Page 111 of Feral Keep

“You said you’d keep me,” I tell him. His words from the grave clearing, weeks and a whole war ago. “My turn. I’m keeping you.”

“Good,” he says. His oldest word. It has never once sounded like this.

Fifty-two women are asleep in shelters he built.

His heartbeat comes up through my cheek where it rests against him, slower than mine, the steady rhythm of something built to last centuries. It’s the same beat that thudded through me during the rut, when I was too broken to feel anything else.

The canopy shifts above us, the mutated oaks creaking, the nightsounds of a world that rearranged itself around an asteroid and kept going. Under it I can hear the women breathing. Lisa’s low voice moves along the perimeter one more time before she sleeps. Gretchen hums the tuneless way she does when her hands are idle.

A settlement, Lisa said.

My hand is on his chest and his hand is on my belly, the twins turning between us. I carry three heartbeats, mine and theirs, and the one under my palm brackets them all.

It doesn’t feel like the ending the camps would have promised me, clean and simple and earned in a straight line. It feels like this: tired down to the bone, one girl shaking in a hollow, one grave four miles south with my guilt still sitting fresh on it, one woman alone by choice in a place with no fences left to keep her. I used to think peace would feel like nothing left to carry. Turns out it just means I get to set some of it down long enough to sleep.

A settlement. Something that stays.

EPILOGUE: MAEVE

The bark-strip arrives on a Tuesday. Or what I think is Tuesday. The counting has never been reliable, not since the camps swallowed the calendars along with everything else. But the women have started marking days. Lisa scratches a line on a flat stone every morning, the scrape of it small and precise over the quiet. Seven lines, then a cross-hatch. The weeks pile up.

It has been three weeks since the second raid. Twenty-two days have passed since we walked fifty-two women north through the canopy and called it a settlement. Lisa’s stones say so.

I find the strip on a walk, a hundred yards from the warren, tucked into a split in a relay tree. The canopy smells the way it always does at this hour, damp earth and crushed leaves and something green just starting to flower. The morning is ordinary enough that I almost miss it. Red showed me these trees. Shades who don’t speak to each other share a network older than the camps, and the carved symbols are territory markers that double as mailboxes.

The strip is small, thin bark scraped smooth, still faintly sweet with sap under my fingers. The writing is neat and small and military, nothing like Red’s halting block letters or camp scrawl. Someone learned to write in a world where writing still meant something.

We are women who survived claiming. We are building something. Are you there?

I read it three times. I am standing in the canopy with the green light on the bark and the twins kicking, holding a message from someone I’ve never met who is doing what I’m doing. Surviving. Building. Asking the dark if anyone else is out there.

My hands aren’t steady. Hope shakes me in a way fear never did, and for a second I don’t trust it, camp-brain flagging it the way it flags anything good—too easy, watch it, this is how they get you. But under the caution sits a small stubborn warmth I can’t talk myself out of. Someone else is still out here, still counting days.

I take the strip back to the warren.

Red is reading when I come in. The bark-strip lessons are a ritual now, morning and evening. He reads faster than he used to, still slow, but the sentences come whole instead of broken.

I hand him the strip.

He reads it once, gold eyes moving across the words with the careful attention he gives everything written. Then he looks at me.

“Other mates,” he says.

“Other women.”

“Other—Shades.” He says the word like he’s tasting it. He hasn’t touched another Shade in years. Each of them keeps his own territory, defending, building, waiting. He has known they exist since before the feral wall came down. But knowing and connecting are different things.

“Do you know them?” I ask.

He’s quiet a moment, gold eyes unfocused, reaching back through years of feral memory for whatever fragments survived.

“North,” he says slowly. “Big territory. A red one—near enough my own color.” His hand sketches a vague shape, size and crimson. “Smart. Even feral. Smarter than the others.”

“How do you know?”

“Never crossed him. Never had to.” He shakes his head. The memories are tangled in feral haze, impressions more than images. “Knew his scent-markers, is all. Old. Far off. He had a mate. I could—smell it. On the relay. The scent changed.” He pauses. “The red one. That’s all he ever was to me.”

So the red one has a mate. It’s another woman, another survival story stacked on top of mine, written in different handwriting on different bark.