Page 29

calix

ALL TOLD, WE spend 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 in the 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.

“You think I should let these brain damaged alphas and omegas mingle and mate, don’t you?” he says. “You think I should stop suppressing their heats and let them in with those alphas.”

“Well… no,” I say. “Not really, because you trained all the alphas to kill omegas, so I think that’s a really bad idea.”

“I didn’t train them,” says Coltrain. “That wasn’t me. That was Dr. Acker.”

“Whatever,” I say. “The only way my mates stopped being triggered in that way was because Lotus went feral again, and we can’t really make that happen here.

” I don’t know what to do. If we let those omegas go into heat, then we either have to let them suffer through it, or someone has to have sex with them.

It really shouldn’t be someone who isn’t also at the same developmental level, or else it’s just disgusting.

But all the alphas are killer alphas. We’re kind of screwed at this point.

We float some other ideas. Let the omegas go into heat with each other, maybe?

But they are sometimes aggressive with each other, just as the alphas are with each other. We’re not sure that’s a great idea.

Let them go into heat and keep them comfortable with sex toys and blankets and the like, but no partners?

This gets debated for a long time.

By the time we’re moving out of Cedar Falls, we still haven’t gotten much further than this.

Other things are happening while we’re trying to work on this problem, though.

Arrow’s ex-wife knows he’s still alive, and she starts contacting Cedar Falls to try to find out what has happened to him. Eventually, this means that Arrow is back in touch with his family, and this means that everyone else slowly begins to get back in touch with their families.

We all meet everyone.

Arrow’s parents come, and they shake hands with all of us and try not to seem freaked out that Arrow is currently in a bisexual relationship where he cheerily admits he’s sexually involved with three other men. Mostly, they do okay with it.

Striker’s family is much more old school Catholic, and they don’t try to hide the fact that they’re freaked out.

Striker ends up going on a walk with them alone, just him and his mom and his two sisters and brother (apparently, his father just didn’t come, since that’s how much he wasn’t going to hide the fact he was freaked out).

When Striker comes back, he’s alone. He says they left.

They don’t come back. He talks to them on the phone, though.

Knight’s parents are really sweet, and they seem sort of gobsmacked that Knight is in any kind of relationship at all.

They watch him be affectionate with us, and his mom actually gets teary eyed.

She hugs me—she hugs all of us—but when she hugs me she says she thinks it’s wonderful, just wonderful.

Lotus’s family arrives, her sisters and her parents, and they are overwhelmed by all of us.

I can imagine it must seem daunting, the idea of your little girl with this many men, all of us sort of huge and imposing in that way alphas tend to be huge and imposing.

They try to make Lotus go on a walk with them, probably so they can try to talk some sense into her and tell her that they’ll help her get out of this if she wants, probably for reasons like that.

Lotus won’t, though, insisting that the pack is important to her, that we’re all bonded for life, and that there’s nothing she needs to hide from us.

I try to step in with them, to assure them that we all live to protect Lotus, that we are devoted to her safety, and that we love her. They hear my words, but I’m not sure if they truly believe them.

So.

Everything’s awkward.

Maggie and her girlfriend come to see me.

I don’t have contact with my mother anymore.

Her choice. She said I was dead to her when I wouldn’t go and bite Selene, and she’s sticking to that.

As for my dads, well, I never had much of a relationship with any of them, even with Jason, who was probably the contributor of half my DNA.

I looked the most like him, anyway, and he seemed to think I was his.

We were close, sometimes, mostly when I was younger.

He sure as hell isn’t ever going to go against the edict of his omega, though.

If my mom says I’m dead to her, I’m dead to him, too.

Lotus remembers Maggie, but she can talk now, and she expresses to Maggie and her girlfriend (whose name is Kim) how much she appreciates them taking care of her right when I got her out of the facility.

“Well,” says Maggie, “we almost let you get hit by a car.”

Lotus laughs. “That wasn’t your fault. I just didn’t understand anything.”

“Then we kept you in that room, like you were a prisoner!”

“You didn’t want me to get hit by a car,” says Lotus, who’s still laughing.

I can tell Maggie wants to talk to me about what I’ve gotten myself into here. She says a few little things here and there, about how she knows that I wanted something else out of my life, and I remember having conversations with her, right after I left the Polloi, conversations about monogamy.

But I don’t go and talk to her, because it makes something in my chest open up and ache in a way that’s too painful to truly feel entirely.

I should have known that wouldn’t be for me, anyway.

I should have known I would never be enough for someone, that a woman would want only me.

That was never in the cards for me.

And then I brush that aside and refuse to think about that anymore.

The weirdest thing that happens is when Kyvelki and Theodorus show up at the facility together, and they’re both freaked out by all the things in the secular world that they’re not used to, like sliding doors and all the televisions and cell phone notifications jingling into the air. They both look like startled rabbits.

They want to talk to Lotus about a revolution.

That’s what I think it is, anyway.

Kyvelki says we’ve gotten here so easily because of the will of the Goddess. “She has her eye on you, and you are under her protection.”

I disagree. Kyvelki has a little bit of a point, I suppose.

We were chased by law enforcement and we did, you know, kill people, but we haven’t been brought up on murder charges.

We were chased by Cedar Falls, who wanted to kill us all, but we’re not dead, and we’re in fact being helped by the facility.

So, this could look like some kind of divine providence, I suppose.

But when you take into account the laundry list of terrible things that have happened to us all this far…

Well, if the Goddess likes us, I’d hate to see how she treats people she doesn’t like, let’s just say that.

I don’t believe in the Goddess anyway.

Kyvelki says that we are meant to lead our people out of hiding and into the light of a new day. “You are special. You are a special pack,” she says. “And you, Lotus, you are like no omega on earth.”

I wonder, though.

I wonder about the omegas downstairs. If I could get them integrated, too, like Lotus, would they be just as powerful? I wonder if Lotus really is special, or if that intensity in her scent and her command is a side effect of drugs.

“You just don’t want anything to be supernatural,” says Lotus when I say this to her. “I get it. You don’t want the Polloi to be right about anything. They weren’t good to you, and you want to reject them.”