Page 108 of Feral Keep

The older one favors her left leg. The blood on her shin has gone black and flaking, and the smell of it is old and rusty, days past fresh.

Every time the line stalls, the younger one presses harder into her side, one hand fisted so deep in the older woman’s sleeve her knuckles have gone bloodless. Sisters, maybe. Or the thing the camps build out of two bodies and enough need.

Lisa crouches in front of them. She doesn’t reach for the leg first.

“What’s your name?” she asks the younger one.

It takes a second to come. “Junie.”

“Junie. I need to look at her leg.” Lisa’s voice doesn’t change pitch, doesn’t drop into the careful tone some women use on skittish things. “Can I do that with you standing right there?”

Junie’s hand doesn’t loosen. She looks at the older woman instead of Lisa, waiting on permission from the only person she trusts.

The older woman’s palm comes up and settles over Junie’s fist. She doesn’t pry it loose. She just covers it.

“She stays,” she says. Her voice sounds dragged over gravel for three days, because it probably has been. “She stays where she’s standing or you don’t touch me.”

“Okay.” Lisa doesn’t blink at the terms. “What do I call you?”

“Nessa.”

“Nessa. Junie.” Lisa says both names like she’s setting them down somewhere she won’t lose them. She’s already unwinding a strip of cloth from the roll at her hip. She finds a second scrap, folds it, presses it into Junie’s free hand, and guides it down to the edge of the wound. “Press here. Not hard. Just hold it steady for me.”

There’s nothing that cloth does the wrap won’t do better. But Junie’s hand has a job now instead of a shake in it, and her shoulders come down out of her ears by half an inch.

Lisa cleans the leg one-handed while Junie holds her scrap like it’s load-bearing. Nobody asks the two of them to separate. You don’t break the ones who made it out still holding on to each other.

Down the line, a woman cradles a wrist bent wrong and leans on a tree to wait her turn. Another sways until someone gets an arm under her elbow. Hasn’t eaten in three days, someone says, and the words travel down the column faster than Lisa does. She gets to all of them, the same crouch, the same flat voice. But Junie and Nessa are the ones I watch start to finish, because I need to see one of these end without anyone getting pulled apart.

Gretchen is already braiding. She started before the last women cleared the tree line, her fingers sorting hair, giving some of them the first touch in years that wasn’t venom or violence. She braids Marta’s hair while Marta holds Cora. One woman tending another tending another.

Red stays at the edge.

He set Cora down when we reached the clearing the way he sets everything down, with the care of hands that know their own size. Then he moved to the perimeter. Most of these women have never seen a Shade that wasn’t behind a fence or on top of them. He knows what he looks like: nine feet of crimson muscle, blood crusting on his arms, his cheek split open again. He knows the stories they were told.

So he builds.

He starts with shelters. The fifteen from the first trip watch with the calm of women who have seen him do this before. The new women flinch at every sound he makes. A branch cracks in his hands. A post thuds into the earth. His chest rumbles, and it isn’t a threat, only the hum of a male in his territory doing what his body was built for.

I sit by the fire. The woodsmoke settles over everything, thick and familiar, scrubbing the last of the dead camp off my skin. My legs won’t hold me anymore. The walk back, the twins, the weight of the day press down through my hips into bones that ache in a way they didn’t a week ago. The pregnancy is further along than it should be. Red’s venom is accelerating things, and my body is trying to keep up with a timeline that isn’t human.

Sitting still is its own kind of hard. My hands won’t stop, picking at the hem of my wrap, smoothing it, picking again. I look at fifty-two women settling into a clearing that didn’t exist a season ago. We did that. I did that. The thought sits strange in my chest, too big for the space camp-brain ever left for being proud of anything.

Lisa comes to me when the sorting is done. She sits with her hands on her knees and her spine straight, because she won’t let herself slump even when every muscle is screaming for it.

“Fourteen with injuries that need attention,” she says. “Three infected wounds. Two broken bones—the wrist and a foot. One woman who hasn’t spoken since the Stained—something older than shock, something that’s been sitting in her a while.” Her voice stays flat, the reporting voice, but her hands are tight on her knees. “Cora is the worst. The withdrawal is—” She stops. Starts again. “She’s in pain. A lot of pain. Everything the venom was holding back is hitting at once.”

“Can we help her?”

“Keep her warm. Keep her hydrated. Wait.” Lisa’s mouth thins. “That’s what we can do. Wait for it to pass. I’ve seen drug withdrawal in the camps—not venom, but close enough. The body comes down. It takes days. It hurts the whole time.”

I think of Cora’s glazed eyes. I know that warm chemical float from the inside, Red’s venom holding my pain off during the rut, the sweetness of not feeling anything that makes the feeling unbearable when it comes back. Except my venom came from a mate. Hers came from a cage.

“She’ll make it,” I say. Because someone needs to say it.

Lisa doesn’t argue. Doesn’t agree. She moves to the next problem. “Food. We have maybe four days of stores at this number. Red can hunt, but fifty-two mouths⁠—”

“He’ll provide.” I say it without thinking. The bond knows it for me. This male will do whatever his body requires to feed his territory, even if his territory just tripled overnight.