Page 112 of Feral Keep

“Others?” I ask.

“West—another one. Tall. Quieter. Black. Crow black, near enough.” He means a quieter territory, less aggression at the borders. “I don’t know—I can’t—” The frustration rises in him, the gap between what the feral held onto and what the man can say. “The feral didn’t—talk. Didn’t—name them. Just knew they were there. The red one. The black one. Shapes on the wind.”

Watching him hit that wall catches behind my ribs, small and sharp. He wants to give me more than he has. He spent years teaching children the right words for things, and now he can’t find the words for his own history. I put my hand over his on the bark-strip, so he knows the reaching matters more to me than the finding.

I look at the strip in his hand. We are women who survived claiming.

“I want to answer,” I say.

He nods. He doesn’t hesitate. He reaches for a fresh piece of bark from the stack by the fire, the supply he carved for reading lessons. He hands it to me and picks up the charcoal.

Then he stops. He holds the charcoal out to me.

“You write,” he says.

It’s the simplest thing and the largest thing at once. He spent thirteen years carving letters into a wall. He is still relearning the alphabet his mutation stole. He hands the charcoal over anyway, because the message should come in my voice.

I take it. The charcoal is heavier than a stick of burned wood has any right to be. Nobody ever handed me the choice of what to say before. In the camps you spoke when spoken to, and you wrote nothing, because there was no one who wanted to hear it. My fingers close around it like it could break.

I don’t write immediately.

Trust is earned, not offered. A message on a bark-strip could be anything—a real woman, a trap, an Ordained trick to locate surviving mates. I’ve seen women in the camps volunteer for Gilded Cage transfers because someone promised them a better life, and they came back broken or they didn’t come back at all.

I watch the strip for two days. I carry it with me. I show it to Lisa.

“Could be real,” Lisa says. She holds the bark up to the light, studying the writing. “Could be bait.”

“If it’s bait, what do they gain? They already know where we are. Red’s territory isn’t a secret.”

“They gain your trust. Then they use it.” Lisa hands the strip back. “I’m not saying don’t answer. I’m saying answer like someone who knows what a trap looks like.”

Lisa is right. She’s always right about the mechanics of survival.

On the third day, Gretchen asks about the strip. I tell her. She listens with her hands in another woman’s hair. She’s been braiding everyone, the touch spreading through the shelters the way fire spreads through canopy.

“Answer them,” Gretchen says. “If they’re real, they need to know we exist. If they’re not, we’ll find out.” She twists a braid and ties it off. “The worst thing isn’t being tricked. The worst thing is being alone.”

That evening I write. Red sits beside me, his hand on my belly, gold eyes tracking the charcoal across the bark. The fire pops and settles behind us, and the firelight makes the letters glow. Woodsmoke drifts between us, the smell of every evening since the warren became home.

I start three times. I cross out two. The camp-speech wants to come out, blunt and stripped, nothing that could be used against me. But this message isn’t for the camps. It’s for women who survived something impossible and are trying to figure out what comes after.

I write:

I’m here. I have women. What do you have?

It’s nine words, camp-simple and guarded. But the door is open a crack, and the crack says: I exist. I survived. Tell me what you are.

I hold the strip up and read it aloud. Red listens with his eyes on my face, a teacher hearing a student read a first sentence.

“Good,” he says.

I place the strip in the relay tree the next morning, wedged into the split the way Red showed me. The bark disappears into the tree’s grip and enters the network, traveling by Shade hands toward whoever wrote we are building something.

The reply comes in four days, faster than I expected. I check the relay tree every morning, the walk through the canopy to the marked oak. Three mornings I find nothing. On the fourth there’s a strip.

The bark is different, the handwriting the same. There are more words this time.

Ada. Mate to Corvin. North, White Mountains.