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Chapter Nine: The Person Behind the Picture
publish date:
2026-03-18 21:17:45
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ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE Chapter Seventy-Nine: Ten Weeks
Ten weeks sounds like a lot until it isn't.I learned this in December.The days have the specific quality of a countdown that you're aware of without being anxious about, the way the last weeks before something important always feel. Full and moving and slightly faster than you'd like.I work through the first two weeks of December. Diane has rearranged my patient load the way she said she would, more assessment, less physical demand, and she was right that it's better. I am good at assessment. I've always been good at assessment. The work has a different texture but the same satisfaction.I stop at thirty weeks.Not because I want to. Because Dr. Vega and Diane and Dominic and Petra form an inadvertent coalition on the same Tuesday afternoon, each from different angles, and I look at four people being right simultaneously and decide that the practical choice is to accept it.I tell Dominic that I accepted it, not that he was right.He accepts this distinction without comment.The ap
ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE Chapter Seventy-Eight: The Month Before Moving
December arrives and the city changes.Not the temperature, which has been cold for weeks. The quality of things. The specific energy of a month that knows it contains an ending and a beginning and leans into both.I work four shifts the first week. Dominic has the apartment painted while I'm at the hospital on Tuesday and Wednesday, which I agreed to in advance because I don't want to be around paint fumes for twenty-three weeks and because Petra supervised it remotely via photographs sent every forty minutes, which is somehow simultaneously excessive and exactly right.The pale green is perfect.I see it Thursday morning when Dominic takes me to check the progress. The morning light hits it and it is the exact color of something new. Not spring specifically. More like the moment before spring. The moment when the ground is ready.I stood in the doorway of Lucia's room for a long time.The piano against the wall. The pale green. The east light."Yes," I say.Dominic stands behind me.
ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE Chapter Seventy-Seven: What He Did to the Room
Petra picks me up at ten. Just the right time. She is in the car before I get downstairs, which means she left her apartment earlier to arrive in Wicker Park by ten, which means she has been operating at elevated anticipation levels since last night when I texted her.She did not ask what it was and that is very unusual of Petra.She asked one question: "The good kind or the terrifying kind?"I texted back: "I don't know yet."She texted back: "Ten o'clock. I'll drive."She is wearing her nice coat, which tells me she dressed for an occasion without knowing what the occasion is, which is the most Petra thing she could possibly do."You look like you're going to something," I say as I get in."I might be," she says. "You don't know.""You wore the coat," I say."I like this coat," she says. "It's become my favorite one""You save it," I say. "For things."She pulls out into the street. Swerving with experience"Do you know what it is?""No," I say. "He said come see. He said bring you.
ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE Chapter Seventy-Six: Six Lunares in Chicago
Thalia arrives on a Tuesday.She texts from the airport at noon with the specific energy of someone who has been moving toward a destination for a long time and has finally arrived at it. I am at work. I text back a welcome and the address of the restaurant where we're meeting Thursday evening and tell her Rosamund will be in touch about the logistics.She sends back one word: “Ready.”The others arrive over Wednesday and Thursday.Rosamund sends me their names as they check in. Brief, factual texts, the way she communicates everything important.Margot. Dublin. Landed Wednesday afternoon.Soren and Adaeze. They know each other. Stockholm. Same flight.Ezra. Lagos originally, Edinburgh now. Landed Thursday morning.Five people I have never met.Five people who carry what I carry.Six, counting me.For the first time since Mira Seca dissolved thirty years ago, a group of Lunares in one city.I think about this on my Thursday shift. Between patients, during the specific moments of clari
ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE Chapter Seventy-Five: Seventeen Faces
I found the email on Sunday morning.Dominic has already gone. He left at seven with the quiet efficiency of a man who has early obligations and doesn't make a production of departures. I heard him in the kitchen, the specific sound of him being careful not to wake me, and I stayed still and let him think it was working.I've been awake since six.The email is in my inbox when I pick up my phone at seven-fifteen. Administrator Pren. Edinburgh. The subject line sitting there with the patience of something that knows it will be opened when the time is right.I make coffee first. Decaf, the herb pots watered, Sunday morning doing its ordinary thing outside the window. Then I sit at the kitchen table and I open it.Seventeen photographs.I scroll through them slowly.They are not glamorous photographs. They are the kind of images that appear in professional directories or on organizational websites or are pulled from social media accounts that were never intended for this purpose. Ordinar
ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE Chapter Seventy-Four: What Edinburgh Means
I didn't answer Administrator Pren that night.I sit with the call the way I sit with things that are large. Let it take up space without immediately deciding what to do with it. The instinct to act quickly has served me well in emergency rooms and less well in the rest of my life and I've been learning, over the last two months, to distinguish between the situations that require immediate action and the ones that require something slower.Edinburgh is the second kind.Dominic stays until ten. We don't talk about Edinburgh specifically. We talk around it, which is sometimes more useful. He tells me about the Conclave's international structure, which is more fragmented than the North American version. Regional bodies with their own governance. The Edinburgh Conclave covers the UK and parts of Scandinavia. They have standing but not unified authority.I listen. I file it.He goes home.I sit in my apartment with the November city outside and I think about seventeen Lunare candidates in
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