I.
By half past five, Rían Callahan had eighty-three signatures, two marriage proposals, one invitation to hell, and a paper cup of tea that had gone cold enough to develop political opinions of its own.
Not bad for a Thursday.
He had been standing beneath the west arch of Galloway University’s old quadrangle since shortly after lunch, one hip braced against the folding table whenever the wind came tunnelling through from College Road. Rain had begun as mist sometime around four and settled into something more deliberate with the dark. It glazed the paving stones beneath the yellow wall lamps and gathered in the uneven seams of the quad, turning every reflected window into a trembling strip of gold.
The OEN banner tied across the front of Rían’s table had come loose twice. Its left corner sagged beneath the words OMEGA EQUALITY NETWORK, making the country’s principal omega-rights organisation look as though it had been assembled illegally in somebody’s bedroom.
In Rían’s case, that was not entirely inaccurate.
Around him, Galloway was emptying by degrees. Students emerged from the Arts Building in groups of three and four, shoulders raised against the weather, opening umbrellas with the practised resignation of people who knew waiting for Irish rain to improve was a poor use of an evening. The student union café across the quad opened every few minutes, releasing a wash of heat, conversation, coffee and toasted bread before the door swung closed again.
Somewhere beyond the library, a bicycle bell rang twice. A minute later the old clock above the eastern range struck the half hour, its sound softened by rain.
Rían cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Guardianship reform. Heat-leave protections. Consent-based bonding laws. Three straightforward opportunities to irritate somebody’s father before dinner.”
A woman in a red scarf slowed.
Rían smiled.
She was a beta, probably around his age, with dark hair curling damply at her temples and a canvas book bag cutting into one shoulder beneath her coat. Beta scent generally sat more quietly in a crowd than alpha or omega pheromones, but when she stepped under the arch he caught soap, coffee and rain-soaked wool.
She read the sign taped across the front edge of the table.
OMEGAS ARE PEOPLE BEFORE THEY ARE SOMEBODY’S RESPONSIBILITY.
“You wrote that?”
“No,” Rían said. “The table became radicalized while I was getting tea.”
Her eyes lifted.
“Sorry. Yes.”
“You’re very charming.”
“I’ve been here most of the day.”
“That explains it.”
“Unfortunately, I’m also like this after sleep.”
That earned him a smile. More importantly, she stayed.
Her attention moved to the petition sheets beneath the clear plastic cover.
People generally approved of omega equality in the abstract. The abstract was clean and generous: dignity, fairness, everybody agreeing that nobody should be treated badly. Guardianship was where that easy agreement usually became more complicated.
The beta tapped the first heading. “What does reform mean here? Getting rid of guardians completely?”
“Mostly? That being twenty-one means the same thing for me as it does for you. If I want somebody helping me, fine. But being an omega shouldn’t mean my parents or a guardian automatically get a say in where I live, what doctor I see, who I date, any of it.”
She looked down at the petition again. “But some people need guardians.”
“Of course they do. That isn’t the problem.” Rían shifted the plastic cover before a gust could lift it. “Most people hear guardian and think somebody helping. Sometimes that’s exactly what it is. But you should still get a choice, and your family shouldn’t be able to turn around later and say you’ve suddenly become incapable because they hate the choices you’re making.”
“Can an omega challenge one?”
“Technically, yes. Then you need a solicitor, money, records, sometimes doctors, and meanwhile the whole case is basically you proving you’re competent enough to be allowed to prove you’re competent.”
Her mouth tightened. “That sounds like a no.”
“It’s a very sophisticated form of no.”
She considered that, then picked up the pen Rían had tied to the table with string after losing three that afternoon.
Eighty-four.
“What’s the heat-leave part?”
“Protected leave at university and work without making me explain my cycle to half the building.”
“They ask for proof?”
“Sometimes medical confirmation. Sometimes suppressor records. Sometimes somebody decides they ought to ring your family because they’re worried.” He gave her a small shrug. “If I’m in heat and need to miss a seminar, it shouldn’t turn into three people discussing whether I’ve managed my body responsibly enough to deserve the day off.”
The pen stopped moving.
“That’s invasive.”
Rían pointed towards the rain-dark opening of the arch. “Would you mind saying that again very loudly? Preferably in the general direction of Leinster House?”
She laughed and finished signing.
The sound loosened something between his shoulders.
She picked up an OEN leaflet. “And bonding laws?”
Before he could answer, a young man passing behind her slowed.
“Isn’t forced bonding already illegal?”
He was a beta too, judging by the subtler scent beneath his aftershave. Two friends had continued several paces before noticing he had stopped.
“Some of it is,” Rían said.
“That’s what I mean.”
“It isn’t always what happens once lawyers get involved.”
Red Scarf remained beside the table.
Rían rested his fingertips along the petition board. He had given this explanation enough times that he knew exactly where people usually became uncomfortable.
“A bite isn’t automatically a completed bond. Sex isn’t yes to marking. Knotting isn’t yes to being bonded for life, and heat definitely isn’t.” He could see from the young man’s face that he had already given more answer than expected, but Rían kept going. “The problem is what happens afterward. Somebody looks at the mark, or the scent, or the fact that the omega was in heat and says, well, surely that must mean he wanted it.”
The young man frowned.
“So the OEN wants explicit consent before a bond is recognized?”
“If I say I didn’t agree to a bond, that should matter more than somebody else saying my body looked like it agreed for me.”
Red Scarf looked down at the leaflet.
“That seems obvious.”
“Yes,” Rían said. “Which is why it’s slightly maddening that we need a petition.”
She tucked three leaflets into her bag—one for herself and two for housemates, she said—and started across the quad towards the library.
Rían watched the red scarf move through the drizzle and vanish through the heavy doors before marking the tally beside his tea.
Eighty-four.
Across the square, café staff had begun stacking chairs near the windows. A few customers remained bent over laptops and mugs, reluctant to trade central heating for the walk home. The covered walks bordering the quad carried occasional bursts of footsteps and conversation, briefly magnified by the old stone before the sounds faded into other passages.
His phone buzzed beneath the leaflets.
NESSA: Still alive?
Rían typed with one thumb.
RÍAN: Still here. Galloway hasn’t managed to get rid of me.
Her reply appeared almost immediately.
NESSA: Eat.
Rían looked at the empty packet of biscuits originally purchased as petition-table bribery.
RÍAN: Done.
NESSA: Something you bought for YOURSELF.
He turned the phone facedown.
Political persecution took many forms.
When he straightened, he rubbed two fingers beneath the collar of his jumper. His suppressor patch sat against his upper shoulder beneath shirt and wool. It was still working, though a long afternoon in the cold and several hours of low-grade irritation had begun to soften its effect.
He caught the faintest trace of himself beneath wet stone and paper: honey, then butter, with something floral underneath.
Two students passing through the arch noticed as well.
One was an alpha. His gaze flicked towards Rían and stayed there a fraction too long.
Rían looked directly back.
The alpha kept walking.
Good.
Scent was information. It was not an invitation, a confession, a diagnosis, or public property simply because other people possessed noses.
Malachi Ward had written something very close to that before Rían was born.
His gaze drifted to the OEN material.
Ward’s language was everywhere in the movement, sometimes repeated by people who had long since forgotten where they had learned it. The Violence of Protection. The Politics of Scent. Heat, Law, and Bonding. The Omega Does Not Consent.
Rían owned all of them.
His copy of On Consent and Coercion contained so many pencilled objections that a reasonable observer might have concluded he disliked the author.
Rían considered that a failure of imagination.
Malachi had been OEN before the network became something undergraduates put in social-media biographies. Poet, journalist, campaigner, professional irritation to men who believed speaking gently transformed paternalism into fact. Old television appearances still circulated online: Malachi younger, leaner, dark-haired rather than silvering, speaking in that low Scottish voice while somebody in an expensive suit explained omega biology to him.
Rían had watched most of them, several more than once and usually for political reasons. There was one interview, however, that he had revisited because Malachi had rolled his shirtsleeves to his elbows halfway through an argument about guardianship reform.
Rían did not regard that as politically significant.
He regarded it as unfortunate.
What complicated the admiration was that Malachi’s career also proved one of OEN’s least comfortable points. An alpha saying listen to omegas had often been granted more authority than omegas saying precisely the same thing.
Rían admired him.
He also resented admiring him, which kept the whole arrangement intellectually respectable.
More importantly, Malachi Ward lived elsewhere, did not know Rían existed, and was therefore unlikely to interfere with it.
“Bit dramatic, isn’t it?”
Rían looked up.
Three young alphas stood on the other side of the table.
Nothing about them announced danger, which would later become one of the details Rían remembered most clearly. At the time, they were simply students.
The one in the middle wore wire-framed glasses and a Galloway rugby jacket zipped neatly to his throat. His hair had been recently cut, and his trainers were impressively clean considering the weather. The second held a takeaway coffee crowned with whipped cream and chocolate powder. The third carried a campus-bookshop tote with the corner of a paperback sticking out.
They could have been anybody’s classmates or anybody’s sons.
Rían followed the man in glasses’ gaze towards the sign.
“Which part?”
He smiled. “All of it.”
“There are nine words. You’ll have to narrow the complaint.”
The other two laughed.
It sounded ordinary enough that Rían’s attention remained on the petition rather than on the three of them.
“Omegas are already people,” Glasses said.
“Excellent. Eighty-four signatures and we can all go home.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I generally prefer people to tell me what they mean.”
A gust sent a mist of rain beneath the arch. Rían pulled the petition board farther from the edge.
Coffee picked up a leaflet.
“Guardianship repeal.”
“Reform or repeal, depending on the provision.”
“You seriously think guardians are the problem?”
“I think people should get to choose who has that kind of power over them.”
“Guardians keep omegas safe.”
Rían looked at him.
There it was—not hatred, nothing so obliging. Concern was more useful because concern could be made to sound reasonable.
“Some do,” Rían said. “Some hurt them. Some love them and still control them. All three things can be true.”
Coffee shook his head. “That’s not fair.”
“To whom?”
“To families.”
Rían’s mouth pulled sideways. “They’ll manage.”
The third alpha, Tote, laughed quietly.
Glasses did not.
He leaned towards the table and read the next heading.
“Consent-based bonding.” He looked up. “Who decides whether a bond is valid, then?”
“The people being bonded.”
“What if an omega’s in heat?”
The question changed the conversation without becoming louder.
Rían noticed the quad again. The café door opened across the square, releasing two students into the rain, and their laughter carried under the arcade before fading towards College Road. The clock above the east range gave a faint mechanical click as the minute hand moved. Yellow light trembled across the black paving stones.
“Then you look at whether he can actually make the decision,” Rían said. “You don’t just hand it to somebody else.”
“But heat affects judgment.”
“It can.”
Glasses looked pleased with himself. “So you admit it.”
“I admit heat can affect you. That doesn’t mean somebody else gets to decide you’re bonded for life.” Rían tipped his head. “Concussion affects judgment too. We don’t solve that by letting the nearest alpha marry you.”
Tote laughed again.
Coffee’s mouth twitched.
Glasses watched Rían for a moment, and the friendliness drained from his face so gradually Rían could not have said exactly when it disappeared.
“You people always have an answer.”
Rían shifted his weight.
“You people?”
Glasses glanced around the arch before answering. Most evening lectures had begun, and the quad was considerably quieter now. A few students crossed beneath umbrellas, moving quickly between buildings.
“OEN.”
“Of course.”
Glasses reached across the table and put two fingers on the top petition sheet.
Rían looked at his hand, then at him.
“Move it.”
The alpha leaned a little more weight onto the table. The metal legs gave a faint creak.
“You’re making a point about choice,” he said. “I’m exercising mine.”
His friends laughed.
This time Rían heard the difference.
