Page 7 of The First Alpha on the Planet
“I do not know.” Fel frowned.
“He’s asking if omegas fuck one another. Yes, they’ve been here for how fucking long with no alphas or betas? Half the omegas here have omega partners and chosen mates. They’ve adapted. They just need baby batter.”
“And appropriate semen.” Fel nodded sagely.
Doc rolled his eyes and shook his head. He made a flippant gesture at me. “Back on topic. What are your big brain ideas for this?”
“Tissue payload.” Fel beamed, clasping his hand as his tail shivered.
“Might work. Noel would sooner eat someone’s face than donate an organ at the moment.” Doc slanted his gaze toward the open doorway as a distanthisscarried on.
“Mind him not, he is in his period.” Fel shook his head. “I’m so excited to potentially carry an egg that I cannot muster the energy to be easily angered. I can understand with a hatchling so young that Noel wouldn’t be as excited about the prospect. Have you thought about flushing his ducts and abstaining the rest of the season? I have documentation on it. With a high enough saline content flush, we can ensure that conception won’t happen.”
Doc gave an awkward grimace of a smile. “Yeah…”
“I do not care if I bear another egg, I will not abstain from Vil! Any work done to flush my ducts would be wasted effort!” Noel’s curt shout from down the hall made Doc flinch then relax.
“Thank you for using decent language around Noah!” Doc’s response earned a huff.
A muttered comment from the other room about someone giving Vil warning because Noel was about to have his own hunt, and it wasn’t for razik!
“Razik?” I gave Doc a second glance.
“Uhh…like a porcup—no. Pork. Pig! Those things.” Doc waved his hand dismissively. “Anyway! I think… For me, it—”
Doc’s lips twisted, and he opened a screen midair, waving his hands this way and that as he opened up password protected files and flipped through photos of a young male, younger, softer, and more innocent looking, staring back at them, and it was hard to look and equally hard to look away at the damaged body he’d been reconstructed from. As if reminded of what had been, Doc rubbed at his arm, squeezing it mindlessly. I’d never lost an arm before. I’d lost a foot, but that memory still brought me no joy. He’d lost so much more, and what he got back…well, it’d always be debatable if it was him. With as much damage as he took, he had to wonder. If any of his body was truly his, if his memories were transplanted—if he was just a petri dish of memories and DNA. I’d never been anything else but myself, so that I couldn’t relate to.
Then again, Sarge likely had the same—or did he? As a body-swapping parasite, he probably had made peace with it in his head.
Noel came in a moment later, Noah in his arms. His face, a usually emotionless canvas, held a note of frustration in it, but the documents Doc had open drew his curiosity. And if anything I knew about Noel, it was that a puzzle trumped any irritation.
“Wait. Go back two pages, second section. A sentence about tissue seeding.” Noel shielded Noah’s eyes by turning his body just enough to keep the little one from seeing any of the more disgusting imagery. Noel squinted at the document and raised a hand, gesturing for the pages to flip and turn. It always threw me for a loop how fast Noel could read, eyes almost shiveringin his skull. “I didn’t know they used my bone marrow like that.Interesting.”
Noel frowned as he glanced from Doc, to me and back at the document again. “Riiight…”
“I still feel guilty about all that, Noel.”
“They took so many samples and pieces of me over time that I don’t remember any one single event. It was all one big jumble. Whatever they did to me to heal you was nothing.” He handwaved it off, and I sat up a bit as Noel frowned. “So, he’s rejecting my tissue. Who did they use to make him?”
“I was told Tal and Raziel,” I added helpfully.
“Raziel…” Fel tapped his bottom lip. “I have his sequencing on file. What if we tried to recreate some of his DNA and injected it into Wallace?”
“Wouldn’t work. He’d reject any new tissue. Noel’s is the only stuff he never rejected.” Doc huffed.
Noel nodded sagely. “My antibodies are fairly universal. Or lack thereof.”
“True.” Doc and Fel spread a few of the pages out, but I didn’t miss Doc hiding the images of his broken body where Noah couldn’t see them.
“Well, if all else fails, shove my brain in another body or something if things get bad.” I shrugged. “Maybe the Colthraxians had something right?”
Fel flinched as if I’d struck him, and Doc frowned. Noel, though, froze, tail flicking with an anxious pace.
Fel, as if alerted by the motion, flicked his tail a different way and caught Noel’s gaze. “Well?”
Noel blinked, a moment’s confusion turning into realization. “Right. Tail. Always feels like someone’s reading my mind, here. No. I—Colthraxian tissue. What if we permeated Raziel’s code onto a cultured piece of Colthraxian neurological tissue and—”
“Simultaneously shut down the rejection and speed up the takeover at the same time! Brilliant…” Fel curled his tail and flicked, and Noel’s shivered in response. A silent convo that had both me and Doc glancing back and forth trying to parse meaning. Before we could ask, though, Fel scampered off, tail swishing in something I recognized as excitement.
