If you go hunting a tiger...

- 2 -

"You are the daughter of Albert Dave Nicholas Terrent," said the old man. "Chris, show the young lady the DNA results."

Haughty, dressed in a tuxedo man in his forties stepped out from behind a closet and handed me a folder. Terrence's workroom, by the way, is not pompous or glittering luxury, very cozy, calm, and conducive to some kind of scientific work or writing.

I sat down at the guest table and looked through the papers. Oh, how interesting: the comparison was only based on blood samples that Albert had left for his doctors, but no analysis of my DNA and Dave's. It's understandable why a week ago at my grandmother's hospital, an unfamiliar nurse approached me and asked for a DNA sample, allegedly for a possible blood transfusion if my grandmother's one was incompatible with the donor blood. And why Dave didn't divorce her and acknowledged her son as his, I'm not interested.

I closed the folder and wanted to talk about inheritance and compensation, but Terrent beat me to it: "I want to correct a long-standing mistake," he said. "I was in vain to forbid my heir to marry an illegal immigrant colored woman."

"What?!" I looked at Terrent in complete bewilderment. "Colored" — this is the obvious thing, a small part of black and Asian blood is visible in me, but there are a lot of them in Alnorria, and I never felt slighted. But "illegal" is strange.

"Your grandmother and mother came to Alnorria from Rudlig. Refugees who sneaked into the country by stealth."

"You did the right thing," I replied before I understood what I was saying and before I realized the new information.

Is Rudlig? But my granny said that she was a descendant of Filipino refugees who, back in the early seventies of the last century, during the next Philippine political and economic crisis, moved to a country that was calmer and richer. I never heard of Rudlig from my granny. But she often said that if life in the country is bad, and you do not have the strength and rights to improve at least something, you need to flee to a normal country and forget your former life forever like a bad dream.

Granny is fluent in two of the three official Allnorrian dialects and has some knowledge of the third, and her accent... It's missing against the backdrop of how all Alnorrianishes speak: a foreigner is often easier to understand than a neighbor because the foreigner tries to follow the standard of the textbook, and the Alnorrianishes in each city have their own language. I live in a more or less prosperous area, the school is sponsored here, so there are relatively good teachers who are not too lazy to give students at least some standard pronunciations in all three official dialects.

"I promised your mother and grandmother not to tell the authorities about their fake passports," Dave said. "And they promised to forget about their connection with the Terrent family. Otherwise, your mother and grandmother would have been jailed for forgery and then deported to Rudlig. Or they would be deported immediately. You too are subject to deportation as being born in Alnorria doesn't confer its citizenship."

"But my father's citizenship makes me a full-fledged Alnorrianish," I protested. "And all Albert's property is mine."

"But your grandmother has no rights," Dave objected. "She will fly out of the country like a bullet."

"But she's not going to Rudlig. Granny will live as a refugee in Greece or Montenegro while I ignite the fire of the Alnorrianish human rights activists and feminists. Oh!" I thought. "I can also involve the Antimonopoly Commission and the Association for the Protection of Consumer Rights."

Dave laughed.

"You are the real Terrent! And a little plebeian blood is sometimes useful, it refreshes the family. You are good material that one to make an heir."