Chapter 266

Yuri could no longer rely on fortune arriving by chance. The patience of fate, which until now had postponed the execution of death, had finally run dry, and its scythe sought to reap their lives. Desperate not to lose his lover, he forgot food and drink, throwing himself wholly into experiments. Failure upon failure piled up with each new attempt, twists and setbacks repeating endlessly, draining him, but he inched forward, step by step, with frantic determination toward an ending.

At the end of that long and grueling patience, Yuri at last encountered a moment even he could scarcely believe. By an accidental mishap during his experiments, he obtained a miraculous therapy on a dimension far beyond his imagination.

Yuri reconfigured Gezar’s genes, expressing them anew, and wholly reactivated his brain. It was like tearing up a road network full of holes and building a brand-new expressway. With the neural network rewired, Gezar’s senses, cognition, and motor abilities were heightened altogether. It was not the rebirth of a man, but the birth of a new species.

But joy did not last. An unforeseen problem arose. Gezar had only postponed death for the moment. Once again the same symptoms appeared—he dropped things constantly, staggered with vertigo. The therapy, incomplete, proved temporary, as though the shadow of death would follow him forever.

Yet what tormented him even more than the thought of his own death was something else. He had become a grotesque beast: a rutting dog, desperate only to graft himself onto Yuri, a wicked predator that endangered Yuri’s very life. After sex that felt like rape, looking at Yuri’s bruised naked back as he tried to gather himself, Gezar was crushed with shame. To think that the result of a lifetime’s effort was nothing more than this—he wanted to throw himself into the swamp that very instant.

Even while misfortune weighed thick above the couple, the twins continued to grow. A few years later, at only fourteen, Isaac and Ezra too manifested the genetic disease, and they were remade like Gezar into that same new humanity. Thus the men of the Bazelli line leapt beyond the limits of humankind, into beings close to gods.

On nights when insects and frogs cried, from the shed’s flimsy windows leaked Yuri’s desperate, harrowing cries. Even if those sounds reminded the twins of the word they had secretly learned from books—“sodomy”—neither of them ever joked about the couple’s nights.

On nights when a man’s powerless moans stained the dark, a rift formed between the two boys that words could never explain. Isaac remained a guileless child, but Ezra, spying the secrets of adulthood, drew near to adolescence.

Consumed by thoughts of love and sex, Ezra naturally fell into the fever of love, as a river flows into the sea. The object of his yearning was the woman who helped with their household, the one with the massive birthmark on her face. Only fourteen, yet Ezra already bore himself as a grown youth. Overflowing with sympathy, tender by nature, Ezra was loved in turn by the woman. In the marshland perched at the world’s edge, the morals and dogmas the world imposed never reached, and nothing barred their love.

“Isaac, from now on you can take the lower bunk.”

Ezra spoke with a smile of affection. Isaac, though wounded by the sense of loss as though stripped of a vital organ or limb, let his brother go without protest. Just as the heroes in the books he had read experienced partings, small and large, and accepted them in the end, he told himself this was simply the order of life.

And so Ezra became the man of the woman with the birthmark. Leaving behind foster parents and brother, he moved into her house. He cut the stilt bridge that connected their land to the outside world, building a kingdom no one else could enter.

For the first time since meeting Gezar Bazelli at fourteen, Yuri felt loneliness. It was not only from the sense of his body being consumed by Gezar’s endless hunger and indulgence. His loneliness was the hollowness of coupling with another species.

Gezar was no longer the man he once knew. When Yuri looked into his eyes, he felt as if facing a wild beast steeped in frenzied lust. A creature pressed together from condensed emotion and condensed flesh, molded into something fierce and untamed.

Compared to that harsh alpha, Yuri was only an ordinary man, frail. Yet Gezar always pushed him past his limits, and after sex left him abandoned in ruins, struggling in pain, staggering toward death.

One night, Gezar collapsed, unconscious from terrible vertigo, exhausted into sleep. That night Yuri, in a corner of the notebook he had once filled in childhood with doodles alongside the Scripture verses he was forced to recite every morning, wrote down a line.

The Lord God said: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

Gezar, and Isaac, and Ezra, were a subspecies of humanity. Called alphas, they resembled Homo sapiens in form but could not reproduce, nor could their blood be transfused with human blood.

Moreover, Gezar had rut. Cyclical heat and hormonal surges damaged his nerves and cells, and the overexpression of certain molecules broke the balance of his body.

But what if there existed a being to suppress and complement this overexpression?

Yuri built a hypothesis—that as Adam had Eve, an alpha’s only counterpart, the unique being that would be their beginning and their end, might save Gezar. An omega.

Yuri placed his own body on the altar of experiment. He sought to reshape his endocrine glands, to construct artificially a new organ unknown to humankind. The word “omega” did not yet even exist, but in order to save the first alpha, one man attempted to become the first omega. It was the beginning of a desperate gamble.

Yet even then Yuri did not understand what his attempt would bring, nor what it truly meant to become the alpha’s complementary being.

It was in the spring when Isaac turned fifteen. The boy felt a fragrance he could not believe, as if in a dream. At the same time, a stench as if from the mouth of hell. Strangely, he sensed it not only through his nose but through his skin. A new, unfamiliar sensation stirred beneath his flesh, writhing awake.

Overwhelmed by the scent that intoxicated and unsettled him alike, the boy masturbated for the first time. The fragrance drifted from the main house, apart from the shed where he stayed. Amid the jumble of odors, it shone out distinct, like oil upon water, and he moaned with desire to roll in it.

He slipped carefully from the shed toward the main house where his foster parents stayed. The closer he crept, the louder the cries—tearing through the heavy night air. It was Yuri’s voice.

He could not believe such vulgar, lewd, debased cries had come from the same intelligent, elegant, noble man. His mind felt like it would dissolve. And then that scent—luminous, silken threads spilling from the cracks of a shuttered window, lashing him into madness.

The fragrance made him a werewolf hungering for the moon. Beneath his skin, a hot, sharp sensation like an army of ants surged, urging him to devour the unreachable moon. Heat surged, threatening to burst through his flesh, rattling his body.

He could not understand what it was, but instinct told him he must conceal it. Otherwise Gezar would cast him out—or perhaps tear him apart.

Like a cub unable to challenge the pride’s lion, the boy licked his lips in hunger and slunk back to his shabby pen. For days and nights he lay awake, listening to the sounds of beasts rutting, knowing with dread that what he craved was Yuri. Yuri’s languid moans churned him sweetly, cut into him like a wound.

The boy thought about loneliness, and about love.

He realized there existed in the human abyss an elemental feeling that books and infinite imagination could never quench. That desolate loneliness fell into his dark-blue heart like the trail of a meteor shower.

But he could bear solitude. So long as from afar, like spring haze, he could secretly breathe Yuri’s fragrance. So long as in dreams he could press a kiss to Yuri’s cheek, it did not matter.

Yet when the season of bright winds came, all of it vanished like a midsummer night’s dream. The boy could no longer sense Yuri’s sweet fragrance, nor Gezar’s repulsive one that made his guts shudder.

All of it was gone. Like a rainbow on a soap bubble, leaving not a trace behind.