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“Ruari isn’t for you to fix, Cassian.”

Cassian nodded into Colin’s shirt. When Colin finally let him go, Cassian took his notebook with him to the privacy of his room.

He sat cross-legged on his bed with the notebook open in his lap. He turned past the fourteen rules, running his thumb along the edges of the pages he’d filled and feeling the grooves where he’d pressed too hard with the pen.

He uncapped his pen when he found the first blank page, positioned the nib at the margin, and wrote the number fifteen. The five had been tricky for months. He used to make it look like a wonky S, but Colin had taught him a method, top line first and then the curve, and now his fives were as good as anyone’s.

15. When your alpha goes quiet, you have to be louder. Fill up the room until there is no space left for the quiet. Shine until he smiles.

He wrote it slowly. Each letter sat on the line where it belonged, and he checked his spelling on his mobile after every word.

He read the rule to himself, mouthing each word. Then he said it aloud, once, to hear how it sounded.

He underlined it with a single clean stroke and held the notebook up to admire the whole page.

Tomorrow he’d go to Proving Ground, and he’d do rule fifteen properly. He’d talk louder and smile wider, filling every corner of that quiet kitchen with enough brightness to chase the flat grey look out of Ruari’s eyes. The Lumineer had always said that a Vessel’s light could break through any darkness.

Cassian shut the notebook and tucked it into the shoebox with his other important things. He changed into his pyjamas, brushed his teeth, and climbed under the duvet with his mobile propped on the pillow, queued to an episode of My Brother’s Alpha Best Friend that he’d already seen three times.

ROYAL COMMISSION INTO THE FAMILY OF LIGHT

Recorded Submission — Transcript Excerpt

Witness: Cassian Calyx (né unknown)

Date of recording: [REDACTED]

Present: Ms Arden Welsh (Counsel Assisting), Dr Rachel Wilson (Support Officer)

COUNSEL ASSISTING: Cassian, I’d like to ask you about Lysander Huxley. Can you tell us how you first came to meet him?

CASSIAN CALYX: He turned up at Hamish’s house. In Melbourne, I mean. He just appeared on the front path with a suitcase. Nobody had warned me about him, and nobody had warned him about me, which Hamish says in hindsight was a mistake, but I think the Universe doesn’t make mistakes, so I try not to use that word.

Lysander walked in one morning, and I was standing in the kitchen doorway without any clothes on. I’d just finished my morning practice, and he looked at me like I was something that had crawled out of a drain.

[Pause.]

I was scared of him.

COUNSEL ASSISTING: Can you tell us why?

CASSIAN CALYX: I’d googled him. Hamish had taught me about Google, and I google everyone now, and the things I found about Lysander were…he’d done sex stuff. On cameras. He had a whole website where alphas paid to watch him, and there were millions of them, and the things he did in those videos were things I couldn’t even look at for longer than a few seconds.

I’d been taught that what Lysander did was the worst kind of contamination. That an omega who lets multiple alphas…who opens himself up like that to someone who isn’t his declared Evermate…that omega has polluted his vessel beyond repair.

So when I met him, I looked at this beautiful, loud, frightening person, and all I could think was that he was everything I’d been raised to fear becoming.

COUNSEL ASSISTING: Did your feelings about Lysander change?

CASSIAN CALYX: Yes. He bought me a turnover.

That sounds like a small thing. But I’d said something terrible to him, something about cleansing the contamination out of his body, and instead of hitting me, which is what I’d have expected from someone I’d insulted that badly, he went quiet. He walked out of the house. I followed him, like I followed everyone then, I didn’t know how to be on my own yet, and he let me follow him even though I could tell he wanted to hurt me for what I’d said.

We ended up at a café. He bought me a turnover and gave me his as well, and then he showed me photos of his family on his mobile. His father, who’s a male omega like us, and his twin brother, who was pregnant. He told me I’d find someone who deserved me.

Nobody had ever said that to me before. That I deserved a specific kind of person, rather than the alpha I’d been assigned by the Light.

COUNSEL ASSISTING: You said Lysander taught you something about being an omega. Can you explain what you meant?