Page 38 of Dead Drop

He compensates without me asking. A slight adjustment of his wing-angle, blocking the worst of the north wind. His arms tighten, pulling me deeper against the shelter of his body. His tail wraps tighter around my waist, the warmth of it a lifeline in the cold air. The wind is moving his membrane in ways that translate through his arms—the fabric flexing and bellowing, alive with the pressure of the air. It's almost like flying myself, the way his wings translate the wind's force into lift. Almost like the wasteland's own breathing is carrying us.

Below the canopy, barely visible through the gaps, the torch-lights of the Ordained search teams moving through the ruins.

They don't look up. They never look up. The Ordained patrol the ground because the ground is what they understand—the old roads, the old buildings, the infrastructure of a dead civilisation they're trying to resurrect in their gilded cages. They don't look up because up belongs to the Shades, to the things the asteroid made, to the new world they're pretending isn't happening.

He holds us here. His wings working in long, slow strokes—barely working, the updraft from the canopy catching the membrane and holding us with minimal effort. The mechanics of flight through his body—the muscles of his back and chest engaged in a rhythm as natural and unconscious as breathing. His arms are around me. My back is against the wall of him—against the lower half of it, the place where I reach on him. Hehunches forward, curling his spine, and rests his chin on my hair.

His wings beat to catch an air current—one powerful downstroke that lifts us higher, then the long glide, the membrane stretched taut and trembling. The wind in the membrane through his body, the way a sail transmits the pressure of the wind to the mast. Each gust shifts the angle of his wings, and his body adjusts—shoulders rolling, spine flexing, the muscles of his back shifting with a fluency that belongs to something born for this. Not learned. Born. The way my body was born for running stairwells. The way Petra's hands were born for a blade.

The altitude does something to my breathing. My lungs—which have been expanding all week, the coal damage healing, the depth of them growing—fill with air that is thinner and colder and cleaner than anything in the aerie. I breathe it in. My chest opens. For a single breath I feel like something unbroken.

A hawk circles at our altitude. It banks when it sees us—a sharp wing-tilt, a flash of brown and white—and drops below the canopy line. Even the predators here know what he is.

My hair lifts in the wind. The braid he made is holding—tight, military-neat, keeping the strands from my eyes. Below, the Ordained torches move in their predictable grid. I know their search patterns. I drilled against them for four years—learning their spacing, their timing, the blind spots in their formation where a runner could slip through if she was fast enough. I could map their route from here. I could time their intervals. I could plot three separate extraction paths if I had a map and a pencil.

I don't have a map. I don't have a pencil. I have his arms around me, his cock sealed inside me, and the altitude.

We are above them. The Ordained are below, searching, and we are above.

I don't think safe. That word doesn't apply to anything in this situation. I think: utility. I think: He didn't have to take me up.

He flexes inside me. Not the rut driving—just the prehensile adjustment. The response to my emotional state, or his, or the altitude. My cunt clenches around it. His exhale warms the top of my head.

At this altitude, held by his wings, knotted, the vibration running warm and constant—there is nowhere to go. Nothing to fight. Nothing to solve. The Ordained move below and I watch them move and my body climbs without anyone moving.

The vibration does it. The vibration and the prehensile flex and the knot pressed against my clit from inside. Just those three things, sustained, while his wings hold us in the cold morning air and the Ordained search the empty canopy floor below.

I come held in his arms above the canopy.

Silent. Because the Ordained are below and because the sound I almost make frightens me more than they do. The orgasm is a rolling wave—quiet on the outside, devastating inside. My walls clench around his cock in long rhythmic pulses. My face is pressed against his forearm, my teeth biting down on the hard muscle of his wrist. His arms tighten. His tail squeezes once around my waist. The pressure sharpens against the spot—a single deliberate press—and the orgasm peaks again, sharper, my fingers digging into his arm hard enough that if he were human I'd draw blood.

He makes no sound. No grunt, no rumble. He holds us in the air, his wings working in slow silent strokes, and lets me come against him while the Ordained search the canopy floor below. The silence is a collaboration. The first thing we've done together.

The Ordained move east. Their torches grow smaller, dimmer, swallowed by the canopy dark. He holds us in the air until they're gone.

The wind shifts.

Something comes from the east-northeast. High. Flat. There and gone in under a second.

My body moves before my brain does. My hands lock on his forearms. My feet find his shins. Four years of training fire all at once—get up, get moving, get to your post.

I know that sound. I built that sound.

The south tower bell. The compressed single-note variant—the one that means no time for the full sequence, no time for anything, just move. I drilled my fighters on the difference between routine and that note until they heard it in their sleep. I am hearing it in my sleep. I am hearing it knotted to this creature five miles from my own wall.

"Let me down." I'm already pushing against his grip. "That's—let me?—"

The knot holds. My body goes nowhere.

His arms lock. Not gently. The full brace. Immovable.

I push harder. The knot stretches against my cunt—pressure, near-pain, my body's attempt to override four days of claiming with four years of training. It doesn't give. He doesn't give. I'm going nowhere and the sound is already gone and I don't know if I heard it at all.

That's the part that's worse than certainty. I can't confirm it. The wind is wrong up here—the updrafts mix everything, distance compresses, a bird call can sound like a bell if you're already listening for one. It could have been nothing. It could have been the watch bell on the south tower, the one Petra used to say you could hear all the way to the eastern cache if the wind was right.

I stop pushing. There's nowhere to go.

New Reach is five miles east-northeast. I know the bearing by the smoke—a thin gray smudge on the horizon, just visible above the canopy line. Five miles. I could run it in under an hour. I could have. I am locked here at the hips and my settlement may have just rung its emergency bell and I will not know. I will not know for as long as the rut holds me, and then I will go back and either it will be fine or it won't be, and nothing I do right now changes that.