Page 82 of Feral Keep

He nods. Drops his hand. Turns to the cooking surface and rescues the meat with the calm, practical motion of a man who has just agreed to tear apart a labor camp and is now making sure his mate eats breakfast. The meat is charred on one side, still raw on the other. He doesn’t care. He brings it to me on the flat stone, settles back on his haunches to watch me eat. The predator goes quiet. The teacher returns, patient and present.

“Eat,” he says. “Your body—fuel for two.”

I eat. The burnt crust cracks under my teeth. The inside is warm and rich. He brought down a deer three days ago. This is the last of it. It tastes like survival. It tastes like a male who chose to stay in one place instead of ranging the territory, because his mate needed solid ground to stand on.

When the meal is done, I map the route from memory.

We eat in silence. The furs pile around us, the warmth of them, the way they smell like safety, all of it about to be left behind. When we come back, if we come back, everything will be different. The camp women will change the territory the way I changed it. The way any woman carried back to safety changes a place.

The floor of the warren is smooth root wood. I use a piece of charcoal from the fire, the stub of a branch, burned to carbon, soft enough to mark. It smells burnt and bitter on my fingers, a smell that still drags me back to the fence line, watching the cooking fires smoke every evening. I draw on the floor. He crouches beside me, watching.

“Here.” A circle. The camp. “The fences run—” A rough rectangle. “Three barracks. Here, here, here.” Three marks inside the rectangle. “The supply building.” A square. “Shayla’s quarters.” Another square, separate. Outside the main compound but inside the outer fence.

“Generator.” I mark it. “Powers the fences. If it’s running—the wire is live. It won’t kill you but it’ll⁠—”

“Hurt,” he finishes.

“Yeah.”

He studies the map, his gold eyes tracing the lines the way they trace the bark-strips. His tail curls and uncurls behind him, the involuntary movement of a male whose body is already preparing for violence.

“Guards here?” He points to the supply building.

“Usually. Two Eunuchs at the main gate. Two on patrol—the perimeter. Two inside, near the barracks.” I’m pulling it from four years of watching, counting, tracking. Camp-survival. You learn the patterns because the patterns keep you alive. “They change at midday. The overlap is—sloppy. Twenty minutes where nobody’s at the gate.”

He makes a sound. Low. A nine-foot Shade who held a territory against Unmade for thirteen years is not impressed by six Eunuchs and a cattle fence.

“The women will be in the barracks. Morning—they’ll be on the lines. Clearing.” I mark the clearing lines. The paths they hack through regrown canopy every day, the backbreaking labor that keeps the camp’s perimeter from being swallowed. “If we come at—midday. When the guards change. The women will be coming back from the lines. They’ll be together. In one place.”

He nods. His finger traces the path from the warren to the camp on my charcoal map. The distance. The terrain. The canopy between here and there.

“Two days,” he says. “Walking. One if I—” He spreads his wings. The membranes catching the firelight, the span of them filling the warren. “Carry you.”

“Walking.” I shake my head. “If we come from the air, they’ll see you before they see me. The women will run. Panic. They’ve never seen a Shade and lived. We need to walk in. Me first. You behind.”

He doesn’t like it. The displeasure is in the set of his jaw, the way his tail goes rigid. His instinct—the predator’s wiring—says he goes first. He clears the threat. She follows when it’s safe.

“I go first,” I say. Firm. “I talk. You wait until I signal.”

His jaw works. The same frustration he gets with words he can’t find, except this isn’t about language. This is about overriding thirteen years of protect-the-mate and trusting that the mate knows what she’s doing.

“If they—hurt you.” He stops. Starts again. Each word pulled out separate, heavy. “If anything touches you. I’m not waiting.”

“I know.”

The silence holds, the charcoal map on the floor between us, crude, camp-drawn, the intelligence of a woman who survived four years behind those lines married to the violence of a male who will tear them down. His hand finds mine on the floor, the crimson fingers wrapping around my smaller hand. Holding.

Saying it out loud made it real in a way the thinking never did. My mouth has gone dry. My hands are cold even wrapped up in his. Somewhere under the fear there’s something else too, fierce and steady, the same thing that got me out the first time—the flat certainty that Gretchen and Lisa would do this for me without a second thought, and I’m not going to be the woman who got out and stopped counting the ones who didn’t.

We leave tomorrow.

35

MAEVE

The canopy is different when you’re not dying in it.

I walked this route three months ago, barefoot, starving, fever-blind, my dislocated shoulder dragging and my cracked ribs grinding with every breath. I crawled parts of it. I blacked out parts of it. The counting stopped working and the fear became the only thing keeping my legs under me.