Page 16 of Dead Drop

The word hits. Valuable. Not as a person—as inventory. As a presentation-grade combatant who would attract a high-status Shade during peak rut season. I'm exactly what Brother Lief was here to collect.

The fact that I fought my way through his soldiers to the roof of a building instead of coming quietly has probably increased my assessed value, because the Shades can smell the fight in a woman. The fight is what the high-status ones want.

I'm worth more for being here. That's the thing that loosens the last bolt holding me to this ledge.

I look down.

The wind pulls at my hair, my jacket. My boots are on the very edge, the gravel shifting under my heels—small stones rolling and falling over the lip, disappearing without sound, the distance swallowing them before they land. The canopy is dark below—not inviting, not peaceful, just there, the way the ground is always there when you're standing above it. The distance is a number. The number is final.

Three options and none of them good. Surrender means the Cages—cleaned, scented, dosed, arranged in a clearing for a Shade to claim. Fighting means dying slower and on their terms, dragged down by three armored soldiers who will be careful not to damage the merchandise. This means dying fast and on mine.

Something loosens in my chest.

Not grief. Not fear. Something older. Something that's been holding on so long it forgot it was holding. Four years of right decisions—every watch rotation, every training session, every supply run, every name on the wall that I looked at without letting myself feel.

I let go of it.

Not all at once. In stages, like uncurling fingers that have been fisted too long. The responsibility. The plans. Theintelligence maps in my jacket that no one else can read. The second-years who still need six more months of training. Renna's pivot. Dov's exhaustion.

The singing in the courtyard at night, the voice I never identified, the song I'll never learn.

Senna on the bench with her hands folded. Petra's blade grip—loose wrist, relaxed hand, the way I taught her.

I let go of all of it because I can't carry it over the edge. I'm going over the edge. A good death. My death. The last thing I choose.

The Ordained squad leader says something. I don't hear it.

I step off the ledge.

7

ADA

The wind is a wall.

The world inverts and rights itself in the wrong direction, and I'm falling. The canopy is a hundred feet below. The ground is a hundred feet below that. I'm falling through all of it, and it's the right decision.

Four years of right decisions. This is the last one. Something loosens in my chest that I didn't know was there—all of it, every wrong morning and bad call and person I couldn't save, just gone. This is finished. I chose it.

A good death. My death. I chose it.

He's forty feet to my left.

Already airborne. Already level with me and closing. Crown horns wider than I am tall, skin the deep red of old brick, dark red hair thick and curling around the base of those horns, cascading past his shoulders. His wings are tucked back in a dive that I understand in the half-second I have to look at him is not random—he was already there, already watching the building. The wind has just carried me to him.

His body goes still. Mid-air. Wings locked. Everything locked.

He hangs in the sky and his eyes change—from amber, the amber of something that has no interest in me, the amber every survivor learns to watch for because amber means you're nobody to them—to something else entirely. Something that has been waiting and has just been told where to go.

I'm falling and he's looking at me like he found what he was looking for. I can't do anything about either of those things.

He dives.

I try to angle away. With nothing to push from and gravity taking everything, I manage a half-twist that does nothing except turn my back to him. His arms close around my chest and waist from behind. His wings snap open and the deceleration hits like a wall.

My vision blackens. Something pops in my shoulder. I bite through my lip. The blood is immediate and copper and real.

His tail—long, enormously muscular, I feel the weight of it—wraps around my thighs in one fast coil and locks my legs together against his.