Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Dean turned his head just enough to look at him. "That," he said, "is perhaps the least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me in a hospital."

Nero barked a short laugh.

One of the physicians coughed into his hand in a way that was not especially convincing.

Arion did not move from where he stood, but his gaze held Dean’s steadily. "If I had been fighting with all my might, the session would not have lasted that long."

Dean absorbed that.

Then he looked at his own bandaged ribs.

Then back at Arion.

"That is grotesque."

"Yes," Arion said.

Dean’s mouth twisted. "You say yes to disturbing things much too easily."

"You ask disturbing questions very efficiently."

"That is because I’m intelligent under pressure."

"You are insolent under pressure."

"I can be two things."

Nero leaned back in his chair, openly entertained again now that the apocalypse had been downgraded to a deeply upsetting medical anomaly. "For what it’s worth, I don’t think the bond dropping made him more violent."

Dean looked at him. "Then why, precisely, do I feel as though I was attacked by infrastructure?"

Nero’s expression sharpened. "Because you hit the nape gland."

That quieted the room again.

A physician adjusted something at Dean’s IV. Someone in the hall rolled a cart past the glass. But the center of the room tightened.

Nero continued, less amused now. "You didn’t just interrupt his field. You hit one of the main output points directly and held it. His pheromones misfired at the source. That would have felt wrong even before the bond issue." He paused. "After the bond issue, it probably felt worse."

Dean looked back toward Arion.

Arion did not deny it.

The scientist, sensing an opening to make things more terrible through precision, said, "The telemetry suggests Prince Arion’s behavioral shift happened at the same time as the gland disruption and bond collapse, not after full cognitive processing. It looked reflexive. A threat-response cascade."

Dean blinked slowly. "So your professional opinion is that I medically offended him."

The scientist hesitated. "In simplified terms."

"That is revolting."

Sylvia spoke before Dean could continue spiraling into commentary. "What happened is this: you hit a biological source point tied to his pheromone output hard enough to destabilize the bond expression. His body read it as a real threat. He responded on instinct and stopped the second he understood your rib had gone."

Dean lay there for a moment, digesting that through pain, exhaustion, and the deeply irritating fact that everyone in the room sounded annoyingly reasonable.

Then he asked, "Can the information be used for the infected?"

The scientist looked at him.

Then at Arion.

Then, very carefully, back at Dean, as though trying to determine whether answering would be rewarded with professional respect or immediate execution.

Nero leaned back in his chair with a quiet, vicious sort of interest. Sylvia shut her eyes for one second, opened them again, and looked like a woman watching inevitability arrive on schedule.

Arion did not interrupt.

That, more than anything, made the room hold its breath.

The scientist cleared his throat. "Possibly."

Dean’s expression sharpened despite the swelling at his jaw. "That is not an answer. That is what cowards say before developing footnotes."

The scientist’s jaw tightened.

Dean noticed, which was unfortunate for everyone because Dean, bruised, half-bound, and medically discouraged from enjoying himself, still retained perfect working vision when it came to other people’s pride.

"I am not being a coward," the scientist said, with the careful dignity of a man trying not to sound like he had absolutely taken that personally. "I am being precise."

Dean looked unimpressed. "That has never stopped people from being cowards."

Nero made a low sound into his fist that might have been a laugh.

Sylvia closed her eyes briefly, then reopened them with the long-suffering expression of a woman whose life had become an endless sequence of competent disasters.

The scientist adjusted the grip on his tablet, squared his shoulders, and continued with the increasingly visible determination of someone who had decided that if he was going to be insulted from the bed of an injured royal-adjacent menace, he was at least going to be technically correct while it happened.

"What I mean," he said, more crisply now, "is that we do not yet know whether Dean’s effect can be replicated by anything external, artificial, or mediated. It may be unique to his specific biological profile. It may require his exact dual-function interaction between local pheromone nullification and source-point interference. Or..." and here his pride, bruised though it was, lifted its head enough to sound almost defiant, "it may have analogues."

That got the room’s attention.

Even Dean, who had been halfway to preparing another insult, stopped.

The scientist saw that and looked grimly vindicated by being useful. "During the session, we gathered a pheromone probe sample."

Dean blinked. "You what?"

"One of the ring sensors was not just reading ambient expression," the scientist said. "It was actively harvesting patterned data from the collapse zone. Not enough for reproduction, not nearly, but enough to analyze the disruption signatures around the targeted gland event."

Nero leaned forward. "You built a probe without mentioning it."

The scientist looked at him. "Had I announced it, you would have interfered."

"That is fair," Nero said.

Sylvia, arms crossed tighter now, said, "Define probe."

The scientist visibly appreciated the question. Definitions were safer than personalities. "A synthetic pheromone-response scaffold," he said. "Not an emitter in the crude sense. More like a calibrated receiver with limited feedback capability. It can sample active output fields, record instability patterns, and, in carefully controlled settings, attempt to mimic one narrow expression profile long enough to test whether a disruption effect can be induced in vitro."

Dean stared at him through the swelling and fatigue. "You’re telling me you built a fake gland with delusions of grandeur."

The scientist inhaled once through his nose. "That is a vulgar description of an extremely sophisticated instrument."

"Which means yes."

"Yes," the scientist said before he could stop himself.

Nero laughed aloud.

One of the physicians turned away, shoulders moving suspiciously.

The scientist looked pained and pressed on. "The point is that the probe may help us determine whether Dean’s effect is strictly biological or whether some component of it can be modeled, reproduced, or at least approximated under laboratory conditions."

Arion’s voice cut in. "Approximated how?"

The scientist’s posture changed slightly at being addressed directly by him. Straighter. More cautious. "We don’t know yet," he said. "That’s the honest answer. We can test whether the collapse signature requires Dean’s exact contact radius. We can test whether gland-target disruption can be induced by artificial feedback fields. We can test whether the bond-expression collapse was a byproduct of local pheromone structure failure or something unique to Dean’s biology interacting with Prince Arion’s."

Dean’s mouth twisted. "That remains a revolting sentence."

"Yes," Sylvia said. "But keep going."

The scientist nodded once, grateful for permission to continue existing. "If the probe reacts to the captured pattern at all, it would suggest there are structural components of Dean’s skill that are not entirely untranslatable. Not reproducible at field strength, probably not without a living carrier, but perhaps measurable. Perhaps emulatable in fragments."

Dean went still in the bed.

"So," he said slowly, "you’re not saying you can recreate it."

"No."

"You’re saying you can test whether anything in the world besides me can even begin to imitate part of it."

"Yes."

"That," Dean said, "is a much better sentence than possibly."

The scientist’s pride, injured but still functional, seemed to rally at that. "That is because it is a better question."

Nero made a delighted sound. "Oh, he’s fighting back."

Sylvia looked at the scientist with new respect. "Careful. Encouraging yourself around him is how you end up working nights."

Dean narrowed his eyes at both of them. "I don’t appreciate the conspiratorial tone."

"No one asked you to," Sylvia said.

The scientist glanced down at the tablet, then back up. "There is, however, a practical limitation."