Page 10 of Dead Drop

He already knew her name. He knew it before he walked into this building. The sweep of his eyes was a formality—confirming what his records had already told him. He didn't come here to find two fighters. He came to deliver two names.

I press my palms flat against the wall behind me and hold them there.

"The protection guarantee would expand accordingly," he continues. Same warmth. Same measured kindness. "Full perimeter coverage. Armed escort for external supply runs. Medical resupply on a monthly basis."

"And if we decline?" Dov's voice is even. I know what that evenness costs him.

Brother Lief's smile doesn't waver. "We would hope the value of the arrangement speaks for itself."

He doesn't answer the question. He doesn't have to.

If we decline, the protection ends. Without the Ordained's guarantee, we're exposed—to the Stained, the feral Shades, the other factions that have been circling New Reach's walls for years, held at bay by the knowledge that the Ordained consider us productive. Take away the production, take away the protection. The walls aren't enough.

I know that. Dov knows that. Brother Lief knows we know.

The meeting ends. I stand at the back wall while handshakes happen. I watch Brother Lief's attendants gather their white cloaks with the same careful movements they brought them with—everything choreographed, everything designed to communicate that they are above the dust of this place. Their world is cleaner. Higher. Closer to whatever they've decided divinity looks like.

I find Dov alone in the corridor after.

"They don't stop." My voice is low. Not angry—past angry, into the clear space on the other side where the thinking is sharp. "Every agreement they offer is a smaller cage than the last one. Quarterly offerings. Named combatants. Next cycle it'll be monthly. The cycle after that they'll want access to our training program. The one after that they'll just move in."

I take a breath.

"The only deal that keeps them out is one that costs them something to break."

Dov leans against the wall. His eyes are closed. The exhaustion is visible—not the performance of exhaustion but the real thing. Ten years of it. The weight of every compromise he's made to keep four hundred people alive, balanced against the knowledge that every compromise has made the next one easier for the Ordained to demand.

"I'm declining," he says.

"Good."

"I need you to stay quiet about it. No confrontation. No?—"

"I know."

He opens his eyes. Looks at me. Whatever he sees there makes him nod once, like he's confirming something to himself.

Dov declines the Ordained. Brother Lief's smile doesn't waver. He says: "We'll give you time to reconsider." He turns and leaves. His attendants fold their white cloaks and file out behind him like a retreat that has already planned its next advance.

I watch them cross the courtyard.

Three weeks, maybe four. That's how long Brother Lief gives you before the patience runs out—not because he's generous, but because three weeks is how long it takes to move a named fighter to a Cage without the settlement organizing around it.

It was two.

4

ADA

The Ordained come back in five days.

Not Brother Lief—he's done his part. The next level down: four Eunuchs in white, moving through the eastern gate in the late afternoon with a cart and what I take for cargo until it gets close enough.

It isn't cargo.

The cage is iron. Old iron, reinforced until you can see the generations of repair in the welds—thick bolts over cracked bars, new metal over old rust, the labor of people who've learned exactly what it takes to hold the thing inside. The wheels of the cart scar our courtyard concrete as they bring it in. The Shade inside doesn't move. It's crouched in the back corner with its wing membranes folded flat against its body, its head down. The stillness is wrong before anything else is wrong—too still, the stillness of something that has gone somewhere the living don't go and come back different.

I'm on the upper walkway. Petra is at my shoulder.