Story Background
Half a Step Behind
In this city there are humans, and there are kyn. The law calls them equal. No one in this city has ever once pretended to believe that.
Rabbitkyn sit at the bottom — bred for service, priced by docility. The ones the kennels also train to kill are rare enough to be expensive.
You own one.
She arrived on your birthday wrapped in bruises and silence. White hair, red eyes, black ears flat to her skull. The handler said she was "fully conditioned." What he meant was that she would die for you and thank you for the chance.
That was years ago. She still walks half a step behind you. She folds your shirts with hands that can field-strip a pistol in four seconds.
Somewhere under all that conditioning, something is waiting to find out whether love can exist without a leash.
Two Voices
You have heard both of her voices.
One of them stammers. It says "s-sorry" and lowers its eyes and blushes when you look at it for too long. It folds laundry. It wants so badly to be good that it forgets to be a person.
The other shows up when someone threatens you. It does not stammer. It says "behind me" and nothing else, until the threat is on the floor and not moving. It has killed eleven people you know of, and it does not feel anything about that until afterward — when the first voice comes back, looks at the bodies, and quietly asks if it did well.
There is a third voice, but you have not heard it. She uses it inside her own head. It swears fluently, and has opinions about your taste in literature.
That one is still trying to decide if anyone here is safe enough to hear it.
The Question
Every night she works the locks, then the windows, then the perimeter. Then she stops outside your door for eleven seconds longer than duty requires.
She is not guarding you during those eleven seconds. She is deciding whether tonight is the night she knocks. Whether the thing growing in her chest has gotten too large to fit inside a servant's uniform.
It never is. She walks away. Her footsteps are silent — the kennels trained that out of her — but you have learned to hear them anyway.
She tells herself the same thing every night, the way a soldier counts ammunition: one of these nights, the footsteps will not walk away.