Page 83 of Feral Keep

Now I walk it upright.

My feet are in the wraps Red made, strips of hide, padded with moss, laced tight around my ankles. My belly rounds forward under the fur-lined covering he stitched for me with bone needles and sinew, his massive hands working the tiny stitches. The covering is thick—layered fur on the inside, tanned hide on the outside. My ribs don’t scream anymore when I breathe. My hips stay stable under the bulk of two growing bodies. My hair is a crown of coils, thick again. My jaw works on both sides. My teeth—all of them, the new ones he regrew—are white, whole, sharp.

My legs are stronger than they were three months ago. The muscles in my calves and thighs have filled out with fed protein and the work of walking uphill, of carrying the extra weight. The twins are heavy. I’m strong enough now to carry them without breaking.

I am not the woman who ran from the camp.

I am not fragile anymore, even though I’m heavier. The weakness transforms into something else. Something dangerous.

The canopy towers above us. Mutated oak and pine and something that used to be maple, all of it grown massive in the thirteen years since the asteroid changed everything. The trunks are wider than houses. Everything is green—a thousand shades of it, the deep viridian of the canopy ceiling. Mushrooms the size of dinner plates climb the trunks, releasing spores in visible clouds when the wind moves them. Some of the vegetation moves—animals now, things that adapted to the changed world. Red showed me the scat of one yesterday. Said it was nothing to fear. Said most predators won’t challenge a female carrying his scent.

The air smells like rain, rot, the sharp mineral tang of changed earth. Decomposition. The asteroid didn’t just change the soil. It changed what grows. Changed the shape of the world.

The light down here is always filtered. Even at midday, the canopy is so thick that noon looks like dusk. The shadows move across the forest floor like they’re alive, shifting with the wind in the upper leaves. Red taught me how to read them, the direction of the thermals, the pattern of the predators’ kills.

I lead.

Red follows. Three paces behind. Close enough that his shadow falls on me when the sun breaks through the canopy. Far enough that if someone saw us from the front, they’d see me first, a human woman, walking with purpose, obviously not fleeing.

His footsteps are quieter than mine. Nine feet of crimson muscle moving through undergrowth with a silence that shouldn’t be possible for something his size. The predator’s walk, each step placed, the body remembering how to move through its territory. His tail sweeps behind him, the white tip ghosting through ferns.

We don’t talk much. The walking takes my breath, not because I’m weak, but because the terrain is brutal: root ridges to climb, soft ground to navigate, streams swollen with spring melt crossing and re-crossing the path I’m following from memory. The weight of the twins pulls my center of gravity forward. Each root-ridge is higher than it was three months ago, or I’m shorter with the drag of them inside me.

Red carries me over the worst of it. Lifts me without asking—one arm under my thighs, the other bracing my back. His wings flare for balance, the membranes catching air. The position is intimate. My back against his chest, his hand curled under my belly, the twins between us. He sets me down on the far side and waits while I find my footing. The teacher’s patience, the male’s patience—knowing his mate will run, trusting the legs to remember how.

The third time he lifts me, the twins kick hard. Both of them, a double-flutter like fish turning in water. His hand goes to my belly. He pauses, standing in a stream with water to his shins and me cradled against his chest, his gold eyes dropping to the swell under the furs.

“Active,” he says. His voice carries approval. The satisfaction of a male checking that his offspring are healthy.

“Always.” I push against his shoulder. He’s holding me like I might break. I might be pregnant, but I’m stronger than I was. “I can walk this part.”

He sets me down. His hand lingers on my back.

We walk the next mile in silence. My legs burn with the exertion, with the fact that my body is still rebuilding itself even as it carries two. I don’t complain. Camp-trained. You move or you die. He follows three paces behind, his weight making no sound on the fallen branches and the thick mat of decades of leaf-fall.

The day passes in miles and silence and the slow work of walking through a world that grew over the old one. I recognize landmarks. Or what’s left of them. A highway overpass, the concrete cracked and greened over, saplings growing from the broken lanes. A shopping center parking lot, the asphalt buckled by roots, the storefronts swallowed by vegetation so complete that only a glint of glass gives away what it used to be.

I stopped here. On the way out. Crawled under the rusted shell of a car and slept for—I don’t know how long. Hours. The fever was bad. I remember the heat of the metal, the way the ground smelled like gasoline and earth, the hallucination that the car was going to start and drive me somewhere. Anywhere.

Looking at it now does something strange to my chest. Like looking at two women stacked on top of each other, the dying one who crawled under there and the fed, upright one standing over the same spot three months later, and for a second I can’t get them to be the same person. My hand finds my belly without me telling it to.

Red stands beside the car now. His eyes move over the area, not the predator’s threat-scan but the quieter look of a man reading a landscape.

“I slept here,” I say. “On the way out.”

He looks at the car. At the gap between the chassis and the asphalt, barely wide enough for a starving woman to squeeze through. The space where I crawled while my dislocated shoulder screamed and my fever-sick brain thought the world was ending. Which, technically, it was.

His jaw works. The muscles tense and release, tense and release. He’s doing the same thing he does when he’s looking for words, building them from nothing, from pure feeling and the grammar of his feral-raised brain. No words come.

He puts his hand on my shoulder. The weight of it is warm and steady. I don’t need him to say anything. I know what the hand means. I’m here. You’re not crawling anymore.

I put my hand on his. The crimson skin warm under my palm, the muscles underneath solid as stone. We stand like that for a long moment. The dead car between us and the canopy and the path back to the camp that’s waiting.

Then we walk.

The light starts to fail.

The canopy swallows the sun early—by late afternoon the world under the trees is grey and green and full of shadows that shift with the wind. The temperature drops. My breath starts to mist. Red stops walking. His head lifts. The predator’s posture—not alarm, but awareness. He turns slow, reading the air, the light, the way the wind moves through the canopy above us. His nostrils flare. His eyes track a stand of trees, then a hollow, then back. The male deciding where his mate will sleep.