Page 286 of Slashed Bonds

The rest are out front.

Dox, Halloran, Roz, Greenie, the twins. In the lobby of a private organization that doesn’t do lobbies, with a line of cameras outside the glass that followed the van from the Civic and are being held at the curb by two of Dox’s men who look like they’re waiting for a bus. Giving interviews. Roz with her reading glasses on, reading from a card she wrote in the van, the same three sentences to every lens.

The Blackridge Vipers are not disbanding. Four members of the roster will be taking a leave of absence effective immediately, to recover from tonight’s events. They are invited to rejoin the team whenever they’re ready. Two months or twelve. That’s up to them.

Up to us.

Viper showed me the clip. Once, on her phone, on mute, with her thumb ready to stop it, in the ten minutes between Lessard leaving and the rest of them arriving, because she’d decided I should hear it from a friend before I heard it from a stranger. Maddie on a dot with a pink stick. The lights going. The screens. A girl in a glass doorway with bandaged arms, and I’d watched her fight two men and I’d watched her mouth say the words I’d said and I’d watched her go over, and I’d handed the phone back before the sound, because I know the sound.

I haven’t let it in yet. I’d like that understood. It’s standing outside the door of me with its hat in its hands, and I know it’s there, and I’m going to let it in tonight, or tomorrow, on a beanbag with a dog on my feet, when the room’s empty and I’ve got the whole night to do it in.

Twelve thousand people watched me go over a rail. Twelve thousand people watched Theo stand there. And Naomi Vance left the Civic in handcuffs with her painted helmet on the dot. All of that is real and I’ll feel it. Not yet.

Maddie at the dot, though. That I let in. The sinister thing on her face when she said pregnant and thriving. I’d never seen that face on her and I’d known it was there, the way you know a house has a basement.

I’d heard it through the wall before I was fully awake and it had gone into me like something warm. A door held open. A seat on a bench kept with a jersey over it. The team that was built in a parking lot with a leash for a net saying, in public, through a woman who hates cameras, we’ll be here.

And will we come back? Any of us? There’s a child. We’ve got a year of paid leave, a house, three continents, a child. Does a woman who’s found out an hour ago that she can carry go back and stand on a dot where men hit each other?

I don’t know. The ice is in me the way my blood type’s in me. But so is this, now, and I’ve never had to hold both.

Hellsing Ross is out. That’s the other thing I heard through the wall, in Roz’s voice, to a lens. Disqualified. The arrest of a rostered Omega under the rule the league wrote this morning to look good in a program, and the league’s lawyers found by nine that the rule they’d written had teeth in it they hadn’t meant to put there. The semifinal’s postponed until the investigation’s done. Weeks. And when it resumes, there’s one team left standing on our side of the bracket and no one across from it.

We advance. By default. By a rule they wrote to put two Omegas in a photograph. The final’s ours to show up to, and the four of us have a note from a doctor and a year.

The dot’s still there. I keep going back to it, lying here. Twelve strides from the bench door on the east end at the Civic, where I was going to stand with my eyes shut and take a pass in the shins. It’ll be there in a month. It’ll be there in a year. Dots don’t move. The question is whether the woman who counted the strides is the same woman who stands on it, and I don’t think she is, and I don’t think I mind.

Dorian never slid. The pass never came. The thing I’d pointed my whole body at for a month happened on a screen instead, and the screen did more than my shin pads ever would have.

Val’s still looking at us.

She’s taken the pencil out of her hair and she’s turning it in her fingers, and the two full sleeves are moving as she does it, and her face has gone to the place faces go when the thing being said is older than the room.

“I was twenty-three. On a pole in a competition in a city you’ve all heard of, three months along, and I came down wrong, and that was the end of it. The baby and the rest. The doctors used the word you’ve all heard.” She looks at me. “Permanent.”

Permanent. A word on a chart. Said through a curtain.

“I spent two years deciding my purpose was to make that word a liar. Not for me. It was too late for me, and I’d made my peace. For the next one. I went back to school. I read everything that had ever been written about Omega endocrinology, which isn’t much, because nobody funds it, because the people who fund things don’t have wombs. I found the gaps. I found that most of what’s done to Omegas who’ve been through trauma isn’t healing, it’s management. Flatten the system so it stops screaming. Keep her quiet. Call it stable.”

Lessard’s word. Built to maintain. Not heal.

“And I met Dox. And Dox had a thing he’d been doing with pigment for Alphas, a compound in the ink that bleeds slow into the blood and keeps the chemistry from going feral, and I said what if we did the other thing. What if we loaded it for an Omega. Not to flatten. To fill in. To find what’s low and bring it up, slow, over weeks, so the body doesn’t fight it the way it fights a pill.”

She’s quiet a moment.

“That’s what Vicious Ink is. That’s why we take blood. That’s why I’ve got a five-year list, and it’s not because I draw pretty.”

“But how did you know I wanted kids?” I ask.

It comes out small. Smaller than I meant.

“I didn’t.”

She says it with emphasis, and then she smiles, and the smile’s the first soft thing I’ve seen on her face.

“I knew the world had been cruel to you from one look at your wrist. I knew, from the panel, that your levels were in the floor and that most of what was holding them there was a protocol, not a wound. I knew enough could be fixed for you to be fertile, if the rest of you lined up. I didn’t know you wanted it. That’s not my business. My business is giving a woman back the door and letting her decide whether to open it.”

The door. The one I’d been told was a wall. She drew a butterfly on my hand and gave me back a door.