Page 67 of Feral Keep

The words come out faster than I mean them to, like if I don’t say it now I’ll talk myself out of it. Admitting a skill in the camps was a gamble—say you’re good at something and they work you at it until you break, say you’re bad at something and they call you useless and cut your rations to match. I haven’t said this out loud to anyone since before the raids. My palms have gone damp waiting for whatever comes next.

His hand goes still on the wall.

“Not well,” I add. Because honesty is camp-currency and lying about your skills gets you assigned to work you can’t do. “I was five when the world ended. The settlement women taught me some. Scratching in the dirt between shifts. I know the letters. Most of the words.”

He turns to look at me. The expression on his face, I’ve seen it once before, during the rut, when I shifted my hips deliberately for the first time. The expression of someone who just received something they didn’t know they were allowed to want.

We sit by the fire.

He’s brought things, bark-strips from somewhere in the warren, thin pieces of peeled wood with marks on them. They smell faintly of the same dust as the wall, mixed with something bitter that must be the ink itself, gone brown and flaking where damp and weather got to them. Not his carvings. These are different. Smaller writing, cramped and careful, in ink that’s faded to brown. Messages. Notes. Part of the relay system that threads between territories, though I don’t know this yet, not the scope of it, not that Ada and Ellie are on the other end. I just know that someone wrote words on bark and the words ended up here.

He holds the first strip between his massive hands. The delicacy is startling—his fingers could crush the bark to splinters without trying, but they cradle it like it’s made of glass. His lips move.

“Th... the...”

“The,” I say. “Yeah. That’s right.”

His eyes stay on the bark. The frown of concentration is deeper than any expression the rut produced. The rut was all instinct—his face during sex was focused, driven, but not effortful. This is effort. Every syllable costs him something. His mouth is relearning shapes it hasn’t made in thirteen years.

“The... w-wom...”

“Women.”

“Women. The women are...” He trails off. Frowns at the next word. His lips shape it silently, testing. “B... bu...”

I don’t help. Camp-blunt: let him work for it.

His finger traces the letters on the bark. “B-u-i... building.”

“That’s it.”

He looks up at me. The expression shifts. Gold eyes clear with the moment where something clicks into place, where the sounds and the shapes line up in the right order.

“The women are building,” he says. Sure. Actual words.

Something in his face—a crack opening. I see it. The moment where he recognizes himself in that sentence. The man who taught children to sound out their own words, who watched them have this exact moment, who knows that this is what learning tastes like. And it’s landing different because it’s his own mouth making the sounds.

The sentence sits between us. I don’t know who wrote it or what it means. But the sound of his voice reading—really reading, pulling meaning from marks on bark—does something to the air in the warren. Makes it heavier. Warmer. Like the fire just got bigger.

“Again,” I say. Camp-bluntness. No encouragement, no praise. Just the instruction.

He drops his eyes to the bark and starts over.

We work through three strips before the light fades. My teaching is terrible—I’m too blunt, too impatient. Patience was a thing you spent on people who could afford to waste time, and nobody in the camps could, so I never learned to hand it out gentle. When he hesitates on a word I’ve already told him twice, I snap, “B. It’s a B. You made one on the wall a thousand times.” He doesn’t flinch. He says the B. He moves on.

He’s a better student than I am a teacher. The patience that outlasted the feral state—the same patience that fed me bite by bite, that tended my scars wound by wound, that washed my hair strand by strand—applies to this. He doesn’t get frustrated. He doesn’t stop trying when a word won’t come. He goes back. Starts the sentence over. Sounds out each letter with his lips and his breath and his clawed finger tracing the shape on the bark.

By the third strip, he reads a full sentence without stopping. I don’t remember what it says. I remember the look on his face when he finishes it—the head lifting, the eyes finding mine, and the expression that crosses his face like weather.

The teacher’s expression. The one that says: I know what this is. I know what learning feels like. I was this.

He was this. Before the crimson skin and the horns. Before the mutation took his mind and gave him something else. He sat in a classroom and watched children make the same face he’s making now—the face of comprehension arriving, of shapes becoming words, of silence becoming voice. He lived for that moment. He told me so.

Now the moment is happening to him.

My hands are on his shoulders before the thought completes.

His gold eyes widen. The bark-strip falls from his fingers—he drops it on the furs and his hands are on my waist, the reflex so deep the feral years couldn’t erase it. The spread of his fingers across my ribs. The heat of him flooding through my shirt.