Page 3 of Feral Keep

My legs are not going to carry me to it.

Shayla’s morning inspection.

She walked the line every day at dawn. Neat, composed, her hair pulled back, her clothing clean in a way that no one else’s in the camp was clean. Shayla wasn’t Ordained—she was human, a woman who had chosen to work for them, to run their camp and keep the rest of us behind fences, and she performed her role with the calm of someone who truly believed she was doing good.

“You’re losing weight, Maeve.” She said it the way a farmer assesses livestock. “Eat more at meals.”

The meals were boiled grain and whatever the supply carts brought—never enough for the labor they demanded. Shayla knew this. She adjusted workloads when someone was sick. Reduced shifts when a woman was close to collapse. Made sure the water barrels were filled. She knew our names.

The kindness was real. The system it served was not.

That was the thing about Shayla that made my skin crawl worse than the guards. The guards were simple—they hurt you because they could, because cruelty was the only skill they’d been asked to develop. Shayla was dirty in a different way. She truly cared about keeping us alive, and she used that care to keep us compliant. Every adjusted workload, every refilled water barrel—all of it fed the same machine. Stay behind the fences. Be grateful. The alternative is worse.

The day a Shade flew overhead during clearing work, every woman in the line dropped flat. The shadow passed over us like a stain on the sky—massive, fast, crimson-dark against the canopy. Shayla stood. She didn’t duck. She stood with her hands clasped and her face turned up, watching the shadow pass. When it was gone, she looked at us pressed flat on the ground and said: “You see? That’s what waits outside the fences. In here, you’re alive.”

I was flat on the dirt with my hands over my head, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth. Underneath the fear, something else moved, quick and ugly: I hated her. Standing there with her face turned up like the sky owed her a show, while the rest of us ate dirt. The hate didn’t last. Hate cost calories too.

Shayla was right. In the camp, I was alive. Outside the camp, the shadows had teeth.

The light is almost gone.

I’m still against the root. My body has made its decision—it’s staying here, in the territory of something the camps told me would kill me. My arms have stopped shaking because they’ve stopped trying.

The shift happens slowly, the way a shelter leans once its props start to give, one after another, until nothing is holding the roof at true. What’s left is a woman lying at the base of a tree, her cheek on the bark, her eyes on the darkening canopy.

Two days was optimistic. One. Maybe less.

A sound moves above the canopy to the north, closer this time—wings, the heavy rhythmic displacement of air. I don’t flinch. The freeze response is gone, spent the same way the adrenaline is spent. I lie on the ground and listen to something enormous move through the canopy above me and I don’t have the energy to be afraid of it.

The musk intensifies, thicker and closer, layered with something else underneath—warmth, almost, a living heat.

My eyelids fall, too heavy to hold up any longer. The canopy goes dark.

Tomorrow I won’t get up. The knowledge is physical. Factual. The camp built me to endure. I endured. Now the endurance has run out.

At least I’m not behind the fences.

The thought is thin. Almost nothing. But it’s mine. Somewhere far off, past the fear I’m too spent to keep holding, there’s a small, stubborn ember of something that refuses to be only afraid. It isn’t hope—hope needs more fuel than I’ve got left to burn. It’s smaller than hope. It just sits there, lit.

I hold it while the dark comes down.

3

MAEVE

The supply transfer.

That’s what the Ordained called it—a scheduled movement of processed material between camps, carts of salvage hauled along the dirt road connecting our camp to the one twelve miles east. Eunuch guards walked the line. More of them drove the carts. The women loaded and unloaded.

I’d worked six supply transfers in four years. The guards were never fully attentive during them—their eyes on the road, the Eunuchs, the inventory count. We were backdrop, bodies that moved crates.

The fence had a weak point. I’d noticed it three transfers ago—a section near the loading zone where root systems had been working on the posts for months, the metal rusting where bark pressed against it, the wire sagging where the ground had shifted. The guards hadn’t repaired it. To a guard, a fence is a line. To the woman behind it, a fence is a map of every weakness.

I didn’t plan the escape.

That’s the part I keep coming back to, the part that makes something in my chest tighten every time the memory surfaces. I didn’t scope the weakness for weeks, didn’t coordinate with Lisa or Gretchen, didn’t stash supplies. I was standing at the loading zone with a crate in my arms, the guard’s back turned, the fence’s weak point three steps to my right. And my body moved.

Camp-reflex. The same automatic response that taught me to flinch, to freeze, to go silent at a half-second’s notice. Except this time the reflex says go, and I’m moving before the word finishes landing.