Page 30

“No,” I say, offended by that. “The supernatural is ridiculous.”

“Well, there’s something with us, though, Calix, with the way everything has gone with us,” she says.

“Biology,” I say. “Instinct. Pheromones. Hormones.”

“The bites, though?” she says with a shrug. “You can’t deny there’s something about omegas and alphas that’s just… magic.”

I snort.

Lotus wants a nest.

She’s wanted a nest for a long time, just like the omegas in the facility want a nest. It’s a deep longing in all of them, something that seems to drive almost all of their behaviors. The nest-making consumes the omegas now that they’ve been allowed to engage in nest-making behaviors.

Lotus tries to nest.

She’s tried to nest everywhere we’ve been.

She tried to make a nest in the punishment house.

She tried to take over Penelope’s nest and claim it as hers.

Here, in the suite at the facility, she does her best. But despite her best efforts to turn our suite into a nest, it’s never going to be home, and we all know that.

So, eventually, we leave.

I won’t say we leave just because Lotus wants a nest.

But, well, we adore her, and she’s our omega, and she needs it, and we are all very motivated to make her happy.

Leaving is fraught with all sorts of issues, most of which come from Coltrain.

He’s been surprisingly accommodating to us, but I realize that it’s because we provide an existential threat to his entire way of existence.

Coltrain is married with three kids, the oldest of which is twenty and the youngest of which is fourteen.

He and his wife have been together a long time, and he’s currently at the phase of parenthood where everything’s crazy expensive.

College. Weddings. New apartments. Cars.

He craves stability.

He does not want to go to jail or be excoriated in the court of public opinion, which could lead to the corporation that owns Cedar Falls firing him.

He wants everything to stay the way it is.

I get that he was easily manipulated by Acker for this same reason.

Acker threatened to explode his life—tell his wife he was unfaithful, destroy his marriage, end everything.

He was willing to allow her to do unprecedented unethical things just because he wanted to protect that life.

So, I’m certain that he’ll do pretty much anything to keep us from destroying him.

The thing is, he’s paranoid about us leaving. He kept Acker close, and he wants to keep us close. We’re a threat, and as long as he has us under his roof, he’s accommodating. Letting us go scares him, however, and it’s obvious that it does.

I manage to convince him that if he uses Cedar Falls resources to bankroll our lives out there, it’ll be just as good as us being here. I float it like we should be paid as employees, because we will be coming back to the facility practically daily to continue doing work on the research here.

My mates hate it.

They don’t want to be bought and paid for by Coltrain. They hate Coltrain and they don’t trust him.

But eventually, they all go for it, mostly because they aren’t really sure what they would do for money otherwise.

It’s not as if they can go back to the jobs they had before.

Arrow can’t work for the police. Striker can’t be a priest. Knight can’t be a mafia hitman.

Lotus never finished her schooling, so she doesn’t have a profession to even go back to.

They would all have to start over from zero.

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the legalities of bringing all of them back from the dead have proved confusing.

The truth is, if Arrow’s ex-wife Carla hadn’t known he was alive and started contacting Cedar Falls asking questions, Coltrain would have been quite happy not to tell anyone’s family anything. But that forced his hand, and that’s why the others have contact with their families.

As for undoing death certificates?

That brings exactly the kind of attention Coltrain doesn’t want.

And he’d rather keep us here, because he can withhold us from our families and keep control over them in that way. With us being out, he thinks we’ll scheme and take him down.

We won’t.

Or, at least, I won’t, and I’ll do my best to convince the others as well. Because I want to help the omegas who are locked up here. The alphas too.

And I don’t even blame Coltrain for this, not exactly. I don’t think he’s innocent in it, that’s for sure.

But when we killed Dr. Acker, it didn’t change much.

It wasn’t satisfying, and it made Lotus feral, and she feels guilty about it all now.

Vengeance just isn’t want it’s cracked up to be.

I manage to convince everyone that it’s going to be fine if we go out and rent this apartment in New Canaan, just twenty minutes from the Cedar Falls facility, and if we all go there, and if Lotus can make herself a nice nest, that we’re all going to figure out how to be, you know, together . A pack.

So, we go.

After three months, we go.

lotus

AT FIRST, NESTING is a full-time job.

I have a budget. We are being paid salaries, and we sit down and figure out how we should divide and conquer the money. We decide how we will pay for rent and groceries and all those sorts of things. But there are five of us, so we have enough money for everything, very easily.

Anyway, I get a nesting budget, and it’s kind of huge. I think this is because my alphas are too indulgent when it comes to me, but I also feel like it’s necessary, like this nest is really important, and like I’ve been waiting for far too long to make it.

I don’t spend crazy amounts of money. I do go and buy a lot of essentials, like blankets and fabric, but I make a lot of things, too. I sew pillows out of plush fabrics, and I stuff them full of shredded memory foam and down fillers and all sorts of good and soft things.

At first, it’s all I do.

I try to be organized. I try to look at everything, make a big plan, and then follow the plan. But what happens is that—while I’m in the middle of finding a certain kind of fabric—I get an idea for something else, which distracts me, and I end up trying to focus on that for a while.

So, for a while, I have about seven different projects at various stages, and I’m trying to finish something, anything, just to feel like I’ve accomplished one thing. It takes a while, and I begin to think that my method isn’t a method at all, just concentrated chaos.

It’s a full-time job.

But then, it starts to come together, almost like magic, but maybe because some part of me knew what I was doing all along, even when I didn’t realize what I was doing.

I begin to see why it was I stopped in the middle of one project to work on a different one, because having that one done makes the first one much easier.

When the nest is done, it’s a perfect room of soft lights, soft cushions, soft pillows, many blankets, warmth and goodness. It’s everything I ever wanted.

And then, with the nest done, I promptly go back into heat.

This heat is different than the last one, when my mates were all so ragged. None of us are sore and exhausted this time around. All of us are eager and ready.

It breaks in four hours.

Then we all lie there in the nest, sweaty and naked, and Knight says we can stretch that out next time if we want, and everyone laughs.

I ask Calix about it later, the next day, I think, when he and I are doing laundry from the nest, shoving the washing machine full of blankets, and he says that in the Polloi, a heat breaking quickly is taken to mean it’s likely the omega is pregnant.

“Oh,” I say, feeling myself shrink inside.

He sighs and pulls me against him to kiss the top of my head. “I haven’t forgotten about it, you know. I did talk to Coltrain.”

I wriggle out of his grasp.

“It’s more complicated, you know,” he says. “Not only do all the omegas down there have their tubes tied surgically, but they’re on birth control to stop their periods, just for the sake of convenience. No one wants women with the brain power of toddlers to have to change tampons.”

“Oh,” I say, wondering why I hadn’t thought of this before. “I haven’t had a period this whole time.”

“Right,” he says. “It’s an injection. It’ll wear off in about six months. Then your cycle should start again. Now, why you’re going into heat at all, however…” He shrugs.

“I shouldn’t?”

“It’s all connected,” he says. “Heat means ovulation. Ovulation should mean menstruation eventually.”

“But with my tubes tied—”

“That just means the ovulated egg can’t get into your uterus,” he says.

“Oh, right, I guess I know that,” I mutter. “Right. The tubes being tied, it doesn’t stop my reproductory cycle, it just stops me getting pregnant.”

He nods. “Tammy and I talked it over, and we think you’re having anovoulatory heats.”

“You talked about this with Tammy?” I put my hands on my hips.

“Sorry?” He cringes.

I sigh. “Okay, what does that mean?”

“It means, like, you’re going into heat, but you’re not ovulating,” he says.

I bite my bottom lip.

“Okay, so a beta ovulates once a month, and she doesn’t go into heat,” he says, “but for a few days of the month, when she’s fertile, there are changes in her body, similar to an omega’s heat.

She’ll be more receptive to sex. She’ll have changes in cervical mucus—like slick but not as intense.

She’ll even have a difference in smell. It’s all mammalian stuff, right?

We’re not a separate species than betas, we’re just… heightened.”

I nod. “Okay, okay. This is interesting. I guess. But what if something’s really wrong with me that I’m not having periods?”

“Yeah, well, Coltrain doesn’t want you going to another doctor, someone who isn’t in house at Cedar Falls,” he says.

“And I have to admit that with your being an omega, the truth is that the regular medical establishment is kind of idiotic about us. The tendency for modern medicine is to suppress anything omega or alpha.”

“Try to make us like betas,” I say.