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So, when he’s done, I say, “The point of stories like that is always that everything’s fated, and you can’t stop it, no matter what you do.”

“Oh, is that the point?” says Knight. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, and maybe I’ve been too specific. I was wondering if it she was trying to say that you were making us violent by expecting violence from us.”

“No,” says Striker, dismissing this. “We can’t risk her. We need to be careful, that’s all.”

“Well,” I say, “if we can sedate Dr. Acker, so we can be sure she’s not a problem, and if we have other alphas standing by in case someone gets out of control—you know, I’m thinking that Arrow should have just bit me that day, Knight. After you’d bitten him.”

“It’s risky,” says Striker.

“But I think it’s a little too much on Calix’s shoulders right now,” I say. “I think he needs not to be the only one bonded to me.”

“Hey, I’m all right, omega,” Calix assures me.

I lean back and kiss him on the lips. “I know you’ll do everything you can for me, baby, but it’s our job to look out for each other. We’re pack. I can feel your strain.”

The ends of Calix’s lips turn downward, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Anyway,” I say, “we should do it one at a time. First, we knock out Acker, then, I get another bite. The question is who it should be.”

“You decide,” says Arrow.

“I don’t know if I should,” I say.

“Then Striker,” says Arrow. “Because he’s got no bond at all.”

“Okay,” I say, turning to look at Striker. “That good with you?”

Striker takes us all in, looking into everyone’s eyes, and then he nods.

“About that story, though,” I say, furrowing my brow.

“It’s bullshit,” says Knight. “The truth is, no one here knows anything about anything. They don’t know why we have the snake teeth. They don’t know if we’re anything special. They sure as hell don’t know how to turn off the brainwashing that Acker did. We are on our own here. We’re just wading out into the void. The only way we’re going to find things out is by trying things out and seeing what happens.”

“Yeah, but that’s a risk,” says Striker. “It’s a risk to ouromega.”

“We have to believe we won’t hurt her,” says Knight. “She’s…” He looks at me. “You’re the center of everything, and you know that, and we all know that. Wefeelit.”

striker

CALIX AND LOTUSgo down to administer the sedative to Acker.

The rest of us stay upstairs, milling around, worried.

We all know it’s better we don’t see that woman, but none of us like that she has so much power over us.

I’m nervous.

I get to bite her, after all, and it’s a big deal.

When I was sixteen, I had never done anything with a girl. Or a guy, for that matter, not that homosexuality was particularly encouraged in my upbringing. I grew up in a pretty Catholic family. When I went to study to become a priest, I was exposed to a lot of different ideas, and I learned that Catholicism was a very big umbrella, big enough to encompass a lot of different ideas.

And that was when I began to understand that if God was really omnipotent and omnipresent, he had to be big, too. Big enough to hold contradictory ideas, even, to embody one thing and also embody the opposite. If God created everything, God would know about everything, and God wouldn’t eschew anything.

But back then, it didn’t seem like that.

There was a girl.

She liked me a lot. This was communicated to me by another girl, who came up to me in the lunch line one day to ask me what I thought about the first girl. Her name was Natalie.