Prologue: Theo
Eight years earlier
I take a number and find a plastic chair near the back wall where I can watch both exits.
It’s an old habit, knowing where the doors are. Not that a fight is likely to break out in the waiting room at the Omega Bonding Bureau but old habits are hard to break.
The woman next to me is filling out her paperwork with a pen that keeps dying. She scratches at the form, licks the nib, tries again. Her hands are shaking.
She looks like she hasn't slept in days and I recognize the expression on her face because I see it in every reflective surface I pass. She’s also not sure that the money she is going to get is worth the price she has to pay.
For me, the math is straightforward. The Bureau registration payment is two hundred and twenty dollars. That’s more money than I’ve had in my pocket for a long time. It’ll last weeks if I'm careful, which I always am. It’ll buy me time to figure out the next thing. That is all I have ever done: figure out the next thing and the next thing and the next until eventually, theoretically, I arrive somewhere that isn't this.
My last meal was a sandwich from the reduced shelf at the corner store on Fifth yesterday, plastic-wrapped turkey on whitebread with a sell-by date that was optimistic even when it was printed.
Before that, a handful of peanuts from a bowl at a bar where I sat nursing a glass of water for two hours, pretending to watch a game I had no interest in.
This is the part nobody tells you about living on the streets and keeping to yourself.
It's not the danger or the cold or the lack of a fixed address. It's the smallness of it. It’s the way your world contracts until everything is about the next meal. Where is it coming from? How long until you need another one? What are you willing to do to get it?
What I am willing to do, apparently, is register with the Omega Bonding Bureau.
I know it's a bad idea. I've known it since I picked up the leaflet at the shelter three days ago, the one with the aggressively cheerful slogan:Your match is waiting!
The smaller print underneath explained the registration incentive program. I give them a blood sample and my scent profile and they carry out biological compatibility screening. In exchange, I get a one-time payment to cover "transport or other miscellaneous expenses during the matching process."
Two hundred and twenty dollars.
By the time my number gets called, I've been sitting in the chair for two hours. The registration clerk is a beta woman in her forties with reading glasses on a chain.
"Confirm your name and birthday please.”
"Theo Holland. Fourteenth of March."
She types without looking up. "Age?"
"Eighteen."
"Designation?"
"Omega."
She looks up and gives a quick scan of my clothes, my weight, my general state of not-quite-holding-it-together. Her expression doesn't change but something in her eyes does. Pity. I hate pity. I'd rather she looked at me with contempt.
"Any previous registrations?"
"No."
"You haven’t filled in family history. We need to know if there is any history of heart disease, diabetes, that kind of thing.”
"I don’t know any of that."
I stare at the form.Family history. My mother was an omega bonded to an alpha who drank and hit and controlled every aspect of her existence until the day he hit her a bit too hard when I was nine and she didn’t wake up from her hospital bed.
My father put his fist through a stranger's jaw in a bar when I was twelve and caught a bottle across his throat for the trouble. I had foster homes after that, three of them in four years, until I aged out of the system and discovered that the state's interest in your welfare expires at roughly the same time your usefulness as a line item on someone's budget does.
As far as I know, neither of them had any form of heart disease.
