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“Yes.”

“What about the Polloi?” I say. “What do women do in the Polloi if they aren’t having their periods?”

He snorts. “Stupid things. Most of them won’t hurt you, like drinking herbal teas and doing ritual dances under the full moon. Some of them carry the risk of infection, like yogurt douches and shit. It’s quack folkloric medicine, Lotus.”

“Yeah, but isn’t it true that a lot of midwives have knowledge of things that modern medicine doesn’t know about because men are afraid of women’s cycles and things like that?”

“No,” he says. “People who are proponents of that kind of claptrap try to say that the medical profession is corrupt, but the medical profession is based on evidence and trials and science, and this stuff is all just hogwash.”

I get it. He hates the Polloi. And I’m not saying that everything the Polloi does is good or right.

But he can’t have it both ways. The first thing out of his mouth is that modern medicine is biased against omegas and then he says that everything the Polloi does is claptrap.

What am I supposed to do, then? Where am I supposed to go?

“Coltrain says he’ll schedule a surgery to undo your tubes being tied if that’s what you want,” says Calix.

“But you should also think about the fact that it’s not going to mean anything until you start menstruating again.

You might as well wait. And, you know, anyway, are we sure we want to bring a child into this mess? ”

I’m stung. “This isn’t a mess to me, Calix. This is…” My family. My life bond. The loves of my life.

He kisses me. He apologizes. He says he wants it for me, he wants me to have a baby, and he wants me to be happy.

I believe him.

But I remember that he said he was staying “for now.”

Am I going to lose Calix? I’m not sure if this is his forever, even if I am positive it’s mine.

arrow

IT’S BORING.

I think that’s the best way to describe it.

Calix is consumed with whatever he’s doing at Cedar Falls, and we still go in for tests and things, but not every day. At first, Lotus is really focused on nesting.

The two of them are busy, but Striker, Knight, and I are sort of adrift.

At first, it’s fine. We have a lot of television to catch up on, after all. We’ve been in danger, on the run, worried and frightened, for sometime. At first, we only have the energy for relaxation, because it’s exactly what we need to calm our nerves. At first, we simply settle into safety.

But after a while, it gets boring.

It sort of reminds me of my marriage to Carla, I guess.

It’s better than that marriage, what I have with my mates. The bond is amazing, often very intense. The way I feel devoted to these people, the way I can feel their sensations and emotions in my body, the way we are bonded, it’s beyond anything I could have imagined.

It’s only that you get used to things, even really intense things, and you get used to them faster than you’d expect you would.

I spend too much time reflecting on boredom itself.

What is boredom?

Is it simply not having anything to do?

I think it’s more complicated than that. I can be bored while doing things. Like, while gathering up the trash in the apartment or loading the dishwasher? While doing those things, I’m bored.

It’s because I can do those actions on auto-pilot. I don’t have to think. I can act, but my brain is free.

So, I begin to think that boredom is about not having anything engaging to think about.

But I also get bored with activities that require a lot of focus, I find, and the reason for this is just that they’re demanding, and I’d rather not waste my energy on doing hard things when I could just relax.

Except relaxation is boring.

What do I want?

Maybe that’s the problem. I don’t want anything. I have everything I need. The way that Coltrain is perfectly happy to keep us on as if we’re staff at Cedar Falls means we don’t need to work. Anything else we need, we just get, easily.

I mention boredom to Striker once and he gets real philosophical about the whole thing, opining about God and taking time to notice the little things and being grateful and all this other stuff. He says that boredom is about paying too much attention to what we are lacking.

“Notice what we have, Arrow,” he says in this voice of his that I have come to realize is his sermon voice, where he sounds all ponderous and wise and whatever.

Maybe he’s right?

Maybe we just notice what we have.

On the other hand, doesn’t it bother him that there are so many unanswered questions?

Why were we all able to heal ourselves and get our memories back when the alphas and omegas in Cedar Falls don’t seem to be able to?

Why is it that we all have the strange snake-like alpha teeth when no other alphas have those?

Why is it that Kyvelki and Penelope were so affected by Lotus’s scent?

I mean, doesn’t he think these things probably mean something?

Knight agrees with me, for what it’s worth. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s like I said, we’re superheroes or whatever. But just because we’re something special doesn’t mean we have to do anything like that.”

“Like what?” I say.

“I don’t know, like lead some revolution, like Kyvelki wants us to do.”

What would a revolution even look like?

“I just want to stay here, in our apartment, drink beer, watch TV, and fuck our omega,” says Knight. “This is great. There’s no reason to make things unnecessarily complicated.”

Is he right?

Am I being crazy?

Why am I so bored?

I start tagging along with Calix. He can do good things for the omegas, right? I wonder if I can help out there, too.

Turns out, I can. My alpha scent calms the omegas, who they have kind of succeeded in trying to teach to talk. They talk more than they used to, anyway, but they still seem stunted developmentally. It’s like being around children. It’s disturbing to me.

Calix tells me his theory about bite frenzies, and I have to wonder why we’re not out there, talking to the Polloi, trying to find out more about all of that.

Calix doesn’t want to talk to anyone in the Polloi. He pushes that aside, and I realize he’s got baggage.

I get it.

The place is weird.

I also know that there’s no way that he and I can go in there and find out answers, not with the way they treat alphas. But Lotus, she’s got a scent that makes people bend over backwards to do her bidding. We should be using that.

“The Polloi don’t understand bite frenzies,” Calix says. “There’s nothing to find out.”

I kind of suspect he’s right.

That it’s not really about finding anything out, it’s about being bored.

When I was a police detective, I was occupied.

I had things to solve, cases to put to rights.

They were like little puzzles that gave me something to do, and they meant that I was doing good for other people.

I know I can’t go back to being a police officer, but I also can’t live like this, not forever, not without something to do .

I say it to Lotus one day, that I think I want to get a job.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m wondering about that, too.

But I guess I’m waiting to see about getting an operation to get my tubal ligation reversed, seeing if I want to get pregnant.

It’s just that I still haven’t gotten my period, and it’s been long enough that the shot I had should have worn off, and I haven’t gone into heat again, and I want to see a doctor outside of Cedar Falls, but Coltrain is kind of blocking that, and—”

“Whoa,” I say. “You haven’t told me any of this.”

She shifts on her feet. “Do you even want kids, Arrow?”

“Uh…” I shrug, thinking about it. I haven’t thought about it in a long time.

“Because you’re older than me,” she says.

“Not that much older,” I say. It really isn’t bad. She was only twenty-one when she went into the facility. I was twenty-seven when I went in, but she went in a year after I did. So, there’s a seven year age difference.

We were all in there for varying amounts of time.

But anyway, I’m thirty-two now. She’s twenty-five.

I’m the oldest. Calix is actually the youngest, younger than Lotus, at twenty-three. Striker is thirty, and Knight is twenty-nine.

“Well, you didn’t seem to be even trying to have kids with Carla,” she says.

“Yeah, I mean, Carla didn’t want kids,” I say. “Which I was fine with, but it’s just because I don’t have strong opinions on it, I guess. If the other guys in our pack really want to pass their genes on or whatever, we should let them knock you up. I don’t really care.”

“Don’t really care,” she repeats.

I feel through the bond this does not please her. I don’t know what to do. I’d like to please her, but I don’t want to lie to her.

“I mean, I know this,” she says, running a hand through her hair.

“I already know. We’re bonded. I feel things.

Knight has never wanted to be a father and is pretty much convinced he’d be terrible at it.

Striker’s perfectly happy without ever doing it.

He was going to be a priest and priests don’t have kids.

Calix… I don’t even know if he wants to be in the pack.

I know this. I’m the only one who…” She trails off.

She starts to chew on her thumbnail, and she’s talking even faster now.

“And I don’t even know if I do. I’m still young.

I don’t need to get knocked up this fucking instant, right?

I could wait. On the other hand, if I wait, you’re going to be really old—”

“Wait until when?” I say. “When am I going to be really old?”

She glares at me.

“You’d be an amazing mom, Lotus,” I say. “I love the idea of you pregnant. I love the idea of us having a kid to take care of. I think Knight and Striker would actually be great dads. I actually think I’d dig it, myself. And Calix, too. It would be good. If you want a baby—”

“I don’t know!” She throws up her hands. “I feel like I’m supposed to want a baby.”

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah, that sounds like Carla. She was real big on not wanting to be an incubator, saying that women are worth more than their wombs. I totally agree. And anyway, there are way too many people on the planet. We’re good. We don’t need to make more, not really.”

I feel through the bond this is not what she wanted to hear either.

“You do want to have a baby,” I say to her.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “Maybe a job. Thing is, though, I hadn’t declared a major yet when I was in college. I still didn’t know, when I lost my memory, what I even wanted to do with my life, and I don’t know that now either. It just seems so huge, you know? How am I supposed to know that?”

“Well, you don’t have to pick the right thing,” I say. “You can just pick a thing, and if you don’t like it, you can do something else. You can change your mind.”

“Right, but I don’t even know what I want to do.”

“Well, me either,” I say. “I said I wanted a job, not that I knew what kind.”

She nods at me, studying my expression. Her own brow is furrowed, like she’s thinking really hard.

I decide to level with her. “Look, baby, the truth is, I’m kind of bored.”

She gives me a little smile. “Bored?”

“Hey, if you want to get pregnant, maybe that’s it. Maybe that would cure my boredom. Maybe that’s all we need.”

“I need to have surgical intervention to get pregnant, though,” she says. “And I think being bored is a terrible reason to become a parent.”

I snicker. “You’re right. Sorry.”

She reaches out and puts her hand on my forearm. “But me too.”

“Huh?”

“Bored,” she says, nodding. “Yeah, I think that’s the feeling I have. Aimless, directionless, confused, boredom .”

“Oh,” I say. “Well, shit. Knight and Striker aren’t. Striker is fine, and Knight is happy being lazy. And Calix is always busy. So, I just figured I was the only one.”

“It’s like, it was too much all at once, but now it’s not enough. We were in constant danger, always on the run, and now… nothing.”

“Exactly,” I say. I tilt my head to one side. “You ever think about the questions that never got answered.”

“Like?”

“Like our alpha teeth, for instance? Why are ours different than others?”

“Right,” she says. “Kyvelki thought we were, you know, a prophecy or something.”

“How bored do you have to be to want a spearhead a revolution?” I say to her.

“What would that even be like?” she says. “It sounds dangerous, you know? And I’m really over danger, actually, for the rest of my life .”