Page 88 of Feral Keep

Lisa counts. Quick, efficient. The women clustered near the fence gaps, some already through, some frozen halfway. Gretchen is on the ground, three others helping her stand.

“Fifteen. Including us.”

Fifteen. Out of forty. Twenty-five women still behind the barracks door with Shayla’s voice in their ears and Ruth’s blood soaking into the dirt outside.

“We’ll come back,” I say. To Lisa. To the barracks door. To the twenty-five who can’t hear me. “We’ll come back.”

Lisa grabs my arm. “Not today. Today we move.”

I close Ruth’s eyes, the eyelids warm still, the lashes dark against her skin. I put a stone from the ground beside her—not on a grave, there’s no time for a grave. A marker. Someone was here. Someone mattered.

Red lifts Gretchen. One arm, careful of her burned hands. He looks at me across the compound. The gold eyes asking: which direction?

“North,” I say. “Home.”

We walk. Fifteen women in the canopy. Red at the back, bleeding, carrying Gretchen. Me at the front with Lisa, my hands bloody, Ruth’s blood under my nails, the twins kicking hard against the inside of my belly.

Twenty-five behind us. Still in the barracks. Still listening to Shayla.

I don’t look back. But I’m already counting the days until the return.

37

MAEVE

We walk for six hours before I let them stop.

The fifteen move in a tight cluster, the way camp women move when they’re frightened, bodies pressing close, the herd instinct of people who learned that isolation means being picked off. They trip on root ridges. They flinch at every sound—the crack of branches, the shifting of mutated vegetation, the call of birds that don’t sound like any bird that existed before the asteroid. One woman jumps sideways when a mushroom cap the size of a dinner plate drops from a trunk and hits the forest floor with a wet thud, releasing a burst of something thick and earthy that catches in the back of my throat. Another grabs the arm of the woman beside her and doesn’t let go for the next mile.

“Is it always this loud?” The voice comes from near the back, thin, barely more than breath. “The trees.”

“It gets quieter,” I say. Not comfort exactly. Just true. “Give it a day.”

They don’t know how to walk in canopy. Four years behind fences—some of them longer—and the only time they left the compound was on the clearing lines, hacking vegetation under Eunuch guard, the canopy something to be fought, not moved through, not lived in. The branches that Red navigates like hallways are walls to them. The root ridges that my feet find automatically are tripping hazards. The sounds—the creak of living wood, the distant call of something large and winged—are all potential death.

Red walks at the back. Fifty yards behind. His gait is wrong. The Unmade’s blow to his ribs has changed his walk, a hitch on the right side, the wing membrane on that side not folding flat. He’s bleeding still. The gash on his cheek has crusted, the dark line bisecting the crimson skin, but the wound on his side is seeping, darkening the already-dark skin with something wetter, warmer. He doesn’t slow. He doesn’t ask to stop. The predator’s discipline—you don’t show weakness in open territory. You walk until you can’t walk. Then you walk more.

I know because I did the same thing three months ago, going the other direction. Starving, feverish, shoulder dislocated, ribs cracked. I walked until I blacked out. Crawled until I blacked out again. Woke up and kept moving because stopping was dying. The difference between us: I was running away from a cage. He’s walking back from tearing one open.

Lisa walks beside me. She hasn’t spoken since the camp. Her hands are still red with Ruth’s blood, dried in the creases of her fingers, under her nails. She carries it the way she carries everything, silently, efficiently, the weight stored in the part of her brain that tracks costs. Lisa keeps a ledger. She won’t tell you it exists. But I’ve known her for four years. I’ve seen her face after women died on the clearing lines, after women were transferred to Gilded Cages and didn’t come back. She tallies them. Ruth is in the ledger now, and Lisa will carry that number for the rest of her life.

Gretchen is on Red’s back. He shifted her there an hour in, the burned hands making walking unbearable, each step jolting the blistered palms that seized on the electric fence. The smell of scorched skin still clings to her, faint now, but there, a smell that pulls me straight back to the fence line every time the wind shifts. She rides between his wings with her face pressed against the back of his neck, her arms looped over his shoulders, her legs not quite reaching around his waist. The wire pattern is burned into her palms. I saw it before he picked her up, the fence she grabbed because she was running toward me and didn’t see the current.

That’s on me too. Ruth is on me. Gretchen’s hands are on me. The twenty-five behind the barracks door—on me.

The women behind us watch Red carry Gretchen. Some of them watch the way you watch something that can’t be real, a Shade, the thing they were told would rape them to death, carrying a woman on his back through the canopy like a father carrying a child. Some of them watch the way you watch a door opening in a room you thought had no doors.

I find the stopping place when the light starts to fail. A root hollow, not Red’s elegant overnight nest, just a depression between two massive trunks where the ground is soft with leaf litter and the canopy provides overhead cover, the air here cool and green, thick with the smell of wet rot and growing things. The women sink into it like water into sand. Some of them are asleep before they’re horizontal, the exhaustion of adrenaline crash and miles of walking on bodies that have been underfed for years. Their breathing changes, from the tight, shallow camp-breathing to something deeper, slower. The first real sleep some of them have had outside the barracks.

Red sets Gretchen down gently, his hands cradling her burned ones, lowering them to the ferns without letting anything press the blisters. He steps back. Takes a position at the perimeter, twenty yards out, his back against a trunk, his gold eyes scanning the canopy. Even injured, even bleeding, the territorial instinct runs. He’ll guard while they sleep, the same way he guarded me every second I wasn’t conscious enough to know he was doing it.

Gretchen catches my sleeve before I can follow him, her burned fingers stopping just short of my skin. Her voice is wrecked, barely there, but it’s the first thing she’s said since the fence.

“You came back.”

Not asking. Just disbelief, still settling into fact.

“I told you I would.”