Page 106 of Feral Keep

For a moment I think Shayla might actually say yes. Her eyes go quick and startled, like the question caught her somewhere she wasn’t guarding. Then it’s gone.

“No.” Shayla’s voice finds its old flatness, like the word itself is a fence she can stand behind. “I’ll stay.”

Lisa doesn’t argue. She nods once, turns, and walks away, already scanning the tree line for the next thing that needs her.

I don’t follow her yet.

Shayla’s eyes find mine across the wreckage. She’s the one who told me the canopy would kill me. She’s the one who kept twenty-five women behind a fence because she couldn’t picture a world where they’d choose anything else. She’s also the one who put food in my hands more nights than she starved me, who never once touched me with anything but her voice.

I don’t say goodbye. I let her look at me and she lets me look back. The set of her shoulders says she knows this is the last time.

My throat closes around nothing. I nod once, small, an acknowledgment that she was here and that she mattered to whether I lived or died even when it cost me. She doesn’t nod back. She just watches me turn.

Walking away aches like a tooth that’s already gone, the one the tongue keeps checking for anyway. Some stubborn corner of me wanted her to walk out of that camp too. She doesn’t. I let her not. My throat stays tight the whole way to the grave.

We bury Ruth.

Red starts on the grave before anyone tells him to, kneeling in the clearing where the dead mate’s mound sits inside its ring of white wildflowers. He doesn’t use a shovel. He doesn’t have one. He drives both hands into the earth instead, fingers curling into the dirt like it’s something he’s fighting, and pulls up double fistfuls in a rhythm that doesn’t break. Wet earth tearing, small stones knocking loose, the soft thud of dirt landing in the growing pile—it’s the only sound in the clearing for a long time. The smell of turned earth rises thick and cold, mixing with the faint sweetness of the dried wildflowers at the edge of the older mound.

I stand at the edge with Lisa and watch the hole get deeper. His shoulders work. The claw marks on his forearms open again with the motion, thin lines of blood tracking down to his wrists and dripping off his fingers into the grave he’s digging. He doesn’t stop to tend them. Some jobs come first.

Lisa crouches beside Ruth’s body, where it’s lain under a blanket six days now. She folds the cloth back just enough to lay a strip of cleaner fabric over her face before the others arrive. “So they don’t have to see,” she says, not quite to me, just out loud. Her fingers are steady. I don’t know how.

Red climbs out when the hole is deep enough that no rain will wash her out and nothing will dig her back up. He looks at Lisa. Waits. He doesn’t reach for Ruth’s body until Lisa nods.

Then he lifts her.

His hands go under her shoulders and knees, the same hold he uses on me when he’s carrying me somewhere I can’t walk. The wrongness of it closes my throat, that careful hold meant for a dead girl instead of a living one. He lowers himself into the grave on his knees, folding his massive body down so he can set her at the bottom instead of dropping her. Nobody tells him to hurry. Nobody would dare.

Red settles her flat. He straightens one arm at her side. His thumb brushes a strand of hair back from the cloth over her face, the kind of thing his hands do without asking the rest of him. Then he climbs back out and stands at the edge with dirt and blood dried together on his forearms.

The women gather. Thirty-seven of them file in from the compound in twos and threes, stopping at the lip of the grave to look down. Some of them wouldn’t meet Red’s eyes yesterday, flinched when his wings moved. They stand five feet from him now without flinching. Whatever he is to them changed in the last day, faster than fear usually lets go.

Lisa stands at the head of the grave. The clearing has been quiet since the first handful of dirt hit bottom, and it isn’t an empty quiet. It’s full of something with nowhere to go.

“Ruth Garza,” Lisa says. “Twenty-two. She sang in the barracks when she thought no one was listening.”

Someone near the back makes a sound smaller than a sob, a breath that catches wrong on its way out. I don’t turn to see who. A woman I don’t know reaches over and takes another woman’s hand, and neither of them looks at the other while they do it.

My chest goes tight before I get a word out. I never heard her sing. I only saw her after—the stillness of her, the stone I left because it was the only thing I had to give her.

“She died because we came to get her out.” My voice doesn’t come out steady. I let it not be steady. “That’s on me. I carry that.”

Nobody argues. Nobody offers me the soft things people say to make grief lighter. Lisa just looks at me. Gretchen, three women down, presses the back of her wrist to her mouth. The silence holds long enough to count—the canopy moving somewhere far overhead, a woman shifting her weight, my own pulse loud in my ears.

I step forward and set the river stone on the raw earth. It’s the same one I left beside her six days ago, warm now from my pocket instead of cold from the ground. It fits like it was always going to end up there.

Red starts filling the grave, slower than he dug it. He uses both hands, drawing the loose earth back in over her. When the first layer covers the blanket he pauses, hands flat on the dirt, head down, before he keeps going. Nobody hurries him. The women stand and watch a nine-foot Shade with dried blood on his arms bury a girl he never met. When he’s done he pats the mound smooth with his palms, shaping it until it matches the mound three feet away.

He stays on his knees between them a while after everyone else drifts back toward the tree line. Then he stands and crosses to the older grave, his dead mate’s, eight years of white wildflowers gone dry and replaced and gone dry again. He lays a fresh handful down, white ones, the ones he always chooses.

He kneels between them, head bowed, and for a long moment nobody in the clearing moves at all.

We walk north.

Thirty-seven women walk. Red carries Cora limp against his chest at the back of the line, his other arm through the strap of a sack of scavenged food from the camp stores. I walk up front with Lisa. Gretchen’s somewhere in the middle, fingers working through another woman’s hair, because that’s how Gretchen comforts.

The canopy swallows us within the first mile. The light goes green and filtered. The air turns damp and thick with the smell of growing things, wet bark and crushed leaves underfoot. The compound’s smoke and blood finally scrub out of my nose. Nobody talks for a long stretch, just the sound of thirty-nine sets of feet finding a rhythm on ground that doesn’t want to give it to them.