Page 63 of Feral Keep

His eyes search my face. Looking for something—disappointment, maybe. Rejection of the recovered name. The human name offered and set aside. There’s a flicker across his features that’s almost pain.

“Red,” I say again. Firmer. “That’s yours. I gave it to you.”

Something settles in his face—relief, not sadness. The deep exhale of a male who tested whether the old life still fit and found out it doesn’t, and that the not-fitting is okay. Alexander is a memory. A ghost name. Red is who he is. The camp-survivor named him the first time she saw him. The name stays because it’s the truth.

“Red,” he agrees. His hand drops from his chest. The tension in his shoulders eases. Like he just put down something he’s been carrying too long.

He sets the pot on the cooking surface. Comes to the furs. Sits beside me—not the looming over me of the rut, not the protective curl from the early days. Beside. His leg near mine. The heat of his body radiating through the space between us, close enough to feel, far enough to choose. Like he’s learning that presence doesn’t always need to be claiming.

“Three,” he says. The word comes slow, careful, pulled from the same deep place as the names. “Boys. Three boys.”

“I know,” I say.

Surprise crosses his face when he looks at me. Confused, like he’s trying to understand how I could know something so deeply rooted in the parts of him he thought were gone.

“I could hear it,” I tell him. “When you said their names. The way you said them.”

His eyes drop to his hands, jaw tight, spread on his thighs, the crimson fingers flexing and straightening. Working through something that isn’t physical. It’s deeper. The kind of work a body does when it’s holding something too heavy.

“Gone,” he says. The word costs him. It shows in the muscles of his throat, the way the syllable comes out like he’s swallowing glass. “All three. Gone.”

My hand goes near his on the fur, not on it. The way the women in the camps sat with each other, shoulder to shoulder, not touching, just present. The proximity that says I’m here without demanding anything. Just a body that will sit in the grief without trying to fix it.

His pinkie moves. Covers mine. One point of contact, his crimson over my dark skin. He doesn’t grip. Doesn’t claim. Just rests there. Steady. Like he’s learning that holding someone doesn’t always mean possessing them.

The firelight moves on the root walls. Outside the warren, the canopy murmurs with the sounds of dusk—insects, the creak of branches shifting in wind I can’t see, the smell of cooling earth and something faintly floral drifting in on it. The canopy that fed him and me and the heartbeat growing inside me. Behind my navel the warmth pulses once. Steady. Growing. A small fist made of cells and possibility.

His sons are dead. Mine is not yet born. The names he gave them, Billy, Sam, Dickie, are still in the air. What those names will mean for the heartbeat inside me is still ahead of me, unwritten. Whether he’ll ask me to carry them forward, to let their names live in the mouth of a child who’ll never meet them—all of it is still ahead.

What I do know, sitting here with his shaking finger over mine, is that something small and terrified has woken up inside my own chest and won’t go back to sleep. He built three children and the world took them anyway, in one day, before he even got to grieve them properly. Whatever’s growing behind my navel right now could be taken just as easy. Nobody promised me otherwise. My hand goes cold thinking it, and I press it flatter against his, like holding on tighter to him could hold on tighter to the thing inside me too.

I just sit beside him in the firelight and let his finger rest on mine and learn the shape of quiet grief from a male who held it alone for thirteen years in the feral dark. His grief isn’t camp-grief. It doesn’t come with punishment. It just is—present and real and allowed to exist between us like a third body sitting by the fire.

I’ll learn to hold it with him. But right now, I just sit. I just wait. I just let my hand be there so he knows he’s not breaking alone.

26

MAEVE

He tells me about them in pieces—not a story, not a speech, just fragments that come loose over the course of a day, shaken free by whatever is happening behind his eyes as the feral wall crumbles. He’ll be tending the fire, or sitting in the furs with his hands on his knees, and a piece will surface.

“Billy was the oldest.” His voice catches. Comes back. “Eight. He was—he liked to climb.”

Silence, minutes of it. The fire cracks, throwing orange light up the sharp planes of his face, catching wet at the rims of his eyes without ever spilling over. My hands keep moving through the greens.

Eight. Six. Four. My chest tightens around the numbers before he even finishes the sentence, my mind lurching somewhere I didn’t send it—how many years I’d get before whatever’s inside me now could climb a tree or draw in the dirt with a stick. The thought scares me more than it should. I push a leaf between my fingers and don’t let my hands stop moving.

“Sam was six. Quiet. Drew things in the dirt with sticks.” A pause so long I think he’s done. Then: “Dickie was four. He followed Billy everywhere. Everywhere.”

The tremor comes back, through his whole body this time, not just his hands. The massive frame that held me through weeks of rut, that drove into me with a force that shook the root walls, that carried three women’s worth of weight without breaking stride—a tremor that starts in his chest and radiates outward through his shoulders, his arms, the tips of his folded wings.

I’m learning the difference between rut-shaking and grief-shaking. The rut shook him toward something, toward the drive, toward the next cycle. This shakes him apart. The vibration isn’t building to a peak. It’s the sound a structure makes when the thing holding it up gets pulled out.

“The asteroid,” he says. “They were—small. Too small.”

He means too small to survive the mutation. I know this the way I know who gets picked for the clearing line and who doesn’t, the grim rule of who lives and who doesn’t, measured in body weight, age, and distance from the nearest shelter. His boys were under ten. The mutation took males under forty-five. Children that young didn’t transform. They just died.

He doesn’t say how. He doesn’t need to. The shake in his body says enough. The fire’s gone smoky, untended, and the smell of it thickens the air between us until it’s almost something I could touch.