Page 39 of Dead Drop

I don't know if there's a New Reach to go back to. That's the thought I've been not thinking since the ledge. I stepped off because I had already lost—Petra taken, the Ordained's deadline closing, the council paralyzed, four years of work about to be dismantled by men in white robes who had never once gone hungry. I stepped off because I couldn't see a version of the next month that didn't end the same way. I was the commander. I was supposed to have another move. I'd run out.

He caught me. I am here. New Reach is a smudge of smoke five miles away and someone may be ringing the bell I built and I cannot answer it, and I don't know anymore if the woman who built it is the same woman pressed against this creature's chest with her legs wrapped around him in her sleep.

He says nothing. His arms don't loosen.

I press my forehead against his forearm and wait for my pulse to drop below emergency-response levels. The knot presses against my clit. The vibration runs. My body is receiving two completely incompatible signals and doesn't know which one to answer.

He descends—slowly, spiralling back through the canopy levels, his wings angled to catch the warm air rising from the nest below. Each banking turn on the descent shifts the knot inside me. Each shift sends a small spike through the vibration. I grip his forearms and breathe through it.

Back in the nest, he settles me against the furs with the careful attention of someone placing something fragile. His arms stay around me. His wings fold forward, blocking the light, creating the warm dark cocoon I've come to associate with shelter. Not safety—I know the difference between safety and this. This is shelter. This is the wings of something that could crush me, curved into the shape of protection.

Not mating. Just holding. His arms around me, the wing cocoon blocking the light, his heartbeat against my back. The aerie smells like us—sweat, furs, sex, the green of canopy sap, the mineral scent of his skin. My scent mixed with his until I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

My body is still coming down from the altitude orgasm—small aftershocks that pulse through my walls, each one answered by a shift in the vibration, each shift creating another pulse. The climb is gentler than usual. Warming rather than driving. My body rides it without tensing, without bracing, without the defensive clench that marked the first few days.

I let this happen. My body uncurls against his heartbeat. My legs—which wrapped around his waist at some point during the descent without my deciding—stay where they are. I hate that they do that. I hate the way my thighs lock around him like something with a homing instinct, like my body has decided where it lives now and has stopped consulting me about it.

The legs are the part I can't explain away. His cock inside me—the knot makes that compulsory. The vibration, the arousal, the orgasms—the venom handles those. His arms around me—his choice, not mine. But the legs are mine. My thighs. My muscles. My sleeping body wrapping itself around him in the dark, pulling him closer, holding on with the same grip I used to use on the stairwell railing during a sprint.

My body is holding him the way it used to hold the things it needed to survive.

I tell myself it's because the knot doesn't give me a choice. I almost believe it. The almost is doing a lot of work, and it's getting harder to carry.

Outside, the canopy is filling with afternoon sound. Insects starting up their metallic whine. A troop of something small and fast moving through the mid-level branches—canopy monkeys, maybe, or the rat-sized things with prehensile tails that the scouting reports called climbers. Life. The wasteland is full of life. From down on the ground, running routes through the ruins, I only ever saw the dangerous parts—the predators, the territorial markers, the places where the canopy closed overhead and you couldn't see what was coming.

From this height, held in his arms, the wasteland looks like something that decided to survive without asking anyone's permission.

17

APEX

She's awake.

I know this the way I know everything about her now—through her walls, through her pulse, through the exact quality of her breathing when she's somewhere else in her head. She's awake and still and not here. Thinking about things that aren't me.

I heard the bell. Settlement bell, east-northeast, emergency register—I know the sounds at the edges of my territory the way I know the sounds of her body. I heard it clearly. She heard a maybe. I'm not going to tell her the difference.

She had a whole life before she fell out of the sky and into mine. I know this. It bothers me the way the trespassing Shade on day two bothered me—something in my territory that doesn't belong, something with a prior claim I didn't sanction. Her fighters. Her routes. Her settlement ringing its bell five miles east while she's sealed on my knot and can't answer.

I had a life before this too. I don't remember it. The outline of something—a person I used to be, before the first rut, before the territory, before eight years of holding this canopy alone. WhenI reach for it there's almost nothing there. A shape. A shadow of a shape. She is everything I can see when I look now.

I don't see why she should have more of a before than I do.

My cock flexes inside her. Her walls grip me—not her deciding, just her body doing what her body does now, answering mine before she can stop it. Good. She smells like me. She's full of me. My cum has been working through her for days. I'm going to fill her again, keep filling her, until there's nothing left of her that doesn't have me in it.

The bell rang.

I press my mouth to her hair. Hold still. The settlement smoke is on the horizon where it's always been. She'll want to go back to it. She can want things.

She's mine.

18

ADA

I'm full of venom.

There's no other way to say it. Seven days of it building—each fang bite on top of the last, the venom sinking deeper into me like sediment—and the woman who clocked watch rotations and calculated territorial ranges is losing her edges. I can still form complete sentences when I try. But the window for trying is getting narrower.