Obsidian and Pearl

Chapter 1

"Why the fuck did you get such a young one?" a man sneered somewhere in the dark. "She's no good to us. Just another mouth to feed."

"Wait, wait," a female voice insisted. Eunju blinked as the sack was yanked roughly from her head and her eyes were assaulted by overly bright lights. She was in some kind of exam room, but an old one, somehow both overly sterile and shamefully shabby at the same time. Two people she did not recognize were peering at her far too closely. "Look at her coloration. Just a couple of pups like her will be worth what we have to spend while we wait for her to grow up."

Eunju flattened her ears down into her silver-white hair. The man was grinning broadly, but it did not comfort her. She had never seen a smile that was scary before. "I see your point," he replied to the woman. "Okay, then. We'll consider her an investment."

"Where's Tete?" Eunju dared to ask, her voice trembling. She did not know how she had gotten here. The last thing she remembered was being at the park, waiting for her friend. "I promised him I wouldn't go anywhere."

"Oh, sorry, little one," the woman crooned. "Your last owners sold you to us. This is your new home, now."

~~~

It was difficult to track the passage of time here. Eunju was not allowed to have her own calendar or any writing utensils in her room. The most reliable way to know how long she had been in the facility was to memorize as many details as she could every time she had a medical exam.

There had been a lot of those lately. She had been fifteen when the breeders bought her, much younger than they usually brought new dams in. Her platinum coloring, rare in a fox hybrid, was valuable enough for them to wait a few years for her first heat. But they had expected that to happen around age nineteen or twenty. Eunju was twenty-two now, according to her medical records, and she still had not experienced a heat.

That had caused a lot of conflict among the facility staff. The man who the residents only knew as "Doctor" yelled at the house mother after every medical exam, and he didn't care who heard. "Mum" was the one who had chosen Eunju, so their losing gamble fell on her. If the white fox still had not had a heat at this age, she was probably infertile, which apparently happened sometimes with these man made color morphs. To a breeder that meant she was worse than useless.

Eunju tried to make herself worth their efforts in other ways. She worked in the nursery and the kitchen, and sometimes she even assisted with births when a dam was anxious and needed support. That happened often, actually. Some of the mothers were younger than her now, crying for their mate as they delivered their first litter.

Not that Eunju had ever met these mates. The facility was strictly gender divided except for breeding purposes. The doctor was the only man she had seen in all of her time here, and he was human. She only knew there were hybrid males here because the births kept happening, and she did know how babies were made. Tete's family had allowed her to be educated and learn to read. She had always believed they held progressive views on hybrids, up until they sold her to this place.

But that had been a long time ago. Seven years since she had read anything other than medical reports while she was being examined. She was pretty sure the doctor didn't know she could read, because if he did, then last week's exam probably would not have said "dispose" with a heavy, frustrated line drawn under it.

She had hardly been able to drag herself out of bed after that. People left the facility all the time, but when they did, they never came back. Eunju did not like her life here, but the only thing more frightening than staying here forever was being forced to leave and not knowing what would happen to her.