Chapter One
They had Phee sit alone in the clinic room while she “collected” herself after they’d given her the news.
It was a little cubicle with a bowl sink in one corner, a scan square on the floor where patients had to stand stark naked every appointment, and a medical bed. Gray cement walls and a white tile floor with a center drain gave the room a utilitarian feel.
This clinic was in an older, backstreet building down the way and around the corner from Sector Administration. With flower boxes under the windows and no signage, it could be anything. Drone-built ages ago, it was a survivor of the conflict between unaltered humans and breed. Phee usually avoided drone-built structures. She didn’t like the clumsy architecture, but that was just one reason among many.
These old brick-and-mortar structures held on to the smell of blood and terror with relentless determination, as if the suffering of others went into their making. They soaked up emotional energy pouring out of breed and drone alike, retaining it like a sponge. Female emotions were as communicable as a disease. And, of course, it was never happy, positive energy stored up in rooms like this.
If even one sad thing happened in this room, the next woman to walk through the doorway and sit on the medical bed might sense the history. Phee knew this happened. Omega breeder women felt things on a different level than others.
Yet Flower Fertility Clinic had a wonderful reputation among her friends. The women who came here for help found hope and discretion.
Or, like Phee, they might hear the most horrifying and devastating news—bad news, delivered again and again, in this dreary little room.
The ghost of every diagnosis hung in the space like a cloud of heavy, aching hurt. Phee sensed these women’s pain joining in with her own, pushing at her. So very sad.
Where other omegas might collapse under the weight of their diagnosis, Phee was too disillusioned to be anything but angry, and the sadness of those who had come before her amplified that anger. Clenching her fists in her lap, she tried to ignore the echoes of wailing omegas as their identities and self-value slipped away.
They lost themselves in this room.
How many women had sat where she sat? How many others had gone through three months of powders, teas, pills, creams, pelvic exams, and blood tests to revive their estrus cycles? How many had seen this clinic as a last-ditch effort to hold on to their social status? To keep their contract marriages together? To fulfill their natural calling?
Phee was sure that at least one other woman had been here before her. She could almost feel the girl’s body heat as they shared the space, set apart only by time. The salt of the other woman’s tears stung Phee’s cheeks. It was like sitting in a haze of grief.
Phee was not the first barren omega breeder in Sector 5, and she would not be the last. But she felt no comfort in knowing that.
Could the doctors and nurses do nothing about the emotional echoes in this clinic? Or did they do this on purpose—separate all the women with a grim prognosis and put them here to bottle up their pain until it seeped into the walls?
Did they even know?
The dutiful beta clinic staff were tall, slim, and pandering. None of them understood instinct. They had the sensitivity of rocks when it came topheromones, the scents of others’ emotions, and psychic energies. Like her, the betas were breed—with extra genes a short-lived worker drone lacked—but they were pathetically dumb.
Dumb enough that someone, at some point, would have surely explained the unique perceptiveness of an omega like Phee.
They must know. They must understand what she was and all her capabilities. This was a clinic that catered to her kind; they must know about her position in society.
Someone was jealous. Phee wasn’t imagining it. Alpha save her from resentful, inferior betas. They all hated their common birth. The beta community’s bitterness was getting to be an issue throughout the 12 Sectors, and Phee was going to report this incident as soon as she left here. It wouldn’t stand. What they did to her, and to those who had come before her, they did out of spite.
Well, Phee saw it, and she would not let it pass. The head of this little clinic was going to find himself and his beta nurses in court, facing a tribunal and a judge.
They were medical staff—they knew what the loss of reproductive abilities did to an omega, to any woman. This was a petty and dangerous sort of bigotry. The nurses were laughing at her. They thought Phee’s situation was funny, that she was getting a little comeuppance.
For Phee, stress always became anger. She’d struggled with her bad temper most of her life. And she’d never experienced stress more dear or deep than knowing that she wasn’t who she thought she was. She was an omega, but not a breeder. Her world was imploding, and there was nothing she could do about it.
And the nurses of this clinic must revel in knowing that an influential society omega could not perform the simple task of carrying out a full-term pregnancy. They must love this. Childbirth was easy for them, but not for her. Phee knew how these betas worked. They might serve her with smiles and sunshine, but their envy showed through in insidious ways.
“Well, my dear…” The nurse who’d given her the news returned, speaking quietly as she slipped in and closed the door behind her. She wore a dove-gray uniform that matched the walls of the exam room. She was the third one Phee had seen in this clinic. Even though betas all looked the same to her, with their washed-out hair and skin tones, this one had a mole under her left eye as distinctive as her fawning, childlike voice.
Looking at the floor, Phee’s eyes landed on the woman’s feet. She wore strange, quilted booties just as gray as her uniform, turning her every step into a muffled swish. They looked silly, like stuffies missing their ears, emptied of their filling, and turned into shoes.
The nurse began to speak again, but distracted by the ridiculous foot coverings, Phee talked over her. “Why are you wearing those?”
“Wearing what, dear?”
Phee grit her teeth at the nurse’s condescending tone. Her first nurse from three months ago had treated her with proper deference. It was, “What can I do for you, miss?” this and, “Would you like a tea and cake while you wait?” that. But just as the clinic had demoted Phee by room—putting her in this stark cell—they’d also demoted her by nurse.
The entire clinic must know Phee’s shame. This nurse knew the truth, holding it out in a big, emerald bottle—a sleeping tonic to help Phee rest. That was the last remedy; something for insomnia.
