Lexi Garcia stepped off the bus and onto the street of the neighborhood she’d lived in all her life. The bus sped away up the street. In this part of town, the busses still weren’t retrofitted with the new alien hover technology she saw in the wealthier neighborhoods around her university.

The tall buildings thrust into the sky around her—red brick tenements that housed thousands of poor souls that would never escape the generations of poverty that had brought them here. Lexi had worked all her life to get where she was today, a top student at the best university in Seattle. She would make it out of here, even if her mother never did.

A couple of thugs standing on the street corner waved guns around in the air and shot off a few rounds. Lexi gripped her books to her chest and ducked into a doorway.

The men wore the anti-Draconian gang colors that so many people wore nowadays. She looked up at what they’d been shooting at. The wide wings of a dragon tilted above in the sky, maneuvering between buildings. She fixed her thick-lensed glasses and leveled her gaze at the young men on the street corner.

“You know your hand guns don’t have enough range to hit that thing, right? You’re more likely to kill yourself shooting straight up like that.”

“Who asked you?” one of them spat at her.

“You some kind of Dragon slut, or something?”

“Of course not!” she gasped, starting past them. Men like this were all over the place nowadays. She’d grown up on these streets, and wasn’t afraid of them.

She knew their mothers.

After she’d passed them, she turned and said, “Their hides are far too thick for regular bullets to penetrate. You should do some research if you plan to take down the advanced alien race that’s taken over our world.”

They postured and growled at her, but she giggled under her breath and hurried to the rusted chain link fence that surrounded her father’s house. Garbage had collected in the corners where fruit trees had once been.

But, that had been years before the Draconians had come.

The Draconians—a race of dragon shifting aliens who’d landed on Earth, demanding fertile women for their breeding needs. That’s when everyone found out that the legends about aliens had all been true—the Draconians had been here thousands of years ago to mate with human females.

Lexi pushed open the warped, wooden front door and stepped into the living room of her family’s three-bedroom house. Her father hunched over his computers—his screens moving a million miles a minute, his fingers moving just as fast over the keyboards.

Her father had always been technical. He’d once been an HVAC installer. That was before the great recession had landed him without a job. Before the Draconians had come and introduced their technology. Before her mother died.

Now, her father was like this. His eyes were covered with a pair of digital glasses that let him see the code he typed up close. He would be like that until late into the night.

“Hi Dad,” she said out of habit. But, he didn’t hear her. He was in his own world—the world of code and infinite connections. When he did bother to come out, she couldn’t tell if he was the same man anymore.

Lexi hurried back to her room, wishing she had the money to get herself a place of her own.

Unfortunately, the technology the Draconians offered in exchange for women hadn’t exactly had the massive positive effect many had originally predicted. Wealth inequality had become even wider. Illegal technology ran rampant in the mafia, and underground. New breeds of drugs, new areas to exploit. Lexi’s neighborhood had turned into a dystopian wasteland in just a few short years.

Still, the Draconians stayed and mated with their women. The mating lottery was open to all fertile females. If a girl was chosen, her family was given a massive dowry in exchange for the use of her womb.

It all made Lexi a little sick.

She dropped her backpack on the floor, and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. Setting her books on her desk, she sat on the rickety old chair and flipped through her notebook. She had a lot of homework today.

As a poor student, it was harder than ever to make it through school. Student loans had been all but frozen. She’d only gotten into school because she had a full-ride scholarship from an old fund. Lexi was a wiz with chemical compounds. Some corporate headhunters had already been at her door, hoping to use her mind in the development of the new technologies the Draconians brought with them.

Lexi wanted nothing to do with it. She wanted to do something noble with her abilities. Like cure cancer, or feed the hungry. Neither of which the Draconian technology had solved.

She pulled out a mechanical pencil and started writing out the first math equation in her homework assignment.