After taking two resounding slaps, Liam passed out. The room fell into chaos. The woman panicked and cried out Liam’s name, while the middle-aged man took a far more direct approach.
He wrapped Liam up completely in a few quick movements, lifted him, and ran out with him. The people in the room parted to either side of their own accord, opening a path.
At the doorway the man turned his head back, sweeping a cold gaze across everyone inside, and warned them in a low voice:
"Today’s business ends here. If I hear so much as a whisper of it outside..."
He narrowed his eyes and left the rest of the sentence hanging. Everyone shivered as one and stammered out their agreement, over and over.
The man carried Liam swiftly away through the emergency exit, with the woman hurrying along behind them. The people left in the room exchanged glances, their expressions running the whole range, but not one of them said another word about what had just happened.
The curly-haired young man from before did not go chasing after the two adults. He busied himself instead with pretending to kindly gather up Liam’s clothes, and edged gradually toward the bedside table. In one swift movement he took the card that nobody had noticed from the very beginning, stuffed it into his trouser pocket, and left carrying Liam’s clothes.
Once he reached a secluded corner, he pulled the card out for a look. It was white with a gold border. There was no real name on it, only the initials N-C and a smart ID number printed in standard gold ink. Below the smart ID number, one line had been scrawled in ballpoint pen: Something urgent has come up and I have to go. Please contact me when you wake.
The young man turned it over and back, examining it, and pursed his lips in disdain. The card looked utterly ordinary, and the material was nothing but the common pulp paper that went for one silver star per ten sheets.
So the person who had rolled around in bed with Liam was nobody of consequence either.
The young man clicked his tongue and tossed the card into the mouth of a cleaning robot, which destroyed it on the spot.
Two days later.
Liam lay naked in the medical pod, his eyelashes fluttering without pause.
He was having a dream. In the dream he became someone else and lived that person’s eighteen years of life. He became Liam Hall, second young master of the Hall family.
This place was no longer the Earth he knew. In fact it was not any planet within the Milky Way at all.
This was a high-technology world, and gender here came in a great many forms. Beyond the male and female distinction used on Earth, people were also divided into three main branches: Alpha, Beta and Omega.
Each of those branches had its corresponding male and female genders. The Alpha branch had male Alphas and female Alphas, the Beta branch had male Betas and female Betas, and the Omega branch had female Omegas and male Omegas.
Of the three, it was the Omega branch in which both males and females could bear children, with a high conception rate, and the children born to them possessed extraordinary innate talent. Omegas, however, were exceedingly rare. Any family that had one cherished them like a precious egg and sheltered them like a delicate flower. Even Liam Hall, before his true identity came to light, had been indulged without limit by the Hall family despite being the lowest E-grade of Omega.
The place where the original owner had lived was the Capital planet, which belonged to the Solaris star system.
The Solaris star system was the central star system of the Lumina galaxy. It consisted of six major planets, with the Capital planet serving as the main headquarters. Ringed around the Capital planet, in order, were Vanguard, held by the 1st Legion; Ironclad, held by the 2nd Legion; Wraith, held by the 3rd Legion; Bulwark, held by the 4th Legion; and Sentinel, held by the 5th Legion.
Each Legion had duties of its own, taking responsibility for the defense of the Capital planet and supporting the others in building up the overall strength of the entire galaxy.
The reason the original owner and Elijah Hall had been swapped came down to a battle fought on the edge of the Solaris star system eighteen years earlier. At that time the Hall family was still a great noble house answering directly to the Royal Family, and its enemies were beyond counting. Madam Hall was kidnapped while heavily pregnant and close to her due date.
The kidnappers found their escape route cut off, and, driven into a corner, they hijacked an agricultural transport ship belonging to a married couple who were out on a delivery run. The husband was killed on the spot trying to protect his spouse, and his body was thrown into the meteor stream that ringed the star system.
The male Omega was eight months pregnant at the time, and the shock of his husband’s death sent him into premature labor. Madam Hall was so terrified by all of it that her water broke in that same moment. The kidnappers had no choice but to put down on a remote planet in the Mohames star system and scrape together whatever midwife they could find.
This midwife was already old and her mind was no longer clear. Having delivered both of them, she set the two infants into the same incubator for the time being. By the time she had finished tending to the two mothers she had muddled up which baby had been lying where, and so she handed each parent the other one’s child.
A day after the two of them gave birth, the Hall family traced their location through a tracker hidden in Madam Hall’s pendant and got both of them out safely. The two parties parted there, each going their separate way.
It was not until seventeen years later, when the eldest son of the Martinez family, which was in fact the original owner’s biological family, fell critically ill and needed a blood transfusion, that Elijah discovered he was not the Martinez family’s biological son.
Before his Papa passed away, Elijah had often heard him speak of his Daddy’s death and the strange business of years ago, so it took him very little time to dig up information on the Hall family. Elijah swept every last coin out of the house, boarded a ship for the Capital planet, and found a way to slip into the Hall family’s charity banquet to tell Mr. and Mrs. Hall who he was.
Out of what had really been an accidental mix-up, Elijah spun a story about children swapped for wealth and glory, and turned the Papa, the older brother and the older sister who had always loved him dearly into kidnappers and criminals.
Did Mr. and Mrs. Hall believe it?
They did. Because Elijah’s face was the exact copy of Madam Hall’s, from his hair right down to his faintly naive features. They didn’t even bother running a genetic test. And because they had raised the original owner for a full seventeen years, Mr. and Mrs. Hall could not bring themselves to send him back to his old home either.
The Hall family was wealthy enough, after all. One more child to raise was hardly worth mentioning.
From the day Elijah Hall came back, however, the original owner seemed to turn into a different person altogether. He took to haunting the seedier entertainment venues, fell in with bad company, and schemed to push Elijah down at every turn. What little affection Mr. and Mrs. Hall had for the original owner was worn away bit by bit...
Liam opened his eyes and sat up. He opened the medical pod, sat there with a hand resting against his forehead, and let out a dark laugh. Turn into a different person, was it?
Weren’t every single one of those things staged by Elijah, start to finish?
And as for what had happened that night, hadn’t it come about because the original owner had found evidence proving the two of them were picked up by mistake rather than swapped out of malice, along with evidence of Elijah framing him, and had meant to use the birthday banquet to bring it all into the open?
Elijah moved first with a vicious little trick. He drugged the original owner, then bribed a waiter to spill wine down the front of his formal suit. The waiter bowed low and apologized profusely, and took it upon himself to suggest walking the original owner up to a lounge room to change into something else.
The original owner followed him without a shred of suspicion. On the third floor, near the lounge room, he suddenly felt that something was wrong with his body. The original owner’s nose had always been very sharp, and the instant the waiter opened the door and invited him in, he caught a mixture of pheromones. There were Alphas inside that lounge room, and not merely one of them.
The original owner turned and ran for his life without looking back. Before the men could catch up with him, he spotted a room whose door had been left slightly ajar. There was no time to think it through, so he ran straight in and locked it behind him.
After that, the drugged original owner ran headlong into an Alpha who had been drugged as well, and the two of them simply tangled together into one hopeless mess. The original owner was only an E-grade, and that Alpha was far too strong, B-grade at the very least.
The Alpha had barely gotten inside him before the original owner kicked the bucket, unable to withstand the pheromone pressure. The one who woke afterward and answered the Alpha’s every move was Liam from Earth.
And after all that, the Alpha ran off.
Liam remembered the soaring, cloud-borne feeling of that day, and his face flushed pink. Then he slapped himself once, gritted his teeth, and silently cursed out that scumbag of a man along with the entire Hall family.