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Lotus puts her hand on my chest. “Knight. I don’t want her dead.”

I back away from her, annoyed, throwing both my hands up above my head. “I kidnapped her for the express purpose of killing her.”

“Yeah,” says Striker, “but then, you know, you didn’t.”

I glare at him.

“Calix says that you were easily talked out of it,” says Striker. “You can’t think that’s not because of her influence over us.”

“I hate that woman,” I seethe.

“We all hate her,” says Arrow. “But she’s in our heads.”

“And that’s what we want her to do,” says Lotus. “Is get out of your heads. She’s the only one who knows how.”

“I don’t think she does,” I say. “I don’t think that’s even possible. Like, if you get a thing associated in your head with sex, it sticks around. You can’t dissociate it.”

“What are you saying?” says Lotus. “Of course you can.”

“How?” I spread my hands. “Okay, you guys remember the thing with the rats?”

“The lemon-scent thing?” says Arrow. “Because I thought that was weird, really, and—”

“They also did this thing where they got rats to associate sex with the female rats wearing something, and they said this was like lingerie. Like, there’s no reason to be turned on by lingerie, except we have made these associations in our brains—”

“Bullshit,” says Arrow, turning away from the railing. “There’s a reason to be turned on by lingerie, and it’s because the woman is nearly naked.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say. “But before there were clothes, we were all just naked, right? Like rats are?”

“But we are not now,” says Arrow. “Which is why we associate nudity with sex.”

“No, you’re proving the point of the study,” I say. “If we didn’t wear clothes, we would not associate nudity with sex, because everyone would be naked all the fucking time, and we’d just see naked people constantly, and we wouldn’t even think about sex, because we’d be used to nudity. But because we almost never see people naked, and because people are naked when we have sex, we associate nudity with sex.”

“Okay,” said Lotus. “Okay, but I’m still not understanding why it is you can’t dissociate this? Because, like, this one time, I went skinny dipping with a group of friends. It was in college. We were drunk. I think, at first, the nudity was kind of a novelty, but after a couple hours, it had totally worn off, and I wasn’t even turned on by it. I was just used to it.”

I blink at her. She’s not wrong, I guess. I know what she means, how you can become desensitized to a thing, to a trigger like that. How if seeing uncovered skin is commonplace, it doesn’t affect you as intensely. But I don’t know how to use that.

“So, anyway,” she said, “I think you can dissociate.”

“Yeah?” says Arrow. “You pretty much not turned on by naked men now?”

Her lips part. “Oh,” she says in a different voice. “I guess it was kind of temporary, the dissociation, wasn’t it?”

I chuckle.

Arrow grins too. “Hey, you are turned on by naked men, right?”

She smiles. “As if turning me on is an issue, Arrow.”

We have real names. These names, these were given to us in Cedar Falls. It’s strange that we don’t adopt our old names, but they simply don’t seemrightanymore.

“The thing is,” I say, “whatever things you have that you associate with sex, those are the things that turn you on. You don’t usually want to make them not turn you on.”

“Well, what if you were turned on by something that you didn’t want to be turned on by?” says Lotus.

“I mean, we’ve tried to undo those sorts of things,” I say. “As a species. But it’s mostly turned out bad, like aversion therapy if you were gay or something.”

“Oh,” says Lotus, nodding. “Right.”