Page 105 of Feral Keep

“Cora.” I take her hand. It’s cold, colder than the morning accounts for. I close both of mine around it and rub heat back into her fingers, the way I used to for the little ones in the worst of winter. “I’m Maeve. You’re safe.”

Her eyes find my face. Slow. Whatever she sees—a stranger, a pregnant woman with blood dried under her nails, one more voice telling her she’s safe—she doesn’t have the strength to react to it. Her mouth moves before sound comes out.

“Hurts.”

“I know.” I keep working her hand between mine. Her fingers curl weak around my thumb, an animal reflex more than a grip. “It’s going to hurt for a while. Then it stops.”

That might not be true. But she needs someone to say it, and I’m the only one here who’s carried a Shade’s venom long enough to sound like I know.

A shudder runs through her, slower and deeper than cold, her whole ribcage rolling with it. Marta tightens her hold. “Easy,” Marta murmurs, the word meant for both of us. “Easy, girl.”

“Where—” Cora’s voice cracks on it. She tries again. “Where is he?”

I go still. “Where’s who?”

“He kept it away.” Her eyes are wet now, tracking nothing. “The hurting. He kept it away.”

Marta’s arms flex tighter around her. Every answer I have would come out of my mouth as a lie, so I keep it shut. I hold her hand while the shaking works through her, my thumb moving slow circles over her cold knuckles. I let her cry for a chained thing that used her without once caring whether she lived.

Red is across the compound, still on his knees where the fight left him. He hasn’t moved to find me, hasn’t called out. Some camp-wired piece of me flags that as wrong before I remember why. He doesn’t need me right now. He’s tending himself, wound by wound, the way he tends everything.

Dust and blood have gone nearly black against the crimson of his skin, the copper smell of him carrying all the way to where I’m sitting. His silver hair is matted flat. His wings sit folded tight against his back, the membranes smeared dark and shining where the Stained’s blood caught the light. He looks like the thing Shayla used to describe to keep us behind the fence—the monster that waits in the canopy, that tears you apart if you stop running.

He looks up.

His eyes find mine across the whole ruined compound, gold and steady, checking on me the same way I’m checking on him. Cora’s cold hand tightens in mine. I don’t get up. He doesn’t stop working his tongue over the next cut. But his eyes stay on me half a breath longer than they need to, and that’s the whole conversation.

He’ll heal whether or not I’m the one holding his arm still. Cora might not make it through the next hour without someone’s hand in hers. I stay. It costs something to stay.

Lisa approaches Shayla.

I watch from where I’m sitting, Cora finally quiet against Marta’s shoulder. Lisa walks with her spine dead straight, hands loose at her sides, the camp-walk she uses when she’s decided something.

The compound still smells like the fight: scorched wood from the collapsed supply building, dust that hasn’t finished settling, and under it the sweet rot of the Stained’s blood drying in the sun. Shayla stands near the rubble with her arms wrapped around herself, grey hair come loose from its pins, her face gone slack in a way I’ve never seen on her. She watches Lisa cross the open ground the way you watch weather.

“The Shade you chained is gone,” Lisa says. No greeting. “The Stained is dead. The Eunuchs are gone. The Unmade from the first raid is dead. Your generator’s dead. Your fences are down. Your supply building’s rubble.” She stops three feet from Shayla, close enough that neither of them has to raise her voice. “What exactly do you have left?”

Shayla’s chin comes up. “I have thirty years of keeping women alive that a monster like that one”—she doesn’t point, doesn’t need to, everyone knows which direction Red is in—”would’ve eaten for breakfast if I hadn’t built something to stop him.”

“He didn’t come here to eat anyone. He came here because his mate was inside your fence.”

“And how many times has that worked out for the girl in question?” Shayla’s voice sharpens, finds its old edge, the one that used to make the whole barracks go quiet. “You think this is the only Cage story you’ve heard? You think Cora’s the only girl who came back broken from a bond that didn’t take? I built walls because the alternative is girls like her, over and over, and nobody left standing to pick up the pieces.”

“You built walls and then you used a chained one to keep her quiet so you wouldn’t have to watch her die where you could see it.” Lisa’s voice doesn’t rise to meet her. That’s the thing about Lisa—she gets colder the angrier she is. “The women you drugged are coming with us. The girl you soft-bonded to a feral is in withdrawal on the ground over there, and she’s going to need weeks of care you were never going to give her. Your leverage is gone. Your fences are down and your reasons went down with them.”

Shayla’s face doesn’t crack. She braces, like a woman leaning into a wind she can feel changing direction. “You don’t know what’s out there.”

“I know what was in here.”

That lands. Shayla’s mouth opens like she has an answer for that too, but nothing comes out. She closes it. Tries again.

“They’ll die without structure.” Her voice has lost its edge, thinner than I’ve ever heard it, close to pleading. “You don’t know that world. None of you do. I’ve kept people alive for thirteen years because I understood that fear works when nothing else does.”

“They’ll have structure.” Lisa doesn’t blink. “Mine.”

The silence after that has real weight in it. Somewhere in the canopy a bird calls, that long descending whistle. Shayla’s arms tighten around her own ribs. Her chin lifts another degree, the last gesture available to a woman watching her camp stop being hers in real time.

“So I’m going to ask you once,” Lisa says. “Do you want to come with us, or do you want to stay here.”