Page 41 of Dead Drop

During the lull, he begins to speak.

Not the rut's minimum—mine, good, stay. Something more. Almost complete sentences, each one dragged out with effort, the words carefully chosen. As if the lull gives him a gap wideenough to push language through, and he is using every inch of it.

"My territory." He pauses. His arms are around me, his spine curled to bring his chin down to the top of my head. "Begins at the river. South to the old bridge. East—the concrete fields."

Fragments. A map drawn in pieces, each piece costing him effort. He tells me the shape of what he holds. Where it begins. What he's defended. What he's lost—a section of the eastern boundary, three years ago, to a coalition of lower-tier Shades that pushed until he pushed back hard enough that the boundary reset.

I listen. My mind gathers the fragments into a shape. Eight years. Alone. Three times the standard claim.

Something is shifting. More of him coming through in the lulls, the words getting longer, the quiet stretches holding more. This isn't the same male who grunted mine on day one.

I've been carrying a question for seven days. The erosion has worn it loose.

"Alli." Her name comes out flat. "The woman who trained me. Taken—Ordained procession, the road east of New Reach. Mated to a Shade somewhere in this territory." I feel his arms tighten. Not much. "I want to know what happened to her."

Silence. Long enough that I think he won't answer.

Silence. He's working toward something. I wait.

"There was a pairing." Rough, compressed—the lull barely holds the words. "East of here. Four years, maybe five." Another breath. "The female didn't survive."

I go still.

"The Shade?"

"Still in my territory." A beat. "Going feral. Not mourning."

I hold that. A Shade whose bond held doesn't go feral—that's not how it works. The female died and the bond went with her, and whatever was left wasn't enough to keep him. The Ordainedput two wrong things together and called it a pairing, and Alli paid for it.

I hold that.

I'd built two versions of Alli in my head over four years—the one where she was saved, where some Shade in the canopy was keeping her the way this one keeps me, and the one where she was destroyed, where the claiming broke her past surviving. I'd lived in the gap between those two versions for years, carrying the uncertainty the way you carry an unhealed injury. Not always. But when you move wrong, it's there.

She wasn't saved. She wasn't destroyed.

She was wasted on a bond that was never going to work, and she died from something that was supposed to hold her and didn't, and the Shade who claimed her is still out there somewhere not mourning, just deteriorating. The most wasteful possible version of the story. Smaller than either thing I'd imagined. It doesn't fill the shape of what I've been carrying for years.

My body is rebuilding. Nails. Hair. Lungs that fill deeper than they should. The exchange between us isn't hollow—I can feel the difference in my own cells. His cum is working through me, feeding me, remaking me into something that doesn't carry the old damage. I don't have the vocabulary for why ours is different from what Alli had, and I'm not ready to look at it directly. I file it underneath the grief and leave it there.

Seven days.

The Ordained's window for moving a named fighter to a Cage runs three to four weeks. I've been in this aerie for seven. The math has stopped working in Petra's favor.

I'd spent the first days thinking about interception—the supply line cut, the courier route collapsed, the window I'd calculated in the council meeting before everything went wrong. That window is probably gone. The Ordained don't wait forcommanders who've gone missing. They adjust their timeline and move.

I shift from interception to retrieval. The mission doesn't end. It changes shape. Retrieval is slower. Retrieval means getting Petra out of a Cage rather than preventing her from reaching one. Retrieval means going in rather than cutting the road.

It's its own kind of grief, that shift. I hold it next to the grief for Alli and don't let them touch each other.

During the next lull he moves us to the aerie edge.

He sits with his legs over the side, me back against his chest, the canopy below stretching to every horizon. He says nothing. He just holds me there—his arms loose around my waist, his chin on my hair, his cock quiet inside me in the warmth of the lull's aftermath.

East-northeast. I find it without needing to look for long. A thin gray smudge above the canopy line, five miles out. New Reach. My settlement. From here it looks small—a suggestion of habitation, something that could be generators still running, people still alive inside, the watch rotation turning over on schedule.

Or not. I don't know. The smudge doesn't tell me.

He didn't have to bring me to the edge to see it. I notice that.