Page 46 of Dead Drop

I breathe in a third time just because I can.

I'm being remade. His cum is in my system—seven days of it, sealed in by the knot, absorbed into whatever my body will take. My body is using it. Building with it. The nails, the hair, the lungs, the scars—everything getting better. Getting stronger. I've never been healthier in my life, and I'm being held captive by a feral alpha in a canopy nest.

There's probably a lesson in that. I'm too full of venom to find it.

The long lull gives me time to think. That's the danger of it—not the sex, not the venom, but the thinking. The peaks fill the aerie with urgency and sound and the wet rhythm of his body against mine. In the peaks, there's no room for anything else. In the lulls, the room empties out, and the things I've been outrunning find their way back in.

For a full minute I consider the distance to the aerie's edge. Twenty feet, maybe. His arms are loose around me, his breathing deep with sleep. The knot has softened slightly in the last hour—still too swollen to pull free without pain, but the seal isn't absolute the way it is at peak. If I could slide forward, work myself off the knot an inch at a time, ease the widest part past my cunt?—

His tail tightens around my thigh. One loop. Firm. Not painful. The tail knows what I'm thinking before my legs do.

I let it go. Not because it's impossible. Because I'm not sure anymore that I'd walk twenty feet through the aerie without turning around.

Then I hear it.

Distant. Carried on the wind that comes through the aerie's eastern gap in the late afternoon. Three short tones, then a long one. A pause. Three short, one long.

The triple-tone breach signal.

My body moves before my thoughts do. My hands find purchase on his forearms. My legs push against the knot. My chest locks and my spine straightens and every four years of muscle memory fires at once: up, post, move.

The knot holds.

I go nowhere.

I lie there while the signal comes a third time—three short, one long, three short, one long, the pattern we set in the second month because the four-short wasn't carrying on foggy nights—and my body keeps trying to stand up through the knot and going nowhere. I can hear it. I can hear it clearly enough to count the beats.

The signal means a breach in the outer wall. It means whoever is on watch has seen something coming. It means every fighter in New Reach is moving to position right now, and the commander who trained them is sealed to a nine-foot male five miles west.

I don't know if it's Ordained. I don't know if it's wolves or a Shade incursion or something else—something new, something we haven't built a protocol for yet. I don't know if there's someone standing in front of whatever is coming the way I used to stand in front of things. I don't know if there's anyone.

Alli heard something like this, once. Or she didn't—that's the point. She was gone by the time whatever it was came for New Reach. Her slot on the watch board was filled with someoneelse's name. Someone stepped into the shape of her absence and held the line. That's how it works. That's always how it works.

The signal fades.

The wind shifts. The eastern gap goes quiet. I count the seconds—one, two, three—the way I used to count on the wall, listening for what came next. Nothing follows. No escalation tone. No all-clear.

Just the canopy going on.

I don't know what that means.

I lie there, knotted, his arms around me, and don't know.

I'm looking at the canopy ceiling—the woven branches, the gaps where the light comes through, the green and gold pattern that I now know the way I know the cracks in my own ceiling back at the barracks.

Petra's ceiling.

The thought arrives without warning.

Petra's ceiling. The barracks ceiling. The cot six feet from mine. The way she breathed in her sleep—steady, even, the breathing of someone whose body trusted the space it was in. I taught her that trust, or at least I created the conditions where it was possible. I trained the fighters. I secured the watch. I made the barracks the one room in New Reach where my people could sleep without dreaming.

The gilded flower on her pillow.

Something opens in my chest. Not the venom—something older, something the venom has been holding at bay for over a week. The venom dissolves thoughts. It softens the edges of plans and escape routes and contingencies. But grief isn't a thought. Grief is a weight. The venom can't dissolve weight. It can only hold it in place, trembling, until the lull gives it room to fall.

Grief arrives in the gap the lull provides, the same way his words arrive in the gap: because there's finally room. The rut'surgency fills the aerie like smoke. When the smoke clears, the things that were always in the room become visible.

Petra was always in the room. I just couldn't see her through the smoke.