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I hesitate, but that small hesitation is enough for my mind to fill with the vision of one single gigantic, perfect peach. I haven’t ever actuallyeatenone, but I saw one once. I was a small Beta kid living in Grasslands and an old man had pulled this somewhat desiccated-looking thing out of his pocket. He’d slipped it into the pocket of the old woman standing beside him and she’d looked at him, shocked, then she’d kissed him and I’d known that whatever he’d given her was something special. Precious.
“Maybe?”
He looks surprised, but he doesn’t hesitate. He’s not a dumb brute, I’ll give him that. Had he hesitated, I’d have taken the request back. “Omega, I command you to raise a — What kind of fruit do you want?”
“Peach,” I tell him.
He gives me a funny look, almost a sad look, before he tips his head down. “Omega, I command you to raise a peach tree.”
I’m looking into his eyes when I feel the earth beneath my fingertips react, and I keep looking at him as vines move over the soil…only, they’re not vines, are they? They’reroots. They twist together, spiraling up and out of the ground, wrapping around each other as they move. But, instead of standing tough and firm, they’re bending and swaying, never forming a trunk, not turning green.
I fall back onto my butt when they suddenly twist towards me. Freaked out by my own abominable creation, I close my eyes and hold up my good hand to ward off the impending attack but, when it doesn’t land, I see that they’ve stopped. Now, they just…wilt back to the ground, their knobby heads making them look like dead rose bushes.
Adam — theBerserker,goddammit — is covering his mouth with his hand, pretending like he’s rubbing his jaw, but that smile is too wide to hide. “Are you laughing at me?”
A warm gust of laughter, like a gale of ocean wind fresh off of the sea, hits me square in the forehead. Feels so…sogood.“Never.”
The ease between us freaks me out even more than the root formation before me. It’s ugly, for sure, like some sort of ill-formed stalactite — stalagmite, whichever one comes up — but when I reach out to touch it, it breaks. “It’s dead.”
“Practice,” he says. He doesn’t sound disappointed at all. No. On the contrary. The Berserker kneeling across the fire is looking at me like he’sproud of me.No one’s ever been proud of me before.
“I…um…yeah, that’s uh…” I swallow and start over. “I’ll help you investigate Trash City.”
“Because you like to please me, don’t you, Omega?”
“Are you making fun of me? For what happened last night?” Fuck. There. I said it.
And his response? Calm. Cool. Collected. “No.”
He stands and spears the end of a large stick into the ground and then does the same thing with four other sticks. Across the top, beneath a part of the fire that’s only embers, he spreads an actual metal grill that was left behind in the mess and tosses strips of the deer on top of it. The sizzle and the smell make my mouth water even though I’m far from hungry. With all the other stuff left behind, there’s enough food to feed ten of me for days. Strange that he hasn’t eaten much of it.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask at the same time that he says, “So where do you think they got the weapons? And no. Wanna see you eat, though.”
“Oh. Um. They must have traded an Alpha.” I swallow hard, responding to the former half of his sentence and not the latter. “No Beta compounds have weapons like that.”
Successfully distracted, he rubs his matted beard again and stares at me from across the flames. “You sure?”
“Positive. I mean, when you were a Beta, did you ever see guns like that?” When he was a Beta.
He gives me another lingering look that’s a little…raw, a little afraid. He breaks the line of our eyes first but in a different way than he does when he’s frustrated with me.Because he’s not frustrated with me now, he’s nervous.“No, I didn’t. But that was a long time ago. Things mighta changed.”
“No.” I wrinkle my nose and rub it roughly with the back of my hand as I realize what I’ve done — the parallel lines I’ve drawn connecting us. “Things don’t change for Betas.” I turn to face him and there’s a crease between his eyebrows and his lips are turned down at the corners. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s a gift, in some ways. In others, it’s purgatory. And purgatory is better than hell.”
He nods, considering for a moment, then says, “You’re right.”I’m what now?“Must be an Alpha tradin’ with ‘em. I just can’t think of any Alpha who’d be so stupid. Can’t be a Berserker. Even Shadowlands isn’t that crazy.” He pegs me with his gaze. “Got any other theories, Omega?” Omega. I flinch at that so imperceptibly I hope he doesn’t notice. But he does. Immediately after, he says in a voice that’s softer than the echo of a heartbeat, “Got any theories, Echo?”
He moves to stand over me, but I get up a beat later and grab my newly formed pack. I drag it closer to the fire and pull my space blanket out of it. I try to fan it out, but it’s hard with one arm…until the Berserker intervenes. He spreads two of the corners easily and lays the blanket on the ground that’s not so much wet as it is a little dewy.
I look up at the him, twisting my neck to look at him from the side. His stare gets very concerned and he stops playing with his beard. His hand strokes down his chest and I focus on the shape of him, thinking back to Trash City, thinking hard.
“Did you see what Trash City did with the Alpha bodies?”
“What bodies?”
“The guy with the Dark City Slayers tee shirt.”
His frown gets gruesome then and his eyes get distant. “Don’t know. Don’t care. Hope they burned ‘em.”
“I don’t know who’s giving them guns.”
