Page 2 of Feral Keep

At least no one is touching me.

The thought arrives clear and certain, the clearest thing my mind has produced in days. No hands on my arms pulling me to my feet for the work detail. No fingers in my hair dragging me where I don’t want to go. No body pressed against mine in the crowded barracks because there was never room to sleep any other way.

I am alone on the ground and no one is touching me, and that is the closest thing to peace I have felt in four years.

It doesn’t last clean. Right behind the peace comes something else, sharp and sudden: how wrong it is that alone and dying is the safest I’ve been able to feel since I was fourteen. My eyes burn. No tears come—my body doesn’t have the water to spare. I let it. There’s nothing else to do with it out here.

Before the camps there was the settlement. Before that, a room, a voice, a kitchen that smelled like morning—shards now, sharp-edged and useless. But the settlement I remember. My mother’s hands on my shoulders, steering me away from the fence line. The way the women slept in shifts, two awake, the rest huddled close.

The Ordained came when I was fourteen. My mother didn’t make it past the first hour.

My breath stops every time that sentence finishes. I don’t let it start again right away. I never have. Four years of practice and I still can’t get past the first hour in my head without something in me slamming a door on the rest of it. That’s the memory I keep in the same place I keep the tooth the guard knocked out—something I carry because putting it down would mean looking at it.

Somewhere under the exhaustion a thin thread is still pulling, telling me I should be afraid of dying here, alone, in a stranger’s ground. My hands, my mind, whatever’s left of me, can’t get a grip on it anymore. It’s easier to let the thread go slack than to hold onto one more thing.

I close my eyes.

2

MAEVE

Gretchen braided my hair for the first time three months in.

I was fourteen. Sitting on the ground between the barracks and the fence, my back against the wooden wall, my knees pulled up. My hair was breaking off in chunks—no products, no oils, no protection, three months of labor and weather doing what the guards hadn’t bothered to. Matted at the roots, dry and splitting at the ends, coming out in my hands when I pulled.

Gretchen sat down behind me without asking. Her hands were rough, split knuckles, nails ground to nothing. But her fingers in my hair were gentle. She didn’t explain what she was doing. She sectioned, she detangled, she braided. I sat there with my knees drawn up and someone else’s hands in my hair for the first time since my mother’s.

The memory hit before I could brace for it. My mother behind me on the ground outside our shelter, working oil into my hair with her fingers while the other women cooked. The smell of smoke and whatever was in the pot. I couldn’t remember what she was saying. Just her hands. Just the feeling of being held still by someone who wasn’t trying to hurt me.

I cried that first time, quiet, the way you learn to cry without moving your shoulders so nobody behind you knows. Gretchen didn’t stop braiding. Didn’t ask why. She just kept her fingers moving, section after section, like crying was a normal thing a person did while getting her hair done.

Gretchen’s braids held for two weeks. When they came out, she did them again.

The ground is cold against my cheek.

I’m lying where I fell. The root under my face is gnarled, the bark rough against my skin. Above me the canopy shifts—wind, or something moving through the upper branches. The light is dimmer. I was unconscious. I don’t know for how long.

Four years of camp reflex fires. Sluggish, delayed, a coal losing its heat, not dead yet, just going gray. Position: ground. Exposure: total. Mobility: questionable. I try to push myself up. My arms shake. I make it to my elbows before my shoulder gives and I go back down.

I lie there and breathe.

The musk is everywhere. In the air, in the bark against my face, in the soil under my fingers. The smell has a texture—thick, warm, metallic, coating the inside of my throat. Some animal part of me keeps repeating the same warning, wordless, useless. The thought doesn’t produce a plan. My body is out of plans.

Lisa on the clearing crew. Day shift, eight hours hacking at root systems that grew back overnight. The Ordained didn’t care about progress. The labor was the point. We were the women they couldn’t sell—too scarred, too defiant, too used up for the Gilded Cages—and the camps were where the system put the ones it had no other use for.

Lisa was sharp. Angry in a way the camp couldn’t blunt. She had a mouth on her that got her hit more than the rest of us, but she never learned to shut it, and after a while I stopped wanting her to. Her anger was the only honest thing in the camp. Everyone else—Shayla included—had smoothed themselves into something the system could digest. Lisa refused. She spat it back.

She covered my back on the line. She noticed things the guards missed—when my shoulder was worse, when the fever came back, when I was chewing on the wrong side and blood was running down my chin. The day a guard hit me hard enough to knock the tooth loose, Lisa helped me spit the blood into the dirt without the overseer seeing. She didn’t say anything comforting. She said: “You’re fine. Swallow the rest. Don’t let them write it up.”

Camp comfort. Practical, blunt, stripped to what you needed to hear to keep standing. Something in me went soft and hot, hearing it—not the words, the fact that she’d stayed close enough to catch the blood before the overseer did. I didn’t have a way to say thank you that wouldn’t have gotten us both hit for talking out of turn, so I let the gratitude sit in my chest with nowhere to go.

I try to move again.

My arms hold this time. I drag myself up to sitting, my back against the root. My hands are shaking. Cracked nails, torn skin, the bones of my wrists sharp under skin gone ashen. These hands cleared vegetation for four years, swung tools until the blisters opened and bled, calloused over, opened again. I flex my fingers. They work. Barely.

Looking at them does something I don’t have time for—a hot, tired ache behind my eyes, the shape tears would take if my body had water to spend on them. I let it come and go. Chasing it further is how you end up somewhere you can’t climb back out of.

Water. How long since I last drank. Not since the stream. My lips are cracked. My tongue is thick. The clearing around me is maintained: underbrush hacked back, paths worn smooth. The firepit is close, its coals dark. The mound of earth with the wildflowers is farther back, tucked against the base of a tree so large it could house a family in its root system. Something drips—water, the thin steady sound of a stream over stone.