Page 108 of Dead Drop

I wonder what color her eyes will be. Mine are blue—the ones I inherited from my father, before the asteroid took him. I remember his face less clearly every year, but I remember his eyes. The specific shade of blue, the way the light caught them. The last thing that looked like me in the world before the world ended.

Will she have his eyes? My eyes? Or will she open them and they'll be amber, the color of her father's, the color that meansShade, means mutation, means she belongs to both worlds and fully to neither.

Will she have horns? A tail? Will she come into the world looking like something the settlements will accept, or something they'll fear?

The thought doesn't frighten me the way it once would have. She'll be exactly what she is. I'll teach her to survive it.

The wind comes up from the canopy. Cool. Carrying the scent of wet bark, canopy moss, the sweet flowers that bloom in the upper branches this time of year.

Far below, the stream catches the sunlight, bright as a blade. A bird calls. Then another. The world is coming back to life, the slow patient recovery of a planet that doesn't care what happened to the species that thought they owned it. The birds don't know about the Ordained. The moss doesn't know about the Cages. The canopy keeps growing because growing is what canopies do. The ecosystem doesn't care about human cruelty. It cares about physics. About light and water and the will to spread.

I hear Corvin behind me. The particular displacement of air that precedes him. His warmth arriving before his body, the way dawn arrives before the sun.

His tail finds my waist. Not pulling me back. Resting there. An offer, not a command. The option of being held without the order to turn around.

He's never pulled me back from the edge. Not once, in five months. He stood behind me while I shook with withdrawal and tested the drop, and he let me choose.

Let me stand here with my hand on his tail and the wind rising around us and the choice still mine to make.

"The eastern boundary needs checking," I say without turning around.

"I know." His voice behind me, low, steady. The full sentences of the post-rut male, the language rebuilt one conversation at a time, each word reclaimed from the mutation that tried to take it.

"The ridge markers are solid. The western edge needs attention."

"I'll take the south. You take the ridge."

A pause. I hear the almost-smile in it. The dry humor that's grown between us like a second language.

"You're giving me orders."

"I'm dividing labor. There's a difference."

"Is there."

I turn around.

He's standing in the aerie entrance. The morning light behind him, catching the ridges of his crown horns, the edge of his wings folded against his back. Nine feet of crimson muscle, amber eyes, the heavy jaw doing the micro-shift that means he's smiling.

His cock doing the idle restless flex through the loincloth—the casual arousal of a male who's been hunting the smell of his mate all morning. His tail on my waist, the tip warm against my hip.

He is, in this light, exactly what he is. A monster. A male.

A former officer who held a sector for six years, who lost his team, who built a territory alone, who read a name on a list and thoughther.Who caught me out of the air when I chose to fall. Who held me through the rut, through the withdrawal, through the grief and the anger and the long slow process of becoming something neither of us was before.

He didn't make me stay. The venom didn't make me stay. The pregnancy didn't make me stay.

I stayed because this is where I choose to be.

The drop is still there. It will always be there. The clean fall, the correct decision, the calculation that came out the same three times on a rooftop four months ago.

It was right. The Ordained were at the door. The stairs were gone. The ledge was the only option that was mine. The choice to fall was the only agency I had left in a world that had taken everything else.

The numbers changed.

I step away from the edge. Toward him. Toward the territory we mapped together, the defenses we built, the room with the pale furs.

Toward the work that needs doing today, tomorrow, the day after. Toward the life we're building in the canopy, one patrol at a time, one argument at a time, one morning at a time.