Page 4 of Feral Keep

The crate leaves my arms before I decide to drop it. It hits the dirt behind me, loud enough that the guard should turn on the sound alone. He doesn’t. Or he does and it doesn’t matter, because by then the wire is under my hands.

Cold. Rusted rough under my palms, flaking where four years of rot have chewed through the coating. My bad shoulder slams into the post without asking my permission first, and the impact should drop me flat. It doesn’t. The post gives instead—a crack, low and wet, wood gone soft with root-rot finally letting go all at once. The wire sags low enough that I don’t climb so much as fall through. One boot catches in the mesh and stays there. The wire scrapes a line of fire up my bare calf on the way past.

Then the canopy. Leaves against my face, wet and cold, closing over me.

I’m through. I didn’t decide any of it—not the crate, not the wire, not the run. My body decided for me, the way it decided the night the Ordained came for our settlement, the way it’s been deciding things for four years while the rest of me went along for the ride.

I ran. Not strategically—no map, no destination, no plan for what came after the fence. The fence was the edge of the world, and beyond it was the canopy, and beyond the canopy was what the camps told us waited there: death with wings and teeth.

I ran anyway.

The canopy at night is a different animal than the canopy by day. No moon gets through the mutated growth overhead—just black on black, branches that rake my arms before I see them, roots that reach up to grab an ankle and slam me down. I catch myself against a trunk twice as big around as anything on the cleared side of the fence, and the impact drives what’s left of my air out through my teeth. My cracked ribs light up. I go anyway, hands finding bark, using it to launch back into the dark.

A mile in, my second boot goes—a strap catching on a root, gone before I can mourn it. My bad shoulder keeps slamming into branches I don’t see coming. My bare feet find roots and stones and the cold wet give of rotting leaf litter, every third step its own small agony.

Something shrieks above me—not human, a high tearing sound from the canopy ceiling—and every hair on my body stands up at once. I go still without deciding to, flattened against a trunk, waiting for teeth. Nothing comes. A bird, maybe, with no interest in a starving girl. I count three breaths and I run again, because standing still in the dark waiting to find out what made the sound is worse.

Somewhere past the second mile, my legs actually slow. The fence-gap pulls at me the way muscle memory pulls a hand toward an old scar. Turn around. Go back before they miss you. Say the crate slipped. I take two full strides in the wrong direction before Lisa’s voice cuts through, before I remember there’s no accident big enough to explain a girl already through the wire. I turn back into the dark and I don’t slow again.

Behind me, the guards take a moment to process it—the loading zone, the dropped crate, the gap in the fence, the space where I’d been standing. Then the shout goes up. One voice, then a second, then a third, layering into something bigger than a warning—she’s gone, get her—and by the time it does, I’m already swallowed by the green.

Boots on the road, a rhythm too even and too heavy to be anything but men running in gear that wasn’t built for it. Then branches breaking behind and to my left—Eunuchs, pushing into the tree line, their voices carrying that wrong pitch, too high, too thin. Their bodies are wrong for the chase—too thin, that strange hunched gait stumbling on roots, their strides built wrong for the ground under them. One of them goes down somewhere behind me. I keep running.

The camp’s real containment was never the fences or the guards. It was the fear. For two hours the search assumed the fear would do what it always did: break me down, turn me around, bring me back to the gap begging to be let in.

The fear screamed. My legs kept running.

By dawn, the voices were gone. By midday, the only sounds were the canopy—wind in the upper branches, insects, birds whose names the camp never taught us.

I stopped running because my body stopped. Not a decision—a mechanical failure. My legs buckled at the base of a tree. I went down, face in the dirt, ribs shrieking, shoulder throbbing. I waited to feel free.

Not free. Exposed.

Four years of fences had built a structure inside me—terrible, but known, fixed dimensions. I knew the distance from the barracks to the work line, the ceiling of the barracks, the width of the sleeping space. Out here there was no ceiling, no walls. The canopy stretched in every direction, the air rushing through gaps my lungs didn’t know how to process. Nothing was standing over me. Nothing was holding me down. That was the problem. Four years had taught my body that safety had edges you could touch, and out here I couldn’t find a single one.

I thought about Gretchen. Her hands in my hair, the braids she put in every two weeks without being asked. I thought about Lisa, sharp and furious, standing shoulder to shoulder with me on the clearing line. I thought about the woman three bunks down who hummed at night, an old song, and the woman who saved her bread ration for new arrivals.

Missing them wasn’t like missing my mother—that hurt is old, worn smooth. This was fresh and it caught me wrong, low in the throat, a want so sudden and so useless out here that I had to press my face harder into the dirt just to keep it from turning into something louder.

I left them.

Lisa’s voice, the last thing she said to me—two hours before the transfer, sitting on the ground between the barracks and the fence, her shoulder against mine. “If you ever get a chance, Maeve. Don’t think. Don’t wait for me. Just go.”

She said it like she was talking about the weather. Like giving someone permission to leave you behind was an ordinary thing to say between bites of boiled grain.

I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t warn anyone. I was through the gap before the thought formed, and by the time it arrived, I was a mile into the canopy running on reflex with no plan to go back.

The guilt hit like the ground hit. Hard, flat, total. It sat in my chest like swallowed glass, and it has been sitting there for every day of every week since. It moves when I breathe wrong—a deep breath taken too fast, and the edges of it shift somewhere behind my sternum, a reminder that it never actually left.

I keep running. Not literally—my body forces rest, forces the fever, the stops, the collapses that mark the weeks. But the movement doesn’t stop. Forward, always forward, because backward is the camp. The guilt. The women I left behind. I can’t carry all of that at once. I can carry forward.

I should have told them. I should have grabbed Gretchen’s arm and said come with me. Maybe she would have. Maybe she wouldn’t have. But at least she’d have known. At least Lisa would have had the choice.

I didn’t give them the choice. My reflex made the choice for me. The same reflex that has been running my body since I was fourteen, since the Ordained came to our settlement in the dark and my mother shoved me behind her and the shoving didn’t help. My body moved through the fence gap the same way it tried to move behind my mother—fast, blind, no plan for what came after.

Now I’m dying in a monster’s territory with my cheek on the bark, the guilt still lodged behind my ribs. Two women who loved me are still behind the fences, wondering what happened to the girl whose hair they braided.

I’ve been moving for weeks.