The police officer turned out to be correct, I barely noticed the passage of time, dlamisa like myself tend to idle well, far more so than humans. But when my attention was drawn away from my contemplations of the self poisoned human, it was toward the sound of a beep from a badge against an electronic lock outside the room in which I sat.

The same male officer from before was standing at the entrance and holding the little red balloon dog. “See, told you, you’re free to go. Don’t leave town, there’ll be more following up on all this, but they’re letting you go for now, your bail has been paid, when you get a letter about a court date, just make sure you appear.”

Bail is a strange human practice, and isn’t even found all over their world. But where it is used, it lets a person leave money as a prisoner instead of themselves. It means the human can go free, and report back to the justice system later, as long as they comply, the money is returned to whoever paid it, but if the person who it is paid for, runs away? Then the money is forfeit. A strange practice to my eyes, but it works surprisingly well even when the money is put up by someone other than the accused.

The officer handed me the balloon and led me back to the entrance. I found William waiting with Fauve at the front desk, neither saw me at first, they were busy typing out something onto a pair of fixed position data consoles, the little clicks and clacks like an ancient typewriter went on uninterrupted, and notably while they typed, Fauve complained. Her fist pounded on the surface of the window desk while the officer went on ignoring her when they saw me and made ready to head to the exit.

We were about to leave when a man in a black formal shirt with bright silver buttons and a large gold shield pinned over his heart approached us. “You’re the alien? We need your statement before you can leave.”

All my ears went down when I heard his voice, I’m sure I looked absurd, I was still wet from the water and I was still clad in the blue swim trunks I’d borrowed from William before the trip, trunks that were still bloody in places.

“We just paid his bail.” William protested, but the officer, a giant of a man with an ugly scowl on his broad face and eyes that seemed to look through us both replied.

“Yeah, well we need it. He should have had that done first, you can take him home in a few.” The officer said with a smile that revealed that humans needed to brush far more often than dlamisa did.

“It’s fine, I’m supposed to cooperate with Earth’s laws while I’m here.” I told William and the officer grunted once before turning around and leading me to a room off to one side and gesturing to a table with only two chairs beneath a flickering light.

As soon as he asked, I recited the events as I recalled them, acknowledging that I didn’t know everything, but acted on what was very clearly a threat to the human girl.

I then repeated it again when he asked it of me.

And then again.

And then again.

He frowned, “Did you memorize your statement or something?”

I cocked my head, “I don’t understand.”

“It sounds rehearsed.” He answered, while I’d been answering, he’d been typing it on a datapad, and so I was unsurprised about the match.

“I’m a dlamisa, not a human. I know enough about your race that memories are fragmentary at best, but the same isn’t true for us. Not to say we remember every minute, but if something feels significant and we have time to process it, we lose nothing. Ask me a hundred times, you’ll get a hundred matching recitations.” When I explained that, he gave a crude snort, sucking air in through his somewhat sizable nostrils.

What I’d said clearly threw him off as he sat there tapping idly on the datapad looking from it to me while water pooled around my feet and wet the chair on which I sat.

“Do you have any hostility toward humans, toward human males? Anything like that?” He asked, and I quickly shook my head hard enough to scatter droplets of water over the floor.

“No, I don’t know many yet. I’m a dlamisa of science, I’m supposed to withhold judgment until I know more.” I answered, and he kept his face blank while he typed my answer.

“Were you trying to kill the one you attacked?” He asked, and there I was hesitant.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was acting on instinct toward a threat to my human.” I answered, it wasn’t quite a lie, though it wasn’t completely true either, in retrospect, I was acting on instinct, but dlamisa predatory instincts are to act with lethal force.

I had to repeat that two or three more times as well, but in the end, he was satisfied, or satisfied ‘enough’ that when a knock at the door came and another human poked his head in and said, “We need the room.” he didn’t protest about keeping me.

He stood and I took that as the signal for me to do the same. “You’re free to go for now, but,” he looked at my shorts, “you’ll need to leave those.”

I shrugged, undid the little white fabric knot and dropped them to the floor, “Fine, but they’re William’s, so he may want them back.”

He did a double take when I reacted that way and strolled out with my tail wagging behind me, as far as I know, William never did have the swimsuit retrieved.

I exited to find Fauve scrawling her signature on a document and shouting at the officer.

“It’s not fair! Bailey was just helping me, the creeper is the one who should be in here!” She snapped at the person on the other side of the chest high desk, a slightly overweight middle aged woman with dark hair and visible makeup on her face. Makeup is yet another curious human practice in which a person paints chemicals onto their face to alter their appearance, but strangely enough, other than the chemicals applied to lips, it is generally meant to not be noticed. Instead it is supposed to accentuate or disguise the natural features of the face, depending on the person.

The human at the desk had one cheek resting on the palm of her hand so that she was propping herself upright where she sat. She gave a very loud yawn and then took a sip from a clear cup of brown liquid. “Look, your friend sent a rich boy to the hospital, I get it. Creepers gotta creep, but we’ve just got to do our jobs, your pet alien will be along in a little while. After the creeper gets his arm stitched up, maybe, we can see about arresting him too. From what I hear, you got lotsa video, right? If somebody got footage of you getting grabbed and led away, we’ve got something. If we don’t, then it's your word against the rich kid, and we already got his statement at the hospital your friend put him in.”

The woman sighed and shook her head, “He says you wanted to talk privately and he was just trying to help, that he thought you were just a lost kid or something and that your pet just jumped him out of nowhere for no reason at all.”

“That’s outrageous!” William protested and stopped typing, “You have to know that’s not true! They have security cameras there, look at them! Even if nobody recorded it, that had to catch him! And by-”

“We’ll request the security footage as soon as we can, once you fill those out at least. It’ll just be a day, maybe less. I promise you we take this kind of thing very seriously, but he’s in the hospital and he’s not going anywhere. Your pet alien is going to be released, Mike has gone to fetch him. In the meantime,” she reached down to her own mobile data pad and held the screen out, “now that you’ve signed those sworn statements and gotten all this started, you should know that this came in for you from the rich boy’s father.”

I remained quiet, not wanting to interrupt, and stopped walking so that I wouldn’t be noticed. Fauve’s father began shaking. Angry humans shake when it gets bad enough, or when they’re scared, or when they’re cold or nervous… shaking means a lot of things.

But on this occasion, I deduced it was anger. Just because they shake for many reasons, that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out what the reason is. And William’s grimace was so deep and fierce that I caught a flash of teeth when he spoke through their gritted position, “It’s a settlement offer… with a nondisclosure agreement. Is he serious?! He thinks his son can just do that and I’ll just take a payout and call it OK? Is this the bronze age?!”

William’s answer struck me as so strange that I had to research it later, and I found that what he referred to was a time in history in which daughters were considered property, and their abuse was considered a form of property damage not against them, but against their father. If a man’s daughter was harmed, it was customary to pay the father for the damage done, and the damaged daughter would become the permanent mate of the one to damage her.

This practice has fallen out of favor over the course of centuries, but the concept of paying currency as compensation for harm done has not. As I thought about it, I often wondered about the contradictions between the past and present, and I reached a conclusion… that it was the change in the perception of families in the eyes of humanity that led to their current state.

In the past, the family was a business, a machine meant to create laborers and shape members of a tribe into something valuable. Any affection was mere good luck, but the family was merely a tool which was wielded by the patriarch and in some cases, the matriarchs of the households for the benefit of the larger society. Children were mere possessions to be trained for their purpose and replacing them if they broke or ‘died’ was a relatively trivial matter much of the time.

Their cultural shift over ages, produced something far… far more dangerous.

Watching William shaking with rage, gritting his teeth and glaring down at the datapad conveying a settlement offer, I must relate, was stunning. I hadn’t known him long, but ‘even tempered’ and ‘calm’ were my impressions.

This was something else. The passionate devotion and love of a modern human for their family members culminated in a single act of defiance. William’s fingers turned ghost white from the pressure on the pad, and he flung it past the woman at the desk, and into the far wall where it shattered into countless tiny pieces.

“He can go to hell! He can take his offer and shove it! You don’t get to do that and walk away! I want justice! I want punishment! And by the way Bailey isn’t a pet!” He leveled his now empty and down at the woman and raised his pointer finger alone out from a closed fist so that it was leveled at her. “He bit a man who put his hands on my child! That’s not a pet! That’s family!”

And only then did I step into view, and I couldn’t have felt better when I did so.