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“No, I could not,” says Striker. “Come on, there’s no way on earth we can top the sex we have together. We have really good sex.”

Lotus blushes again. “True.”

I glance at Calix. It only leaves him.

“I’m here for now,” he says. “Probably forever, but…” He folds his arms over his chest. “You guys, you haven’t even reconnected with your families. It’s easy to think these packbonds are everything, because it’s all we have right now. But when you get back in touch with your loved ones, it could change. I don’t know if we should all be making promises.”

“These bonds are everything for me,” I say. I think about losing them. It makes me feel a sensation of panic that I’m not used to feeling. I don’t get that frightened that often.

“I’d let you go,” says Lotus, giving Calix a hug. “I would let any of you go.”

Calix wraps his whole body around her. “I’m not going anywhere. Unlike the rest of you, I don’t have a family to reconnect with.”

I touch his shoulder.

He looks up at me.

“Yes,” I say. “You do.”

His lower lip trembles.

And I kiss him.

Mine. All of them are mine. I’m not letting any of them go, not without a fight.

21

calix

ALL TOLD, WEspend a total of three months at Cedar Falls.

By the time we leave, we’ve been working side by side with people like Tammy with the omegas and alphas who are imprisoned down there. We’ve made enough progress to feel good about what we’ve done, but things are still pretty grim for those alphas and omegas.

The others all subjected themselves to dozens upon dozens of scans. Me too, actually, because they wanted to see if I was different than the others. We all had our blood drawn. We all sat in rooms with sensors stuck to our scalps and looked at pictures of butterflies and flipped through scent books that contained scents of alphas and omegas.

None of the results of these tests does anything to deny the theory that I had, which was that the reaction that happens to these alphas and omegas essentially causes them to go feral, much like a bite frenzy in the Polloi.

But nothing confirms it either.

We don’t have any data on what a bite frenzy looks like. No one has even been able to scan a member of the Polloi’s brain while he or she went through it. There certainly isn’t anyone inthe Polloi volunteering to undergo that now, and we couldn’t even induce a bite frenzy on command if we had a volunteer. No one knows how to make them happen.

One evening, while on a long walk with Tammy, who finds it strange that I’m an alpha, but is still friendly with me, even though I’m not really a Cedar Falls employee anymore, I tell her my theory that maybe the way to turn off ferality is through the hierarchy of a pack.

After all, when a biting frenzy happens, and it spreads through a Polloi gathering, it’s eventually quelled. Why is that? Is it because every member of the Polloi has someone higher than them in the pack, who calms them down?

My mates started coming back to themselves because of a scent match. Pack bonds. So… maybe.

We don’t have any way to test it, though. None of the omegas or alphas who are here at Cedar Falls have a pack. We do know the omegas respond to me, though, as an alpha. So, I try alpha-ing the omegas harder. I give direct orders to a set of them, and I instruct them not to do anything to interfere with the omegas instincts. “Let them nest,” I say.

We get some encouraging responses from this.

We now have omegas who have some speech, but it’s very basic.

We wait, hoping that it will come back with time, like it did for my mates.

However, they seem halted there.

Tammy and I discuss my theory with Coltrain, and he’s not into it.