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occupied only by a single ancient doe. Even before she found out who I was—Nestor told me she’d been certain I was human—old Bethany had been more than willing to rent us her back room. Then, when I finally walked in through the front door carrying my little travel bag, well… Her jaw dropped, then she knelt on the floor and wept. It took me almost twenty minutes to calm her down and convince her that I didn’t want to be treated any differently by her nowadays than back when I was eight and had accidentally flown my toy glider through her front window.
     
    “That was you ?” she whispered from behind wide eyes. “I’d forgotten!”
     
    At any rate, my fellow Rabbits no longer stared and made a fuss when I passed up and down the streets, now that they knew I liked it that way, and I was starting to feel very much at home again in Rabbit society.  Bethany insisted on cooking for me, which I allowed her to do despite the fact that it wasn’t specified in the lease agreement. She was a much better cook than Nestor, though he was learning fast, and the cuisine of my childhood was good for my still-recovering digestive tract. In exchange I made sure she received some extra rations for trade purposes and set up a small shoreside power supply in her back yard. That way she had electricity all the time instead of having to put up with frequent blackouts like the rest. Overall, she was delighted with the arrangement,
     
    And so were all the other Rabbits I found myself in daily contact with. At first my money wasn't any good—one day I stopped at a produce stand, for example, and the proprietor insisted on giving me the single, solitary orange he’d seen in the last four months. It was terribly embarrassing—the thing was almost beyond price for him, then and there, while just days ago I’d been aboard a luxury liner where I could’ve eaten a dozen of them every morning had I wished. But Pete would’ve been terribly offended had I refused his gift, so I accepted the shriveled, pathetic thing with a bow, ate it on the spot so that I could at least share it with him, and tried to “shut up and be honored” as His Majesty had once put it. Since then all the other merchants had done similar—I’d been given a beat-up datapad that really should’ve been in the hands of a school-attending kit, for example, and a beautifully-finished hand-made Rabbit-style chair for the single overcrowded room I shared with Nestor. It was touching! In return I did what I could to help them, which wasn’t much since I already had an all-consuming, oversized task of my own to perform in setting up the fencibles. If Nestor or Bethany heard about any Rabbit who was having a particularly tough go of it, I made it a point to type up a quick inquiry and send it along to the local authorities, sealed with an impression from my signet ring. If this ever failed to produce results, I never heard about it.
     
    In some ways it was emotionally difficult for me to have so much contact with the old neighborhood. The Imperial occupation government hadn’t been nearly so open-minded about Rabbits as the Marcuses, and from day one had clamped down upon my home community like a vise. Where my own House preferred to let their Rabbits roam as freely and unencumbered as Royal law allowed, the Imperials had taken one look at Rabbit Town and seen nothing but an untapped resource. Not only was the neighborhood systematically looted of everything of value over and over again, but press-gangs gathered up every last able-bodied Rabbit and sent them off to who knew where. Only the very young, the very old and a tiny handful of the crippled who’d somehow managed to escape euthanasia remained—my entire generation was practically absent, save for Nestor and I. All the kids I’d played and attended school with might as well have evaporated. Including Frieda, the girl I’d once had such a crush on. And her entire family to boot. None of my inquiries led me