feline mix, last name Edwards. Others, like his own, black lab mouse revision three, last name Salcedo, found it important to find ways to be different from each other and used a variety of small, conscious methods to do so. But only small methods, and not too different. More than little things would be wrong, somehow.
Hair colour, though... most furs had longer hair, part of the genetic tweaking they'd all been given in the production process. It first appeared between the second and third generation furs, as part of the attempt to make furries ever more human. But the shade of hair was generally not too different from the major fur colour. Dye or genedye was a natural choice for most, others cut their hair almost as short as their fur.
But the different shades. Was it even a conscious mechanism to differentiate? Did it even matter? Wasn't he just using his interest in social dynamics as an excuse to keep staring at her?
Troy shifted restlessly on the stone bench, outside the function hall's secondary entrance. He moved his briefcase off his lap and set it down beside him on the bench. His tail was curled under the bench's back, its tip laying cold on the concrete sidewalk. It was late now. Probably. A quick glance at his wristwatch confirmed the thought. 
He'd already gotten Dallas into his and Florence's car. Apparently Dallas and Nadine had exchanged phone numbers. Florence had spent most of the evening talking to some young up and coming film actor filming on location in San Iadras who'd taken the opportunity to mingle. Well. At least now they were safely off home to their shared apartment. Sydney had been around earlier, somewhere, and probably left for Florence and Dallas's before the end of the speeches. Turin had made his perfect getaway.
Troy shook his head. His brothers weren't really his responsibility. Not anymore, not now that they were all done with schooling and surgery and finally making their own decisions in the world. He felt guilty about hating that responsibility, but in a way it had been kind of nice to be the capable one again for awhile, even if it was difficult, vaguely frightening. Something that distanced him a little from his brothers in a way that felt wrong.
Maybe the 'eldest' Dixon sister was having similar thoughts about the whole situation, standing with her arms curled around herself, just a couple of dozen feet away on the sidewalk where she waited with the other two sisters for a cab, drenched in the light of a street lamp.
Then again, her production run had been a lot bigger than his, something like a hundred and fifty survivors if he remembered it right. His group only had fourteen left, now. Maybe she wasn't the only one who had to play big sister amongst the Dixon sisters. 
Even so, she was extremely good at it. And extremely good looking. Light yellow brown fur, pointed muzzle, red hair, slinky little grey-blue dress that made her green eyes seem all the more dazzling.
Not that the other two girls, in red and brown dresses of similar cut respectively, weren't as beautiful as her... It was probably the confidence issue, Troy thought. She had a lot more confidence in the way she walked. Maybe her love life contributed to that. From what Troy had managed to accidently overhear, Jeane and Jasmine consistently had boy troubles. Their 'elder' sister probably had a more stable boyfriend, giving her more emotional stability.
Which put him out of the running. Troy shook his head and grasped his hands together, staring down at them. One of them was real, and the other hand wasn't. Just like his chances with her.
Oh well. It wasn't as though he'd ever manage to say hello. He hadn't ever managed to maintain a relationship with a girl past a couple of weeks. Partly because he couldn't really afford the time away from study and research, partly because initiating conversation was always a little rough. Being a furry who got jumpy around humans didn't help any up in the states either, with its countrywide population of five hundred furs. The fact most of the girls were only interested in him for the exotic factor hadn't been terribly fun, either.
A cab rolled up, a traditional yellow, light over the credit reader blinking. It was just a cheap two seater with dark windows and an obvious set of camera shrouds for the automatic driver. It pulled up to the sidewalk, doors sliding open. Jeane and Jasmine made their way into the cab, the 'elder' sister holding their purses for them while they got themselves settled, sitting at an angle to the seats to avoid crushing their blunt, stiff tails against the seat back.
The two took their purses from their sister, said their goodbyes, and shut the doors. The cab rolled off with a characteristic sparking sound that made Troy think about misaligned capacitors arcing off voltage.
The third Dixon sister straightened, slung her own purse over her shoulder and glanced back across the stretch of pavement. At the function hall. No, not at the function hall... at him.
As soon as the realization hit him, she'd looked away again, facing the street lamp. She pulled something from her purse, there was a plastic click, and Troy thought he spotted a mirror glinting in her hands. She held something up to her face, brushed something back and forth. The sharp hiss of a cosmetic spray applicator pierced the night sounds of traffic, there was another glint of the mirror.
She fanned her face with her hand for a moment, drying what Troy presumed must have been shading dyes. A plastic click as the cosmetics were closed and placed back into her purse. She glanced down the street. A private car rolled by, silvery and humming as it rounded the function hall and swept past. 
Troy expected it to stop, some corporate playboy blessed with having that pretty fur in his life. The car did stop, rolling to a halt and backing up to the sidewalk where she stood. Troy picked up his briefcase again and hugged it to himself. Oh well.
The private car's back windows rolled down. No playboy, though. Just a little boy. Iggy, miserably tired, determined to stay awake as long as he possibly could on a night with no bedtime.
"Hi."
"Hi sweetie. Shouldn't you be taking a nap?"
"Maybe."
Then the front window rolled open. It was Mrs Rutherman, seated beside her husband.
"Jennifer, dear, don't you need a lift?"
Jennifer. He liked that name. He liked it a lot better than Jeane or Jasmine. Jennifer Dixon. It rolled around his mind nicely.
"Oh, no ma'am." Jennifer smiled, reaching up to flick a few errant lengths of her hair back over a shoulder. "I've got a cab coming. The company I use is a little far out, that's all."
Mrs Rutherman nodded, glancing back at Iggy and Susan-Mae in the back seat, the horse-like fur's face illuminated briefly by an electric screen. Mrs Rutherman turned back to Jennifer with a smile. "If you're sure. Thank you for helping out Jeane earlier, Jennifer. You've always been so good to my girls."
Jennifer hunched up one shoulder in a kind of helpless shrug, smiling whimsically. "They're my sisters."
"Yes, but my three kittens, ooh, don't you tell them I still talk about them like that! Well, those three hardly ever visit their brothers."
"Ah, well, that's men for you." Jennifer paused a moment, before adding, "Most men, anyway."
"I hope that exclusion includes me, Young Lady."
"Absolutely, Mr Rutherman."
"Me too!"
"You too, sweetie."
"She's just saying that," Susan-Mae's protested, unseen in the back. "You're going to grow up to be a little monster, Iggy."
"Am not!"
Mrs Rutherman turned back in her seat, staring down her children. "In any case, thank you again, Jennifer. My regards to your parents."
"I'll give them to the Karlsens when I see them next."
Mrs Rutherman smiled, perhaps just a little too tightly. Most foster parents, Troy realized, must have preferred to think of their adoptive children as their actual children. Even if they were an entirely different species.
"Ah well. Good Evening, Jenny."
"Good Evening, Elaine. Mr Rutherman, Susan-Mae. Don't you let her get in your hair, sweetie. You're a perfect gentleman."
"Yes miss." Iggy leaned on the window frame, even while the windows rolled up, seeing how long he could keep the safety switch engaged. Susan-Mae's white-furred and black-striped hands dragged him back off the frame soon enough.
Jennifer stepped back from the car, waving as it pulled off again, windows rolling up. The electric engines purred back into life, with none of the sparking sounds of the cab, and she was left standing there alone again.
She glanced back again. Definitely not at the function hall this time, but at Troy. He looked away, embarrassed. From the corner of his eye, he spotted her examining the building's facade this time, the concrete, steel and glass ribs, looking his way every so often. He was sure she couldn't help but notice every time he risked looking at her directly. 
He looked away, down the street at the road junction. Her cab would round the corner fairly soon, he imagined, and then she'd be gone, and he could relax. Be very relaxed. Relaxed and entirely alone, true, but-
"Troy, right? I liked your speech."
Troy jumped reflexively, his briefcase slid from his grasp and clattered onto the sidewalk.
Jennifer was standing right next to him, beside the bench, a hesitant smile on her lips, distended somewhat by her muzzle, changing into a look of concern. "Oh, I'm sorry, I..."
"No, no, it's perfectly alright, I, uhm," Troy bent over, grabbing madly for the briefcase, fingers slipping off its side, "It's, er, uh." His fingernails scratched over the faux leather case, pulled it straight, found the handle, dragged it up onto his lap. He waved one hand out rapidly, "I'm just very, uhm..."
She sat down beside him on the bench, slowly, lifting her tail slightly to slip it over the edge of the bench. She winced a little, as though empathising with the discomfort he was trying to hide. "Mind if we start over?"
Relief flooded through Troy. "Not, uhm. Not at all." He tucked his briefcase onto the side of the bench away from her, laying it flat carefully so it couldn't end out knocked over.
She smiled again, then. "So. Hi. I liked your speech."
His speech. Ten terrifying minutes under the spotlights. "Thank you." He'd talked himself into doing it, because he couldn't bear the idea of any of his brothers having to stand up there under the lights and say the words themselves, remember their time in the labs.
She nodded, a slight twitch of the ear. "I thought it was very brave. What you and your brothers did."
Did? All Troy had done was survived. Maybe that was the brave part. Or maybe she meant consenting to all the other medical examinations, back during the investigations that led to the furries being 'freed' from their lives in the corporate dormitories and research labs. The medical examinations had been easy. Easy in comparison to the rest of it.
He shrugged a shoulder. "It, uhm, wasn't anything special." He bowed his head, not quite able to look up at her, only steal a surreptitious glance at her knees, covered in pretty grey-blue fabric.
She paused a moment too, reaching up and smoothing down her hair, patting her face gently. "And your help with Jeane's phone. That was really very kind of you."
He looked up then. Her eyes were beautiful. Gentle shading had been applied to her fur, flowing into the natural light patches of fur around her eyes. Beautiful green eyes. Really just so.... He was staring again. He glanced away, swallowing dryly. "Oh, uhm. It was nothing."
"Still, though. Jeane really appreciated you replacing hers with yours. And I really don't know how you got the data and accounts to transfer, I can never figure out all the features."
Troy held out his hands, shrugged. "Well, they were similar models. And the casing was busted. That's all. The working life of these things is only really six months to a year anyway. I don't even use mine that much."
She smiled a little, held out a hand, her claw-like nails clipped short and manicured, yellow-brown fur short and kempt. "Jennifer Dixon."
"Troy Salcedo," he replied a little lamely. He reached out, his fingertip brushed her knuckle. She put her warm palm in his, closed her fingers around his hand. 
His own hand wasn't so well maintained. His own fur not quite so finely brushed or well trimmed or a such a lovely shade, hand so beautiful and delicate, so finely proportioned. Troy silently thanked whatever surgeon put this girl's hands together.
Troy glanced up. She was looking at him. Not oddly, as others might when he lapsed off into a conversational lull. Kindly. She'd even let him hold onto her hand for a few moments more than was necessarily polite. His heart ached just a little as their hands parted.
"So. Where are you heading? If you like, we could split cab fare."
"I, uh. I'm really just in town for the function. I was thinking about getting a room at the Greystone hotel, Downtown. Last time I was here they weren't full."
She tilted her head quizzically. "And then?"
"I'm flying out on Sunday morning. Day after tomorrow."
"Oh. Well. Downtown's on the way for me, anyway. So... Would you mind?"
"Splitting cab fare? Uhm. No. Not at all."
"Great," Jennifer replied with a smile. She glanced away at the road, crossed her legs and brushed the hem of her dress back over her knees.
He followed her gaze, found himself watching the paved street, praying it would remain empty for a little while longer. Praying he could think of something more to say.
"So. What do you do for a living?"
Troy glanced back at her. "Oh, uhm. It's not very interesting, really."
"Try me."
"Working on my Doctorate at the University of Minnesota."
"Which field?"
He pulled at the collar of his dress shirt. This was about when most people lost interest. "Nuclear Chemistry. Mainly synthetic atoms, isotope decay reactions. That sort of thing. I work on reactor fuels."
She smiled at him. "So is it all computer simulations and reactors, or do you still get to play around with test tubes and Bunsen burners?"
"Uhm. Only on weekends, when we've been good."
It was a lame joke.
She grinned anyway.

Never underestimate the simple pleasure of talking to a patient woman who's pleasant on the eyes. She waited for him to compose himself, let him think through his words. She smoothed over all the bumps. It turned out she was a secretary. Mostly. What the rest of the mostly entailed, well, that was another bump that got smoothed over, but he really didn't mind. Hard to mind, sitting in a tiny little two-seater cab right beside her. Another thing not to underestimate.
And all too soon, it had to be over. The two seater cab rolled to a halt, the imposing gray facade of the Greystone hotel was now before them, a carpet leading from the drop-off area and up to the lobby doors.
She sat facing him, on the faux leather bench seat of the cab, knees together, purse beside her, angled with her shoulder against the seat back to accommodate her stiff tail. She glanced past him at the hotel, back at him.
He dipped his gaze. He'd been sitting in a similar fashion. His knee a couple of inches from hers. He swallowed dryly.
"Uhm, thank you for sharing your cab with me."
She indicated his briefcase. "Is that all your luggage?"
He nodded, patting the briefcase.
"And you don't actually have a room booked?"
He shook his head.
She watched him a moment longer, maybe a moment too long. "Troy..."
"Jennifer?"
"Don't take this the wrong way, but... can you really afford to waste money on a hotel like that?"
"I, uh..." No. Not really. In all honesty he should've searched out a cheaper hotel, or maybe have asked to stay on the floor at Florence and Dallas's apartment, since Sydney had the couch. Too late for that.
"I don't want to, you know, intrude, but... well. I've got a foldout bed at my place you're welcome to for a couple days. I mean, if that isn't too forward."
Troy couldn't quite manage to focus on her. Embarrassment, maybe. He felt a vague hot flush somewhere up around his ears. Maybe something like a blush, just without the cheeks and skin of a human. Possibly a twinge of terror.
Jennifer continued, shifting somewhat on the seat. "It's a quiet place. I'm quiet. It really won't be intrusive for you, I mean, you can be alone if you want to. I'll be quiet as a mouse, if you'll excuse the pun."
The uncomfortable feeling faded. At the worst case, if the paranoia got too much to bear, he could quietly stick his nose in a text file or something.
"It's... uhm. If it's not going to be a problem."
"It won't," she said, smiling with something approaching relief.
He nodded, then, smiling back a little hesitantly. "Thank you. You're really very kind." 
Jennifer swung the thin map screen towards her, picked out her address. She smiled at him, face lit by the screen's glow. "It's nothing, really." She reached for her purse, as the screen flashed its payment icon. 
"Oh, uh. Let me get that." Troy grabbed his wallet from his jacket, passed it over the cab's credit reader He flicked his wallet open, checking the screen before nudging the pay option with a knuckle. The electronics gave a beep as payment was made.
She paused, hands in her purse. Another smile, drawing her lips in a graceful curve across her muzzle. "Thank you."
"It's the least I can do," Troy replied, settling his wallet back into his jacket as the cab started rolling once more. He moved his briefcase down under the seat again after a moment's thought.
She put down her purse, settled again with her shoulder against the seat back. The lights of the hotel faded, leaving the cab interior in slight darkness. Just enough for her green eyes to become prominent, reflecting the meagre light. 
The cab picked up speed, street lights flashed by, casting a slow strobe of light across her.
She blinked languidly, smiled a little more, and he realized he'd been staring into her eyes for half a minute, maybe longer. He averted his gaze, she tapped his knee with one of hers.
He glanced up at her, she grinned in response.
"So, uhm. You seem very good at putting me at ease."
"I met one of your brothers at college." She admitted, tilting her head slightly. "Didn't take me long to figure out you guys prefer being treated gently."
"That's, uh. That's how you knew I'd be able to help with Jeane's phone?"
Jennifer bit her lip awkwardly. "Iggy said I'd sent him over?" She sagged a little, embarrassed.
"Yeah."
She lifted her shoulder smoothly. Smiled briefly. "Didn't take me long to figure out you're all really brainy, too."
"You studied at the City University of San Iadras?"
She nodded.
 The fur on the back of Troy's neck pricked up. "Monaco."
"Monaco," she agreed. "I haven't heard from him in, god, three years? How is he these days?"
"He's, uhm. He's in..." Troy frowned. "Turkey, I think? Maybe Georgia." 
"Eastern European Union?" She lifted an eyebrow pointedly. "Seems like him. I would've expected France or Germany though."
"Oh, he wanted to, but it's difficult to get in. He was very into that war from the Nineteen-Forties." Troy swallowed.
She nodded, crossing her legs and once again brushing down the hem of her dress. "I remember he had a lot of vids and things about it. Is he still studying, or?"
"Sort of." The last time Troy had seen his brother Monaco, Monaco had been unwilling to talk about much that was happening in his life. More interested in slinging around the new brand of politics he'd thought up in Europe. "Archaeological digs, I think. He sent some nice wilderness and ruin photos with his last set of E-mails, but that was a few months back."
She nodded placidly. "It seems a little weird to me, that all of you Salcedo boys are so far apart. Pretty much all of my sisters are here in San Iadras. Well, there's six of us in Milan, Jodi, Jaye, Jacqueline, Jacoba, Joey and Joy, and about a dozen out in Australia. But most of us are here."
"You've all got names starting with Jay?"
"Jays, Gees and Is, mostly," she said. "There's a Jacqueline with an I, and another with a Y, so a lot of names get recycled through spelling. I'm kind of lucky, being the 'proper' Jennifer. There's also Jenny with an I, with a Y, and an I-Ee. And two Jens, one with one en, the other with two."
"Must make things a little difficult," Troy said, meshing his fingers together, carefully winding those of his right hand between his left, closing the left down over the others little by little.
"Not really. We all used our serial numbers at first. Getting used to names and living apart after being in the dormitories was a little traumatic."
She explained a little of her early life, growing up as a foster child after the emancipation released her from the dormitories she lived in, back in 2090. Adjusting to all the new people hadn't been all that hard for her, apparently her run had frequently had tea parties and dinners and things. A childhood entirely unlike his own. He didn't remember all the details, the things about learning which fork to use and wine glasses with soda, but he did remember her eyes. Green, beautiful eyes. 

//: City of San Iadras. 'Uptown' district.

"So July went into music production. Started as a go-for girl with the big name labels, very popular... you remember that song, 'Made-Up Girl', by Elandro Vasquez, the Columbian guy?"
Troy twitched an ear slightly, glancing away to the side. The walls of the corridors here were a gentle cream white, he hadn't actually seen the outside of the building, been too busy listening to Jennifer in the cab when it'd pulled up in the underground lot. The white walls, tiled flooring, it was all vaguely spartan, too clean. Almost institutional, if you ignored the faux chandeliers and pot plants.
"Ah, I don't really know music very well," he admitted.
"The ad campaign for Wessex Electronics, with their AI assistant on the high end machines, Clara?" She asked, shoes clacking on the tiles as they walked. Strange shoes, too. High heels, complete with strapping, showing off her sinuously curved feet covered in tawny, yellow-brown fur.
Troy frowned slightly, passing his briefcase from hand to hand. He'd done that twice already. He wasn't sure if carrying it on the side closer to her would act as some kind of barrier, or if on the other side it might scuff against the wall, maybe chipping the paint, which seemed like a sin given the cleanliness. "Uhm, 'Pretty girl, fresh off the assembly line, made up in some genius's mind?' Something like that?"
She nodded, fishing around in her purse. "Originally about July. There's another line about coffee machines she's always preferred... Anyway, she's with him, now." She pulled out a set of keys, adding quickly, "Managing Vasquez's career, that is."
Troy rubbed at the back of his head lightly. "That's great," he said, nodding. "I never really figured out how musicians make their money. Other than live concerts, of course."
"Oh, it's all licensing now." She fingered through the keys dexterously, selecting a piece of plastic shaded green. She jammed her thumb into it, pressing it up against the reader beside a door. "Payview, interactives, movies, advertising. Nostalgia types sometimes buy recordings, too." The door, cut timber with metallic insets at the joins, swung open noiselessly. 
"Recordings?"
"Oh yeah. Physical media. You get these little doodads with lasers to read them for an audio device," she said, poking with one long finger at a raised panel on the doorway, like a laser striking. "Little flat things, so big," Jennifer added, holding her thumb and forefinger wide apart. She stepped through the door and held it open, letting her handbag slide off her arm, straps grazing at her fur. 
Troy stepped through, holding the grip of his briefcase tightly in both hands. Her apartment was huge. The ceiling was high, the floor tiled in the same white as the corridor, but past the little kitchen nook and bar it was covered in a thick throw rug with some kind of Amerindian pattern. The walls, other than the full length windows  that took up one side of the room and led out to a small balcony, had paintings - not prints, Troy could tell immediately, because prints were produced to standard paper sizes, and the paintings were out of standard proportions. One was even a trapezoid shape, framed in heavy wood, with a heavily foliaged landscape. Of course there was a screen, though it too was framed in wood and set with another landscape image. 
Jennifer set her handbag down on a wickerwork end table, which had old glossy fashion printouts stacked on it. She glanced back, adding quickly, "Watch the door, it bites."
Troy spun around, blinking at the door. Sure enough it snicked shut, having decided he'd gotten clear and out of the way. Which would have been true if he was human. If he hadn't turned around, it'd have closed on the tip of his tail. "I can, uhm, recalibrate that for you," he offered.
"Really?" She glanced up, sweeping some of her loose hair over a shoulder. "I never figured out where to get at it. I was thinking about just replacing it with a real door, latch and all, but building regulations, you know?"
He nodded, turning away from the door, pulling his briefcase up to his chest tightly.
Jennifer leaned over the kitchen bar, pulling out a small inset control panel from the surface. She wasn't, Troy noticed, averting his eyes, wearing a bra. 
"Here are the environment controls," she said, walking over, head dipped to peer at the control panel. She gestured at it until menus lit up on the screen. "Lighting, temperature, so, just, y'know. Make it so you're comfortable. And, uh." She bit at her lip lightly, looking up at him and holding it out. "Did you actually manage to eat anything at the function hall?"
He shook his head wordlessly, putting down his briefcase to accept the control panel. 
"Me either," She nodded, turning back to the kitchen. She briefly reached up to settle one of the straps of her dress firmly over a shoulder as she bustled past the kitchen bar, tail swaying behind her while she walked with an unintentionally sultry gait. "Sandwiches okay?" She ducked her head to read off the fridge's screen, brushing her hair back yet again. "Cheese, ham, peanut butter..."
He dragged his thumb over the panel until it returned to the main menu, set it down. He didn't want to switch from her presets. "I like peanut butter," he replied, looking up.
Jennifer smiled, a pretty curl at the side of her muzzle, pleased. "There's some whole-wheat I can toast for you, if you like."
And so in five minutes Troy was chewing on peanut butter spread on toast. Peanut butter. She couldn't have known about him and peanut butter. First thing they'd given him after the emancipation took him out of the labs? Peanut butter. New and scary, like the rest of the world, but wonderful. It was comfort food, the first comfort food he'd ever had outside the labs.
They traded small talk, while she leaned up against the counter, occasionally chewing on a slim piece of ham from the fridge. She didn't seem to mind when he glanced up at her, stared off into the distance. So after a time, he stopped glancing away so often. 
"-It didn't really matter, of course, but we always ended out wondering why he did it," Jennifer continued, finishing her story with a shrug and a smile. She shook out her arm, shaking her wristwatch about to get a glance at the time. 
"Alaska." Troy shook his head slowly. "It's a long way to go," he concluded, sipping down the last of the water she'd given him after the snack. 
Trailing a hand on the counter, she stepped around, moving for the couch. She lifted a shoulder smoothly as she passed by him. "I certainly wouldn't want to live up there. Anyway," she said, bending over beside the couch, the folds of her dress tightening over her buttocks as she did. "That's life." she started running her fingers beneath the edge of the couch's base panel.
"Oh!" Troy got up with a start as she started hauling, moving close beside her he reached down, running his fingers along the padded edge of the couch's panel, beside her own. "Let me, uh... let me help you with that."
"Thank you," she breathed in his ear, suddenly closer than he'd realized. She gently put her hands over his, guiding his fingers over a latch. "It's pretty straightforward."
The flesh beneath his fur tingled with her touch. His ear felt hot where she'd whispered to him. He nodded numbly, unlatching and pulling the couch open to reveal an unadorned blue mattress's surface. As she straightened, her hip brushed against his.
Jennifer smoothed down the hem of her dress, running a hand along her thigh to do so, cocking a shoulder with a smile. "Well. I better go and get you some sheets. The bathroom's over there if you need it."
Troy tugged at his dress shirt's collar and dry swallowed, still crouched down as she looked him over. "Ah, if you don't mind me using your shower, that'd be great."
She nodded brightly, then. "Sure." She stepped back towards her bedroom, flicking her tail. "Just be comfortable, Troy."
Troy licked his lips nervously, watching her go. How could he be comfortable, with that bulge in his pants?

Jennifer's bathroom seemed large. Almost too large. The femme's apartment, come to think of it, seemed just a little too large and expensive for a secretary. Anxiety gnawed at him while he undressed, piling his clothes on the upturned lid of a laundry hamper, along with his small bottle of soap.
She couldn't be single. He shouldn't think about her like this. But she was pretty, beautiful really. Sexy, too. Very sexy.
As usual, Troy's train of thought was broken while he fiddled with his left hand. The prosthetic wasn't exactly waterproof. It soaked up water worse than a sponge, leaving the exterior cover bloated and prone to tear or shed fur. Human prosthetic skin didn't work as well with fur punching through it.
He grasped an empty towel rail with his left hand, keeping his grip tight as he searched around in the back of his mind for the right command to give it. It was like trying to move a limb that wasn't there. As usual, the disconnection left a sick feeling in the back of his throat. Sent a hard to define cold feeling along the circuit bridge stuck in his spine, triggering sensations that didn't, couldn't, naturally exist. His left hand went numb. He reached out with his right, picking at the line of skin and fur before folding it back from the scars. 
He got ahold of the little notch for the locking ring and gently worked it around until it released. The hand remained in place on the towel rail, keeping its grip. The stump of his arm felt cold, with its scarred pink flesh and plastic-ceramic sockets left exposed. But those were waterproof.
He entered the shower cubicle, naked, pausing to twitch his tail inside before closing the shower's glass door. The console lit up with the snick of the shower door. A custom model, he realized from the menu's options.
There were covered vents. Warm air, for drying. There were a pair of shower heads, one on a flexible hose curled up on the wall. Her shampoos were lined up on a shelf, and he set his own bottle beside them carefully. She kept combs and brushes in the shower. Not something he'd seen anyone else do before.
He selected the temperature and water pressure he wanted from the most familiar of the menu sections,  and once again set to fumbling with  his bottle of soap, clenching it between his teeth while popping open the cap, returning it to his mouth while he scrubbed up a lather in his fur.
Then the usual routine set in, and his mind began to wander again, imagining Jennifer using this shower, what she looked like drenched, grooming the fur on her throat and stomach and breasts and-
Knock Knock.
"Uh?"
The door opened, and through the water speckled glass Troy saw Jennifer walk in, blurred, but plainly with a grey towel over her arm. "Thought you might want a towel," she said brightly, pausing beside the towel rack.
She'd see his hand, was his first thought, shortly followed by the one that this glass, even if steamed up, was hardly blurry enough for his own modesty's sake. "Uh..."
She paused a moment, glancing down while getting the towel over the bar. He could easily see the slow sway of her tail against the gray-blue of her dress as she worked.
Don't be freaked out, he silently prayed. 
Her head bowed, she stared at the hand a long moment. "Aaanyway," she drawled, the chirp gone from her voice. No comment about the prosthetic hand hanging on her towel rack, anyway. "Sorry to intrude, just, thought you'd need a towel, or something." No brightness at all in that voice. She shrugged up a shoulder, seemed to glance back.
Shit. Shit! Did she really glance back at him? Through the water drops on the glass he couldn't tell. He hunched down on himself, turning his back on her, but-
Yeah. She'd seen, she'd definitely seen something other than the prosthetic hand on her towel railing, and her voice was bubbly again. "Anyway. Enjoy your shower," she teased, sashaying back through the door.
"Uhm, thank you!" he called, suddenly gulping for breath.
She giggled as she shut the door, a pleasant sound, one that made his heart beat faster, and he glanced down. He sucked in another breath, squeezing his eyes shut in embarrassment.
He cringed against one of the shower doors, lightly bumping the back of his head against the tiling for a few minutes.
Enjoy yourself. Troy flattened his only hand across his face. Shit. She definitely hadn't missed his prosthetic hand. And she almost certainly hadn't missed the pink of his erection against his almost black fur, fogged up shower door or no fogged up shower door.
Shit.

Between the shower's hot air blowers and the towel she'd left, Troy found himself drier than he usually was after a shower. His fur was light and fluffy almost immediately, instead of waiting around for twenty minutes feeling like a, ha, drowned rat.
Wearing a fresh pair of undershorts from his briefcase's meagre assortment of clothing and seated on the side of the fold-out bed, Troy swallowed nervously again, staring at the pieces of Jeane's phone he'd set out carefully on the white bed sheets.
Intellectually, he knew he should be thinking about how to repair the phone so he could use it until he got a new one. Maybe about what he was going to do with himself tomorrow. Practically, however, his mind was stuck on Jennifer. She'd made the bed for him, and he could smell her on the sheets. A dry, almost dusky odour that he couldn't describe to himself satisfactorily.
She was in the shower now, and he could hear the faint roar of droplets pitter pattering against the shower door glass. Against her. Where he'd been standing a couple of minutes before.
It was silly. She couldn't be single, not with a place like this. 
All too soon her shower ended, and he heard the blowers start up. Not something humans generally needed, but for furs... God, it had been useful. He wished he could install one in his little apartment out by the university, but he didn't think the terms of his rent contract would allow it even if he could afford a set-up like that.
A bathroom set up like that had to be expensive. And one didn't just get that kind of money for being a secretary, surely?
 The bathroom door clicked open, and Troy tried not to stare while Jennifer stepped out, fog pooling around her feet. Her feet were almost like paws, reshaped with bone and collagen implants like his own, but she seemed to take a natural gait that put most of her weight on her toes. She left damp patches from the pads of her soles on the tiles, then as she moved further along and onto the Amerindian patterned rug.
She looked up with a smile, adjusting the towel wedged up under her armpits. "Don't mind me," she offered, "I'm sure you want some sleep by now."
Troy felt a thickness in his throat, and he nodded quickly. "Ah, yeah." Eyes dipped to the floor, her wet trail of prints, he added, "Ah, good night, Jennifer."
Jennifer nodded, ducking her head. "You too." She slipped towards her bedroom door but paused beside the wall console. She glanced back over her shoulder. "You want the lights out?"
Her damp hair was mostly in a folded towel on her head, flattening her ears, but a little curled down, framing her face, the line of her muzzle, the seductive darkness of her lips. 
Troy forced himself to look away. "Ahh, yeah. Thanks." He began picking up the pieces of phone. He'd deal with it tomorrow, maybe while she was out with her boyfriend... if there was one.
She paused a long moment by the doorframe. She bit her lip, drumming her fingers on the doorframe. "You sure there's nothing else I can do for you?"
He shook his head.
"Not like, uhm. A nightcap or a little more company?" She tapped her foot against the doorframe lightly, tail swashing behind her.
"No, I'm. I'm okay. Thanks."
She nodded, looking away from him. With the beep of a menu, he was suddenly in darkness.
"Ah," he started, looking up before she'd quite gotten her bedroom door shut. "Jennifer?"
"Mmm?" She glanced out from behind the door, pulling the towel off her head with one hand.
"Are you single? I mean, this apartment is kinda..."
"Oh, no," she shook her head.
Something cold grabbed Troy's heart.
"No, the apartment's a job perk, I work for the owners."
"But, you're uhm..."
Jennifer opened the door again, leaned up against the frame, damp hair slouching against her shoulders. "Yeah. I'm single. Got the whole place all to myself." She glanced around, shrugged a little, smile coming back.
Troy's ears tensed, perking with tension. That had been a little frightening. He nodded again, rapidly, taking a relieved breath. Which caught in his breath as she asked, "You?"
"Oh, uhm, yeah." He flapped a hand rapidly beside his face, scratching at the air as if it'd explain things for him. "I haven't really been able to, ah, hold down a relationship." The idiocy of what he was saying struck him silent.
She tilted her head slowly. "Huh." A smile twisted at her lips. "I wouldn't have thought so." She licked her lips, added deliberately, "I think you're a pretty nice guy, Troy."
"Uh, thank you," he choked out, not believing his ears, which were hot with embarrassment. He clutched his hands together between his knees, grinding his knuckles together. His heart hammered inside his chest. "I, uhm... think you're very nice, too, Jennifer."
She smiled then, just a little crookedly, catching a finger between her teeth. "Well. Thank you, Troy."
He looked up at her. The moment stretched, and he looked away nervously. "Uhm. Goodnight."
Jennifer smiled a little wistfully, lifting her eyebrows. "You sure I can't interest you in a little drink, or. Or anything?"
"No, uhm." Troy dry swallowed. "I'm, uhm. I'm fine, thank you. Really, thank you."
She let out a little sigh. "Okay. Goodnight, Troy."
"Goodnight."
She shut the door, and Troy took a heaving breath in the dark. He scooped the bits of the phone off the bed and piled them haphazardly on the coffee table beside the couch. For awhile he just remembered to breathe. He had to force himself to stop rubbing at his neck nervously in the dark, trying to get through what just happened.
 He lay back on the bed, pulling open the blankets and ducking his legs underneath them. He rubbed at his prosthetic arm for a moment, before deciding on unclipping his wristwatch and setting it down amongst the phone detritus. He stared into the darkness, thinking.
Not absolute darkness, though. A thin line of light sliced across the ceiling over his head. He glanced around, looking for the source. Jennifer's bedroom door, open ever so slightly.
She probably didn't realize it, because he could hear her humming gently, see the slight shine of a mirror through the door.
Her arm passed across the narrowly open door, carrying a towel. Something dark blocked out the light, and his breath caught in his throat again. It was a thin part of her silhouette, the inner curve of her leg as she just stood there. He saw her drag a brush over her leg, a flash of the shadow of her tail.
He really shouldn't look, he told himself. He really shouldn't.
Jennifer shifted posture, muscles of her side and thigh flexing as she drew the brush over another part of her body. She seemed to sway with tune she hummed, and he heard a light slap as she clapped one of her hands against her bare buttock. Turning, in the shadow of her silhouette he saw, briefly, the tiger stripes crossing the tawny pattern of her fur across her backside. And then, thankfully, she turned away from the thin crack in the door, still humming.
He almost didn't dare to take a breath, eyes wide. He shouldn't look, shouldn't invade her privacy like that. Then again, she had barged into the bathroom while he'd been showering.
He forced himself to roll over, stare at the dark walls, but when he heard her humming again Troy couldn't resist just glancing back.
He felt a guilty pleasure. The paler white of her stomach was visible, reflected in the mirror. The curve of her hip, a faint shadow cast by the side of her pelvis. She swayed again, side to side, and he could make her out bending over. She pulled up a white pair of panties, fingers hooked through the straps. 
She stepped side to side, pulling them up tight enough to outline the curve of her crotch. She turned away from the mirror then, humming away, her striped buttocks visible for a moment or two longer. She reached back, running her fingers underneath the waistband of her underwear, plucking it with a percussive snap in synch with the tune. 
He breathed a little easier when she turned off her light, but still he found himself staring at the darkness of her bedroom, beyond the door.
Wishing very intently that he'd agreed to that drink, he watched the darkness for long moments. He could get up and, and knock, and maybe say he'd changed his mind, and... and this was insane. He barely knew her. He'd only met her maybe three or four hours ago.
But the way his heart beat when she'd given him that toast,  the gentle calm she'd given him when she'd offered him an alternative to dealing with the hotel staff. That was something else. Maybe. Or maybe he was just trying to tell himself it was more than just lust to get past the guilty thrill he'd had watching her.

Troy forced himself to roll over, twisting his arm so he could leave his prosthetic hand to lightly rest on the covers. It was so late the birds were singing outside. He'd had trouble staying asleep, waking up every so often with a gasp or a whimper. No screams yet. Nightmares. Memories of his childhood.
But it never took long for him to remember where he was, who was in the next room over.
What had she doing last night? Seducing him? At some guilty level, Troy hoped so. It was irrational. How much did he know about her? She was a secretary, she had a nice apartment, beautiful eyes, a voice that made him shudder when he thought of it gracing his ear. But how much could she know about him? 
He and his brothers had been reported on in the news when they'd been released, but that was fifteen years ago. Troy had been around ten years old at the time. His run had been one of the first of the fourth generation, so he was likely two or three years older than Jennifer and her sisters. Unlikely that she'd have been reading newsfeeds at eight. But she'd heard his speech, which covered a lot of that. And, he realized, she said she'd known Monaco in college.
Monaco and Osaka. God. Thinking about that hurt. Troy lifted his hands to his face, pushing his fists against his forehead.
A year ago, during the brothers' mutual birthday party. Monaco and Osaka had come back to San Iadras to celebrate with Florence and Dallas. Not everyone had made it back, Troy had been busy sifting through research articles in German with the help of translation software. Then he'd gotten a call. Turin was in tears over the phone. Dallas couldn't speak. It'd taken him twenty minutes to get the story out of his brothers, finally getting the last of it out of Florence.
It had turned out that, unannounced, Osaka had snuck into town to join in on the festivities. He and Monaco had started talking over dinner.
Monaco was the history buff, Osaka studying genetics under a scholarship from the Tri-Corp, the structure that'd absorbed what was left of Estian Incorporated after the furry emancipation and asset seizures bankrupted them. Monaco called it a betrayal, since it was Estian that had used them like... like lab mice in the first place. Osaka disagreed, it was getting something back for once. There had apparently been one hell of a shouting match after the two of them had downed a few drinks. Enough of one to leave Dallas shaking for hours.
That, Troy had hoped, would be the end of it. In a terrible way, it pretty much was.
Two months later Troy got another call. This time from Osaka's landlord, in Argentina.
Osaka hadn't wanted to talk to anyone after the fight with Monaco, hadn't wanted to go outside. He'd just kept to himself, too hurt after his fight with Monaco to do anything but just sit in his conapt, alone, working gene sequencing simulations from his workstation.
Doctors were scary. Osaka hadn't wanted to go to them for his lower back pain, the general malaise he'd felt. No. He'd just kept to himself, quietly slipped into a coma and died two days later of something so mundane, so preventable as renal failure.
Troy'd flown down, spent some time with the undergraduates Osaka had had helping him with his research. They'd shown him the miserable conapt Osaka owned, the tiny bed he'd wedged underneath his workstation and crawled into to die in.
Perfect place for a mouse to die, cramped and dark and dingy. Almost like underneath the floorboards.
All the Salcedo brothers descended on San Iadras from the four corners of the earth for the funeral. Afterward, Monaco had gotten angry as all hell over everything, unhappy with the funerary arrangements. Unhappy with how Osaka had died. He blamed everyone, for not looking in on Osaka enough, for not consulting with him over the funeral plans. Blaming everyone for everything, but most of all blaming himself, Troy thought.
Troy, Orleans, Nagoya, Philadelphia, Denver and Sydney had been the pallbearers. It was Denver's first time, Troy's Seventh. He remembered each time all too clearly. 
Houston's coffin was shockingly light, he'd wasted away on some weird variation on Tuberculosis none of the doctors in Japan could deal with after the labs had been closed down. Houston had loved physics. Those crazy general relativity paradoxes of his.
York... York had killed himself. Rat poison. Christ, he'd had a black sense of humour.
Lagos died of loneliness. Or near as good as, miserable and alone, playing with Russian supercolliders almost obsessively. Pneumonia. It was immune to antibiotics. The medical staff had given them out like candy back in the lab, made every bug the brothers carried dangerously resistant.
Paris was killed, but he died slow. Stabbed eight times by some fundamentalist crazy out in Texas. Troy'd given a piece of his liver, Turin and Nashville donated stem cells, everybody else gave blood. He'd died slow. But not slow enough to let him finish writing his book on the life of Nietzsche.
Toledo got a cancer relapse - most of the brothers had suffered something cancerous at one time or another - and all the bone marrow donations the doctors allowed the brothers to make couldn't keep him alive. He just faded away, until he was just furless skin and bones.
Nashville. Nashville just hadn't been looking both ways. He'd gotten run over in Dubai, a drunk driver. None of the medical facilities could handle his unique physiology. They'd even tried calling in a veterinarian.
And then Osaka. Poor, poor Osaka.
Troy had been pallbearer for all of his brothers, bar three. Springfield, Kiev, and Berlin. None of them had gotten funerals. Maybe that was for the best. Funerals meant talking about what had happened. Troy had been able to talk about the incinerator in his speech, but he'd only hinted at what happened to put his brothers there.
Back in the lab they'd killed Springfield for spare organs to patch up Dallas, back when Dallas'd been sick. The rest of them, on ice, had variously saved the lives of Paris, Sydney and Troy. The other remains had been burned. Springfield didn't even struggle when they put him under for the dissection. With his last words, he'd asked if Dallas was going to be okay. 
They made York help. Forced York to help cut up Springfield and let him haemorrhage until he exsanguinated on the operating table. No wonder York eventually killed himself.
Kiev hadn't done much better. The testbed cybernetics they used on him were badly installed, so they'd had to open him back up and rip the circuitry out of his spine. He ended up paralysed, and then they took him aside and took him apart. Thank god, the doctors hadn't wanted any of the brothers to 'assist', too interested in what damage they'd done to Kiev.
Berlin died just a few months before they'd taken the brothers out of the lab. Leukaemia, the doctors had said. That time they'd made Troy help with the autopsy. With the stump of his wrist and his spine wired into the surgery interfaces. Maybe it was just running away, but Troy gave up on medicine, even though he'd been good at it as a kid. Radioactive metal alloys didn't bleed. Isotopes didn't have faces or heartbeats to stop, thank God.
All the horrors of the labs. Just a couple of miles from this nice fold-out couch and the pretty femme in the next room.
There'd been two-dozen mice to start out with. Now there were just fourteen. Maybe he'd be next, thought Troy. Follow York's example, maybe. Or end up with cancer.
But then who would Florence call for advice when Dallas had another really bad nightmare? Who'd help Turin book his plane tickets? Who'd Boston get to read the first drafts of his papers?
He rolled over and tried to get a little more sleep.
He only managed it when he put his mind off his brothers, and onto that pretty femme just a not-quite closed door away.

Morning found him seated at Jennifer's kitchen bar, with his watch strapping together Jeane's old phone. He picked at the light blue T-shirt he'd pulled on after waking up again, though there was enough sunlight to make waiting out the morning easier than sleeping again.
The interface display of the phone was a worrying green. One of the organic wafers was probably dying. That Iggy kid really had done a number on the phone. He'd traded data firmware between his phone and Jeane's last night, though, so he still had his interface software loaded in it. The vaguely incomprehensible sine waves of sensor threshold graphs flickered on the countertop display.
Jennifer's bedroom door creaked as she pushed it open, glancing down while she tied a terry-cloth robe shut around her waist. "Good morning," she offered with a smile.
Troy reached up to scratch at the side of his neck, glancing up at her while keeping his muzzle dipped towards the console screen and it's outputs. He watched as she reached up, ruffling her red hair and scrunching at it with her fingers, the way her shoulders moved so fluidly, her slender arms dropping back to her sides.
She stepped up, head tilted. "What's all that?" she enquired, ears perked with interest. 
Troy dry swallowed, tearing his eyes from where the cloth of her robe brushed against his elbow and down to the display. "Ah, your door's sensor profile," he explained, running his finger along the sine curves. "That's the relative strength of input it wants before deciding someone's walked through, so it can shut, and here," he said, trailing a finger to where it flattened, "is where it knows to shut itself." He tapped the first half, adding, "if you graph these differently you'll get a kind of humanoid shape, head and shoulders."
"Huh." She leaned forward a little, slender muzzle dipping as she peered at the display. "And I thought fixing printers was technical." She glanced up at him, her eyes bright with the morning's light. "So you're teaching my door not to bite? I didn't really think you'd bother..." she trailed off, nipping at her bottom lip.
Troy found his ears going all hot and flushed again. "Ah, yeah," he replied, twisting his gaze back to the display. He ran his fingers over the alternative settings file he'd put together, bringing it up. He pointed at a meaningless squiggle, explaining, "That'll make it keep an eye out for tails. It's, uhm. Kind of, uhm. Just, uhm."
She tilted her head slightly, smiling. "Really kind of you," she supplied.
Troy reached up nervously again, dragging his fingernails through the fur on his neck. He nodded mutely, then. "If you say so," he ventured, before pressing his lips together, hard, and glancing away.
"Thank you," she said, leaning in. She buried her muzzle against the side of his face, a damp peck of her lips.
Troy shut his eyes lightly as she drifted past, around behind the kitchen's bar. He tried to hang onto that moment. Then he heard her open the fridge. "Oh, uh," Troy stammered, pulling himself straight in his seat and carefully setting aside the damaged phone. "I was, uh... I was wondering what your plans for today were, since, uhm," he nervously watched her pause, a jug of milk in hand. "I rather hoped," he added with a nervous twitch of his head, a kind of half nod to a side, incomplete, "that I could buy you breakfast, somewhere."
She seemed frozen, a doe in headlights, before she slowly set the jug back down in the fridge. "I'd like that." She glanced down as she straightened, her ears perked while she smoothed down the pale fur over her throat. She paused just a moment, before adding, "I've got a little shopping to do. A little busy tonight, but I'm really free otherwise."
"Well, maybe I could help you with that, and." And? Troy scratched at the fur beside his jaw, "Maybe we could find something to do afterwards."
She nodded, rapidly. "Okay." She backed away from the fridge, slipping back towards her bedroom. She glanced down at her feet, suddenly, lightly biting her lip. "It's, it's been awhile since a guy took me out for the day.  Kind of a nice surprise. Let me just go get dressed," she added, pointing back into her room, "And we can find somewhere for that breakfast."
He nodded in turn. "Great." The door shut behind her, and almost immediately he nearly tripped over his own feet scrambling for his briefcase laying open on the bed. Hurriedly he flipped up the lid and dragged open the laundry compartment to reveal the meagre collection of clothes he'd allotted himself for his trip out here. 
Damnit, damnit, damnit! What had he been thinking when packing? Well, clearly not that he'd need to dress up for anything other than the function last night. He pulled his black dress shirt, wrinkled, on over his T-shirt, rolling up the sleeves and hurriedly cuffing them down, leaving it open and loose. He only had two pairs of pants, his trousers that matched his jacket and the slacks he'd worn flying in. The slacks'd be okay. Maybe.
Hurriedly, Troy yanked on his slacks, taking a few moments more than necessary to deal with the buttoned flap for his tail. What was he thinking? Just asking a woman out for the day with no plans? He felt ill. Then again, she'd already agreed to go, and she seemed nice.
Actually, nice was an understatement. More or less any word he could think of was an understatement, and that scared him.
 Yanking on a spare pair of socks, Troy wished he'd brought his other pair of shoes. Black leather didn't quite seem casual enough, but they were all he'd brought with him. He hurried through tying his shoelaces, finishing all too rapidly. Troy breathed hard, trying to think. He glanced up at her door, thankful he'd finished dressing in time. In time for what? Women don't just change clothes in an instant and burst out of their rooms expecting to leave right now... Did they?
Troy dry swallowed, pulling his wallet from last night's trousers and stuffing them into a pocket and moving his lapel pin from his jacket to his shirt. He took his wristwatch from the phone and put it back on, took a deep breath, and went to brush his teeth. No reason to rush things. None at all.
He fiddled with his short, almost fur-length hair in front of the mirror, wishing he had some kind of good scent to wear. He eventually settled for washing his face in the sink. When he came up for air after the scrubbing, she was standing there, a faint smile on her lips, wearing a pair of maroon shorts and a black halter top, leaving her back bare.
"Oh, uh, hi." Troy smiled lamely.
She held up a towel, patted at his chest where an errant splash of water had dampened it. She pressed her hand lightly against his chest after a moment, nose down as she leaned into his space. "Hey," she replied. "Uhm. I need to brush my teeth, and, bathroom stuff."
Troy nodded slowly, watching her pad lightly with the towel. "Yeah."
She sniffed at his chest lightly, before setting the towel down, and she grinned crookedly. "And with two people in here, it's just a little weird."
Troy blinked, wide eyed, and he drew back from her. "Oh, uh, of course, sorry." He smiled tightly as he edged around her, back to the living room.
She glanced back over a shoulder, the halter top showing her bare back where dark stripes crisscrossed her fur. "See you in a bit, huh?"
"Yeah," Troy replied, rubbing his forehead sheepishly. A moment later he realized he didn't know where he was taking her, he'd just... offered. He picked up the phone, cradling it so it didn't fall apart without the strap, and dialled a familiar number. His own voice greeted him. "Hello?"
"It's Troy. Florence?"
"Hey, Troy. No, it's Dallas. Let me get him."
"Thanks."
A moment passed, and another voice took up the phone. "Troy?"
"Hey Florence. Look, uh. I haven't been in town awhile. Where's a good place to take a girl for breakfast?"
Florence chuckled. "Didn't think I'd hear that from you. That nice little grey tabby girl from last night?"
Troy swallowed. "No, uh. That was Dallas."
A pause, just longer than a heartbeat. "Oh." Florence's voice was unusually guarded. "He didn't tell me."
"Must've slipped his mind, I guess."
"Maybe. Uhm. So who are you taking to breakfast?"
"It's one of the Dixons, those canid women. She's letting me crash on her couch. Just letting me crash on her couch. I wanted to do something nice, you know?"
"Oh, well, uhm." Florence paused, gathering his thoughts. "You remember that bar Fred used to manage, out in the furry district? Just a couple of canyons over from our place?"
"Of course."
"He owns the place now, you should drop in to see him," Florence continued, distractedly. "Uh, anyway. Up on the top floor of the canyon the bar's in, on the side nearer the river, there's a little garden on the rim, in the light of the mirrors. Next to that there's a coffee shop, it's just a Tyrel's, but it's nice in the mornings."
Troy tried to fix it all in his mind, "Right. A Tyrel's. Tyrel's is good. Thanks Florence."
A deep breath. " You might want to drop by, say hello to Fred. He's not so well lately."
"Uhm. Sure. I, uh. Gotta go. Bye."
"You really aughta look in on Fred."
"Yeah, uhm. I'll see. Bye." Troy hung up by the very simple expedient of not quite accidently letting the phone fall apart in his hand.
With a click of her sandals, Jennifer returned, a pair of sunglasses holding her hair back, the kind with slightly tight sides that'd hold against a fur's face, rather than try and deal with the oddities of the various furry genotype's ears.
She pulled her purse onto her shoulder, tilting her head a little. "So where are we going?"
"You like Tyrel's?" Troy ventured, packing the phone's parts into his pocket.
Jennifer moved up beside him, linking her arm with his. "I love Tyrel's."

//: City of San Iadras. 'Furry' district.

The canyon was a twisted city planner's solution to problems with street space. A multi-tiered canyon had been carved almost a hundred feet into the ground under the streets of San Iadras. Up above, to a driver, it'd be little more than a parking turn off, a strip of empty space between the traffic lanes, and pedestrian access points.
Below, eight levels of tiers cut into the sides of the canyon were bathed in gentle sunlight from large mirror and prism arrays, suspended just below the massive canyon skylight.
Getting here hadn't taken too long, just a short bus ride that Jennifer seemed to know the route for better than Troy did. They'd passed down into the canyon, making a quick stop at a Japanese immigrant's electronics stall, where Troy had gotten a cheap replacement phone, having to haggle the price in a mangle of Japanese and Spanish.
He apologised for the delay, and fairly soon they were seated in the heat of prism reflected light, outside in the fresh air, the waving fronds of a garden pod held up near the top of the canyon for the light their only company. It was still too early on a Saturday for throngs of shoppers and city folk to be at their business. 
The menu wasn't too different to the Tyrel's outlets up north, stateside. He ordered a muffin thick with muesli, along with coffee. Jennifer picked out a complex coffee with a Spanish name that wasn't on the menu back home along with eggs and bacon. Fairly soon they were sitting together, elbows on the table, waiting for one another to say something to break the silence. 
She did it first. "So. Japanese? Where'd you learn to speak that?" she asked, rubbing her hands together lightly, leaning a little forward on the table, perched comfortably on the backless stools that made Tyrel's a favourite coffee shop of more than one fur.
"Oh, uhm," Troy gestured a little helplessly. "My late brother, Houston. He lived in Japan, I visited a lot." Especially while he was in the hospitals. He'd had to learn Japanese to get any decent information on Houston's condition.
Jennifer nodded gently, averting her eyes. "I'm, sorry. I'm sure he was a nice guy."
"He was." Troy glanced down at his hands. "Japan's a nice country, though. Not much contamination, still very green outside of the cities."
"I think I mentioned I have some sisters out in Milan. Not so green, but they like it anyway." She rested her chin on her hand. 
Troy glanced at the mirrory windows of the Tyrel's. No sign of their waiter, yet. "How'd they manage to move? Western European Union's hard to get into these days."
"Oh," she smiled, "work contracts. They picked up French and Italian fairly fast, so it wasn't too difficult for them to find a job. What about you and your brothers?"
"Most of us have a knack for science, so universities are generally willing to help a little. Houston was in physics, uh, my brother Saigon is a pretty talented electronics engineer."
Jennifer nodded. "Did he teach you?"
Troy blinked, shook his head. "Uh, no. Why?"
"You just seem so talented," she replied, pulling her sunglasses off and setting them on the table, not needing them in the gentler sunlight of the mirror. Jennifer looked up at him, and Troy found his heart melting in her eyes. "Electronics, with the phone and the door. And this chemistry too? And you know so many languages. Where'd you pick it all up?"
Troy paused, closing his eyes for a moment. "Oh, uh." He clenched his teeth together. "That's, uhm. Back in the labs they taught us a lot. Helped their intelligence testing." He flashed a false smile. They were taught a lot of things. Things best left untaught.
 Jennifer paused only a moment, then glanced down awkwardly at the tabletop with its animated ads for Tyrel's food.
Troy took a grip on his mind, breathed. Breathing was the key. "What about you and your sisters?" he asked, opening his eyes again with a fluttering blink. "They must have done something right in the dorms to get you to turn out so charming."
She smiled, glancing down slightly then. Her smile deepened for a moment, ears perked as if to signal embarrassment. "Oh. Nothing special I imagine. We used to play tea party a lot. To teach us conversation."
"Tea party? I wish they'd let us come and visit, that sounds like fun." 
Jennifer laughed, shaking her head. "Oh we were awful! Just imagine about a hundred and eighty little girls putting blame on one another. We all used to use our embryonic numbers, and we learned pretty quickly that the staff couldn't remember them as easily as we could."
Self-consciously, Troy stuck his tongue up between his lips and his teeth, and licked at the gum on the right hand side. Sometimes the batch numbers tattooed there itched.
"So if one of us spilled something on our dress, or, just felt cranky and didn't want to get along, we'd start mixing up the numbers." She chuckled, laughter in her eyes, waving a hand. "Thirty-One Thirteen, put that back, oh, sir, I'm Forty-Three Sixteen, where's Thirty-Three Ninety?" She shook her head slowly, sending her red hair swaying. "It was silly, but, you know." She glanced up with a mischievous, ever so slightly dark little grin on her lips. "It was fun anyway."
The creak of glass caught Troy's ear. The waiter exiting the Tyrel's storefront, a pimply teenager who looked like he was still nursing one hell of a hangover. As usual, Troy fell silent, dry swallowing. He never knew quite how to act around waiters.
While he put down their cutlery, plastic wrapped with a serviette, set down their plates, Jennifer looked up and offered the kid a tight smile. "Thanks."
"Is no problem, señorita."
Watching the waiter walk back from the corner of his eye, Troy relaxed little by little.
Jennifer picked up her cutlery, twisting the fork through the plastic wrapper and peeling it off professionally.  He followed suit. "I wish I was as comfortable with people as you are," he admitted, carefully scrunching up the cutlery wrapper.
She shrugged self-consciously. "It's just practice, really." She picked up the cup of coffee, tasting it with a careful sip. She looked up abruptly, grinning eagerly. "Ooh, so, what's the scariest-." She cut herself off. Hesitated only a moment before correcting herself, "craziest thing that ever happened to you at work?"
"Uh, hmm." He stalled for time by cutting open his muffin and taking up a piece to chew on. Was that conversational training? A standard icebreaking line? Troy silently thanked her for changing it. "Well. Sometimes we work with these gas centrifuges, which are kind of huge pressure cylinders with magnetic rotors in them." He demonstratively ran a spoon around the edge of his coffee cup to start the fluid spinning. "They help separate out heavier and lighter isotopes, heavy at the edges, light in the middle. You can enrich nuclear fuel and stuff with these," he explained, waving his right hand with its wet spoon in the air while stalling for words.
Jennifer nodded encouragingly, whilst tipping sugar into her coffee. "Sounds like you could build a bomb or something with all that."
"Uh, yeah," Troy replied awkwardly with a nod. "People did that about eighty years ago. But it's pretty inefficient." He set down the spoon carefully on the side of the saucer. "So these things run upwards of a hundred and twenty thousand revolutions a minute, which is, like, nuts. We run a cascade farm for the university's reactors and colliders, which is maybe fifty rows of a hundred and twenty of these things. Around six thousand at peak operation. It's... loud."
"How loud?"
Troy dipped his head for a quick sip of his coffee. "Pretty loud. Without hearing protection the little bones in your ear just break."
Concern crossed her features, the lighter fur around her eyes shifting just a little. "That sounds, uhm, dangerous?"
"It's pretty safe if you take care. But you don't want to take risks." He dipped his gaze to her hands, curled around that cup of coffee, the way she gently rubbed the tips of her thumbs together over the mug's handle. "It's antique gear. So, uh. One day prospective investors for the university come down, this was back when I was working as a technician during my studies."
She nodded encouragingly, reaching out lightly with her left hand, curling her fingers over his right hand. 
Troy found himself taking a slow breath, lightly turning his hand so he could hold Jennifer's in turn. The contact made his chest feel too big and too tight. He looked up at her, and squeezed her hand gently.
She squeezed back.
"Mm?" she prompted, pulling her hand back.
He could still feel her warmth under his fur.
"Ah," Troy smiled, taking a breath. "Now these guys want a tour of the cascade farm, because they've never seen any of this old equipment before. So we packed up the funding agents in protective headgear and suits, Greg - one of my co-workers - takes them through the safety procedures." He dry swallowed, then thought better of it and took a quick sip of his coffee. Bitter.
Jennifer nodded again, cutting into her serving of bacon and eggs, dipping the fried meat before snapping it up.
"Goggles, hard-hats. At the end of all this they're set up with enough ear protection that they won't be able to hear a bomb go off next door, and Greg takes them through to show them the centrifuges after warning them how loud it is and how they must not, at any point, do so much as try and scratch an ear. They come out, and one of the investors compliments us on our safety gear." Troy shook his head. "You're running the safest department in the university, the other labs should take a page from your book, that sort of thing. Your hearing protection is excellent, the guy said. Didn't hear a thing."
She set down her fork and lifted her cup, sipping at it slowly. "That's pretty good."
"Yeah, we were pretty pleased." Troy took a swallow of his coffee. "Mainly because we were terrified someone would realize that we'd shut down the entire cascade farm because of resonance damage and we hadn't had time to fix it yet."
She snorted with laughter, reaching up to cover the tip of her muzzle with a hand. She resettled herself on her seat and started at her bacon and eggs again. "They couldn't tell?"
"Well, when the whole thing's running it feels like you're being shaken by a giant hand," Troy explained, making a fist. "But I guess they just never spent any time with heavy machinery before," he added, breaking off a piece of his muffin.
"I always thought that sort of radioactive stuff was a little more physics, though," Jennifer said between bites.
Troy nodded. "It gets kind of similar the further you go. A lot of science borrows sugar from its neighbours, so to speak." He chewed for a moment on his muffin. Light, bready. Crunchy with the muesli. Pretty much like the Tyrel's meals at home. "So how about you?  What sort of crazy things have happened to you at work?"
She paused for thought, glancing off to a side for a moment. The reflected sunlight made the green in her eyes stand out. "I used to do a lot of part time temping while I was in college."
"Filling in when people are ill, that kind of thing?" 
"Mhm," she nodded. "One week I filled in for a girl working in the elementary school offices at district twelve, in the suburbs south of the city." She looked up at him, while pausing to chew on a strip of bacon.
Troy nodded, pausing to brush the crumbs off the front of his shirt, never quite knowing if he should hold the eye contact. He found himself glancing away every so often, but always his eyes returned to her, and she smiled at him.
"So as part of my duties I get to run the reception desks, and make the public address system announcements. Will Tommy Fisher report to the principal's office sort of thing."  She paused to reach up and smooth her hair back over a shoulder. "I had to call up this one kid, Emilio Vasquez, who was ill, and after the principal dealt with him he went home."
Troy had never been in an elementary school, he'd only caught the last few years of high school by the time he and his brothers had been released from medical rehabilitation. But he remembered the paranoia over being sent to the principal.
"Usually we got sent batches of kids at a time," Jennifer explained, holding her hands out in parallel, touching the tabletop for each block of time as she went on. "Just after the school day starts, all the tardy kids start arriving. Then later in the day, all the kids who were naughty during recess, you get the idea."
He nodded again.
"Now these kids were usually kind of difficult to handle, but the day after Emilio went home they were all sitting there, good as gold, but looking nervous. A little more nervous than usual, given that they were going to see the principal." She cleared her throat, "Now it transpires that I had to call Emilio up just before lunch period, and he hadn't come back to school the next day..."
"Oh no," Troy put his hands to his face, trying to hold his grin back.
"So this little kid comes up to my desk and says, like she's in a horror movie," Jennifer softened her voice a little, eyes wide, slouching in the chair to mimic a child, "Miss Wolfy Lady, is it true you ate Emilio for lunch yesterday?"
Troy chuckled, shoulders shaking.
"It was so cute!" She leaned back in her chair.
Troy shifted his coffee cup from hand to hand. "You're definitely not the kid-eating type."
"Oh, you never know." She grinned, then, displaying her teeth, all relatively sharp. She made a show of biting at the air twice, and she added with a giggle, "Snap snap. Eat 'em right up."
"Oh, that is cute," Troy smiled.
"It was," she agreed.
He diverted his eyes down, waving a hand. "No, uh. You." He found himself self consciously scratching at the side of his neck again. " And I like your laugh. It's nice."
Jennifer bowed her head, catching her thumb between her teeth lightly. "That's nice of you to say."
An awkward silence lapsed on them. Not too awkward, though, from the way she was smiling at him.

Shopping in the canyon wasn't too different to how he'd remembered it. The map of storefronts was, as always, three or four months out of date. Troy worked his way down the tiers of the canyon with Jennifer, helping her carry her things while she browsed. Thankfully, most of what she needed was right here. 
Things had changed since the last time he'd had a serious look at the storefronts down here. Even though this was the furry district, humans still outnumbered the furs about five to one. In the rest of the city, though, it was more like thirty to one. 
It was reflected in the products in the storefronts, like the clothing outlets in the middle tiers with their glass fronts, displaying custom clothing on projected display images built for a furry anatomy while they walked past. He waited with Jennifer while the printing machinery in the back of one of the larger outlets cut and sewed one of the dress designs to her size.
She looked pretty in it while she tried it on.
Troy said so.
She smiled and glanced down, and Troy noticed the way the tips of her ears gently bent away from each other when she was a little embarrassed by his complements. She seemed to like it though.
They stopped by a pharmacy, and Troy found products on the shelves he'd never heard of before. 'Anatomic fit' condoms (ridiculous), shampoos and brushes and fur trimmers, a static cling device to get shed fur out of clothes. He bought himself one of those, he was sick and tired of being forced to wear black all the time just because his fur was dark.
They sat on a bench for awhile and watched an Amerindian juggler's show on one of the high level tiers. Troy put his arm around Jennifer's shoulders, she pulled herself close to him and put her hand lightly on his chest. He left a couple of new dollars as a tip and off they went again.
Troy carried her bags for her, and thankfully, before the shopping crowds got a little too dense, before any sense of worry or panic began to set in, she finished her shopping and he took her to a little early lunch at a bar on one of the lower level tiers.

"Can I get you two some drinks?" a harassed looking feline fur asked, setting out mats and menus as Troy and Jennifer sat down. 
Troy noted the waitress's nervousness for what it was, since Jennifer picked up on it fairly quickly too. Did she and Jennifer know each other? It was a little difficult to tell, when there were almost community sized groups of clones.
"Yeah, uh, Tonic water and lime."
"Just a coke, please. You're, uh, Mathilda's sister?" she ventured to the waitress. 
It was an inane question. The waitress, to Troy, looked to be an Andrews. A closely related run to the Edwards felines he'd met last night. She looked hardly any different from the Andrews Dallas had met last night, Nadine. Obviously she was Mathilda's sister. Trying to identify a fur you knew could be difficult, at times. 
The waitress nodded, though, keying the order into her cashier's tray. "Yeah, I'm Therese. Uh, that's Mathilda over in the residential canyon under Fifteenth Avenue? Or Mathilda outside town in Greyview?"
"Fifteenth Avenue," Jennifer confirmed with a nod.
"Yeah, we're close." Therese seemed to relax, and the tension washed away in the both of them. "You must be Jennifer? Mathilda's foster? We met at her graduation?"
Close. Meaning in a familial relationship, of sorts. Troy and his brothers were almost unique because they were a 'small' run of furs, they were all 'close'. As for fosters. Foster family. Troy didn't really have one of those. Maybe the padre. Maybe.
"Yeah," Jennifer said with a relieved smile. "She mentioned she had a sister working somewhere around here, but I didn't know if it might be you. Troy, ah, Therese Andrews, the sister of one of the girls I grew up with. Therese, Troy Salcedo. He's very kindly taking me out today," she said with a perky grin. 
Troy offered a smile, "Hi, Therese."
"Hi," Therese offered, hugging her cashier's tray to herself now, smiling and bobbing from foot to foot easily. 
"I, uh, don't suppose Fred Rodney's around?" Troy asked, a little hesitantly. He licked his lip nervously, glancing at Jennifer. "He's kind of an old friend, one of my brothers asked me to stop by."
Therese paused uncomfortably, glancing back to one of the bar's back doors. "Uh, I'm not sure. Lemme go see. Troy, right?"
Troy nodded, dry swallowing, and Therese scurried off.
Jennifer watched her go for a moment, and asked curiously, "Rodney? The third generation foxes?"
Troy offered Jennifer a nod, waving a hand, "He helped us, me and my brothers that is, when we got out of medical rehabilitation."
"Medical?..." she blinked, reaching out and pulling one of his hands across the table, holding it in both her own. His right.
The fur across the back of his neck tensed a little. "Yeah, when we got out of the labs there was a lot of, uhm, damage to fix." He lifted up his left hand, as if it explained.
Jennifer's ears tensed a little. "I kind of wanted to ask about it, actually." She squeezed his right hand gently. 
Troy nodded quickly, a little too quickly, nervously. "Not something I like thinking about," he offered, before the temptation to say more got the better of him, which would just get him thinking about it again.
Therese popped back out of the door, with a little confusion across her features. "Sorry about that, Troy. I'm pretty new here. Fred'd really like to see you, apparently. Just, uh, through the back there. Upstairs."
"It won't take long," Troy promised, looking up into Jennifer's eyes.
Abruptly she leaned forward, kissing him on his cheek. "It's okay," she whispered. "I'll be waiting for you right here."
He pulled back to stand, nodding slowly, heart pounding again. "Thank you."
Jennifer just smiled warmly up at him for a moment, then turned her attention to Therese. "So how's Thomas? I really haven't had an opportunity to ask Mathilda about how they're getting along."
"Oh, they're thinking about adopting a kid, actually," Therese said.
Troy swallowed down his fear, his worry about how it seemed to just leave Jennifer there. But she seemed to understand. He pushed through the employees only door. He remembered the way to Fred's little office, watching his feet as he turned from the corridor to the kitchen behind the bar and up the thin stairs. 
He knocked at the office door at the top, the glass frame in it still marked with the old manager's name. Ed Fontaine. Some human guy who'd run the place since before furries had been brought out of their jar. Back in the old days Troy and his brothers had helped Fred fill out the tax forms, while Fred found them a communal room at a hostel.
He pushed open the door carefully. The office was dark, smoky. Soothing electronic music poured from a tacky little media set in the corner.
"Jesus, Troy. How'd you get with a pretty thing like her?" Fred asked, peering through a set of one way glass from his office to the bar below.
Fred's fur was a rusty red colour, patched with white at the throat and running down into his shirt collar. He wore a bandana, folded so that his ears poked out the top, one shirt sleeve rolled up with a strip of IV tubes snaking down from his elbow into a piece of medical machinery on wheels with a handle on top.
His fur was groomed immaculately, as always. But there was grey around his muzzle and eyes, and the smell of the smoke was all tobacco and marijuana. The way he slouched in his 'furgonomic' chair, notch cut of the back for his tail, looked unhealthy, too.
Fred was only thirty one, six years older than Troy. But he looked older, thanks to being of the third generation, from before the refinements in gene sequencing that'd given Troy's fourth generation a metabolism that didn't need medical support. At least, those of his generation who hadn't been through the research labs.
Troy dropped his gaze uneasily. "Hey Fred."
Fred turned around in his chair, tilting his head at Troy. "Fuck. You look like a million bucks, man. How's things?"
"Same old," Troy ventured with an awkward shrug. "Chances are good we're going to get new cold fusion reactions together if we manage to synthesise Unbiquadium."
"What?" Fred laughed, an almost barking sound.
"Element a hundred and twenty four." Troy looked up with a half hearted smile. "We think it might react violently enough while it exists to start off self sustaining fusion reactions. Maybe. How're you doing, Fred?"
"Fucked up." Fred grinned, showing off his muzzleful of teeth, crooked and wickedly sharp. "Tumour the size of my ass in my lungs, but the viruses'll get it." He patted the IVs in his arm lightly.
"Glad to hear it. You gonna stop smoking anytime soon?" Troy clutched at his left wrist with his right hand, staring at his feet, at the old beer can laying on the floor just a couple of feet away from a bin.
"Nah," Fred sighed. "It hurts enough that marijuana's the big part of my day now."
"How bad?" Troy tried not to pray that Fred wasn't going to ask him to brew something up illegally again. Levorphanol, Morphine, Oxymorphone, whatever painkiller he was addicted to now. Fred helped them, now he was in pain. Troy should want to help - but he didn't.
"Bad." Fred smiled grimly, pushing himself up out of his chair. Troy tried not to show his shock at how the fox was shaking. He looked more like ninety, not thirty.
"Damnit, Fred. You stay sitting," Troy said, stepping closer and helping Fred back to his chair.
"No, no, I want to meet her. You gotta introduce me, man, where'd you dig up a girl like that?"
"No, Fred, it's okay, I mean," Troy suppressed a shudder, glancing downstairs through the glass. Jennifer was still talking to Therese. "Is there anything I can do to help?" Troy asked, swallowing back his dread.
"Aw, you boys are all so shy." Fred accepted the help to sit back down, settling down with a whuff of air. The old fox's nose twitched, as he watched Troy, reading his mood. "Nah."
Troy thanked the heavens, eyes squeezed shut.
"But I should be helping you, man!" Fred grinned."What do you need, Troy? Nudies? A nice apartment? When are you moving back down here?"
Fred had done more than enough for Troy. He and his brothers had been dumped out of the orphanage they'd been held in for medical rehabilitation after they turned sixteen. They hadn't any money to their names, foster homes were already choked with the flood of furs. It'd been Fred and a few of his third gen friends, old enough to have jobs, who'd helped the Salcedos get introduced to life. Fred who'd encouraged them into academia.
"I'm fine on New Dollars, and I don't need a place." Troy said, shaking his head. "I'm here for the weekend, just for that conference thing, that's all."
"Shit, man. Those old humans exploited us enough, now you're helping them with their 'I'm so concerned' parties?" 
"Come on Fred," Troy grimaced. "The rehabilitation fund isn't like that. I mean they're funding Oslo's treatment, and if you applied they'd help you too. That Estian grant can't be covering this."
"Yeah, yeah," Fred turned his head away, grimacing, ears flattened over the cloth of his bandana. He glanced back downstairs, then, grinning again quickly enough. "She as nice as she looks?"
Troy dipped his gaze uncomfortably. "I like her."
"You ever dated a furry before, Troy?"
"No," Troy admitted with a shake of his head. "Just a few human girls here and there."
"Humans, they're all interested in how exotic we are." Fred grinned wider, as if goading Troy to try and disagree. "The size and shape of our dicks, what kind of gossip they're going to get with us on their arm, y'know? Fuck, and the way human men treat our girls..."
Troy wanted to disagree, but he couldn't. When he'd dated in college, his difficulty in maintaining the relationships weren't always because he was buried knee deep in his studies or that he never knew what to say. No. Sometimes it was because he felt like they just wanted him because they could parade him around like a conversation piece at a party.
"Dating a furry, now, that's different. They just know what we've all been through." Fred reached up and slapped the side of Troy's arm with a grin. "We got it better than the humans, too. Break up and hell, how many sisters are there to try your luck with?"
Troy smiled weakly. 
"Now you two go on and have some fun, huh? Everything's on me, you two have something nice."
Troy bowed his head, nodding a little. "Thanks Fred."
"It's no problem. And you, you lean on old Fred a little more, huh? I'm here to help!" And when he did, Troy knew, he'd owe Fred a favour. And when he owed Fred, Fred started asking for favours. All kinds of favours that would go right into Fred's veins.
Troy waved, and headed back downstairs, head bowed. He let himself grind his teeth together until he stepped out into the bar proper. Their drinks were there, Jennifer had started on hers.
Troy sat down, joining her, and waved for Therese. He took a quick sip of the bitter tonic water and lime he'd ordered, fizzing lightly in its glass. 
"You're shaking," Jennifer frowned, leaning forward concernedly. 
"It's, uhm... It's nothing," Troy said, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. He forced through a smile. "You want to finish your drink? I had a better idea for lunch." He pulled out his wallet, flipping it open and keying in a payment and generous tip before slashing it across Therese's cashier tray as she arrived. 
"Sure," Jennifer replied worriedly, setting down her coke. "You wanna go right now?"
"Uh, yeah. Come on. It'll be fun," Troy said, getting to his feet and taking Jennifer's hand, not quite running as he led her back out, leaving his drink almost untouched.

//: City of San Iadras. Beach section five, semi-restricted admittance.

The difference between outright panic and calm could be quite subtle, made up by the small things. In this case, the small things were a few cooked and prepackaged meals from a supermarket along with cheap towels and a few bottles of water and soda, along with a pair of cheap flipflops and a sunhat with ear holes he'd bought for Jennifer on impulse.
All that, a cab ride, and a couple of beach tickets.
"I always wanted to come out here. Never really had the time or money. How'd you get tickets so fast?" she asked, grinning from beneath her sunhat, which she wore proudly, sunglasses reflecting pristine and empty white sands.
Well, relatively empty. There were only about forty people in view spread out across the open sands and the greenery higher up the shore side, where they lay beside each other in the part shade of a date palm tree.
Practically deserted.
"My brother Philadelphia," Troy explained, twisting open a difficult bottle with a grimace. "He's a consultant for the coastal defence and decontamination array," he said, pausing to point out to sea, where a faint black dome broke up the horizon. "He thinks open day tickets are good Christmas gifts."
"I wish I had a brother like that," Jennifer complained playfully, holding out her plastic cup for a refill.
Troy carefully shepherded the bag of litter to get rid of the bottle cap - fines were upwards of ten thousand nudies - and refilled her cup for her. "It's not that great, it's not a swimmable section," he apologised. 
She sipped at her drink, just some sugary soda, and grinned, "The best part of a beach is the sand, and the sunshine, and the salt air." She leaned close, propping her head up on his arm. "And the company," she whispered.
 Gut feeling light and empty, Troy moved to put his other arm around her, and she smiled, nuzzling the side of her head into his shoulder until the sunhat flopped off.
"Especially the company," Jennifer breathed, her voice almost husky. Her lips, a dark tan shade, darker than her fur, parted slightly.
Troy leaned his face closer to hers, curling up around her. Her lips were inviting. He paused nervously, didn't know what to do, what to say. He buried the tip of his snout into her long red hair. A dry, dusky smell filled his nose, a weird scent.  Her scent. "I love how you smell," he whispered, voice quivering just a little.
She shifted a little, rolling one of her shoulders against the towel, setting down her cup in the sand. "Thank you," she breathed huskily into his chest, pulling him closer. She licked her lips lightly, expectantly.
Troy dry swallowed. "I want to kiss you."
"Do."
"I don't know how."
Her eyes flicked open with surprise, and she blinked at him. She smirked slowly, disbelievingly. "You... don't know how?"
Troy cringed a little, his tail curling a little, ears hot. "I've never kissed another furry. I don't know how our snouts go, and..."
Jennifer grinned, then, pulling at his dress shirt to get herself close, her legs sliding against his. "I'll teach you," she said, moving a hand up to cup the back of his neck. In a moment she'd pushed her lips against his, and they felt hot, damp, but a second later Jennifer tilted her head at an angle to Troy's, her jaw parting against his until he got the idea, slackening his jaw, eyes sliding shut. Carefully, bit by bit, she pressed her mouth against his, the length of her muzzle sliding against his just a bit, so that they meshed together, and her tongue was hot and insistent against his.
Breath came in unsteady shudders for Troy, while her breathing quickened, huffing air through his fur. She curled her hands behind his head, edging her hip against his until she'd pushed him over onto his back. 
Her tongue was a little rough, she twisted it against his, he reciprocated until she pulled back, her breathing quick. Her lips were a little moist, and she grinned down at him, pulling her body over his. He could feel the heat of her body, even through the layers of clothing they wore, and he finally put his arms around her back lightly. 
Her ears cocked up high while she grinned, expectant again. "Got the idea?" Her short, stiff tail flicked side to side.
Troy nodded, blinking rapidly. 
"Wanna try it out?" she enquired teasingly. 
Troy nodded again, gulping down air. 
"Okay." She leaned in closer, taking a slightly wheezing breath.
He kissed her face, gently.
She curled her arms around his neck, groaned against his throat, "You can put your hands on my ass, too, if you want."
He did, not daring to squeeze. She pushed herself down against him, her breasts squeezing against his chest, and while he kissed her he could feel how her butt squirmed with every flick of her tail.
On the whole, life was good.

The sun dipped enough to pull the shade of the palm off them, but Troy didn't mind, and Jennifer certainly didn't. They kissed. They talked a little. Kissed some more. She ended up on her back, he laying beside her, shading her face with his head.
"You're beautiful."
"You're just saying that."
"No, I mean it. But I can say it again if it'll earn me another kiss."
"Hmpf," she protested, wriggling her shoulders back into the towel. She got her elbows underneath her and kissed him on the cheek. "There. Now you have to tell me I'm beautiful."
"You are. You are very, very beautiful Jennifer." Troy dipped his head to kiss her forehead lightly. "I think I might love you."
She scrunched up her face a little, tiny wrinkles forming in the fur along her muzzle, and she pushed her hip against his. "Love's a dangerous word, Troy."
 Troy swallowed. "Oh."
"I'm not rejecting you, sweetie." She reached up, picking at his shirt lightly. " I just find myself falling in love a lot. And getting hurt a lot."
He bit his tongue, lightly. Settled his hand over hers, unsure of what to say.
"You're...  You're nice." Jennifer lightly ran her fingertips down his breastbone. "I like you. A hell of a lot. But love's a funny thing. It lasts easily for a week, over a weekend. After that and," she hesitated, squeezing her eyes shut a moment. "It gets complicated, difficult, you know?"
Troy nodded a little. He dry swallowed, tried to remind himself not to do it. "I can understand that."
She cracked open one eye, peering up at him cautiously. "You can?"
Troy nodded. "I get caught up in things. In streaks. It's like going crazy for a little while. Can't do anything else. When you get back to the rest of life, things just... Look changed." He glanced aside uncomfortably. "It's been a contributing factor with me having a little difficulty with steady relationships. But it doesn't really change how I feel."
Jennifer blinked her pretty eyes up at him, while a soft breeze blew in off the ocean. She ran a hand over his arm. It was his left one. The usual clench of terror failed to appear. "And how do you feel?"
"Strongly. Very strongly." He moved a little closer, his chest against her side. She didn't recoil.
"Uhm." She lifted her hand to her mouth, made a petite little fist, thumb out, and nipped on her thumbtip. "How often are you in San Iadras, Troy? I mean, if you're feeling guilty because this is probably just a one time thing... "
He shook his head, feeling a weird pricking along his spine. "No, it's not that. I'm around pretty often. Not that often, uhm. Four of my brothers live in town, I come down most holidays, sometimes more often if there's a function or a conference."
"Conferences? Like last night?" she asked.
"No, uh. Science things. San Iadras and the other middle American cities are pretty big destinations for it. A lot of funding from corporate head hunters, that kind of thing. There're three or four I go to a year."
She nodded, pulling herself around till she could sit up, twisting around so as not to bend her tail badly when she sat up. She looked out to sea thoughtfully. "Well. Maybe we could try something a little on again off again." Jennifer turned back to him, settling her hand on his shoulder. "See how it goes. If you want. Just no broken hearts, you know?" 
She seemed incredibly vulnerable, just then. Something felt strange. Very weird, but Troy would've given her the moon if he could, if some corporate venture hadn't claimed it first. "No broken hearts," he promised, not quite knowing just what he meant. Or what she meant.
Jennifer nodded quickly. "Okay," she whispered heavily. "Well you should know a few things first." She grinned, self-consciously. Pulled back. "Only fair for you to know. I act, and, stuff. As a hobby. Sort of, uhm. Erotic dancing type stuff."
"That's something I should know?" Troy asked, something weird rolling around in his gut, now. 
She took a breath and huffed a little, patting his shoulder heavily. "Yeah. Before we think of this as more than kissing on a beach." Jennifer smiled worriedly, then. "It wouldn't be fair to spring that on you out of nowhere, later. And you should probably also know I tend to be a bit. Open. In my relationships."
Open relationships? He expected to feel jealousy. And he did, a little. Not so much it mattered. "That's okay with me." Troy bit his lip lightly. "I'm not, but, uh. I've never really thought about it much."
"It's nothing dirty. I mean it's not like I'm unfaithful or a slut, I just." She picked at his shirt again, calmer. "I don't do real well when guys get possessive." She took a sharp breath, staring at his chest. "I don't do real well when I get possessive." Whatever thought she was having passed, and she smiled up at him. "So is there anything you want to tell me?"
Troy hesitated. He glanced down. "Well. It's not like I've had a lot of experience with this. But, uh. I'm pretty much dead to the world when I'm caught up in something. Not always the nicest guy." He offered a slightly unhappy smile. "My work's important to me."
"That's okay," Jennifer said, patting his chest. "It just means you know who you are. And I can deal with that.  But, uh," she breathed, winding her fingers into his shirt and pulling him close again. "I'm interested in you. And I kinda think you're interested in me. That about right?"
He felt his ears tense up, start going all hot again. "I am," he admitted. "It's kind of difficult not to be."
Jennifer grinned hesitantly. "So, maybe we can try it. An on again off again sort of thing." She took a deep breath, tried to smile. She released his shirt, snaking her arm back around him. "When you're in town. If you like."
"I like." He dipped his head close to hers, pressed his lips to hers until he felt her hot tongue in his mouth. She moaned, just a little, before pulling back bit by bit, kissing him gently on the side of the snout.
"You need to come and see my show, Troy," she said slowly, voice quiet. Intimate. "Before you decide. It's nothing bad, just, a bit of fun. Helps me deal."
"Helps you deal?"
She looked up at him, along the line of her muzzle. "Love and sex are very related, when you do them right. It helps me... express myself. Think about the good things. It's important to me. And it's not really fair for me to get involved with you if you don't know about it. If it came up later it might hurt."
Troy bobbed his head uncertainly. He had a weird feeling she'd let him through some kind of barrier. Had he done the same with her? He didn't quite know.
"So I have a gig for that tonight," she said, glancing at her wristwatch. "But there's still a couple of hours, so..." She bit her lip lightly. 
"So maybe I can kiss you again?" Troy asked, bowing his head closer to hers.
She smiled. "Yeah."
"Okay."
The sand felt warm through the towels. Her lips were positively burning.

//: City of San Iadras. Spirit of '67 adult club/theatre.

Troy had stopped by Florence and Dallas's after Jennifer had stepped into her cab at six. She'd given him a key to get into her apartment, but snooping around there without her felt like a bad idea. So Florence had lent him a few things to wear, and they'd let him use the shower.
He'd helped Dallas with a section of his dissertation in astronomy, but his heart hadn't been in it. Too absorbed with thinking about Jennifer. She was a strange mix of strong and soft.
Eventually he'd taken a cab, telling Dallas to check with Denver on the math, and he spent his time waiting to get through the traffic fidgeting with the card Jennifer had given him for the address. It was interactive, and had a directory listing for the club, along with a short piece of promotional material.
By the time the cab dinged and let Troy out onto the sidewalk, he'd spent a little time looking the place up on his cell phone. The place seemed to be a mix of retro styles mingled with a blunt openness about sexuality, along with such oddities as live theatre and music. 
Of course there were darker rumours, but those seemed to be just that. Rumours.
He took his place in the queues outside, staring up at the building. A facade with a rounded centrepiece, with 'the Spirit of '67' printed in luminous red neon tubes, throwing pink backlight against the rest of the building's facade. Banks of partly shaded light bulbs were animated, flicking on and off to show plain text ads for various shows. 
It was archaic, quaint. Troy flicked the business card against his fingertips while he shuffled along, curling his tail lightly to one side to avoid taking up too much space in line. The others in the queue were mostly human, as usual, though here and there another fur stood with others in couples, or mixed in with small groups.
It felt a little isolating, but no one tried to strike up conversation with him in the queue, though he heard some laughter. Finally he left the queue, moving up in front of one of the ticket stalls. Troy found himself vaguely shocked to be confronted with a human face behind the glass, instead of the console he'd expected.
"Good evening sir. Here for the performance of My Fur Lady?"
"Ah, no, I think I need a general admittance? I was invited by a friend."
The teller nodded, "I see, sir. Your name?"
"Troy Salcedo."
"Yes," the teller nodded rapidly, slipping a plastic tag through a recessed slide beneath the glass. "You'll want the main clubroom, enjoy your evening."
Troy picked up the tag with a nod. "Ah, thank you." He stepped aside, looking the tag over. A fairly simple piece of electronics emblazoned with '67'. If it even was electronic. He wasn't sure, it might've just been a moulded chunk of plastic.
The doorman beside the doors nodded politely as Troy stepped through to the lobby. White walls, plush brown carpets which meshed with the wood grained panelling. It might've been cheap foamed ceramic, of course, but there was too much money here for that.

The usual routine for a Saturday evening rolled into motion. A few last minute patrons were admitted into the main clubroom of the Spirit of '67 and were led to one of the few remaining free tables by the club waitresses. They were all pretty young women, wearing a variety of costumes which tended to integrate animal ears and tails.
The lights within the main clubroom slowly began to dim, with just a little back lighting throwing the nude sculptures around the edges of the room into silhouette. The club waitresses started to deliver the last round of drinks, carefully lifting the glasses from their trays and settling them in front of the patrons.
Troy shook his head lightly at the offer of a refill, having been nursing a soda water and lime for the past few minutes.
Bit by bit the room sank into darkness, until the last of the waitresses slipped through the finely carved doors and into the back rooms.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," an announcer droned. "Miss Elle Dante. As usual, a quiet audience tonight please. "
Troy blinked a little as a spotlight snapped on, illuminating the main stage with its heavy velvet curtains. Dante? Her stage name, probably.
"Sometimes," a husky woman's voice - Jennifer's voice - whispered, boosted by speakers. "Sometimes, a look, is just a look."
She slipped through the velvet curtains, moving them aside with one hand, her yellow-brown fur bright under the lights. "A look across a crowded room, between strangers," she breathed into a slim pen microphone, running one hand along the dress she wore, dark scarlet and silk.
The spotlight followed her as she stepped down from the stage, along the sidesteps. The dress was open from the base of her tail, up along her back and up to the shoulder straps holding the dress in place. She turned her back to the audience, revealing, as she turned, that the tiger-like stripes starting at the tip of her short, blunt tail continued up to just beneath her shoulderblades.
She drew a deep breath, causing the stripes in her fur to ripple along her back. She reached up, flipping her red hair over a shoulder, looking off to a side and putting her canid-like muzzle into profile against the white wall. "Sometimes, a look is more than a look," she said, twisting around to glance back over her shoulder into the audience, running a hand down along her thigh, smoothing her dress. "A look across a crowded room, though, between lovers to be..." Her green eyes flashed across the darkened room.
One long moment of eye contact sent shivers along Troy's spine. He tugged at the neck of his shirt, staring up at her.
"That," she said with a heavy breath, "is more than a look. His eyes," she continued, turning to strut around the bottom of the stage on high heeled shoes, built specially for her feet, "his eyes will tell you everything." She stepped back up on stage, trailing her fingers along the lush curtains. "He'll glance away, and you'll know, you'll just know, that he's just a little bit frightened. Scared you'll ignore him, even though you spotted him first. Afraid of how he's going to approach a pretty thing like you." She started swaying from side to side in front of the curtains, flicking her tail out to each side. "Looking at a pretty girl like you, that's not just looking." She bit her lip lightly, turned around slowly, showing her naked back to the audience.
"No." She turned her head again, flicking an ear and reaching up to smooth her hair. "He can't take his eyes off her, my God, he's staring. What will people say? He wants her. Can't he keep his eyes to himself? Can't he go and tell her?" She smiled back across her shoulder, running her fingers through her hair and flicking it behind her shoulder. "He doesn't have to tell you a thing. His look tells you how beautiful you are."
"Then there's that other look," she turned her side to the audience, cocking her hips and stepping forward a little. "That intimate look," she whispered roughly, taking a breath and pulling at the fabric of her dress so that the folds drew taught against her breasts, exposing every curve in profile as she arched her back.  "That long gaze while his eyes wander over your body, while he wonders what it's like kissing you."
She took long breaths that sent her chest heaving, biting her lip lightly, smiling invitingly out at the audience, her eyes sneaking back to that one quiet table where Troy sat. She pouted her lips, as if blowing a kiss. "That look where time stands still." She released the dress, turned to step towards the velvet curtains. "Of course he can't look too long, or they'll all know he can't get his eyes off you." She slipped through the curtains, the spotlight flicking off with a snap. "But what about when there's nobody else but him?"
Quiet, without the lights. Troy wondered whether or not it was already over, nervously taking a quick sip of his drink.
The rustle of the curtains rolling back was overpowering in the dark, then the click of a latch, and a door on stage swung ajar. Bright light spilled through, a narrow slice cutting across the clubroom's ceiling.
Troy's chest tightened.
"When the two of you are alone, he'll look at you differently." There was a flash of red silk behind the door as the performer slipped up to a mirror visible to the audience, watching herself in it. And, Troy realized at the green flash of her eyes, watching the audience.
She held her hands in front of herself, turning her almost nude back to the door, only a little obscured by the doorframe. "He'll almost touch you with his eyes, if he thinks you don't know," she whispered into the mic, swaying again, sending the hem of her dress swinging back and forth.
"He'll start at your shoulders, the curve of your arm." She lifted up an arm, turning it so that the tawny white of its underside was visible in the mirror. She licked her lips. "He'll imagine those arms of yours around him and then he'll start working his way down."
She reached up and slipped the shoulder strap of her dress off, twisting the thin scarlet material around her fingers while she slowly tugged the dress down, holding the front against herself. "His secret thoughts about you will start to bubble up, he'll finally start admitting to himself how much he wants you." Her gaze lowered to her own body, breathing a little fast. She lifted up the mic, turning her nude back to the audience, the soft tawny white fur of her throat and chest exposed in the mirror.
"He'll imagine holding you close, pressing you against him," she breathed, hugging the top of her dress to herself, slowly letting it sink, sinuously rocking her hips from side to side, letting the slack in the dress pull it down from, revealing her tiger-striped rear, the dark stripes stretching down her thighs. The open back of her dress drifted down to her knees. "He'll think of touching you."
She let the front of her dress slide down in her hands, over the gentle curves of her breasts, till she stopped it at her hips, staring at herself in the mirror, staring at her own white-furred curves, the tan flesh of her nipples. "He'll want to find out where you feel soft," She tossed her head, flinging her hair across her chest. She reached up with one hand, lightly cupping her own breast. She pushed down hard, flattening it out around her fingers, and she groaned hard, strands of hair swaying across her chest.
She dragged her hand down her body, a slight line trailing her touch, tan flesh revealed where her fur was parted. "Where you feel firm." Her hand trailed down across her taut stomach, then underneath the dress she held against her body, as if she were touching herself somewhere more intimate, and she moaned, with an almost urgent yip to her voice, "And where you feel hot."
She swallowed in gulps of air, before backing away from the mirror, away from the door, out of view. "And if he can't see, he'll go wild," she groaned, as first one bare leg, then the other unfolded along the ground to extend out into the doorway's line of sight. 
The heels of her shoes clicked as she braced herself against the ground, her legs flexed as if she were arching her body up off the stage floor. "Because," she moaned, breath heavy, "he has to imagine what it is you're doing." Her knees parted, and a slightly wet sound slipped over the speakers. "Are you laying there, thinking of him?" Her breathing was rhythmic with the flexes of her legs. She groaned, long and loud. With an almost wanting whine she asked, "Are you desperate for him to do everything he imagines?"
Suddenly she kicked at the door, and it slammed shut. The audience was bathed in darkness again, but still her heavy breathing could be heard, quickening in pace until her voice rose, almost sonorous, in a quick series of almost agonised, wailing, needful yelps.
Her breath slowed, and she once again whispered, voice a husky wheeze, "I am. I've been imagining a lot of things to do to him, too."
A moment passed until the sound of her breathing faded. Troy dry swallowed, trying to remember how to breathe while the lights came up. 
"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen." The announcer again. "As usual tips for Miss Dante may be forwarded to her through the club waitresses. Those of you who wish to attend My Fur Lady may be interested in joining some of the cast for drinks in the upper lounge prior to the performance. My Fur Lady is an adaptation of the antique and multiple Tony Award winning Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, featuring Christine McCall as Eliza Doolittle and Richard Edwards as Henry Higgins, with the curtain rising tonight at ten thirty."
Troy tensed his ears, trying to make sense of what he'd heard. He couldn't. He was fixated on what he remembered. From just a few minutes ago, and last night. He shut his eyes, taking deep breaths. Jennifer. Up on that stage. Through that door. Through her bedroom door. Part of him was aroused. Part of him disturbed.
Briefly, he glanced around. The audience was mainly made up of men, obviously. But there were women here and there. Not many furs. Troy dry swallowed reflexively. He shut his eyes briefly, trying to block out the realization that he'd felt almost as if he were alone with her in the darkness. But he hadn't been. He didn't know how that made him feel. Jealous? The bitter taste in his mouth didn't last long. Her eyes, after all, had met with his. She'd been kissing him on the beach, not these other men. 
There was a click of paper on the marble surface of his table, and Troy looked up with a blink. A butler, dressed with a fox mask and with a well made matching faux tail was standing, waiting beside the table. He'd left a neat card, with the kind of matte finish that meant real paper, not smart, lay there.

To the recipient.
Miss Dante desires your presence at the side exit at ten thirty.
The vulpine butler will show the way.

The writing on the card was slightly depressed, the ink damp. It looked almost handwritten, although by a skilled calligrapher. 
"Ah?" Troy asked, looking up at the butler and his mask, starting to stand.
The butler merely tapped his wrist lightly 
Troy glanced at his own wrist, still just ten fifteen. "Oh, uhm," Troy took a swallow of his drink, picking up the card. He flicked out his tail and pulled it from the gap in the seat's back, shifting to sit on the seat's edge. 
He took another sip of his soda water and lime, staring at his hands. His empty hands. 
"I, uh. I need to get her something, don't I? Flowers?"
The vulpine butler paused a moment, tapping the chin of his mask, before nodding approvingly. The butler led Troy away, through into the lobby and into a dimly lit gift shop. He looked over buckets of fresh cut flowers to one side of the small place, presumably for men returning home to wives, or for those wanting to give their partner on a night out something special, but the butler drew Troy's attention with a click of his fingers.
The butler tapped a small rounded box he'd brought up to place on the counter with his gloved fingers. The butler opened it, displaying a thin silver necklace. 
"Oh, uh..." Troy hesitated.
The Vulpine butler picked it up, body language changing almost immediately from the neutral masculinity he'd held to something altogether more feminine, posing like a woman on a film poster, lifting the necklace up as though he were wearing it.
Troy blinked as the Vulpine butler then held a hand to his throat, as though he were a flattered woman, shoulders shifting as though with a dramatic - if silent - impassioned sigh. 
It was faintly ludicrous to watch the butler mime, but it got the message across. Troy smiled, a little uneasily. "So, uh. You think she'd like that."
The Vulpine butler nodded emphatically, setting the necklace down again. 
The price printed on a ribbon that had been around the box was a little expensive. Troy bit his lip. He wasn't paying for a hotel room. "So, uhm. How do you think she'd feel about a pendant?"

Jennifer stood in the darkness outside, taking deep sniffs of the night air beside the secluded side exit, silhouetted by a street lamp's illumination. Her eartips were almost quivering with tension. Stress. She passed her purse from hand to hand, finally slung it over a shoulder. She held her tail stiffly out at an angle, shifted her weight from foot to foot. 
She must've heard his footsteps across the paving to get to her, but she didn't look up. Her shoulders were bare, wearing the halter top and shorts she'd had on that morning. Even with fur, the night was probably colder than shorts and a shirt could help. Jennifer seemed cold, fragile.
Troy slipped off his - Florence's - jacket, and gently settled it over her shoulders.
The fur across the back of her neck visibly bristled and she tensed a moment, looking up at him while he pulled the jacket straight across her shoulders. "So, um. What'd you think?"
Troy ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth, trying not to dry swallow again, not to give in to the nervous reflex. "It scared me a little," he admitted.
"Scared you?" Jennifer searched his eyes carefully, nervously. 
Troy glanced down at the ground, biting his lip. He swashed his tail from side to side in the darkness, before blurting, "I'm afraid."
Jennifer moved closer, carefully, eyes wide. "Why?"
"I don't know," Troy concluded after helpless moments. He dry swallowed. "Am I being seduced, am I falling prey to lust?" Troy forced down a breath.
She gnawed her lip. "Would that matter?"
"I'd have to question my motives. Then I saw you standing out here, cold and fragile, and..." Troy trailed off, unable to put two words together.
She put her hand on his chest, pulled close. "Troy. I'm scared too." Jennifer's ears flicked lightly, still so tense. "I took you home to push away the lonely hours. That didn't work out quite how I'd planned, and then you told me you love me, and then you were nice to me, and, and." She took a shaky breath. "That's really hard for me to deal with, okay? If that's how this is going to be, I need to know that's not going to change because I get up on a stage. Because I am how I am. "
Troy took her hands lightly in his own. He felt like he couldn't speak, but the desperate look in her eyes forced him to. "What I meant to say, is, seeing you out here, now, reminds me why I fell for you the second I saw you."
She leaned closer to him, squeezing his hands tight. "Why?"
"You were the oldest one."
"What do you mean?"
"When I first saw you, you were dealing with your sisters, I think. And I was reflecting on how hard it is to be the older sibling. I mean, we're all clones, but... we're the ones who have to be strong." Troy dipped his gaze back down, sipping at the air to stay calm. "It's hard, because there's just nobody to talk to. The others can talk to you about their problems, you can help them. But there's no one there for you." 
She watched him curiously for a long moment. "I know exactly what you mean," she said, voice a little stronger.
"We're both like that," Troy said finally, taking her hands again. He dropped his gaze, watching the ground, their feet. "I think that's when I fell in love with you. Not last night when you fed me peanut butter, not on the beach when you kissed me. I fell for you when I realized that in some small way, I wasn't the only one like this. Alone and apart."
Jennifer nodded. She drew close, lay her head on his shoulder, settling down. She took one quivering breath, closed her eyes. "We don't have to be alone. Forgive me for seducing you?"
He hadn't really minded that. It had been almost flattering. He kissed her hair. "Forgive me for watching you?"
She pressed her hands against his chest, leaned up and pushed her mouth against his until he yielded. Maybe she hadn't minded, either. "Deal."

//: City of San Iadras. 'Uptown' district.

Jennifer's back thumped into her front door, her arms around Troy's neck, her purse slack in one hand, the tag of the purse's zip in the other.
He pushed her against the door, needfully pressing his lips to her face, the side of her snout, her ear, her neck.
"Keys," she grunted, slapping her purse against Troy's back.
He pulled back long enough for her to fish her keys out and jam the green plastic one against the reader. She backed through the door as it opened, pulled Troy through by the shirt. Pushed him back against it when it closed, forced her lips against his in a quick kiss. She groped for the control panel in the dark, tagged the light switch, dialling them down from full to something a little less bright, a little more intimate.
"Jesus," Troy whispered, panting for breath. 
She pulled at the neck strap of her halter top, trying to pull her head through, but his jacket was in the way.
"Whoah, whoah," Troy panted, tugging insistently at her shoulders, coaxing her out of the jacket. He pulled it off her and dropped it, everything in the pockets clattering on the floor, and she ducked in close, pulling open the buttons of his shirt one by one. 
She pulled the tucked in hem of his shirt out from his pants, pushing the folds back while burying her face in his chest, licking at his nipple, making him shudder with chills along his spine. Jennifer's hands joined the chills on his spine, while her hot tongue lapped across his fur. Her exploring hands found little hard edges of plastic under the skin beside his vertebrae, and she pulled her head back, glancing at him questioningly.
"Where the sockets used to be," he breathed, shrugging his shoulders and trying to pull the shirt off. "Doesn't matter."
Jennifer nodded and pushed him back against the door before he'd finished, yanking the sleeves down to trap his hands. She crouched, tail slashing from side to side, pulling at the button and zip of his pants, dragging them down just a few inches till they hung from the tail loop, shoving his boxers down with them.
"Uhm." Troy took a shaking breath, watching her fold her hands over his erect penis, rubbing her palms along his smooth flesh. She stuck out her tongue and lapped at the head, sending Troy into another fit of shivers, legs shaking. "Jesus."
She closed her wet, hot mouth over him, running the tip of her tongue along his cock's underside. She pulled back before he could do more than groan, licking her lips. "Get your shoes off," she grinned, pulling back to work her media centre's control.
He shook his head, gasping for breath. Her saliva on his penis began to cool, chilling him. It only made him harder. He shook off his shirt and bent over, heaving for breath while pulling at his laces. By the time he got his pants off, she had the music on, a soft rolling sound, like electronic waves.
Jennifer pulled her shirt over her head, tossed it aside. She put her feet apart, gyrating side to side, clutching at her hair to smooth it out for a moment, sparing only a brief glance to make sure he was watching. She put her hands to her shorts, pulling her legs together and shoving hard, till they stretched over her hips and popped down, revealing black lace panties, only to have her shorts catch on her sandals. She struggled, fell backwards onto the couch. "Fuck, my tail," she grunted, then giggled. "That never happens on stage."
Troy stepped closer, kneeling beside her, he started unbuckling the sandals. He pulled one free, yanked down the leg of her shorts and closed the fingers of his right hand over her toes. He laced his fingers between them, squeezed lightly.
She lifted her leg, clenching her toes and dragging his hand with her, and she swept her extended leg to a side, spreading her legs, grinning while steadying herself against the couch.
He pulled his hand free, running it along the underside of her leg, across the lowest tiger stripes on the back of her thigh, then her firm buttock, the elastic edge of her panties. She grasped at his hand, pulled it against her crotch, already damp. Troy ran his fingers over the silky fabric, hard, and she groaned.
Jennifer dropped her leg down beside Troy's head, crooking her knee over his shoulder, and flapped her other foot, still entangled with shorts and sandal, against his chest. While he pulled them off, she shifted closer to him on the couch, squirming her panties down inch by inch.
"Wanna lick me a little?" she offered, biting her lip hopefully.
Troy nodded, dipping his head towards her crotch while she pulled the front of her panties down. She'd dyed her fur in to seem like trimmed red pubic hair, left a few curls longer than the almost creamy white fur over her labia. He pressed his tongue to the meeting arch between her legs, where the line of her slit began, and she whimpered.
Hot and wet, she grunted, splaying her fingers against herself, close to his nose, and she parted herself, revealing soft and wet pink flesh.
He ran his tongue over her clit, tasting her. The taste was strange, different, altogether her in the same way her scent was. He leaned closer, placing his hands to either side and stretching her open with either of his thumbs while he lapped at her.
Jennifer slumped back with a whimper, clawing at the couch cushions. She rubbed the sides of his head with her thighs with each shudder, moaning at him with each gentle probe of his tongue.
He pushed her thighs a little further apart, and she whimpered.
"Hold on, you'll stretch 'em," Jennifer gasped.
Troy pulled back, blinking a little, keeping his hands on her, drawing them along her thighs.
She pulled her leg off Troy's shoulder, pushed her knees together, and slid off her panties, pushing them under Troy's hands and he pulled them off entirely, dropping them on a corner table.
"Come on, sit down." Jennifer reached forward, running her hands over his sides until she simply dragged him up onto the sofa, shoved him a little roughly till he was seated, tail caught against a padded hollow in the back board. She leaned close, bit at his neck, grinding her teeth in his fur.
"Christ," Troy breathed, leaning his head to one side, leaving his neck open to her.
She slid her nude body over his, pushing herself off the couch with her hands, feet to either side of his. Her hair hung limp in front of her face, and she paused, flipping it back with a hand. "Like what you see?" she asked, reaching down to stroke his erection, then pushing back to stand in front of him, cupping a breast with her hand, kneading herself.
"How couldn't I?" Troy replied between gulps of air, watching the way she twisted in front of him. She sat on his knee, grinding herself against his leg, and he felt her, hot and wet.
Jennifer felt him too, hard and waiting, his penis pressing against the side of her tail. She pushed her hands down against his knee, lifting herself up, and she scooched back, sitting on his lap side-saddle, his penis held flat by the side of her ass, and she shifted herself with careful little pushes until her tail lay across his hip.
She reached down, pulling the his length up against her crotch.
Troy groaned, leaning his lips against her shoulder, breathing hard against her fur. He breathed faster, from the touch of her fingers, from the touch of her. She glanced over her shoulder at him, watching every little flicker on his face while she eased down on him. Slipping him, into her. He felt the walls of her vagina clench down, a tight warmth, a hot friction that became more insistent as she started jogging herself against him, pushing with one hand against his hip to lift herself in the slightly awkward position necessitated by tails.
Jennifer moved her hand from his side, slowing, and dragged his hands, one by one, over her vagina, tight around him. She squeezed his balls gently, starting a gentle bounce that made Troy want to yelp. She lolled her head back, with a whimper.
He ran his fingers over her soft flesh, until he found the slight little knot that made her shiver against his cock, made her moan all the louder. His fingertips trailed over the insignificant little line that separated her from him, he felt the stretching of her flesh as she moved, faster and faster.
"Ahh, oh God," she wheezed, shifting one of her knees over slightly, squeezing Troy's hands against her crotch, tightening down on him inside her.
He leaned forward, pressing his chest against her back and side, kissed the back of her neck, the side, trailed his tongue in her fur even as heat boiled up inside him. Then, as he started shuddering, he bit her fur with a grunt, breath coming in hot gasps. It was a shiver, a tingle, a muted shockwave through him.
Jennifer reached down to his suddenly still hands, grinding them into herself with a fast yelp, shuddering, squeezing, while an extra warm wetness began to flow over their linked fingers, their linked bodies. An almost painful squeeze, a second high pitched yelp, her wheezing breath fast, then slow and satisfied.
Troy kissed the back of her neck, chest heaving.
She bent forward and Troy ran his slightly sticky hands over her back, across the light and dark pattern of the tiger stripes beneath her shoulders. She picked up her shorts, holding the rough fabric against their genitals while she gingerly raised herself, wiping the two of them clean.
The rough cloth on Troy's penis made it feel itchy, hot. Troy kept panting for breath, grasping her hips lightly.
Jennifer leaned back, kissing him gently on the side of the snout. "Let me go and get something into the oven for us to eat and, and then I'll be back."
Troy nodded mutely, letting his arms slip from her, content to concentrate on pulling in air while she padded off lightly, a spring in her step, her tail swaying from side to side.
He rubbed his fingers together, the fur between his finger pads a little sticky. It didn't matter. He got up, trailing after Jennifer, paused to pick up Florence's jacket.
She pulled a couple of packages out, setting them on the counter. She moved with a strange grace, her nude body almost seeming to flow from position to position as she stripped off the package labels and let the cooker scan them before closing the oven doors. 
Jennifer straightened, glanced back at him. She leaned back on the kitchen bar, almost posing. She rolled a shoulder back primly, reaching up lightly to straighten out her hair, tucking some of it behind her ear, some back over her shoulder. 
Troy set the jacket down over the bar, dipping his gaze lightly, past her flat stomach, the curl of fur between her legs, her knees, her calves. Finally, he stared down at the jacket on the counter for a moment and bit his lip. 
"See, that's what I was talking about," she offered, crossing her legs demurely while leaning back against a countertop, folding her arms across her breasts. She grinned. "That is that look that tells me you're crazy about me, you want to touch me in every little place. Be... touched. "
He looked up at the ceiling, ears flushing hot. He couldn't help but smile. "You read minds too?"
"Maybe," she replied, stepping around the bar,  pressing the flats of her hands against the sides of her breasts, dipping her nose to lick awkwardly at the cleavage between them. "Maybe you want me like this," Jennifer said, before turning slightly, sliding herself up onto the countertop, back to him, her tail thumping against the plastic surface. She stretched out one leg to brace herself against the fridge, leaning her head back slowly, until Troy could make out the tips of her breasts. She ran her hands over her stomach, peering up at Troy, upsidedown, back arched. "Or like this?" she asked, grinning.
"Is that in the Kama Sutra?" he asked with a quirked eyebrow, pulling a slim box from his jacket.
"We could put it there," she offered, straightening out and glancing back at him. "What've you got there?"
"I, uh. I got something for you." Troy held it out, leaning his hip on the bar lightly.
Jennifer hopped down, turning around to take it. "René put you up to this, didn't he?"
"The butler?"
"Mhmm. He's so material. Not that I'm complaining!"
"I just wanted to get you something. He helped me decide on what, that's all."
She lifted the necklace up, either end in her fingertips. It was silver, with a shining charm hanging from it's centre. Jennifer blinked slowly, then looked up at Troy with wide eyes. She held out the ends of the necklace. "Put it on?"
Troy took the necklace, waited until Jennifer pulled up her hair, eyes lightly shut. She turned her back to him, and he slipped the necklace around her neck. His fingertips brushed against the fur at her throat, and she took in one sharp breath. Even as he struggled to get the tiny clasp shut without trapping a few errant wisps of his own fur, or hers, she leaned her body back against his, grinding her shoulders into his chest contentedly.
He kissed the side of her neck, putting his arms around her when he was done. She lifted up the charm, and it sparkled a little in the dim light. A small silver image of the sun, with waving rays emanating from the edge. "Sunshine," she whispered.
"Because it's the best part of the beach," Troy replied, closing his eyes and burying kisses into her shoulder. "Next to the company."
She lay her hands over his, and lightly guided his right hand over her breast.
He squeezed it lightly, feeling her nipple harden against his hand.
"Bedroom or couch?" she asked, taking whimpering breaths.
"What about the food?" he breathed hotly in her ear.
She moaned, tail thwacking into the inner side of his leg. "Food later. Fuck now."

She pulled his head to her breasts, he licked her nipples while she whispered contentment to him. Licked his way down the length of her body, and then she yelped it. She ran her hand along the length of his tail while nipping at his stomach, sending electric shivers of desire through him.
She pushed him down into her bed and straddled him, bobbing on him with an agonizingly slow pace, reached down to part her labia, leaning back and forcing him to watch their union. He pushed her up against the wall of her shower door, the fur across her breasts leaving patterns in the glass while she lifted her tail for him, each thrust he made rattling the doors. They massaged each other with the showerheads, she pulled him close afterward and licked at his penis till it firmed, and she had him on the rug of her apartment floor.
He listened to her urgings, nibbling at the edge of her ears, her back shoved against his chest while he dipped his fingers in her while they lay together. While she waited for him to firm up again she sat him on the couch and settled on the coffee table, legs spread, using a vibrator to bring herself to ecstasy. Like torture, until he had to have her again, ramming himself into her until they couldn't speak anymore.
She pushed his hands against the headboard of her bed and writhed against him in a weird, fiery dance.
He kissed her again and again, told her that he loved her.
She bit into his fur, grazed her teeth against his throat, whispered insistent things in his ear and purred her pleasure to him.
They ate together, off each other.
They ended up in the shower again, pressing against each other under the spray and the drying air.
Eventually he pulled a pair of shorts on and she teased him for it, fondled him through the fabric. He kissed her, but they managed to fall asleep. Eventually, anyway.

"A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy. Guy Fawkes said that."
Pressed tablets of neon pink powder had been crushed underfoot, had been smeared across the floor.
"Why the hell did they do that? Why? I had to kill him! There wasn't any reason!"
Blood pulsed from an open wound, with every beat of a dying heart.
"This research is important." A dull pink smile behind shining spectacles. "You want to help your brothers, don't you?"
"Can you find me a dictation programme? Maybe I can, maybe I can just speak it. God, am I bleeding again?" 
Lips drawn back, nose sharply pointed and poking into the air like a dead rat's, foreteeth bared, eyes dry as sin. Sizzle of burning flesh. Pain of cut flesh.
"I don't want to die. I've got cancer, I know that. I just don't want to die. Please, Troy... Please..."
It's wet and rubbery and full of capillaries and still viable and the wiring's wrong so it feels like sick in the back of the throat when it gets picked up but it's viable it's still alive he isn't alive but it might save me anyway and-
"Ain't that crazy? From the perspective of the ladder, the shed's only three feet long. It can't fit inside. But from the shed's, the ladder's only-" Coughing. Wet coughing.
A dull smile. A shrug. "You're helping your brothers."
"W-Where's Springfield? Where'd they take Springfield?"
-dust in the eye little motes of dust and the saw goes on and the red speckles slowly settle on the white but there are no tears no blinking-
"A dangerous remedy. Don't that fucking beat all?" Swallow the pills one by one by one by one by one by one...
-make the cut open the wound put the optics inside take out mine put in his pour in the stem cells- "You're doing the procedure very well, Troy." -go away don't choose me I'm eight I'm fucking eight years old- "Berlin would be proud."  -it's not my fucking liver it's not my fucking liver it's too small it's empty it's hollow it's in me I had to take it out and put it in me and not him so I can live but it's dead inside me dead like Berlin- "If you keep up this good work, you can help your brothers."  -WHY DIDN'T YOU CLOSE HIS FUCKING EYES?! WHY DIDN'T YOU-

Can't breathe. Can't breathe. Troy rolled out of bed,  left arm tangling in the blankets. For a second it hurts, it hurts and it sickens and it burns and-
"Troy?"
His feet thumped against the bedroom floor, his tail lashing around panickedly. Bile in his throat, tears blurring his vision. The bedroom door's open. They made love last night and the door's still open. But it happened not three miles away and- 
Troy pulled his hands to his mouth and raced away, away, in a second he was hunching over the toilet bowl and his stomach was tearing itself apart and little green floods of goop were pouring out of his mouth and he was crying and it hurt and, and, and-
And Jennifer touched a towel lightly to his mouth, wiping his face clean, his fur dry, dabbing at his eyes. He couldn't get out anything more than a squeak, ridiculously low. Real mice didn't make that noise. But he wasn't a mouse. Not really. He just looked like one and had one's genes and one's tail but not one's hand and-
"Shh, Shhh, Troy, it's okay. It's okay Troy, it's-"
He couldn't hear her, his stomach had found something else to throw up, until that ran dry. He tugged at the flesh of his left wrist, scrabbling at it until he found the locking ring, wrenching it open with the god-awful electric snap it gave him when he didn't find the switch in his head but he didn't want that he never wanted anything in his head, they never asked they just-
He flung the suddenly limp hand away, cradling what was left of his arm, gasping for breath, tail wrapped around his knees as he fell back against her, sobbing.
"Shhh." Jennifer kissed him gently. "It's okay now."
Troy concentrated on breathing. One. Two. Thre-
Troy hunched back against the toilet bowl. It felt sick inside him. Sick and twisted and dead and wrong and he felt her hand on his back. She folded over the towel, and wiped at his tears. She helped him blow his nose in it, and after a few abortive attempts he managed to count his breaths all the way up to ten.
"You want to talk about it, sweetie?"
No. "Yes."

"- and they didn't have any reason to do it, I checked the research documents, they didn't even take any fucking notes they didn't learn anything they just..."
She kissed his ear, putting her arm around him. 
The robe made her look pretty. It was an absurd thought, but it was true.
"Shhh. Slow down."
Troy took a breath. "They just, they just came in one day. And they took Lagos, and cut off his ears. He's got cosmetics now, and they told us they needed tissue, but, but... Oh God he's dead he died too, they just shoved antibiotics into us and his immune system died and he got the fucking flu and he died and his ears they just tossed them in the incinerator and-" Troy felt bile in the back of his throat.
Jennifer blinked away tears of her own, rubbing his back gently. "It's alright, Troy. It's long gone. It can't hurt you anymore."
"It hurts me every day," he whimpered, eyes cold and wet with tears.
She pulled close, squeezing her arms around him.
"They gave us a choice of things to study. I picked medicine, I wanted to please them so maybe they'd leave me and my brothers alone." Troy swallowed. His mouth still felt dirty. "They told us Berlin had gotten Leukaemia. They took off my arm and wired me into this machine and, and told me to, to, dissect him. But-"
She dabbed away his tears.
"-it's my fault because I didn't say anything but I checked and he didn't have anaemia and that's the first fucking thing that happens with leukaemia and then liver damage and Berlin was studying literature and they didn't like that, and he didn't have leukaemia they killed him to see what the hell I'd do - they killed him because of me so it's like I killed him because I got sick and I stuck his liver in me and it's it's its..." Troy forced himself to slow down at the touch of her hand on the back of his head, forced himself to stop clawing at the fur that hid all those scars so very, very well. 
She kissed him gently.
He held her tightly.
"Occasionally," she started, "one comes across parents who show no interest at all in their children, and these of course are far worse than the doting ones. Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood were two such-"
Troy couldn't remember the story. He could remember the name of the little girl, Matilda, but he couldn't tell you who she was or what she did other than love reading.
What Troy did remember, what he remembered best of all, was Jennifer's warmth as he lay against her on her couch in San Iadras, just three miles from the labs, at four AM one Sunday morning.

//: Flying North.

Troy's phone beeped. It took him a moment to realize he should answer it, because the ring sounded different to his old phone. 
He heard his own voice, but without saying anything. "Troy? It's Turin."
"Good morning, Turin. Troy. How're you?"
"Bad headache. But, uh, Christ. You need me to take you to the airport?"
Troy couldn't help but smile. "Been in the air for about fifteen minutes. A friend dropped me off."
"Crap! Sorry, Troy. Just a bit disorganised."  There was a long pause. "Damn headache."
"Take yourself to a doctor tomorrow, Turin."
"I'll be fine, just need some aspirin."
"Seriously. "
"Okay, okay. Look, I'm sorry I ditched that Rutherman woman on you Friday, I bet you wanted to get out of there, huh?"
Troy paused, had to think for a moment. Rutherman. The frightening woman at the conference. He had. He'd wanted to go and get a cab and get out of there. But what if he had ditched early? "Things worked out okay."
"Well, Alright. Sorry about all that."
"It's okay."
"Okay. I'll call you in the week." 
Troy nodded just slightly. "Okay. Take yourself to a doctor. Maybe take Dallas with you, he's not talking about something, I think his ankle's up again."
"I will. Bye."
Troy keyed off the call, ignoring the hmmph of the passenger in the seat behind him. It was a lot easier to ignore him than try to look at him, at any rate. Troy grimaced, twisting around in his seat to try and find a way to sit comfortably without crushing his tail against one of the arm rests.
Glancing at his phone to check the call time, he noticed that the wallpaper had been changed to text. He cleared the menus and read:

To remember me by: Main/Media/Girlfriend

Troy blinked. Girlfriend, was it? He shifted over to open the directory, picked out the file inside.
"Hey Troy," a voice played, image twisting around to show Jennifer. She grinned at the camera. "I noticed your new phone has a camera, and, you're still asleep," she continued, twisting the phone about briefly to show Troy's own black-furred backside curled up on Jennifer's bed, light shining in through the window.
She had seemed a little... what, perky when he'd finally woken up after getting back to sleep?
"And I'm awake, aaaand..." She held up the purple length of the vibrator she'd had out last night, hitching her thumb through the band of her panties. "Maybe this'll help you not forget about me while you're working?"
He tilted his head at first, blinking at the phone. Then he realized where he was, and he desperately thumbed around to try and find the volume control, the stop, the-
The passenger in the seat beside him glanced once at the sound of a groan. Lifted an eyebrow disapprovingly.
Troy shut off his phone, squeezing his eyes shut, ears burning hot with embarrassment. He dry swallowed, pushed his phone away very firmly, and started scheming some way to beg, borrow or steal his way to the next conference in San Iadras.
He wouldn't forget about Jennifer. 
He couldn't.