Page 105 of Dead Drop

"The ones who didn't die changed. I changed. We changed at different rates." His arms tighten around me. Not much. The weight of something holding itself together while it tells a story it hasn't told in a very long time. "I was the fastest. By the third month I was—" He pauses, and I hear him reach for the words, pull them from somewhere painful. "This."

He doesn't need to describe it. Nine feet of crimson muscle, crown horns, claws, fangs, wings, a tail that wraps around me with the same precision it uses to kill. This.

The thing he became while his team was still becoming their own versions of the same catastrophe. While the mutation rewrote his DNA and his body and maybe the core of who he was, leaving only fragments of the officer he'd been.

"My second-in-command," he says. "Maren."

The name lands in the cocoon like a stone into water. I don't have to ask why he's telling me this. The storm.

The wings wrapped around us. The reminder that things can be destroyed. Notloved.He doesn't say the word. He says the name, and the way he says it—the careful precision, the twosyllables given equal weight, the slight pause before and after, like he's handling something fragile—tells me everything the word would have.

"She didn't change. She was the only one who stayed herself while the rest of us were becoming something else. She was the anchor." His voice shifts, drops lower. "She held us together. Gave orders. Made sense of what was happening when we couldn't make sense of it ourselves. When I couldn't understand what my own body was doing."

His arms shift against me. He's remembering being afraid.

"She kept talking to me. When I could barely talk back. When the mutation had stripped my language down to sounds." He pauses. "She kept talking. I think that's why I have as much language as I do. She wouldn't let it go."

I think of the barracks. Of Petra, fourteen years old, terrified, her first night on the wall. How I sat with her while the city sounds echoed below and talked about blade angles until the shaking stopped.

Not because blade angles mattered. Because the talking did. Because being heard when you're breaking is the thing that stops you from shattering completely.

"She didn't make it," I say. Not a question. I can hear the answer already in the careful way he's building this story, the way grief is baked into the structure of it.

"She didn't make it."

The storm hits a peak outside the wings. The aerie shudders. The wind screams against the membrane, a sound like something dying.

His wings hold. The cocoon holds. His hands press fractionally tighter against me, and I realize he's holding two of us now—me and the child and the memory of his team.

"The ones who survived became territorial. Solitary. The rut drove us apart—each male carving out space, building aeries, running patrols to mark boundaries."

He swallows. "The instinct replaced the chain of command. We went from soldiers with a structure to creatures with an imperative. I was the strongest. The territory I held was the largest."

"The ones who couldn't hold their own became outliers, became desperate. Became?—"

"Stained."

"Eunuchs first. Unmade. Then the Ordained came. Started their operations, collecting the unmade, turning them into something with purpose again. Making them into something they could use."

I think through this. The hierarchy isn't random—it's built on who survived the mutation strongest. Corvin didn't become the Apex by accident.

He became the Apex because whatever he was before the asteroid—officer, sector commander, the male who held sixteen people together through the end of the world—made him the most resilient to the transformation. The mutation amplified what was already there. Strength. Territorial instinct. The compulsion to protect.

The male who built a room for our child while I was running the boundary. The male who listens when I'm afraid. The male who learned my scent and the particular temperature of my skin and the way my breathing changes when the nausea peaks.

The male who hasn't forgotten the name of his second-in-command in thirteen years.

"They would have liked you," he says. His mouth moves against my hair—I feel his lips form the words more than I hear them. The vibration of his voice moving through his skull and into me.

"Maren would have liked you."

"Why?"

"You fight like someone who has already decided to die and changed her mind." A beat. His tail tightens incrementally. "She did that too. She walked into a room full of the infected with a knife and a purpose and she did what needed doing because someone had to. Because the alternative was giving up. She never gave up."

The storm eases. The rain drops from a roar to a steady hiss, the wind beginning to blow itself out. His wings relax, the membrane softening, the amber light shifting as the membrane moves with his breathing.

Outside, the violence is becoming rhythm. The canopy begins to sing with runoff.