The Omega Bond (Book Five in the Omega Game series)

Chapter 15

Fair

The Yellow Islands

Present…

“This is the thing,” said Baobao the next morning, right after finishing his apple and pointing at the basket full of letters. We were inside of the messenger center, which was a brown room at the side of the main building by the back of the servant’s quarter. The place was small, crowded and hot. Not the place I wanted to wake up every single day to look at. Baobao threw his apple inside a bin and looked back at me, speaking so fast that I had to focus on reading his lips so I didn’t miss anything of what he was saying, “Messengers have a one single policy when dealing with the selections of our mail. We follow the first come, first served law. My advice is to be here at dawn if you don’t want to end up getting the mail that no one wants to deliver.”

“The letters that are on top are the ones that nobody wants to deliver, so you do this,” Baobao took a couple of envelopes in his hands, then proceeded to lick his right thumb with his tongue and started shuffling through the missives with one eyebrow arched. He divided two piles, gave me one and then placed the other missives in the basket of another messenger. I made a face of disgust at what he had done and Baobao shrugged dismissively, “First come, first served. Better to protect your neck than end up dead like that girl who died in your room.”

“Did you know her name?” I asked right away and Baobao frowned at me.

“I don’t ask questions and you shouldn’t either,” I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

“Come on! You know everything in this place and believe me, that’s a compliment,” I said while he did his best to ignore me and kept organizing our mail. I followed him while he worked, “Baobao, a girl died! She just...died. Someone, somewhere has to know something about her. Like, what was her name? What was her favorite food? What happened to her?”

“See,” said Baobao, clicking his tongue, “Those are the type of questions that get you killed on this island. She is dead, Zenny. Very dead. Like, dead enough that she is not going to care if we find the answers to all of those questions. Put the lid on it, forget about it and move on.”

“I can’t move on,” I said, accepting the three envelopes that he passed me over his shoulder, “I feel like I need to do something. I want to help her.”

“Help her?” Baobao turned around, his eyes wide and mouth pointing down, “Girl, you can’t even help yourself. How the hell are you planning on helping others? There’s nothing a little girl like you can do to help anyone. Just let it go. Focus on surviving this place and finishing your day alive, hmm?”

His words were like a slap, right on my face. I took a step back, a little unbalanced after hearing his truth. I was starting to understand a very simple concept. People owned their truths in different ways. My truth and Baobao’s truths were different, but that didn’t mean they were wrong. In his eyes I was a nobody. Weak. Incapacitated to do much and probably too fragile to survive what he knew was a hard life of work. I knew the difference. I was small, yes, and right then I wasn’t as powerful as I might be able to be one day. I was on my way there and helping that unnamed girl find peace seemed to me like a good first step to take.

The problem about truth was that nobody could own it. Once free nobody could catch it. Nobody. Not even the ones they belonged to. We were inept products of the constant shielding that lying gave us. How many lies did we tell ourselves every single day? This is just temporary, you will be somebody in the future. It doesn’t hurt. Tomorrow will be better. A lying loop of positivism. And right there, staring back at me, was a boy that had seen too much and had stopped lying to himself long ago. Baobao only believed his truth and tried to own it as best as he could. That was why he didn’t believe in much other than himself. He was a survivor. A stronger, dead and improved version of a child who had been killed with the gentle poison of a sad reality.

He patted my shoulder, trying to give me a reassuring smile that didn’t touch his eyes, “Listen, you can’t give one coin away if you don’t have one coin in the first place. Let’s go to work and if you do well I will treat you to dinner tonight.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything while I followed him into the city. The vivid streets and lively people didn’t interest me as much that morning. My mind was too worried and I kept thinking about the dead girl. I just couldn’t understand how nobody could remember her name. It felt as if she had been a nobody. A ghost before even dying. How could that be possible?

Baobao showed me the best roads to connect between houses and one or two shortcuts to return to the servant’s quarters. We did our rounds twice while I grew used to the dynamic of the job. It was a fast transaction delivering letters. I noticed that immediately, since we were always on the move, never taking any breaks. I did everything that Baobao ordered me to do. Not look anyone in their eyes. Keep my mouth shut. Pull my hat down and conceal my face.

I had never worked a day in my life. Actually, everyone I knew was either in the military or royalty. I was pretty sure the mere definition of working would have made Nira’s skin crawl, but I enjoyed it. It was strangely entertaining and before I realized the day had passed. Sunset found us walking up a street. My forehead and back were covered in sweat but I was focused and my mind had finally stopped moving in rounds about the girl’s death. Baobao seemed to be happy enough about how the day had progressed.

He invited me to eat rice balls and drink tea by the harbor once we finished working. The place he picked to eat was a little stall near the sea. It was crowded with people eating on their feet. It wasn’t anything fancy, but the rice balls tasted amazing and the tea was hot and sweet. While I was eating at Baobao’s side I felt the strange sensation that I was being watched. I looked around the harbor but there were too many people coming and going for me to pinpoint if I was actually being spied on. Baobao rolled his yellow eyes at me when he saw me eat slower while I studied the crowd around us.

I was about to tell him about my strange feeling of being watched when a girl younger than me stopped right in front of us. She looked dirty and unkempt. Dust stains covered her cheeks and neck, which hinted it had been a while since her last bath. She had thin brown hair that was kept firmly braided in a crown over her head. In silence she passed me a bulletin made of brown paper. I felt my eyebrows raise to my hairline. Paper was extremely precious in the Dark Desert, where there were no plants that could be properly treated to transform into paper. The girl was holding an entire basket full of brown papers that she seemed to give randomly to people all over the street. The Yellow Islands could use paper so freely. I still couldn't wrap my mind around it.

I narrowed my eyes, studying the street. The little girl seemed to have given the papers only to other girls but no men. That was strange. What was this bulletin about? I looked down at the paper in my hand and read the large symbols that had been painted on it with black ink.

HELP NEEDED. MONEY GUARANTEED

“What is that?” asked Baobao, pushing his head over my shoulder to read the paper as well. He frowned after reading and looked back at the girl, “The crown doesn’t allow open prostitution advertisement.”

“What?” I screeched, staring between Baobao and the girl feeling a little dumbfounded. The girl looked angry at the insinuation and shook her head, staring at Baobao with a frown before staring back at me.

“The Hand doesn’t sell our bodies. He is a good boss and only hires human girls to give them a chance to work. We do all sorts of odd jobs but nothing illegal,” I felt even more confused at her answer. The Hand? Was that a man, an organization or a place? Surely enough once I studied the street I realized that all the girls and women who had been given the bulletin were humans. They didn’t smell like Betas or Alphas. They were all unscented like me. Strange, but I’ve seen stranger things happening.

Baobao smirked, rolling his eyes and taking a sip of his tea, “Whatever. She already has a job, kid. Go and waste someone else's time.”

The girl’s eyebrows grew knitted in the middle at Baobao's rude remark. It was such an old expression in a young face that it felt kind of wrong to see her look like that. I smiled at the girl, accepting the paper and carefully folding it before placing it in my pant’s pockets, “Thank you for offering me the bulletin. I appreciate your good intentions.”

She smiled a little and nodded at me, “If you are interested, go to the old theater in Dragon Town. We meet at midnight after the Alpha guards do their round.”

I could almost feel Baobao’s smirk a mile away from him.

“That sounds lleeegal!” chimed Baobao with a sing-song voice that made me laugh under my breath. There was something about Baobao’s insensitivity that made him grow fast on people. Like a fungus or a sickness. The girl and I nodded at each other and then she was gone, moving fast through the street and disappearing once she rounded the corner.

I looked back at Baobao and lifted an eyebrow at him, “Was it really necessary to be so blunt?”

“No offense Zenny, but nobody wants to hire humans in this city,” said Baobao, taking another sip of his tea and shrugging, “They don’t have a scent. They can’t be properly trusted. If anyone offers you a job because you are a human, then it is either illegal or morally wrong. Don’t be stupid and go searching for this offer. Dragon Town is dangerous. Especially after midnight.”

“I didn’t know humans had it so hard in this city,” I murmured and Baobao frowned, staring at me as if I’d grown two heads.

“Have you been blind and deaf since you were conceived? Humans have it hard everywhere, Zenny. Alphas are always in power and Betas serve. Humans do whatever is left and that’s not much,” he explained and I nodded a little.

“What about Omegas? They have it the worst, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” he said, scratching his chin, “They are too rare in this world and very treasured. Alphas go crazy about them but they are always protected and safe. A lot of women in this world don’t have that chance.”

I knew better than that. Yes, what Baobao said was right. Omegas were treasured, but they were never free. Not completely. Even Lira and Lora, who were still very young, were always afraid of their Omega Instinct. Our Heats degraded us into becoming animals. Animals that were even lower than violent Alphas, and that in its own way, made us a prisoner of our nature. I have never known what it felt to be a human before, but their anonymity was reassuring in a strange way. Although not always.

I felt myself grow a little sick when my thoughts returned to the girl who had died in my room. Has her human anonymity made her vulnerable? Had her powerless lack of dynamic made her a target? I chewed on my lower lip while I overanalyzed thought after thought, slowly obsessing over that dead girl that nobody could even remember by her name.

“Come on, let’s go home,” said Baobao after a while, offering me a hand and helping me to get up from my seat on the street.

That night back at my room I laid on my back while I watched the ceiling with a frown. My conversation with Baobao kept me awake even if I was dead tired after my first day of work. I’d never give too much thought to the humans outside of the dynamics. All my life- or at least what I remembered since Nira had picked me- I’d been in direct contact with Alphas and Omegas. I’ve seen humans back at the Dark Desert, but they had been very few and seemed to be always busy like Betas. Now I was starting to see this classified system in a whole new light. Alphas were in power, Betas served and Omegas were treasured. And humans…Humans were not even a group that had a direct purpose in the pyramid of power. Which didn’t make sense to me.

What about humans? What set them apart from the dynamics? Who defended them? Who fought for them? What could they give to every society? Sure enough they wanted something. Like Alphas wanted to protect and Betas’s instinct was to serve and help, humans surely had their purpose. What was it? Why had I never thought about them before? I felt so shallow and stupid. All those years so carefully protected had made me blind and deaf. Exactly how Baobao had called me this afternoon.

I frowned, crossing my arms under my head and staring out the window to the starry night. I needed to do something about that girl’s death. I wasn’t sure what I could possibly do to help her, but there must be something. Tomorrow I will try to find some clues about the girl’s death and hopefully I will finally find some peace of mind. I wasn’t sure why her death had become so personal to me, but after finding out I was the Neutralizer I felt I needed to do more, to help more. To do something, anything, that could make me feel in control of…what I was.

Yes, I might be a weapon, but I wasn’t entirely an instrument.

I also had good in me and tomorrow I would use it to help that dead girl.