Page 101 of Dead Drop

He doesn't explain it. Doesn't acknowledge it at all. He's eating, his claws stripping meat from a bone with the focused efficiency of something that hunts for two now, for three when the time comes.

I stand in the doorway of the new chamber. Don't cross it. Not yet.

The construction is intricate. The walls curve slightly inward—the stone beneath the furs is hand-shaped, textured with a grip-pattern that would help a small body climb. The seams where he's fitted the fur walls are nearly invisible.

The bottom layer is coarse, a dense practical weave against the stone. The middle layer is soft, thick enough to insulate from the aerie's cold hours. The top layer—the one that would touch skin—is the pale pelts, the kind that feel like they're breathing, warm against every inch they cover.

The branch structure is an engineering marvel. He's woven lighter wood in a lattice pattern, each joint reinforced at angles I recognize from the main nest's construction. Tested angles.

Angles that hold weight. Angles that survive wind. The whole frame is stable enough that a small creature could pull herself up the inside walls, could climb, could explore without danger of collapse.

He built this while I was mapping the southern boundary. Three days ago. While I was running lines through the canopy, checking the markers we'd placed last month, he was here with his claws and his engineer's knowledge and his deliberate hands, building a room for a child who doesn't exist yet.

A room. Not a shelf. Not a basket.

A room.

"You built this," I say.

"Yes." He doesn't look up from the bone. His jaw works. Unhurried.

A stripe of blood on his lower lip.

"When?"

"While you were mapping the southern boundary."

"That was three days ago."

"It took two."

I stay in the doorway. My hand on the frame he wove. The branch is smooth under my palm, the bark stripped, the wood shaped by intention.

My other hand moves to my belly, where the child shifts in the particular restless way that I've learned means awake. The small movements more pronounced now, stronger, the pregnancy writing itself across my body one day at a time.

The stone around me holds a coolness that the furs will moderate. The opening is small enough to retain heat, large enough that I won't feel trapped inside it. Large enough for him to reach through it.

Large enough for her to crawl out into the aerie when she's ready.

Her. The pregnancy has collapsed the future into this. I know.

He knows. We don't have words for it yet, not the words that matter.

Something moves in my chest. Not the baby. Not the addiction, not the venom's permanent hum, not the withdrawal ache that surfaces when he's been gone too long.

Something underneath all of that. Something I've been carrying since before the asteroid, since before the wall, since the first time I held a blade and decided to survive.

Something that isn't survival. Something that doesn't have a tactical purpose. Something that is just mine, given freely to thecreature who built a room for our child because that's what he does.

He builds things. He maintains territory. He makes it liveable. He shapes stone with his bare hands because he was an engineer before mutation and rut and war rewrote him into something else.

Now he makes it ours.

I turn to look at him. He's watching the fire, not watching me. His tail sweeps in that idle pattern that means he's waiting.

Waiting for what, I'm beginning to understand. The male across the aerie with his back turned and his meal held in his claws, he's waiting for me to understand what he's built. Why.

"Corvin," I say.