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“Is he going to be all right?” I say.

None of them say anything.

We go into the dining room. I feel that my mates are weak, tired. I have run them ragged, I think again, but I feel a jolt of discomfort at the thought.

No, no, no. This is more weak human thought.

I am an omega. They are my mates. They are my alphas. They have been put on earth for me. They are mine and they serve me.

Except I’m not sure how I feel about that either.

I tell them all to sit down and I go into the kitchen and make them sandwiches. I’m in the midst of an assembly line of turkey and cheddar when Calix appears in the doorway.

“You don’t… serve us,” he says.

“Yes, I do,” I say, annoyed. “Go sit down.”

He looks me over and then obeys. He has to obey. He is my alpha, and I am his omega.

They eat, and I eat, too, because as I am assembling the sandwiches, I realize I am also hungry. The food makes me feel sleepy, and we all crawl into the nest together to sleep.

We curl around each other and I am safe and happy here, surrounded by my alphas.

Peace overtakes me.

calix

I AWAKE LIKEsurfacing from a long stretch of being underwater. I gasp for air, flailing in the nest where we’re all sleeping together. I remember this feeling, but I’ve only feltlike this once before. And I can’t think about it, because I am hearing something that is incongruous, a noise that I shouldn’t be hearing here, on a Polloi compound.

Sirens.

They wouldn’t have done that. Penelope would never have called the police. The Polloi hate the police more than they hate anything on earth. They distrust them. They think of them as evil, secular and goddess-forsaken, controlled by the enemy—and everyone who is not Polloi is the enemy, of course.

But this feeling, this memory…

I get up from the nest, going to the window to look outside and I see the police car pulling straight up to the house.

All the while, the memory is rushing through me.

I was young, but it was after I had presented. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen. No, thirteen. I remember because Maggie was still on the compound, and she left the following year, when she turned seventeen. Maggie is my beta sister, and I remember the look on her face as she looked me over when I turned up at the doorway of the trailer we all lived in.

I remember the curtains on the windows in the trailer. They were plaid and a little frayed at the ends, fluttering in the breeze, because the window was open. The breeze was spilling out over the stack of bunk beds in what was meant to be the living room of the two-bedroom trailer we lived in, but there were too many of us kids, so four of us slept in the bunk beds, two to a bed, on the narrow twin mattresses. Those beds were all unmade, which was strange because it was a point of order that we all made our beds first thing in the morning.

Discipline, it was what held our way of life together.

I remember looking down at my hands. My fingers were bloody and the nail on my index finger had gotten torn. There was dark blood under my nails, and it was brownish, the way blood gets when it dries.

It was deer blood.

I remember that, too, ripping into the animal, the group of us alphas, all of us in this vicious frenzy while the drums were still beating in the background and everyone was dancing and whooping around the bonfire.

But it was morning at that point, and the deer was dead, and I was still running around, drunk on the energy of the biting ceremony I’d attended, the one that Maggie must have left sometime much earlier in the night. I would have left them early too, before I presented.

Anyway, this didn’t usually happen at a biting ceremony, whatever it was that had happened. I had never experienced anything like it. I had heard stories of being overtaken by the power of a joining, where the Goddess took control of her people and gave them the power of ten men to fight their enemies. Stories, though, and I had always thought that when people claimed this kind of stuff happened it was just the way that a mob gets overtaken by a frenzy, just what happens when people drink too much cheap wine and drinks made of vodka mixed with Sunny D, that kind of celebratory madness. Not… whatever this had been.

Which frankly frightened me.

I was naked, and my dick was hard, and I had a knot. That was strange. I was just a kid, but there had been… sex. Blood and sex and drums and madness.