Page 33 of The First Omega Made
In the memory, Shafa, from my perspective in his body, placed the egg in a holding chamber in a neat row of dozens more. The vibrant red of the shell stood out in a cluster of red, green, orange, and others.
An omega with bright-red hair clung to his side, scales a pale pink down his form. Shafa comforted him until another male approached, giving Shafa a nod.
Shafa had mates?I caught myself glancing at shoulders to look for mate marks but found none. The pink omega wept, and I brushed hair off his shoulders, nails tracing a collar with inlaid nacre of some variety—a stone or shell. I couldn’t tell.
The way he traced his nails made the omega shudder, but he didn’t recoil. “Were it not a crime.”
The omega lifted his head and stared up at me with silvery eyes, the endless black of his sclera glittering with tears. “I wish I could go with you.”
As my vision obscured by tears, the memory ended with a beta wrapping his arms over my shoulders with a tight grasp. “Until our deaths, will I hold your memories.”
I snapped out of the memory and shook my head, finding tears dripping in my lap.
And suddenly I knew why mating an omega was such a terrible thing. I knew why Shafa hated Noel, even beyond his status as a life seed. Omegas were dying. So many dead, so many diseased. They didn’t worship omegas, but they revered them and held them so very dear.
Which explains why Nirem wouldn’t allow Noel to perish…He likely couldn’t stand the thought of an omega losing his sense of self…
I stood and took a deep breath, wiping the tears from my eyes with my sleeve. My heart ached because not only had I finally secured Doc, he was as special and important to me as I felt he was.
And as I tapped Shafa’s memory—many Naleucians had been made, and of them, omegas often died in the process of transition.
This brought other questions and answers, too. So many humans died when given blood from Noel, but many flourished. And they’d gone on to carry those traits and further. Noel could make more omegas.
And Doc was the first omega ever made.
Chapter Eighteen
Doc
Wallace lay on my exam table, his breaths uneven as I did him a favor and connected an intravenous drip. He’d let himself go too long without a top-up and needed some nutrients.
While he luxuriated in chemical sustenance, I thawed a sample from Vil, his isolated white blood cells. Unlike human white blood cells, they proliferated in the bloodstream and behaved in odd ways. Their macrophage equivalent not only enveloped cells, but instead of destroying infected ones, they rectified them. They pushed little tendrils through cell walls and into the nucleus with snippets of DNA just repairing away in a viral fashion.
Unlike Noel’s samples, Vil’s took time to settle in. It’d be a day or two before Wallace felt right.
“Feels like someone inverted my grav boots.” Wallace groaned and slapped an ice pack on his head.
“We could speed things up. Want to try a shot of Noel’s isolate?” I tossed a used needle into the RPC and cleaned my area.
“Not today. Maybe when we’re at base sometime. If I’m going to be laid up for a while, I’d rather not have crew to feed.” Wallace huffed. He took his duties feeding us seriously.
“Then you won’t get shore leave?” I raised a brow and gave him a look. Wallace thoroughly enjoyed shore leave. He got to shop for and sample new food—when stores would allow him in. He was charismatic enough to do it. That, and he had more Tal in him, so he looked less like a hybreed than he did a Tal hybrid and didn’t get questioned.
“But who will cook?” He lifted the edge of his ice pack and stared me down.
“Sarge can cook.” For something that didn’t have taste buds, he was remarkably adept at it.
“True.” He grumbled and sighed. “So, I gotta ask questions, and I’m going to be rude, but I’m curious.”
“Ask away.” I busied myself tidying up and running the air samples that Merriel had extracted and sent through one of the ship’s message chutes.
“What am I?”
“What do you mean?” I opened a panel in the wall to reveal a stage for a microscope. Merriel’s cameras would do the rest for me. As I lay slides out and cleared them for plating, Wallace huffed.
“Am I an alpha or beta or…” He waved his hand toward his groin. I’d not kept it secret what’d happened to my genitals. I wouldn’t lie. It was weird but oddly comforting.
“Beta, like Gorm.” I shoved the slide into the view field and glanced up at a screen. Nothing concerning lit up, no spores of the variety Sarge feared.
