Page 146 of Slashed Bonds

I don’t know how he got it. I didn’t ask. There are things Cassian Vane can retrieve that a lawyer would tell you don’t exist, and this was one of them, and it was eleven minutes long, and I made it to minute four.

Not the footage of her. There’s footage of her. A boardroom, a vial, a window, and I’m going to see it someday when I’m ready and I’m not ready.

The other footage.

Four men and a woman in a room with good furniture, watching the first footage on a screen, and laughing.

Laughing.

At her misery. At a nineteen-year-old on her knees on a carpet asking what she’d done wrong. At her career, which they’d burned. At a house on Alder Row, which they’d burned. At two kids pulled out of their beds and put in a car marked protection. At parents who had to go somewhere, anywhere, to keep anything left of a life.

That’s minute four. That’s when the Switch came up, and Cash was ready for it, because Cash is always ready, and he had the syringe in his hand before I’d finished standing, and he put it in my thigh through my sweats without a word.

He didn’t have time for my emotional feral ass. His words. After. When I could hear words again.

I don’t blame him. I’d have done the same.

I came back on the lounge couch forty minutes later with Killian’s hand flat on my chest and his face six inches from mine, and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and after a while he said, “Minute four,” and I said, “Yeah,” and that was the whole debrief.

Cash finished the briefing without me. Killian gave it to me in the kitchen at four, over the sink, in the fewest words a man has ever used to describe eleven minutes of video. Then he said the thing he’d been holding.

“Vance. The father. Donor plaque in the Halbrook lobby.”

And I understood why he’d held it. Because the sentence after that one is so what do we do about a man who funds two thirds of a program, and the answer is Cassian’s, and Cassian’s answer is going to be slow.

Here’s what I keep circling.

If his father hadn’t intervened. If a stranger with a foundation and a dead daughter hadn’t signed a form at forty-one hours.

What would have happened to her?

Death, probably. That’s the kind answer. Paralysis from the waist down, which is the one she was begging about on the way out the window, which is the one I can’t think about for more than a second.

Or worse.

A facility.

That’s what the system does with Omegas who break and don’t die. It puts them in a building with a pleasant name. A home. A place of care and shelter for those who can’t protect themselves, with a brochure and a garden and a locked ward on the third floor.

We know what happens in those buildings. Everyone on the second floor of Viper House has been within one bad month of one.

They hurt you in there. They put the newest compound in your arm to see what it does, and they write it down, and when it does something bad they adjust the dose and write that down too, and you’re not a patient, you’re a column.

And that’s what kills me. One man, in silence, with a checkbook, stood between her and that column. And then he never once came to see what he’d saved.

My teeth are gritting. I can feel the hinge of my jaw.

Because of the drug.

Cash said the name like a man setting down a weight. Caesura. Clinical designation. A bond-severance compound developed, if you believe the paperwork, for Omegas whose bonds had become medically dangerous, who needed the tether cut to survive.

That’s the brochure. Here’s the pharmacology.

It targets the bond site at the nape, the dense cluster of receptor tissue where the tether anchors, and it doesn’t cut the bond so much as burn the ground it grew in. Scar tissue instead of receptors. Nothing to anchor to, ever again.

And it doesn’t stop at the neck.

The bond site and the Omega reproductive axis share a signaling pathway. That’s the thing the brochure doesn’t mention and the clinicians know. Caesura follows that pathway down. It induces follicular atresia, the eggs dying in their sleeves before they ripen, and it suppresses the hormonal cascade that would wake them, and it does it permanently, and it does it in a single dose.