Page 60 of Dark Mate

He chooses the words one stone at a time off the riverbed. “The change took the men. Some it killed. Some it made into this.” One hand moves down his own body—the wings, the dark, the size of him. “Some it only broke. Half-made. Left wrong.” His jaw works. “The Ordained gather the broken ones. Finish them. Build something that hunts, that doesn’t tire, that doesn’t die easy.” A beat. “Put one down and it gets up. You kill it twice, or it kills you.”

The cold crawls up the back of my neck.

“Dangerous?” I ask.

His jaw works. “To you.”

Not to him. To me. Which means it’s a threat that’ll get met with every inch of the ten feet of predator sitting next to me—and this time not because the rut’s making him do it. The rut’s done. Him choosing it is the whole difference.

He comes down off the alert slow, wings folding, tail loosening, the claws letting go of the bark one at a time, the same measured way the rut ebbed. Takes ten minutes, maybe more. I sit and watch him do it.

His hand finds my knee. Light.It’s gone,the hand says. And then it stays.I’m not.

I put my hand over his. My fingers fit in the grooves between his knuckles and cover maybe a third of it.

We sit. The canopy goes back to its business—birds, insects, the wind, something tapping wood three trees over to saythis is mine.The world’s enormous and full of things that don’t know my name. Some beautiful, some dangerous, most of them both.

“I want to come back tomorrow,” I say.

The almost-smile.

“Yes,” he says, and the one word carries about ten.

I lean into his arm. It’s warm and solid, his pulse slow under the skin now, a thing that went to full alert in a heartbeat and found its way back down with a woman pressed to its side.

The canopy breathes. We breathe with it.

32

ELLIE

Ineed to reach Neve.

The thought shows up whole, not in pieces, not assembled out of fog the way a lot of my thinking still is. Complete. Neve’s still in the Cage. Neve who slipped me a knife and told me to stay off the east wall at night. Neve who came back from a week in the wasteland with sharp eyes because she’d missed her doses and seen the bars for the first time. Neve who knew the tea was a leash before I did.

Neve’s still drinking out of a cup with her name on the bottom. Neve’s one of the forty-one.

“I need to go back,” I tell him, at the nest entrance, the morning light coming through green-gold.

He shifts behind me. I don’t turn around. I know what his body’s doing, the tail tight to his thigh, the wings at quarter-spread, that halfway posture I’ve learned means his mate is walking toward something dangerous.

“The Cage is Ordained ground.” Level. Stating it, not ordering. “The perimeter’s patrolled. The routes overlap east and north every forty minutes. If you’re seen?—”

“I know.” I turn. His instincts are screamingno. I can read the whole fight in his jaw—and he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t forbid me. That’s the thing about him now: the rut used to make his decisions, and now he tells me the risk and lets me make my own. “I won’t make contact. Too dangerous for her. I just want to leave a marker. Something that says I’m alive and outside.”

He works through it a long time, the conflict moving across his face.

“At night,” he says finally. “I’ll carry you.”

The flight is nothing the Cage got me ready for.

His arms close around my ribs, my back to his chest, and his wings open—the full span, the leading edges grabbing the night air with a sound like sail canvas. He leaps, and my stomach drops through the floor of the world, and then the wings catch on one hard downstroke that shoves us up. We punch through the mid-level, through a layer of mist I didn’t know was there, and?—

We break through the top of the canopy, and I forget how to breathe.

The sky. The whole sky, no bars on it. It goes in every direction, deep and black and packed with so many stars they clump into clouds of light. A half-moon, high, throwing silver across the tops of the trees until the whole canopy looks like a rolling silver-green sea running out to every horizon.

I’ve never seen the sky without something between me and it.