Page 54 of Slashed Bonds

Switch.

Some doctors call it a bipolar disorder of a special case, because that’s the closest word they’ve got and doctors hate not having a word. It fucks Alphas and Omegas on a different tier than it fucks anyone else.

Alphas go feral. Nonverbal. All scent, proximity, and teeth.

You saw that one, four minutes ago, put a dent in a trophy case.

Omegas go the other way.

Or I did.

I know this because I spent six months in a temporary facility during my recovery, and I’d like to say that’s the kind of sentence I can deliver without my hands going cold.

They go cold every time.

Bellwether. That was the name on the gate, in wrought iron, as though the place were a vineyard.

Ninety beds. A designation ward on the third floor with a separate elevator and a door that locked from the outside, because that’s where they put the ones like me. Alphas who’d stopped responding.

Omegas who’d stopped bending.

A hallway that smelled of industrial lemon and the pheromone scrubbers they ran twenty-four hours a day, so loud you stopped hearing them by the second week and started hearing them again the night before you left.

I was there because I’d put a man through a plate-glass window at a pharmacy for touching the back of my neck.

He was reaching past me for a bottle. I know that now. I didn’t know it then.

Six months.

Group in the mornings. A doctor in the afternoons who used the word dysregulation the way other people use the word weather. And in the evenings, when the ward went quiet, a night nurse named Okafor who’d worked the third floor for nineteen years and had opinions about the doctors that she’d only share after ten.

She’s the one who taught me.

Not in a session. Standing in a hallway at two in the morning, both of us watching a two-hundred-pound Alpha named Dez come apart in the day room, four orderlies backed against the wall and nobody wanting to be the one to go in.

“You want to know a secret about them?” she said. “About the ones who go like that?”

I didn’t answer.

I was watching his hands.

“They’re waiting for somebody to tell them where the floor is.” She folded her arms. “It’s not about being stronger. Nobody’s stronger than that. It’s about being the one thing in the room that isn’t afraid of him. You put that in your voice, nice and low, and you don’t ask. You tell them. Like an order they wouldn’t dare refuse.”

Then she walked into the day room, and I watched a five-foot-two woman in orthopedic shoes put an Alpha on his knees with one word.

Kneel.

It took me four months to do it myself. The first two times I got hit. The third time it worked, and Dez went down in front of me like a building with the supports cut, and I stood over him shaking so hard my teeth clicked, and I understood something about myself that I’ve never been able to un-understand.

I’m not afraid of them. Not the feral ones. Never was.

It’s the calm ones that did this to me.

Okafor told me one more thing, the week before I left. She was signing my discharge, not looking up.

“You’ll be tempted to use it on the wrong ones,” she said. “The ones who deserve it. It won’t work on them. It only works on a man who’s lost himself.” She capped the pen. “The ones who know exactly what they’re doing don’t have a floor to find.”

I think about that more than I think about almost anything.