Page 85 of Feral Keep

My body knows what’s coming. My heart is already racing. The weight of the pregnancy feels like it’s trying to slow me down. My hand drops to my belly, the twins moving underneath it—fast, anxious, picking up on my nervous system.

“They know,” I say.

“Yes,” Red says. He’s already awake. I don’t know if he slept. “They know what their mother knows.”

I get up. My muscles are stiff from the cold, from lying in the same position all night. I put on the wraps. The bone needle I made catches in the wrapping and I have to rewrap it. My hands shake slightly. Camp-shake. The fear starts to run through my blood in preparation for what I’m about to do.

I look at him—nine feet of crimson violence, gold eyes clear in the early light, the stillness of a male who has decided something. His wings are folded tight against his back. His tail is rigid. He’s preparing himself too, but differently. For him it’s the gathering of violence.

“Stay behind me,” I say. “Until I signal.”

He nods, his jaw tight, the restraint costing him something in the set of his shoulders, the rigid line of his tail. The predator wants to go first, to know his mate is safe. But the teacher inside him—the man who chose to raise a child alphabet in stone, who chose patience over rage—the teacher understands that sometimes the mate has to walk first.

“If they hurt you,” he says. The words coming out slow, heavy. “If I see—any hand on you.”

“I know,” I say. “You’ll burn them down.”

He nods once. Sharp.

I turn toward the smell of camp.

The wraps are tight on my feet. The weight of the twins is centered, secure under the wraps around my belly. My lungs fill with the changed air, carrying everything that tried to break me.

I walk.

The fear is with me. The memory of the fences is with me. The knowledge of what I’m walking toward is with me. But Red is three paces behind, and the twins are inside me, and I am not the woman who crawled away from this place anymore.

I am going to walk my sisters out of the dark.

36

MAEVE

The fences are smaller than I remember.

Four years of my life behind cattle wire, and the wire is only as tall as my shoulder. The posts are wood, rough-cut, weathered, the bark still visible on some of them. I remember them as massive. The edge of the world, the line between inside where you survived and outside where the Shades waited to rape you to death.

The posts are rotting.

The generator hums at the far end of the compound, and the fuel smoke off it drifts thin and oily across the clearing, a smell I’d know blind. It hits my skin, the hairs on my arms rising. The current runs through the cattle wire. Not enough to kill. Enough to lock your muscles. Enough to make Gretchen’s hands seize on the wire, her body arching, the scream⁠—

I’m not there yet. I’m twenty yards from the gate, and my skin already remembers this exact distance—the stretch where camp-trained women learn to arrange their expression into nothing. My palms are damp. My heartbeat kicks against the twins, hard enough to climb into my own throat. The canopy at my back. Red somewhere behind me, invisible unless you know where to look. Nine feet of crimson muscle folded into the undergrowth with a stillness that shouldn’t be possible for something his size. The steady pulse of his presence, the massive patience of a predator waiting for the signal his mate promised she’d give.

The camp is smaller too. Three barracks. Tin roofs rusted orange, the rain stains tracking down the sides. Clearing lines radiating outward from the compound, the paths the women hack through regrown canopy every day, the work that kept our muscles strong and our spirits crushed. Smoke from the cooking area. Shayla’s quarters, set apart. Even from here the camp smell reaches me—rust and mildew and boiled roots, underneath it the flat chemical sting of the fence line, a smell my body remembers before my mind finishes placing it.

I know this place the way I know my own skin. Every angle. Every shadow. The gap between the supply building and the fence where a small woman can stand and not be seen from the guard posts. Four years of watching, counting, learning the shape of my cage.

I’m going to tear it open.

But there’s something new at the main gate.

The shape is too tall, too thick in the shoulders, the proportions wrong in a way that drops my stomach. Not a Eunuch—I know Eunuch shapes in my sleep, the too-thin silhouette, the hunched posture. This is bigger, massive thighs out of proportion with the narrow torso above them, no genitalia visible, naked, the skin pale, stretched too tight over angles that don’t belong together.

Unmade.

My legs stop. Camp-freeze hitting before the thought catches up—that shouldn’t be here. In four years at this camp, I never saw an Unmade inside the perimeter. The Ordained used Eunuchs for enforcement, wrong, uncanny, but controllable. Unmade were the things that howled in the canopy at night, the reason Shayla gave for keeping the fences live. They’re out there. They’ll tear you apart.

The Ordained are escalating. Adding muscle. Whatever happened when I escaped—a woman vanishing into the canopy, surviving what should have killed her—rattled the system enough to change what they’re willing to risk.