Entry: July 18, 654 A.E

Evening

The Hunt

Then the Company made a mistake. They tried to stage a frameup.

A man named Oscar Lurkin and his ten-year-old daughter came forward claiming that six Fuzzies had attacked the girl, beating her with clubs. It was an obvious lie—the girl was covered in bruises that clearly came from her drunken father, not from Fuzzies. But the Company-controlled media played it up, and suddenly there was a city-wide hunt. Resident General Nick Emmert offered five hundred sols per Fuzzy, dead or alive.

Chief Justice Pendarvis put a stop to it, issuing an order that anyone killing a Fuzzy would face murder charges until their legal status was determined. The hunt fell apart. But it told me something important: four strange Fuzzies had been seen during the hunt. That meant at least some Fuzzies had survived.

We tracked those four. They weren't mine—they belonged to Ruth Ortheris, who'd been working with them for the Company before she revealed herself as a Federation Navy Intelligence agent. But finding them alive gave me hope.