Page 107 of Feral Keep

Lisa falls into step beside me a couple hours in. Her hands are clean, scrubbed in the stream near the graves until the water ran clear, but she keeps glancing at them anyway.

“Thirty-seven,” she says, mostly to herself.

“Plus the fifteen at the warren.” I do the math out loud because it’s easier than doing it silent. “Fifty-two.”

Lisa stops walking.

It’s brief, three seconds, maybe four, long enough that the woman behind us has to step around. Lisa doesn’t notice. She’s looking past my shoulder, her mouth moving slightly, counting it again to make sure it’s real.

“Fifty-two women.” She starts walking again, faster now, like the number put something behind her feet. “And one Shade.”

“One Shade.” I look back down the line without meaning to, checking on him. At the end of it, Red moves through the undergrowth with his forearms still crusted dark where the claw marks reopened at the grave, his eyes never quite settling in one direction. “He needs help. I’m not talking about the ribs.”

“I know what you’re talking about.” Lisa’s jaw tightens. “Fifty-two mouths. Fifty-two bodies that need somewhere dry to sleep before the next rain, and half of them still flinch when he gets within ten feet.”

“They’ll stop flinching.”

“Some of them.” She says it without cruelty, just the flat honesty that’s always been Lisa. “Some of them are going to need a year. Some of them are never going to stop. And he’s going to have to live with women in his territory who look at him like he’s the thing that’s going to eat them, every single day, because that’s what we’re asking him to take on.”

The answer to that one belongs to Red, so I leave it for him. We walk another stretch in silence, boots finding roots, someone up ahead coughing.

“The bark-strips,” Lisa says eventually. “The relay network he told you about. If there are other Shades out there with mates⁠—”

“There are.” I’ve seen the strips myself, tied along branches at the edge of his territory, marks that mean something to males who read the world in scent and scratch instead of words. “He said other territories are doing it too. Building the same thing.”

“Then we’re not alone in this.” Lisa looks at me sideways, and her face eases, like she’s set part of something down. “You understand what we’re building here, right? This isn’t fifteen women hiding out until things get better.”

“I know what it is.”

“Say it anyway.” Her voice has an edge now, not unkind, just insistent, the way she pushes when she wants to know a plan is real. “Say what fifty-two women walking north behind one Shade actually is.”

I look at her—the sharp face, the dark eyes that used to scan barracks for trouble and now scan tree lines under a different sky. She’s the woman who told me to run.

I don’t answer fast enough. She says it herself.

“Fifty-two women is a settlement, Maeve. Not a shelter. A settlement.”

The word hangs in the canopy air, bigger than the two of us walking.

“Yeah,” I say. “A settlement.”

Lisa doesn’t smile, but her shoulders come down half an inch, like she needed to hear me say it back before she could believe it. The canopy closes tighter overhead. The camp falls away behind the trees with Shayla still inside it, alone, the door shut on a compound with nothing left to run. Somewhere south, a green and brown Shade is flying toward the scent of a mate that isn’t ours to worry about. Somewhere north, a relay tree holds a bark-strip that says we are building something, waiting for the next male to read it.

The world the asteroid made keeps turning under all of it. We walk through it, thirty-nine sets of feet and one set of wings, north, toward a territory that’s about to get a great deal more crowded.

The difference this time: we know where we’re going.

45

MAEVE

The warren is too small.

Fifty-two women. Fifteen from the first trip are already nested into the shelters Red built, the rhythms Lisa set, a place starting to feel like it could hold. Then thirty-seven more walked out of the canopy, eyes hollow, feet bleeding, the smell of a dead camp still on their skin.

Lisa meets the column at the clearing’s edge before the first woman has stopped walking. Water skins go hand to hand down the line before anyone sits. Her mouth moves, counting, and her eyes go face to face.

Two women near the back won’t come apart.