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“Oh, yeah,” says Calix.

“I thought it was like, clean food, farms, stuff like that?”

Calix snorts. “Okay, well, there’s Polloi and there’s Polloi, so you got to get that straight, first.”

“What’s that mean?” I say, and I’ve found a skillet. I put it on the stove. It’s a gas range, so I turn on the flame and then adjust it before I put the skillet down. Then I empty the bag of frozenmeat into the skillet. It lands with a plunk and sits there, sizzling, ice crystals melting. Yeah, this is definitely ground beef.

“I’m trying to tend my bite here,” says Calix.

“Is it complicated?”

“You were a priest. You have to understand that there’s the rules of a religion and there’s how people in the religion actually live,” Calix says.

I guess I understand that.

Lotus strokes his hair. “Well, I’m curious, too. Because I’ve heard that the reason Polloi go into heat and ruts on schedules and we don’t is because of impurities in modern culture and diet, like if we stopped drinking alcohol and eating McDonald’s and stuff, we’d be better off.”

“Right,” says Calix, “and the doctrine of the Polloi is no alcohol and to eat fresh food from farms and things, but the doctrine of the Polloi is asking too much of most of the members of the Polloi. We don’t allhavefarms, for one thing, and not all groups believe in the alcohol prohibition.”

“Oh,” says Lotus, nodding.

“Yeah, it’s up to the Vasilissa, a lot of the time,” says Calix. “Penelope’s old school. No booze out here. But where I grew up, it was much laxer on that. Neither this pack or my old pack had farmland or anything like that. Everyone was supposed to go out and work, but the closer you were to the Vasilissa in terms of bloodline, the more likely you were to actually sit on your ass. The money all got turned over to the Vasilissa, though. She was supposed to divide it evenly amongst everyone for food and things? But, uh, she kept more of it than she gave out. We ate cheap. A lot. Ramen. Rice. Beans. Hamburger Helper.” He goes back to tending Lotus’s bite.

I speak up. “So, you’re saying that the ideals of the Polloi might be noble, but the execution of them is often corrupt?”

He shrugs.

Lotus bites down on her lower lip. “Why’d you bring us here, Calix?”

He doesn’t answer. He just tends.

6

lotus

IN THE DARKNESS, my stomach full of beef and powdered cheese and noodles, I can hear Dr. Acker in the basement. Even though she has her mouth taped shut, she is whimpering in pain, and I can hear that.

I am pinned against Calix, who fell asleep with his mouth to my neck, and Striker is in front of me. Knight and Arrow are on the other side of him, all twined up. I don’t know what happened regarding that bite of theirs, to be honest, and I don’t know what it means for us that Calix and I are the only ones bonded.

I can feel him now, and when he talks about the Polloi, I feel his pain splashing through me, dark red, so dark it’s almost black. He hated it here. I can’t imagine why he brought us here at all, and he doesn’t seem to know either.

All I want is to be safe.

I want to be bonded to my mates. I want them not to be triggered into killing machines at the drop of a hat. I want somewhere we can live where there’s no threat of law enforcement or Cedar Falls coming after us. I want a nest. A real nest.

All I want…

Maybe it’s actually a lot.

Maybe I’ll never have any of it.

Why won’t that woman stop making noise?

I wriggle out of Calix’s arms, and I climb out of the makeshift nest we’ve made here. I am only wearing a nightshirt, so I put on a pair of leggings and then I go downstairs into the basement.

Acker sees me when I pull the chain on the hanging light down there, bathing the place in yellow-ish light, and she cringes from me in fear.

I go to her and yank all the tape off of her mouth.