Page 1 of Feral Keep

1

MAEVE

The canopy eats the sky.

I’ve been under it for... days. Weeks. The counting stopped working when the fever started and didn’t come back when it broke. There’s a rhythm now. Move. Hide. Sleep if my legs give out. Move again. The rhythm doesn’t need a number attached to it.

The trees are wrong. Taller than anything humans ever built, trunks wider than the camp shelters, bark split into ridges deep enough to shove my arm inside. Roots break through the ground like bones through skin. Everything up here grows too fast, too hungry—the mutated canopy pressing in on all sides, closing the gaps behind me as fast as I make them.

My feet know the ground better than my eyes do. Root, dip, stone, root. My boots are gone—lost them days ago, crossing a stream that turned out deeper than it looked. I’m barefoot, but four years of camp labor callused the soles enough that I don’t feel the roots at all.

The hunger is the loudest thing. Not the sharp hunger of missing a meal—the deep, grinding kind that lives in the bones and won’t let a thought finish without circling back to it. How far can I go before my legs stop. How much does this body weigh now. Less than yesterday.

I watched women in the camp go through the stages of it, the way a body eats itself. Muscle first. Then fat. I’m somewhere past the fat. My ribs are a cage I can count through my shirt. My shoulder grinds in its socket with every step—dislocated eight months ago, never set, healed wrong. I chew on one side because the teeth on the other side aren’t there anymore. A guard knocked them out. Or maybe I fell on the clearing line. The memories blur—violence and accident wearing the same face after four years. My tongue finds the gap sometimes without meaning to. Sitting with things costs calories I don’t have.

I keep walking.

The undergrowth changes. Cleared back, pathways worn into the root systems by something heavy passing through again and again. I stop, straining to hear past my own heartbeat. No birdsong. No insect drone. Just my breath, ragged, and somewhere far off a branch settling under weight that isn’t wind.

The alarm fires before my conscious mind catches up. Something lives here. Something large.

The claw marks start ten feet ahead—deep gouges raked into bark well above my head, fresh enough that sap still beads at the edges. Territorial marker. The camps told us. The Ordained told us. Nethershade males mark their territory with claw gouges, scent deposits, and sound. If you see the marks, you are already inside the kill zone.

My body locks. Every muscle. Camp-brain doesn’t wait for permission to be afraid. It just is, already deciding the danger before I’ve finished seeing it.

The camp-voice in my head, calm as Shayla on inspection morning: Go back. Find another route. The fences were bad but at least you were alive inside them.

I don’t go back. Not because I’m brave. My legs don’t have another route in them. I have enough walking left for forward, not back. Forward, until my legs stop, and then I stop.

The musk hits me fifty steps later. Dark. Metallic. Alive—nothing like the sour smell of the camp barracks. This is animal. Predator. Something large and territorial and present, laid so thick into the air I can taste it on the back of my tongue.

My body wants to run. My legs say no. Fear screaming, exhaustion winning, the way it’s been playing out for weeks. The markers are on every tree now—some at chest height, some so high whatever made them was reaching from a wingspan I don’t want to think about.

I am inside a territory.

The propaganda keeps coming back. Shayla’s calm, careful voice, the same briefing she gave every new arrival: The Nethershades are predators. They do not think like humans, feel like humans, or want what humans want. If a Shade finds you, it will claim you. The claiming is not survivable for most women. The ones who survive wish they hadn’t.

I believed her. I believed her when I was fourteen and shaking on the intake line with Gretchen’s hand between my shoulder blades. I still believe her. Believing her should feel like something. It doesn’t. Just the belief sitting there, flat and heavy, next to the fact that I’m still walking forward, into the one thing that belief says will kill me.

But the fences are behind me. The guards, the labor, the slow grinding death of being worked past the point where the body can maintain itself—all behind me. The territory I’m walking through smells like something that could kill me in a single motion. It hasn’t killed me yet. My feet are still moving. I am too far in to pretend I have a choice about what happens next.

A sound moves above the canopy—wings, the displacement of air heavy and rhythmic, something enormous passing overhead while the branches sway in its wake. I don’t look up. The shadow passes. The canopy settles.

I keep walking.

The light is going gold. Time doesn’t hold its shape anymore. My left knee buckles. I catch myself on a root, my arms shaking with the effort of holding my own hollowed-out weight.

Two more days. The thought shifts. Maybe less. Your legs will stop working, and then your arms, and then the rest. You’ll lie down and you won’t get up.

The musk is so thick now that every breath is saturated. My throat tastes like metal. Some animal part of my brain firing a signal loud enough to cut through the starvation fog: you are not alone here.

I keep walking because stopping is dying.

The path widens. The underbrush is cleared here, the ground hard-packed. A firepit to my right, the coals dark but the ash fresh. A clearing with a mound of earth, wildflowers growing over it, petals bright against the dark soil. I don’t know what the mound is. I don’t stop to look.

My right knee buckles next, and this time my arms don’t catch me. The ground comes up fast. My cheek hits a root, the crack of it swallowed whole by the canopy before it can even sound like something. The impact jars through my skull, through the shoulder that screams and then goes silent because the pain is so constant my nerves have stopped bothering to report it.

I lie at the base of a tree with my face in the dirt and the musk in my lungs and the canopy impossibly green above me.