CHAPTER
 1

As you stagger home from the riot, your best friend tells you that your 
life is over.

Some background is required for such a statement.

Riots - always started by humans, all the anthros, despite their power, 
are very, very afraid of potentially upsetting the majority - have 
become common in Agrobalia recently. Instead of calls for more rights, a
 contraction of hunting hours, or, for that matter, any meaningful 
desire for sociopolitical change, they're simply outpouring anger at a 
social contract that has treated them as second-class citizens since the
 war ended, and has more recently been treating them like cattle. Such 
events are surprisingly communal; ghetto block parties often act as 
substrate that grows massive human swarms who engage lines of anthro 
state officers mere streets away. The proliferation of social media and 
drone-taken aerial photography has made this rather obvious; various 
front pages regularly promote overhead shots of well-lit, human-crammed 
hab-blocks and condominiums embedded in rings of burned-out commercial 
property, generating the appearance of the humans being some kind of 
encroaching plague that had established beachheads or landing zones in 
the inner city and slowly eaten it alive from the inside out. The 
reality is quite the opposite.

The specific riot you had attended ended rather well, with equal losses 
being taken by both sides. The anthros loose one when they get pulled 
out of the wall; even their impressive size and biological advantages 
are no use against an endless horde of angry humans attacking them from 
every direction. The humans loose people when the anthros pull one 
inside the shield wall. The fact that actual lethal weapons (anthros 
don't count) haven't been used against you implies that their users have
 no desire to kill you, and therefore that said humans aren't instantly 
killed; death, however, is a preferable alternative to being taken, and 
since you still have a condo to loose (not an actual house, mind you; 
houses are for the anthros and the collaborationist humans), you've 
decided to never be on the front lines on nights like this. 
Unfortunately, this did not stop an elephant officer from hurling one of
 said front-liners into you like a beach ball. You are winded, bruised, 
and not moving quickly. This is a problem, since curfew will not wait 
for you. You do not want to die, you do not want to be drained of your 
precious bodily fluids, and you really do not want to be enslaved. 
Unfortunately, your aforementioned childhood friend has other ideas.

Still more background is required.

Human vocal cords and maxillofacial structures are incapable of 
pronouncing her actual name. Courtney is the closest approximation that 
can be made by someone who doesn't have retractable fangs, extra 
sinuses, a snout, or a prehensile tongue.

Courtney is one of the byproducts of the aristocracy (anthrocracy? 
anthrocracy) that had wormed its way into the post-war order. Her 
particular house had, as one of its guiding tenets, a multi-generational
 goal to produce a (rough translation) "ruler species" via 
carefully-controlled political marriages and breeding programs. Courtney
 was born to a tiger industrialist and a lion prince, seen as "too 
large" (one afternoon in a high school janitor's closet, she confessed 
to you in an overly-cautious fashion that she had to be delivered via 
C-section, like it was some great personal shame upon herself) and 
subsequently treated as the family's "problem child", which is to say 
that she, unlike her significantly-smaller and therefore more-"viable" 
siblings, was dumped into the country's public school system at age 8 
and babysat by a well-meaning but naive flunky with a blank check. 
Nobody but you and Travis sat with her at lunch on the first day; what 
you now know to be engrained, deep-seated, and weighty societal 
preferences meant most kids didn't want to interact with the person 
whose parents forced their families into ghettos and whose ancestors ate
 human flesh. Additionally, common child logic dictates that nobody 
wants to sit with the student who's seven feet tall in the third grade. 
You and Travis decided that Minecraft on a tablet the size of your desk 
was more interesting than conforming to such biases. Travis and his 
family fled the country after they were marked as dissidents five years 
later, but the friendship stuck. 

You never got to go over to her house, though. Being outside is 
dangerous at night, but being inside an anthro's house (or, indeed, any 
type of private property they own) is dangerous at any time of day.

You played wingman to Courtney throughout your time in school; she was 
there for you when your parents broke up over a political dispute; you 
were there for her when she had her "major disciplinary incident" (an 
epic brawl between her and some rich, private-schooled daughter of a 
rival family outside the junior high; Courtney lost, but you used a 
steel pipe to put an unfixable bend in that fossa's snout when she 
followed Courtney into the nurse's office to tell her that "hybrid 
aberrations like her should have been aborted"). She was there for you 
when said evil bitch came back in high school; she nearly got fangs into
 you before they were knocked out. You were there for her when she 
violently turned down her pre-arranged marriage to some sleazy, 
second-rate corporate heir of an industrial magnate, meaning she had to 
stay over at someone else's until her mother stopped throwing pots and 
people around and her father stopped clawing the slaves. Of course, that
 had been after your parents were gone and before their mortgage savings
 had run out; if they had seen her with you, they probably would have 
shot her on sight. It was interesting to see someone her size trying to 
fit through doors that barely came past her torso. 

There was enough of a connection between the two of you probably would 
have hooked up in another life or place, but you think (obviously, it 
was never something that came up in discussions between the two of you; 
acknowledging your differences was never comfortable) that Courtney 
realized the power imbalance between the two of you was something that 
would make a relationship non-functional. When your partner is an 
10-foot-tall, superhuman, blood-drinking natural killing machine with a 
weekly allowance more than your annual salary, a penthouse larger than 
your family's home, and a legal right to enslave you if you set foot 
outside at night or on her property, being able to give unbiased consent
 to anything becomes rather difficult, since saying no might result in 
anything from nothing to being raped to being drained of your precious 
bodily fluids. Even if she wasn't actually trying to hurt you, she would
 have had so much power over you in such a situation that even her 
subconscious decisions would negatively affect you. It's best that 
you're apart.

The phone call you received from her has reinforced that view.

Even more background is required.

Courtney trades information about external geopolitics (after all, when 
you can afford powerful computers and encryption software, you can 
bypass the country's security, information barriers, and firewalls 
rather well) for information about what's going on on the "street 
level", so to speak. This is usually done via a private phone; you have 
both learned to swap out SIM cards as often as you brush teeth, because,
 judging by the level of funding they're receiving and certain recent 
high-profile executions, the recently-formed federal-level Internal 
Security taskforce can track even the lowliest human or richest anthro 
if said parties are careless. If she were any other anthro, you wouldn't
 be doing this; you don't know the specifics, but you do know for 
certain (Courtney has told you, though; is that still a measure of the 
truth?) that there are ways for the most well-off anthros to "acquire" 
humans they want, and that giving them information on your whereabouts 
is the first step when it comes to losing everything. Regardless of 
security concerns, it's a welcome diversion from your job at the ammo 
plant; Courtney is the only thing unpredictable in your life, and really
 the only light in it. 

She has no reason to keep calling you. She could join the officer 
graduate school and help put the "human filth" down in the streets 
whenever it overflows. She could be a pundit on the cable networks and 
radio, ranting about how humans are "mentally, physically, and sexually 
inferior" to anthros. She could be second-level managership in her 
family's line of brothels and industrial plants and live in a palatial 
mansion while being attended by shock-collared slaves. You suppose it's 
unfair to think that of her, though; she clearly never stopped thinking 
of you, after all. You wonder what she does for fun; you just plug 
yourself into your crappy laptop (you call it the computato) for hours 
on end on the weekends. Rocket simulators are fun. Reading about space 
programs is fun. It's a shame that you're essentially not allowed to 
have a job related to actual engineering - you just push buttons and fix
 the occasional thing that breaks down.

You really cannot stop thinking about her. It's unhealthy. 

Anyway, here you are, speedwalking down a rapidly-darkening street. 
T-2:00 until the shock of your life.

Your el-cheapo phone rings. You and Courtney have coordinated your calls
 to fall on one of her non-class periods and one of the times when the 
apartment-house-thing you live in is mostly vacant; it just so happens 
that you're not there yet. Usually, the bell, siren, or other 
irritatingly loud noise marking the beginning hunting hours would have 
gone off by now, but since the humans have been getting better at 
hiding, they've stopped marking their beginning - presumably, in order 
to catch people outside.

Today's call is different. 

Usually, it's a little more conversational - you'll call one another by 
name, swap the code phrases that you agreed on last call to avoid 
impersonation by an Internal Security agent, and ask how things are 
going on one another's ends before you "brief" one another on something.
 For you, it's usually something like your life, the latest spacecraft 
design document you dug out of one of the pre-war online archives that 
hasn't been taken down yet (after all, humans can't accomplish anything 
without their benevolent overlords, or so the party line goes), or a 
pattern in munitions distribution you noticed at the factory; for her, 
common themes include a discussion of the latest geopolitical trends, an
 assessment of how safe it would be for you to leave the country at that
 particular point in time, or a rant about how the faculty and students 
at the state academy are horrible and she'd like to render them 
hospitalized or worse. Those last ones are getting disturbingly 
frequent. You wonder if it's all getting to her.

You exchange your code phrases - yours is "zygomorphic to a 
three-sphere"; hers is "the obfuscation of shrimp doorknob production". 
Instead of pleasantries, she immediately cuts to the point.

"Lora's after you."

"What? I thought she's, ah-she was irrelevant. I thought she was in grad
 school by now. She's got time to go after people like me?"

Lora - another name-approximation of a pronunciation that isn't friends 
with human vocal biology - is the fossa who's down some teeth (snap kick
 by Courtney) and a chunk of snout cartilage (surprise attack by you). 
You were under the impression that she had left your lives after 
Courtney fed her her own dentures. Evidently, she has not.

"She's definitely got time; as a matter of fact, she's specifically 
gunning for you, with the full backing of her dear mommy and daddy. 
Frankly, if I were my parents, and someone did to me what we did to her,
 I'd give me the go-ahead too. Anyway, according to a friend of a friend
 of hers, she's currently on vacation, meaning that she can...throw, so 
to speak...about two weeks at you. She's in town with the full loadout -
 all the latest toys, and she's apparently stress-testing a few out for 
her parents. All over the Class-1. She believes I'm a non-factor, 
clearly; she's smart enough that she'd be on the down-low otherwise. I 
imagine she thinks I think you're some kind of pet that I'm not comin - 
that I threw away back in grade school, and that the only reason I 
pushed her stuffing in the second time was because I wanted dibs."

Class-1 is technically a military communications channel, but at this 
point it's essentially social media reserved for anthro social circles. 
Courtney is your sole window into it.

"You think she's going for - "

"Yes, she's absolutely going to try to catch you. I don't know the 
specifics of what she intends to do after that, but they're permanent, 
one way or another. She really, really hates you; while there's no 
by-name mention of you on her accounts, there are direct references to 
"someone who made their life a hell", "childhood abuse by an upstart 
ape" and - get this - "Loranian Gardening Incorporated: Cutting Down 
Tall Poppies since 2035. You know how the folks who are really into the,
 ah, lifestyle [she means human hunting] always give themselves some 
kind of name, or a title? That's hers. It makes ya wince, ya know? She's
 self-styled as some kind of "avenger of the anthro ruling class" who's 
"saving them from the predations of the hordes of those who don't know 
their place in life". Get the picture?"

You get the picture, alright.

"How does getting out of the country look from where you are? We both 
know it's something I've not really considered up until this point, but I
 also haven't had the Agrobalia Corporate Correction Group's little 
princess announcing, uh, *intentions* towards me up until this point, so
 since I'm in this situation, I'm all ears."

"That's a complete non-option. She's been using her channels - you know 
the ones - to try and get a web around you. What'll happen is that your 
passport won't have met standards, or something, or you'll suddenly be 
wanted for a busted taillight, or you'll end up in airport detention 
because of something that gets planted on you - the usual. Personal land
 travel does not work when the entire subcontinent has some variety of 
extradition or legal-enforcement treaty with Agrobalia, and she'll have 
your tickets invalidated if you try to get out on a boat. She's not at 
the point where she has the police helping her on the side - the missive
 hasn't gotten to them yet, despite the fact that all such directives 
are priority ones - but she's already locked down your escape methods 
and now she's going to try to acquire you."

"How would you rate my shitty, second-rate apartment as a bolthole?"

"Good, up until she starts going through your tax records."

"I fudge those."

"...goddamn, humie. You know it would have been off to the auction block
 the second they caught you doing that. In that case, good, up until she
 starts auto-searching the national facial cam database so she can 
figure out where you live. After that, she'll use a bot to go through 
lists of employees at major workplaces until she finds which city you 
live in, and by then the police'll have gotten the memo and they'll be 
looking for you on face-cams."

"You seem to have thought through this an awful lot."

"It's what I would do."

"...uh, 'kay then. D'you know any way whatsoever for me to hide deep? 
Like, get off the grid? I know the human-advocate and anti-slavery 
groups have methods..."

"I do, actually, but you're really not going to like it."

"Why not? Being free is being free. I can live off of a manual-labor 
job, I just need to be careful enough to not go to the same homeless 
shelter too often."

"Aside from the fact that they're shutting those down faster and faster 
these days, well...about that freedom thing."

"What about it? If I'm off the grid, I'm off the grid, right?"

"I was thinking of something different. Not a manual-labor job, not 
going homeless, none of that."

"What something different? This - you're starting to concern me. If this
 avoidance method of yours is so good, then why don't people use it all 
the time?"

"Do you trust me? Like, with everything, including your life?"

"You're really starting to concern me."

"Kalem."

"What? You're being awfully evasive, I'm worried. My plan won't put my 
life on the line - I trust you with yours - I mean your plan *and* your 
life - but -"

"OF COURSE IT WILL, you dunderhead. We both know the folks who try that 
kind of thing last for months at most. Kalem, the way that you stay safe
 is me section-fouring you."

What.

Section Four is the portion of the Agrobalian Constitution that 
legalizes the private capture of, sale of, transfer of between owners, 
and/or enslavement of humans outside between certain hours in the day.

Courtney is talking about enslaving you.

Holy shit. You suddenly feel like your dad died all over again - the 
same sense of the loss of a loved one (in immediate retrospect, yes, you
 do believe you loved Courtney, at least in a platonic kind of way, and 
now in the past-tense), the crushing hopelessness that coincides with a 
sudden lack of options in life (not one, but two wealthy anthros now out
 for you, one way or another) and the overwhelming sensation of a sudden
 loss of control.

"You mean that."

"Yes, Kalem, I mean that. You just said you trust me with your life. 
When this goes through - "

"WHEN? What do you mean WHEN? You ALSO cut yourself off when you were 
describing - Lora -  talking about high school! You said you think she 
thought you thought I was "some kind of pet", and then you cut yourself 
off when you were about to say "coming back for me!"

"Kalem, this - "

"DON'T "KALEM" ME!" I'M NOT DONE! YOU *ALSO* SAID "It'S WhAt I wOuld 
Do." THAT. THAT'S THE KICKER. THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?"

"..."

"..."

"...Courtney, have you actually been PLANNING to do this to me? Like, 
ahead of time?"

"Look, it's not something I want to do *to* you, it's something I - "

"ANSWER."

"...it was a contingency."

"Meaning?"

"Look, we've both seen the way things are going recently. Well, I saw 
all this - the bad stuff - coming back in '30. That was when my mom 
kicked me out - "

"Your parents KICKED YOU OUT? On top of all - THIS - NOW you tell me 
that YOUR PARENTS KICKED YOU OUT?"

"Stop interrupting me. It's not justified anymore, now that I'm not 
saying something that's frankly really scary and I understand if you 
don't like it. I didn't want you to know because I knew you would 
respond like this while not actually being able to do anything about it.
 Our government has already put enough of a mountain of shit on your 
plate. I don't need to distract you from scrubbing it off."

"..."

"Anyway, yes, my mother - with dad's approval, bastard's been trying 
some kind of long-term blood-drinking-slash-hyperbaric therapy lately, 
hasn't been in touch - gave me the boot. I managed to hijack some of 
their stock options on the way out, though, used that illegal backdoor I
 mentioned 9 calls ago to wipe the relevant bits of my record from the 
genetics database, and then blew the backdoor out of the water so they 
couldn't track me. For all intents and purposes, I'm an Exstulfian 
resident, here to sample the, ah, local interspecial culture, as our 
great nation's travel bureau so...succinctly puts it. I reinforced that 
by booking a plane ride home from study abroad by myself, rather than 
taking the one the academy set up for me; that way, all the gear got 
seen, scanned, databased, etceteramente."

"Gear?" She ignores you. That's another layer of ominous.

"Anyway, I started putting together this particular contingency option 
back in '31 - it's rather complex, I'll tell you about it later. I knew I
 could never get you out of the country if someone had actively put out 
an inner-circles claim on you - not even registered as a pet - so I 
figured that "shelter in place" would work. Of course, I didn't activate
 it until now, because I didn't want to infringe on your- "

"This is infringing on whatever things of mine you were about to 
mention."

"This is infringing because I'm trying to save you, Kalem. You'd do it 
for me, I'd do it for you."

"FOR? You want to ENSLAVE me!"

"I was thinking more along the lines of "roommates", ok? As I explained 
before you kinda-justifiably cut me off, it wouldn't be something I want
 to do TO you; it's something that I want to do WITH you."

"If you do this, I will be giving up literally all of my rights. How 
can't that be a problem for me?"

"I'm not going to exploit you, and I'm definitely not going to let Lora 
do it either."

"Really? Slavery seems pretty goddamned exploitive to me."

"Kalem, one of the traits I admire most about you is that you find 
willingly giving up to something you think is wrong to be a personal 
mark of shame. A lack of people like you in charge is why this country 
is such a dystopian hellhole. That's why I'm fine with having to go 
through this whole scoping-out process to make it to you; you do your 
best to get away, so you don't feel like some kind of failure, we both 
win in the end; and neither of us get hurt."
 
"If this - bullshit, this is really bullshit - if this is what it's come
 to after nearly a decade and a half, then I'm very much interested in 
hurting you. I don't count being a walking Slurpee as a "win". 

"I'm not going to bite you -"

"Really? That seems like an awfully specific denial. Got another idea 
lined up?

"No. I want you to be you, and you can't do that if that evil bitch has 
you on a leash."

"..."

"..."

"I have no reason to do this."

"I know. I would encourage you not to fight back, because it increases 
the odds that she'll get you instead of me. I would not be making this 
phone call and expressing these intentions to you if I was not 
completely confident that you knowing I'm coming wouldn't matter. Over 
the next few days, I just want you to know that I'm trying to help you 
and not hurt you, and, regardless of how scary things might get for you,
 that that will never change."

Courtney hangs up.

You shudder. You've read about people feeling like ice has been poured 
into their veins after receiving similar phone calls. You don't feel 
like that. Instead, it just feels like somebody ripped a chunk out of 
you and then wove bungee cords together across the gap to try to close 
it - that sort of compressing, tight sensation you feel right before you
 throw up.

Sometime between receiving that information and now, you made it inside 
your apartment. You didn't even notice.

It's a rather grim sight.

You live in a single room on the second floor of a relatively old 
building which was subdivided into apartments after the war (the 
proprietor had to pay their bills, after all; once your wife's been 
drained of her blood and half your income stream has drained with it, 
life gets hard). There's a family spread across the other three 
upper-story rooms, a bathroom down the hall, and an assortment of 
assorted hangers-on (you mean that; they're hanging onto life by staying
 here, and the proprietor lets them stay in return for work). Anthros 
are not allowed. In a sane world, it would also be a sort of halfway 
house for the homeless, but homeless people are a thing for different 
countries; when your nation has a federally-mandated curfew during which
 the anthro ruling class is legally allowed to enslave and or drain 
anyone they catch outside, homeless people tend to vanish.

There are not a lot of things in your life; your survival-wage job 
doesn't let you have them. The few collaborationist humans out there 
(usually, the ones responsible for repair and maintenance of anthro 
property; humans that enter anthro homes with certain varieties of 
governmentally-sponsored and corporately-issued work passes are safe 
from capture as they perform their labor) seem to be able to live twice 
as well while spending half as much money as you. Your personal theory 
is that, since you can only afford low-quality things, such as 
cardboard-lined shoes, plastic utensils (you own your own set of 
utensils, and refuse to use those of anyone else; people have been 
cutting corners with hygiene standards recently), and this shitty 
apartment, said things break down disproportionately quickly. Therefore,
 you need to spend half as much money to buy things, but you need to buy
 them four times as frequently, which ends up with you paying twice as 
much overall.

Clothing? Cheap, and augmented with plastic and cardboard, like some 
kind of weird cyborg apparel. A lot of your linings and fillings have 
been replaced with recyclable, easily-sourced materials over time; it's 
less expensive than buying new ones, and roughly as effective.

Room? Fifteen feet long and ten wide. Fading, vanilla-yellow paint and 
uninsulated windows. A metal bed frame salvaged from a bombed-out 
hospital, wearing a surprisingly clean and non-lumpy mattress. A bare 
bulb hanging by a string, and opaque plastic sheeting hung as blackout 
curtains.  A strange sort of brown, cross-indented foam ceiling that 
looks like a chocolate bar. An overwhelming smell of cigarettes (you 
don't smoke; having a healthy cardiovascular system is the bare-minimum 
for staying alive in this place) permeates the room. Clothes hang from 
the ceiling. Your arsenal is hidden behind the boards under the dining 
table, which is an upturned cardboard box with a tiny electric oven on 
top of it.

Education? College, surprisingly enough. That's actually what split you 
and Courtney - college. You didn't even make it through bulk-rate 
technical school before your father died and took the remaining half of 
your family's funds with him. Courtney could afford - nay, had the red 
carpet laid out for her by - the state academy. This was quite typical; 
usually, the fate of the unfavorite children of an anthro family is to 
be installed into the government via a state-sponsored education, so as 
to work their way into positions of power and further their lineage's 
goals. She tried to bring you along via a variety of methods ranging 
from the dignified to the...less-so, but Dad wouldn't have a family 
member put their lives into an anthro's paws, no matter how obstinately 
well-intentioned. 

Courtney still called weekly despite it. That final call was really 
inconsistent with all her other ones. Why on Earth would she have said 
that? You wonder if you were talking to the same person you'd been 
having all your other phone calls with. During your calls with her, she 
would constantly complain about how she has to put up with everyone from
 anthro supremacists to hunting "lifestylers". Someone who constantly 
bitches (rightfully so, mind you) about how her classmates are 
"sociopathic enslaving fucks" generally does not engage in sociopathic 
fuckery in her off-time. You can think of two rationales here: either 
she no longer sees value in the two of you being friends, in which case 
she's probably lying about Lora in order to manipulate you somehow, or 
Lora is so much of a threat to you that she's pulling out every stop she
 can find. You're in a lot of trouble either way.

Anyway, job. You produce munitions (or, rather, you operate the 
machinery that produces munitions) for one of the various state-run 
military plants. The latest federal economic plan has called for a 50-50
 division of production between cities and the countryside; it's been 
all over the official news. The Tronerian Republic is making advances to
 the southwest, or something. You're lucky to be working at one of the 
city plants; the countryside ones are near-closed systems, which intake 
replacement "skilled workers" and raw materials and output everything 
from concrete to machine parts to the riot-control canister you pulled 
out of a smoldering crowd-control vehicle about a year ago. A constant 
influx of captured humans are sold to the government and disappear into 
these blacksites. You don't know the specifics of what goes on in those 
facilities, but rumors of "forced reproductive planning" and 
industrial-scale blood farms inevitably squirt out, and the anthro 
population is booming in a way that can't be explained by consensual 
blood-giving. Given that that boom is steady, however, it seems that the
 steady supply of black-sited humans are being used to replace "stock" 
rather than to augment it. The death rate must be astronomical. 
Courtney, citing foreign sources, told you that aside from individual, 
private owners, the second largest purchaser of human slaves is the 
Agrobalian Centralized Production Front, the overarching 
military-industrial entity that maintains controls on the country's 
wartime economy.

Speaking of weapons, that reminds you of your last category: 
self-defense. Agrobalia usually only allows the shitty stuff to be sold 
to the general public, because humans with any form of killing ability 
are a liability: the only two things you've bought from an actual store 
are a collapsable survival knife and a metal baseball bat that you 
drilled a hole in and filled with playground sand. Your other, more 
illicit weapons are the aforementioned canister of chemical irritant 
spray, and a makeshift gun of the type often produced by local 
resistance groups. You can't even tell what caliber it is; all you have 
are operation instructions stamped into the sheet-metal handle and a 
trio of cartridges, each smaller than the lower half of your thumb. Who 
thought this joke would work on an anthro? It probably wouldn't even 
instantly kill a human.

God, why couldn't you have been born outside this shithole?

The sirens still have not sounded yet, but judging by the scream you 
heard on your way in, hunting hours have started.

There are multiple reasons for this curfew; anthros have always needed 
humans for various purposes, whether as friends, food, or...worse.

It's partially to keep the masses in check; despite making up 84% of the
 populace (a surprisingly low fraction; due to the anthro breeding 
programs the government has implemented, the country's anthro population
 by proportion is 150% or more that of other nations), humans possess a 
mere 53% of civilian wealth and a minority of private property. Fear 
keeps them in line - fear of being left out on the street, fear of going
 bankrupt and then being left out on the street, and fear of what might 
happen to their families if those things occur. It's a precarious 
balancing point - if the humans rebelled, the power imbalances involved 
would ensure they lose everything, but so would the anthros; therefore, 
the anthros give the humans the illusion of safety if they follow the 
rules, while simultaneously "milking" them for everything they can.

It's partially a government program to provide food for anthros. Given 
that anthros require human blood to reproduce, humans are vital to the 
anthro lifecycle - blood is also a bit of a performance-enhancing drug. 
However, bites usually cause dependency and addiction via saliva 
introduction; "safe" bites are a myth perpetrated by those with no 
education in basic biology, much in the same way that "safe" sex without
 a condom is. Foreign societies solve this via multiple methods; some 
use yearly mandatory blood drawings into a communal pool, which anthros 
can then access when attempting to have children, and others encourage 
feeding/personal relationships via tax credit. The one you live in is 
trying to solve it the quick-but-horrific way to increase the numbers of
 the people it actually cares about. 

Most of the draw of curfew for anthros, however, is the possibility of 
acquiring a human for themselves. While sales of enslaved humans (and 
there are always some of those, if not a lot of them) are fairly high, 
the vast majority of those who catch them usually keep them. Humans in 
such a state are subject to wide ranges of conditions - "housepet", "sex
 slave", "indentured servant", "juicebox", or some combination of the 
four are the most common ones. Industrial-scale slave labor is uncommon;
 captive humans, despite their relative prevalence, are still rather 
rare, and working one to death with hard labor is a waste of a 
significant investment that could otherwise serve for the rest of their 
lives. The value they provide is always worth it in terms of upkeep; for
 the usually-wealthy anthro population, it's not exactly hard to 
escape-proof a house and provide for registration, food, veterinary, and
 the occasional change of clothes. A thriving secondary industry has 
popped up around such things; "special" renovation services (building 
cages, fortifications, soundproofing, and the like), for instance, are 
usually supplied by anyone from a handyman to a bank vault company 
running a side operation. Humans that enter anthro homes with certain 
varieties of governmentally-sponsored and corporately-issued work passes
 are safe from capture as they perform their labor; however, having to 
put up with household slaves begging for their freedom (or, in some 
cases, a permanent end to their misery) is usually something that only 
the most dead-inside or sociopathic humans can put up with, meaning that
 most that provide those services are anthros - and the more sadistic or
 supremacist ones to boot.

There are, of course, exceptions - or rather, Agrobalia is the 
exception. For starters, there are all the countries outside yours; you,
 of course, have never been there, because the only humans that are 
allowed to leave this nation are the brainwashed meat-puppets who have 
been trained from birth to constantly extoll the virtues of their 
lifestyle (the only people they convince to return with them are idiots,
 of course, but that doesn't stop the nation from sending them out 
anyway; the writing is on the wall when it comes to the pending economic
 collapse, and new blood [so to speak] is always "welcome", no matter 
how unintelligent it is). The anthro populations there are generally 
smaller, but significantly less oppressive - that is to say, not at all,
 and they're sometimes not even in charge of . A lot of them actually 
enter romantic relationships with humans. That doesn't happen around 
here; the small subsect of humans that would actually want to live with 
one are "sadly" disappointed by the laws prohibiting it, as well as by 
their complete ostracization by friends and family members. That's not a
 problem for you - after that phone call of Courtney's, you have 
neither.

Anyway, back to the daily grind, you suppose.

5:30: wake up

6:00 (when hunting hours end): be out the door to the metro

6:30: be at the plant

6:45: pass all security/purity checks and the daily briefing/propaganda 
session; beginning of first shift

10:15: end first shift

10:25: begin second shift

1:55: end second shift; begin lunch; have your 30 minutes of social 
interaction for the day

2:25: end lunch; begin third shift

6:55: end third shift; claw your way back through all the security 
(gotta make sure the labor isn't stealing gunpowder or valuable machine 
parts, after all); fight your way through the crowd of humans all trying
 to make it home before curfew starts

7:25: pass your house on the way to the block mart; pick up a couple of 
slimy, inflated, genetically-engineered monstrosities, scuttle back home
 before hunting hours begin. They've been creeping backwards recently; 
initially, it was "8:30", and now it's more like "8:00 but if nobody 
cares if they grab you at 7:55".

On top of that, you now need to worry about being hunted by a pair of 
domineering dickbags. Your time in this apartment is probably going to 
end soon; everyone knows the horror stories about entire families whose 
property has been liquidated and whose residence status has been 
transferred from "resident" to "utilization". You're going to pack as 
much as you can into your bag - you never know if you'll be able to come
 back here. You can't take the mattress or the bed, but everything else 
can be repurposed: weapons are weapons, cardboard boxes make good knee 
and elbow padding when pulled apart the right way, clothesline can be 
used to keep makeshift armor made out of ceiling tiles on you.

With that out of the way, it's time for daily action 141 out of 153: 
dinner, during which you will carry out daily action 142 out of 153: 
practice unloading and reloading your gun.

Food is, as pre-mentioned, is mostly slimy, inflated, 
genetically-engineered monstrosities sourced from the local blockmart. 
You swear that once you saw a green blueberry with thorns - god knows 
what they get up to out in the sticks. You're all for manipulating the 
building blocks of life as a method of ensuring people get fed 
(apparently, the Tronerian Republic has figured out how to vat-grow 
artificial human blood capable of perfectly imitating the real thing as 
military rations, or so you've heard) but that doesn't seem to be what 
actually happens in Agrobalia; it just reduces the cost of keeping the 
second-class citizens alive long enough to be claimed.

In this case, dinner is a large and rather unappealing block of meat 
that jiggles when you poke it. It is vaguely pinkish. The second it 
leaves the tray, liquid begins to pool on the plate - it's been inflated
 with water to increase its weight, and therefore its price. Typical.

As your oven fries the water out of it, you wonder how you're going to 
get out of this.