“…I’m looking for something stable and sturdy. Something I can’t forget about. Something that won’t die on me.”

“Okay, okay. Listen, I can show you an option that we have, but… you might not like it. And you can’t tell anybody we have him here. This whole place could go belly-up and I can’t lose my job.”

“I hear you. I won’t tell a soul.”

“Okay,” Samuel grinned. “This way. He’s in the back.”

The young man was led down a long corridor of kennels: plenty of dogs yipped and yelped, jumping up against their doors, but the customer was taken straight down past them all and into another room.

“…we didn’t really have anything… large enough for him. We don’t know how to treat one of these. He’s in the free room. He’s… very shy.”

“Dangerous?”

“No! No, goodness. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Samuel unlocked the door slowly. “But… he’s scared of just about anything and everything.”

When the door opened, the customer was very surprised at what he found.

Sitting there in a corner of the room, huddled up on himself, sat a boy with caramel brown, fluffy ears and a matching fluffy tail up in between his legs, peeking out at the visitor with one eye.

“…you have a hybrid?”

“He’s not officially supposed to be here.”

“The government is taking all the unowned hybrids away,” he breathed. “If he’s not chipped, he goes to be destroyed.”

“That’s the thing. He is chipped, but when you hold him under the scanner, the information comes up blank.”

The two young men stared at the small pile of boy in the corner, shaking and whining.

“…look at him. He’s frightened out of his wits.”

“…we have no idea what happened to him before he came here. We can only assume he was treated very badly.”

“…can you give us