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“You did?” I say. “When?”

“Well, when I was trying to find you guys, I called a friend of mine who has access to this sort of thing,” says Calix. “So, anyway, I’m going to do a deep dive into that. Or if we could get a laptop, I could go in to work, and you guys could be logged in here.” He makes a face. “Okay, no, because there’s no internet here. Maybe if we had a mobile hotspot…” He shakes his head. “Not the point. What I’m trying to say is that if we can get in, we can possibly find out more than how give Acker amnesia. Maybe we could figure out how to save all the omegas and alphas who are locked up down there.”

I turn to look at him. “Yes,” I say.

Striker nods. “If we can do that—”

But the door’s opening.

I get up off Calix’s lap to look as Arrow and Knight are coming inside.

“Hey,” I say. “There you are. Where have you been? What’d you find out?”

“Nothing,” says Knight, looking very frustrated. “Absolutely nothing. It seemed like I was getting somewhere, but no matter what I do, I’m stuck getting nowhere.”

It’s exactly what I said the other night. I go to him and wrap my arms around his body.

He folds his arms around me.

“Where were you, though?” says Calix.

Knight sighs, letting go of me. “You’re going to be annoyed.”

“Oh, you did not go to Kyvelki!” says Calix.

Knight scratches the back of his head, sheepish.

“That’s fantastic,” says Calix, sarcastically. “Did you piss her off?”

“She seemed to mostly find me amusing,” says Knight, his voice dull.

“Thank Goddess for small favors,” mutters Calix.

“She just told me a bunch of stories,” says Knight. “The last one… I don’t even know. She made me think it was going to give me answers, but it had absolutely nothing to do with our situation.”

“Stories about the teeth?” says Calix. “What’d she say?”

“Uh, it’s a lot,” says Knight.

Calix gestures for everyone to sit down at the table. “Tell us what she said, Knight.”

Everyone sits down.

Knight starts talking. He tells us about going to play chess with Theodorus and about how Theodorus took him to Kyvelki.

Calix concedes this was not a terrible way to go to see her, but that Knight shouldn’t have gone on his own.

Then Knight starts relating all the stories about the origins of alphas and omegas, none of which I’ve heard before, but they all do sound like folklore stories, I have to admit. He tells us howKyvelki said that the stories are told to confirm that the Polloi have only two choices—endure tyranny or erase themselves.

Calix snorts. “Well, how about option three, which is to stop the tyranny within the goddess-damned religion, Kyvelki?” He gestures at the ceiling, shaking his head in disgust.

“Yeah,” says Knight, nodding. “Good point.”

Calix holds up his finger, as if he’s seconds away from launching into a diatribe of some kind. His nostrils flare. And then he lowers his finger, shaking his head. “Go on. What else did she say?”

Knight massages the bridge of his nose, searching for his train of thought.

The final thing he tells is the story about the omega who brought about her own destruction by actively trying to thwart it. It reminds me of other stories like that, tragic stories, likeOedipus Rexor something.