Reborn (Alpha's Claim 3)

People were disgusting.

On the dank walls underground, pictures of her were pasted everywhere Corday turned.

The Premier even called a day of mourning, and Thólos had a fucking ten minute moment of silence.

Corday had gone through her loss once when she’d disappeared from the Omega sanctuary. It was nothing to the pain he was in now. Everything had gone wrong; furthermore, the guilt was killing him.

Why had they not given him the body? Was the fall really so bad she was totally unrecognizable? Thinking back over the last year, obsessing over every last detail, Corday searched for the thread that would explain away his building feeling of foreboding.

How many times had he sat in the softly colored blue room with her when she had hardly been lucid enough to speak? Why were they constantly sedating her?

Claire had never complained about it... and he wondered if she’d had the mental capacity to understand the extent to which they controlled her. She was just one small Omega the Premier kept sequestered like a pampered pet.

Why had they not pulled the plug when she refused to breathe for weeks after she had been found in the Citadel?

And the doctors had been so possessive of not only her, but of the things Claire kept in her room... like she was some specimen, or experiment, and everyone wanted to see what she would do.

Corday began to have a sinking feeling whatever they had been pumping into her was not for her benefit, but for theirs. That was why they would not release her body—they wanted to poke around inside first, to take her apart.

Did they think she knew where the virus was? Had they been using pharmaceuticals to try and pry it out of her?

Corday had slunk around the building that imprisoned her enough times to know, the North Wing was exactly what it claimed to be: a refuge for Omegas who could not protect themselves had they been forced to live with the masses in the Undercroft. So why had they kept him away? And then why had they suddenly given him carte blanche to visit her? The doctors were aware he was gently courting her. In hindsight it seemed almost as if they encouraged it, even the less than congenial Premier Dane.

He’d always assumed it had been beneficial to her recovery.

But that went back to the original question. If she was recovering, then why was she constantly sedated?

After the funeral, he returned underground. Sitting on a worn chair, tucked into the small stone grotto where he slept, Corday stared into space, distracted by the injustice of the situation.

Something was very wrong. Why did he feel like everyone, including Dane, was lying to him?

He waited until nightfall before sneaking into the Premier’s Sector.

He cornered Dane alone in her office, and put a knife to her throat. “What did you do to her?”

Even as he threatened her life, the Alpha had looked somewhat impressed. “You saw for yourself, we were only trying to help Claire.”

In the months he’d had access to the Omega, he’d been blinded by his own joy, had stopped asking questions and stirring up the people underground. He could see it now—that’s why Dane had let him near her.

He let the blade dig in until a line of blood dripped along the sharp edge. “You’ve lied to me enough.”

“You were the one who unleashed Svana on us, who pointed Shepherd’s men at our resistance.” Hissing, trying to pull her neck away from the blade, Premier Dane growled, “You cannot be trusted, Corday. Be glad that I let you live, allowed you to continue work as an Enforcer, and that no one knows what your part really was in the suffering of our people.”

The words cut him deeper than his knife pricked her throat. “You know the circumstance, the reasons, for why I did what I did.”

“Yes.” Dane did not say more.

“I want to see pictures of Claire’s body. I want proof she’s dead.”

Continuing to appear unperturbed by Corday’s threat, Dane gestured to her desk’s COMscreen. “Patient file 142.”

Withdrawing the knife, Corday typed in the file name. There was a year’s worth of gathered data on Claire: physician notes, photographs of her paintings, a log of her treatment. At the end of it all was a series of disturbing images. The face of the dark-hair corpse had been crushed on impact. It was just gone. Something had darkened her skin to grey, left it blotchy in the places where bone stuck out.”

“It took us three days to find where she’d landed in the Lower Reaches. We don’t even know how she got out of the North Wing. The only video we have is of her walking down the hallway, alone.”

“Why does her skin look like that?”

“The heat of her body melted the sludge just enough that it encapsulated the corpse. Sewage leeched into her, there was some kind of chemical reaction.”