Chapter 7: What the Doctor Asked

Adrian sat down across from the desk. Voss’s chart was already open on it, and the coffee beside the chart had stopped steaming a long time ago.

“Mark the calendar,” Voss said. “My office called you three times. You moved it twice. And here’s the man himself, on his own feet, at the hour he agreed to.”

“Something’s wrong with my pheromones.”

Whatever had been on Voss’s face went off it. He put the chart down.

“Wrong how.”

“It’s been—“ Adrian stopped. He had the sentence. What he didn’t have was the word to end it with, and he took a second to find one that would do. “Quiet.”

Voss didn’t say anything for a moment after that.

“You’re a high-tier alpha with no omega and no mark,” he said then. “Nothing gets out of you the way it’s supposed to, so it builds up. The ruts get worse instead of better. You know all of that better than I do.”

“I do.”

“Once a month I take some of it off you in here and send you back to work, and nothing I’ve ever done in this room has touched the cause of it. So when you sit there and tell me it’s quiet, either you’ve been doing something, or something’s wrong with you.” He leaned back. “Which one.”

“No temper. No headaches. Nothing out of control.” Adrian thought about how to say the rest of it and gave up on the attempt. “I’ve felt fine all month. That’s the part that’s different.”

“Sleep.”

“Fine.”

“Eating.”

“Fine.”

“Anything else you plan on answering in one word?”

“No.”

Voss looked at him for another second, then got up and set out what he needed.

“Collar down.”

Adrian undid the top button and turned his head toward the far wall. The back of his neck was the one part of him other people handled. He had stopped having an opinion about it years ago.

It took a few minutes, and Voss worked without talking. That was most of why Adrian came to this office instead of to somebody closer to the building, and neither of them had ever said so out loud.

Then there was a wait, and neither of them filled it. Voss watched the screen. Adrian watched the wall.

Voss read the result twice. The line between his eyebrows had been there when he started; the second time through, it smoothed out. That was not where Adrian had expected this to go.

“Say it.”

“This is better than what you walk out of here with on a regulation day.” Voss turned the screen a few degrees toward him and then turned it back, as though the angle had been the point. “Not the same. Better.”

“Better than what.”

“Better than anything I have on you.” A pause. “So. What have you been doing.”

Adrian didn’t answer.

He had gone back over the last month himself, at home, twice. Same building, same hours, same six days a week. One night in a hotel, and that night was not going into anybody’s file. That left him nothing to say, so he said nothing, and Voss let him.

“Or,” Voss said, “you finally went out and found yourself an omega—“

“No.”

He said it before Voss finished. He hadn’t. Whatever that night had been, he had not gone looking for it. And the man from the elevator — the one who had explained himself too many times, and badly, and who Adrian had believed anyway — was, by every read Adrian had of him, a beta.

“Can a beta do that,” he said. “Redirect it.”

Voss took his time with that one.

“An ordinary beta can’t,” he said. “The designations are ranges, though. Some of them sit closer to omega than their paperwork says. An alpha and one of those, close enough and long enough — it moves things.”

“Mm.”

He was thinking about the elevator anyway, and about a voice in it that had been working much too hard.

“So,” Voss said. “A beta.”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.

“I was asking in general.”

Voss didn’t push it. He had pushed on a lot of things over the years and had never once pushed on this one.

“Your numbers are good,” Voss said. “Good enough that I don’t need to see you this month.”

“Mm.”

Adrian fixed his collar, stood, and got to the door.

“When you go,” Voss said, “if there’s a normal way to handle this, handle it the normal way. I can keep you running. Running isn’t the same as comfortable.”

Adrian nodded. It was the nod he used when he had decided nothing. Voss had seen it before, and let him go anyway.

Outside, the corridor was full — everyone leaving at once, coats over their arms. He went back down one floor and out through the lobby, where the day’s crowd was thickest: wet coats, floor wax, coffee, a kid crying about something dropped on the tile. He didn’t slow for anybody. People moved for him.

He was most of the way to the garage side when he stopped.

Vance was down by the front doors, on his feet, with a chair behind him and three men in front of him, all three of them bigger than he was. Adrian had no idea what the man was doing in this building.

People went around him. Somebody said excuse me and got nothing back. Vance said something that didn’t carry this far, and pushed his glasses up, and the three of them didn’t move, and the lobby went on moving past all four of them, everybody on their way somewhere else.

The message came in when the cab was still three blocks from the bridge.

Sam Renner’s name came up on the screen. That was information by itself. They hadn’t spoken since the thing at school. Sam hadn’t come back to the dorm after it either, so there had been nothing to say and nowhere to say it, and Elliot had apologized once, by text, and gotten nothing back.

The message was four lines. A scooter, on the way back to campus. His leg bad enough that he couldn’t put weight on it. A list of things he wanted brought over, because he couldn’t get up to get them himself. The last line said where he was: Meridian.

Elliot read it twice, leaned forward, and told the driver to turn around. The driver did it mid-block, and the cars behind them let him hear about it, and Elliot put his head back against the seat and did not think about anything for the length of the bridge.

Meridian at six-forty in the evening was a building with a crowd in it. He called from just inside the front doors, got Sam on the second ring, and saw him while he was still talking: one of the chairs against the wall to the left of the entrance, one leg stuck out straight in front of him, three men standing over him.

Nobody in the lobby had decided yet that this was their problem.

Elliot went over. He stopped in front of the chair and turned to face them, angled enough to keep Sam in the corner of his eye.

“Did they take care of the leg?”

Sam nodded. His color was bad.

“So somebody showed up for him.” That came from the tallest of the three, who turned until he was square to Elliot before he said the rest of it. “Good. Here’s where we are. My brother’s still in there getting looked at, and if anything comes back wrong on him, this stops being something your friend here can pay his way out of.”

“The accident gets a report,” Elliot said. “There are cameras on that corner. If anybody has a problem with how it comes out, it gets worked out through the report and the insurance. Not in this lobby.”

He didn’t know whose brother it was. He didn’t know whether the brother existed, or what a man on a scooter had been doing on that street, or how much of this had been worked out in the parking lot before Elliot came through the doors. What he had was a report, the cameras, and a lobby full of people who would remember it.

And that morning he had decided he was done standing still while people put their hands on him. That had been one man and a cup of coffee on a sidewalk. This was three of them and a chair.

Elliot stayed exactly where he was and kept his voice where it was.

After a second he glanced back. Sam had both hands on his own knee, and his fingers were moving, small and quick and not on purpose. He was watching Elliot’s face.

Elliot put his eyes back on the tallest one and left them there.

The tall one looked at him for a while. Elliot looked back and didn’t fill it.

In the corner of his eye, Sam’s hands had gone still.