Page 75 of Dead Drop

The night air is still warm. No storm smell. No ozone. No pressure change in my ears.

So not weather.

Something in the canopy, then. A predator moving through—one of the big hunting cats that survived the mutation, the ones with the wrong number of legs and the flat reflective eyes. They clear a silence around themselves when they hunt, the prey animals going mute, flattening against bark, tucking into hollows. I've watched it happen from the aerie during daylight. The silence rolls ahead of the cat like a wave.

But the cats are ground-level hunters. The aerie is ninety feet up. I shouldn't be able to feel their silence from here.

The nightbird stops.

Mid-note. Not the natural trailing off of a bird settling into sleep—the sharp cutoff of a sound that's been killed at the source. One note hanging in the air and then nothing.

The canopy is silent.

I'm on my feet. My knife is in my hand, the blade catching the half-moon's light through the woven branches. My body has made the decision before my mind catches up—four years of training doesn't leave. It goes quiet, it goes dormant, it sits in the back of your body waiting for something to need it.

Something needs it now.

I cross to the aerie edge and look down. The canopy trunk drops away below me—the massive pillar of living wood that holds the aerie platform, its bark scarred with Corvin's territorial claw marks and roughened by decades of growth. In daylight, I can see the mid-level branches, the vine bridges, the lower canopy floor where the stream runs. In the half-moon's light, everything below the first branch line is shadow.

Shadow, and silence.

I breathe in through my nose. Slowly. Reading the air the way Corvin does—the way the venom in my blood is teaching me to, whether I asked for the lesson or not.

Earth. Canopy rot. The distant mineral note of Corvin's territorial markers, fading at the edges where the boundary meets unclaimed ground. The stream's wet stone smell. The green of living wood.

And underneath it all, faint but getting stronger: something sour.

Not rot. Not death. Something chemical—a venom smell, but curdled, like milk that's turned. It hits the back of my throat and sits there, coating my tongue with something that tastes like copper and bile. My stomach turns. The clean warmth of his venom recoils from it the way skin recoils from a burn.

Wrong. That's the word my body gives me. Not dangerous, not threatening—wrong. The venom signature of something that shouldn't exist. Something broken at the chemical level, running on a fuel that's poisoning it even as it drives it forward.

The Stained.

I know what they are. Every settlement knows. Males who lost their mates or never had one, hollow with the absence, running on stolen venom—harvested from mated females, from Cage stock, from whatever the Ordained sell at the borders. The venom keeps them alive but it doesn't keep them sane. It metabolises too many times through a body that isn't producing its own, and each cycle strips something away. Judgment first. Then speech. Then everything except hunger.

I've seen what they leave behind. Petra found one of their kills near the northern boundary two years ago—a woman from a smaller settlement, a scavenger who'd gone too far from the walls. Petra didn't describe it. She didn't have to. Her face when she came back through the gate said everything.

The sour smell is getting stronger. Coming from below. From the base of the canopy trunk.

I grip the knife and wait.

Scratching. Below the aerie platform, on the trunk. Fast, erratic—not the steady climbing rhythm of a large Shade but something quicker, more desperate. Claws on bark, slipping, catching, slipping again.

More than one set.

My heart is pounding. The venom warmth in my blood has gone cold—a defensive response, something my body is doing on its own, pulling the heat inward to protect what matters. Protecting the plum.

I position myself at the center of the aerie. Fifteen feet across. The drop is to my left. The woven branch wall is behind me. The fur bed is to my right. I know every surface, every handhold,every place where the floor gives slightly under weight. This is my ground. I've been living in it for weeks. I know it the way I knew the wall—every angle, every blind spot, every place where a body can hide and where it can't.

Corvin is forty minutes out. Maybe thirty. Maybe more. It doesn't matter. Whatever is climbing this tree will reach me before he does.

I settle into my stance. Knife forward, weight on the balls of my feet, breathing controlled. The scratching is louder now—close, frantic, something that can smell what it wants and can't climb fast enough to reach it.

They can smell me. A newly mated female, full of the Apex's venom, carrying his child. My blood is exactly what they're hunting for.

Three of them come over the aerie edge.

They're smaller than Corvin. All of them. Two are maybe seven feet—lean, fast, their skin a mottled gray-green that says Stained—males who lost their mates, gone hollow with it. The third is bigger, darker, with broken crown horns that have healed badly.