Page 86 of Feral Keep

It stands with the patience of something that feels nothing. Its head turns—a slow, wrong pivot, the neck going further than necks should—and I see the face—almost human, features compressed, like someone pushed a face together from both sides, mouth too wide, eyes without light. No intelligence. No malice. Even at this distance something rank rides the air off it, spoiled meat and wet earth, a smell that doesn’t belong to anything living I’ve ever stood near.

It hasn’t seen me. My pulse pounds in my temples, in the spot behind my sternum where the breathing goes tight. The twins shift low in my belly, responding to the fear in my blood, the shared blood carrying it into their half-formed nervous systems.

I walk out of the tree line.

The Eunuchs see me first. Two at the gate—sallow, elongated, the wrong walk. One clicks—the sound their jaws make. The clicking draws the Unmade’s attention. Its head pivots. The hiss comes—wet, pressurized, the sound of air pushed through something that shouldn’t be a throat.

“I’m coming in,” I say. Camp-voice. The voice I used for four years at morning assembly and work rotation and the evening count. Flat. No fear. No challenge. “Move.”

“Maeve?”

Shayla. She steps out from behind the supply building. Thin, straight-backed, the grey hair pulled tight. She takes me in, the weight I’ve gained, the belly rounding under my fur-lined wrap, and something shifts behind her eyes—the look of a woman seeing evidence that contradicts everything she’s told herself and everyone else.

“You’re alive,” she says.

“He didn’t kill me.”

“Yet.” Her eyes move to the tree line. Scanning. “Where is it.”

“Close.”

“Call it off. The Unmade will engage. It doesn’t distinguish between Shades and threats.” Her voice is tight, calculating—the administrator weighing what my return means for the structure she maintains. “Your women will be caught between them.”

She’s right about that part. The women on the clearing lines have stopped, heads turning, machetes slack at their sides. There they are, the shapes I spent four years sleeping beside, working beside. Thinner than I remember. Dirtier. The camp does that to your memory. You normalize it while you’re inside. From the outside, looking at them with fed eyes, the starvation is obvious. The arms that are all tendon and bone.

“Gretchen!” I shout. “Lisa! It’s Maeve!”

A machete drops. The clatter of it hitting packed earth, the sound carrying. A shape breaks from the line, thin, running, the particular gait of a woman who has been doing manual labor for years and whose body doesn’t remember any other kind of movement. She runs toward me, toward the gate, and I know her before I see her face—the length of her stride. Gretchen.

Gretchen hits the fence.

The current takes her, hands locking on wire, the electrical charge driving through her palms and up her arms. She arches. The scream starts and cuts off, the muscles in her throat seizing along with everything else, the sound strangled by the same current that’s locking her to the wire. Her body jerks. Once. Twice. The terrible puppet-motion of a body being moved by something that isn’t muscles.

My whole body locks with hers. I can’t move. Can’t breathe. Five years of mornings, her hands in my hair, and now this, her hands seizing on wire while I stand twenty feet away doing nothing.

“RED!”

The tree line comes apart—nine feet of crimson, wings flaring, the shadow of him falling across the compound. He doesn’t come for the gate. He doesn’t come for the Unmade. He comes for the generator.

The Unmade sees him.

The shriek—wet, pressurized, the scream of a thing built for violence and nothing else. The massive disproportionate thighs bunch. It launches. The speed is wrong, the body eating up the distance between the gate and Red in a blur of pale, wrong-jointed limbs.

They go down together. The impact shakes the ground under my feet, the Unmade’s mass driving into Red’s side, the misplaced appendages grasping, a tail from the wrong spot on its spine, a stunted arm growing from its ribcage. Something cracks. Not bone—the hard-packed dirt splitting under the force.

Gretchen is still on the fence. Her hands are locked. The current running through her. The smell—burned skin, burning hair—reaches me across twenty yards and my body moves.

I run, belly heavy, breath short, running for the generator because Red can’t reach it. He’s got the Unmade on top of him, pale skin pulled tight over the wrong angles, thrashing, the misplaced limbs striking. The generator is a metal box at the compound’s edge, fuel-powered, humming. I reach it. My hands find the fuel line, a rubber hose, cracked and sun-damaged, the weakest point in the whole compound. I’ve stared at this hose for four years from the clearing lines. I’ve imagined pulling it a thousand times. I grab it. Yank. Yank harder—both hands, my weight behind it, pregnant belly pressing against the casing. The hose tears free. Fuel sprays, across my hands, my arms, the chemical smell of it sharp and biting. The generator coughs. Stutters. Dies.

The fence goes dead. Gretchen falls.

Behind me, Red and the Unmade are fighting. The Unmade is fast—wrong-fast, the thighs driving it in bursts that shouldn’t be possible. It doesn’t fight like a predator. It fights like a body that knows one thing and does it until it stops. Strikes from angles that don’t make sense.

Red takes a blow to the ribs. The wet thud of impact. He staggers—one step back. Blood from his mouth—the blood of a cut inside the cheek. The Unmade hits him again. The stunted arm from its ribcage driving into his side. Red catches one wrist. Twists. The joint snaps—a sound like green wood breaking. The Unmade doesn’t react. Doesn’t slow. It hits him with the other arm.

Red drives his fist into the Unmade’s chest. The full force of nine feet and three hundred-plus pounds behind the blow. The ribcage caves. I hear it from thirty feet away, the wet crunch of bone collapsing. The thing drops. Hits the earth. Dead.

Red turns toward me⁠—