Forbidden Bonds (The Controllers #11)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

There were rumors of a Singular who had defected to our enemy, seeking to bring about peace. That was several years ago. Some said she was dead. Some said it was our own government that held her in isolation, deeming her views too heretical to be allowed a voice.

And some said she’d never wanted peace and now lived among the Uncorrupted, where she plotted to bring about our downfall.

After my time in the hands of the Uncorrupted, I couldn’t believe they would ever accept peace. Nor did I believe an omega could plot anyone’s demise.

~ Doctor Lillian Brach

Larissa

A hulking alpha is strapped down to a gurney, roaring like a beast and thrashing so hard the bars holding the restraints threaten to buckle. A tangle of cables and electrodes are delivering his stats to a nearby console. There is a drip inserted into his arm, hooked up to a drug dispenser.

They haven’t sedated him yet.

I really wish someone would.

His name is Jord, and he’s diverging, which is the Uncorrupted official term for when their alphas lose their minds.

Among the troops, they call it glitching. Different words, same thing. Just another side effect of the modified version of the Copper Virus that the Uncorrupted began experimenting with ten years ago.

His skin glistens with sweat as his body pumps out pheromones that saturate the small room, making my stomach churn.

Alpha pheromones should be appealing to an omega. Only, the Uncorrupted’s virus doesn’t work in the usual way. Diverging aside, their alphas smell and act wrong.

Two guards stand by the head of the gurney, ready in case the straps snap—which is a possibility, given how the gurney rattles under Jord’s rage.

This is not Jord’s first divergence.

A bleak sense of inevitability tells me it won’t be the last. I’m convinced he only lives because it provides a learning opportunity for Jenda, the alpha doctor in charge of the Uncorrupted’s experimental program, and one of the first of their own to be turned.

She stands to my left, eyes on the data display, everything about her totally clinical, detached, and military, from her cropped hair to her stark gray uniform. Her fellow alpha’s suffering doesn’t move her in the slightest.

They call this rehabilitation. It’s more like scraping out a mind. And I would know more about minds than most, being the only known mind-reading omega.

“Monitor his thoughts as I administer the dose,” Jenda instructs me, fingers already tapping the console’s controls.

I open myself. His mind is still locked on the incident that brought him here: the omega he broke, lying on the floor of a nesting chamber, a jumble of bloody limbs, twitching in the throes of a seizure. Medical personnel are working on her as a dozen soldiers swarm Jord with immobilizer rods.

The omega is currently in a regen tank with enough broken bones and soft tissue damage that she’s likely to be there for another week.

He did that to her… I feel polluted having to touch his mind.

The chaos of violence suddenly fades as orange and purple colors wash the scene away.

“He’s stabilizing,” I say.

“Good. Good,” Jenda says coolly, still busy at her console.

The two guards at the gurney both relax their rigid posture as Jord’s thrashing slows and stops.

He looks at peace. Different images fill his mind now, of his younger years before a twisted version of the virus turned him into this unhinged beast.

I want to hate him, but when I look at him, I feel only sadness for what might have been but for circumstances beyond his control.

If he’d gotten the original version of the virus—the one used in the Empire—I believe he would be just an ordinary alpha.

One whose scent wouldn’t make my skin crawl.

One who wouldn’t leave an omega bloody and broken.

The quiet is profound.

It won’t last.

It never does.

In the silence, my thoughts return, as they often do, to how I ended up here, a prisoner of the Uncorrupted, my omega gift—if one can call it that—turned into a tool.

Did an insider betray me? Or was the attack on the transport ship ferrying me from Chimera to Tolis merely the luck of the draw?

I have asked myself those questions too many times. I wasn’t the only omega taken that day, and many more omegas have been taken since then.

Ten years is a long time to live with your enemy.

But this is my life now. There is no escaping the Uncorrupted.

There is no exit plan that does not involve death.

And—as I’ve learned along the way, from those times when I have rebelled, and punishments have ensued—I still want to live, even here, even in this dreadful half-life filled with pain and misery.

The monitors bleep intermittently.

Jenda remains hunched over her stats. Jord is just a data set to her. His thoughts, feelings, and emotional welfare are reduced to numbers on a screen, fed into algorithms that care only about his remaining usefulness in the war.

Am I assimilated? I don’t believe I am. But I also accept that not everyone here is bad, just as not everyone in the Empire is good. Many ordinary people came over to the Uncorrupted, non-dynamics who left the Empire seeking a better life, hoping to escape the bottom of the caste system.

Life is not better here for them, that much I can tell. There is merely a different kind of prejudice, except here it exists within a culture rife with corruption.

Living so close to the Uncorrupted’s military leadership as I do, I’ve touched minds engaged in the study of warcraft, strategy and subterfuge across the ages.

The endless flood of information that churns through my mind every day provides me with a unique perspective on humanity; a thousand snapshots into our nature—the centuries of battle between the Empire and the Uncorrupted, dynamics, and non-dynamics.

The rise and fall of civilizations.

Stability. Anarchy.

Power. Ruin.

Change is coming, the balance is poised to tip, though which way is anybody’s guess. Both sides deploy propaganda, spinning tales to keep their populations complacent, and obedient to the games played by their leaders. For a long time, the Uncorrupted were the underdogs.

But are they still?

Jenda rises from her console and heads over to check the alpha’s vitals. Satisfied, she nods to me. “Come with me.”

I fall into step beside her as we exit the lab and enter the corridor beyond.

“I’ve been given leave to begin testing you again,” she says.

I fight to school my features, to hide the panic that slams into me.

Testing. Such an innocuous word and woefully inadequate to encapsulate the torture delivered under this woman’s direction.

Not only have I personally experienced her experiments, but I’ve also had to sit through many more tests performed on others, reading their minds as they suffered.

Jenda’s feeling especially cruel at the moment, and lashing out due to her own recent failure. She is not well-liked, but she was respected… until a high-profile omega escaped under her watch.

As we come to a stop before the door to General Cohen’s office, her soulless eyes rest on me, assessing me.

Cohen is my master, the one from whom Jenda borrows me. Though only when he allows it, when it fits with his own agenda.

I wonder if he has even agreed to the testing. Did she say it just to frighten me? Is she bluffing? Or maybe it’s not so much bluffing as an unwavering belief that she will get what she wants. Unfortunately for her, her recent failure has left a mark against her, and Cohen is a powerful man.

Jenda smirks at me. I know that look, and my heart skips a beat, rattling the mental vigilance I use to keep out of her mind. She enjoys pain, meting it out both in her intimate life and in the name of research. Images slam into me, bringing bile to my throat.

For the most part, I can choose to read someone’s thoughts.

But intense emotions, or proximity—especially if it involves touch—can allow thoughts and feelings to bleed through without my consent.

Jenda makes a game out of it. She loves nothing more than to see terror on my face as her hideous intentions spill over to me.

And she’s making it clear that her planned tests will deliver me into a fresh round of suffering.

“How did such an uninspiring wrapper give birth to such a mind?” Her eyes trail down my body.

No need to read her mind to see how very little she thinks of my ‘wrapper’.

Plain.

Unremarkable.

Not exactly ugly, but not pretty, either. Not like the other omegas who pass through her tender care.

“Remind Cohen he needs to make time for me to test you in his schedule.”

She walks off. Leaving me outside my master’s office.

General Hammond Cohen is sitting at his desk on a video call when I enter. He doesn’t pause to acknowledge me, just motions me over to stand at his side.

He’s speaking to his assistant about the next in-person alpha briefing Cohen has coming up.

The Uncorrupted move around a lot. Their ships and space stations are numerous, but in a few days, we will be arriving at Pilgrim Point, one of a few rare planet-side bases that has sprung up in recent years.

At every base we visit, Cohen tries to have time scheduled to meet with the alphas stationed there so that he can update them personally.

“…that theta prick has been wasting my time. Tell him I’ll be in contact. Let him sweat it out…”

My ears prick up at the mention of the theta. I’ve only come across such a dynamic once before, during a similar call where Cohen had me stand as I am now: he likes to display me—his little war prize—because it elevates his profile.

The theta wanted to borrow my mind-reading skills. Cohen had been open to that… at a price. One that, from the sounds of it, will not be delivered any time soon.

He finishes up his call and turns his attention to me. “What did she have you doing?”

“A diverging alpha.”

“Her little pets,” he muses, with a dark smile as his gaze returns to his desk.

An ironic statement given he wants to be an alpha. Desperately. However, despite many attempts, he remains unaltered.

I hate Cohen and everything about him, but I know he is not the worst monster to be found within the ranks of the Uncorrupted.

I despise them all. At the same time I am aware of my hypocrisy in seeing others as evil.

I myself am a monstrous tool wielded by both Jenda and Cohen to facilitate the Uncorrupted’s recent rise in power.

Their manipulation of my singularity has been the catalyst for their own viral program; without me, they would never have been able to torture the necessary information out of the Empire’s soldiers.

Helping him and his people has only ever caused me shame and sickness.

Early on in my incarceration, in an attempt to avoid being used for their purposes, I tried to deceive him.

I was young and na?ve, then. He must have suspected that I was lying, because he planted some tests and caught me out.

The resulting punishments were swift and severe.

I shy away from those memories by coming back to the here and now, only to remember what my imminent future holds. Jenda is going to experiment on me. Part of me acknowledges that I deserve the pain when my very existence has brought suffering to so many.

Melancholy wraps around me. Better if I’d died ten years ago… or, better yet, if I had never been born.

These thoughts are not new. But for some reason beyond my comprehension, as terrible as this life is, —and as much as I loathe myself and what I’ve been forced to do—the bottom line is… I still don’t want to die.