Page 4 of Dead Drop

Then the canopy shifts. Something large, moving deep. The bird is gone.

Behind me, the settlement is stirring. The first kitchen fires sending up thin smoke through the ventilation shafts we punched through the upper floors. The smoke smells like reconstituted grain and the chemical fire-starters we make from salvaged cleaning supplies—a sharp, acrid bite underneath the warmth of cooking. Someone in the east block coughing—the same cough for three weeks, which means infection, which means we need antibiotics we don't have. The solar array humming to life on the warehouse roof, the panels ticking as they warm and adjust. A generator running low and rough in the med building, the rhythm uneven, a cylinder misfiring.

The sounds of four hundred people keeping themselves alive for one more day. I know every one of those sounds. I could map the settlement with my eyes closed by listening to which generators kick on in which order, which doors scrape on their tracks, which stairwells echo differently when the wind comes from the south.

Four years gives you that. It also gives you something harder to name—the way a place stops being where you ended up and starts being what you'd bleed to keep. Not every person in New Reach is someone I'd choose for company. But they're mine. The cough in the east block. The bad generator. The three weavers who start at first light because they can't sleep past it. I know them the way you know the terrain you defend: not because it's beautiful, but because knowing it is what keeps it standing.

I climb down from the wall. My knees pop on the third rung—loud enough to hear, sharp enough to feel. Four years of this rotation, and my body keeps a tally I don't check.

My hands find the rungs the way they always find them: by memory, not by sight. The steel is cold through my gloves, the grip worn smooth where my palms land—a different smoothfrom the parapet, this one polished by motion rather than stillness. I'm the only one who uses this route down. I chose it because it's faster, because the angle lets me scan the canopy edge during the descent, because I don't like being on a wall with only one way off.

I don't like one-exit anything. It's a policy that has kept me alive.

The corridor from the wall post to the main block runs past the Ordained ceremony room—the space the council allocated three years ago as part of the protection agreement. The Ordained don't stay here. They come for the collection, perform what they need to perform, and leave the room exactly as they found it. That's the condition. The walls here are poured concrete, slick with condensation this time of morning. The cold pulls moisture from the air and lays it in thin sheets that catch the solar-strip light—a wet gleam on gray, like the corridor is sweating.

I don't stop. I slow. There's a difference.

The room is immaculate—that's the other condition, that no one touches it between visits. Polished wood, white cloth on the table, the gilded flower arrangement in the corner that is somehow always fresh. The flowers are hothouse roses, the gold-petalled kind that haven't grown wild since before the canopy. Their scent reaches the corridor—rich, complicated, layered with something underneath the sweetness that smells like the fertilizer they must be using. Living flowers in a dead world.

Someone cultivates them. Someone carries them here. The effort involved in keeping live flowers in a wasteland settlement should tell you everything you need to know about the Ordained's priorities.

Three names on the wall this month, written in the Ordained's careful script on cream paper, each one pinned beneath a pressed blossom.

Meera Daly. Seventeen.

Talia Marsh. Twenty-two.

Brin Alcott. Nineteen.

Volunteers, according to the paperwork. Women who heard the divine calling and chose to answer it. Women whose families will receive the Ordained's protection package—medicine, food supplements, priority housing—for the duration of the arrangement. The arrangement is permanent, because the women don't come back.

Some do. Two that I know of. One couldn't stop shaking for six months.

Her hands trembled so badly she couldn't hold a cup. She flinched at sounds that nobody else could hear. The other said it was beautiful. Said it like she meant it, like something had been rewritten inside her that she didn't have the language to explain.

I look at the names. I feel nothing.

I learned that trick in my first year on the wall, the night they added six names at once. I was nineteen. I hadn't learned yet that grief is a resource you can't afford to spend on things you can't change. Meera is—was—one of Petra's sparring partners. Quick feet, good instincts, the kind of smile that made the training yard feel less like a killing floor. Seventeen. A year younger than I was when I first took the wall.

I keep walking.

"You're up early." Petra falls into step beside me, still pulling her jacket on, her hair sticking up on one side the way of someone who slept hard and didn't mean to. She's twenty. Sharp-boned. Quick. The best fighter I've trained in four years.

She moves like someone who understands that her body is the first weapon and everything else is supplementary. I taught her that. Or maybe I just showed her the shape of something she already was.

"I'm up on time. You're up early."

"Couldn't sleep." She yawns into her fist. "Dreams."

I don't ask about the dreams. Everybody has them. The canopy makes sounds at night that the hindbrain doesn't forget—the distant wingbeat, the territorial calls that carry for miles through the dark, the silence that means something large has just landed nearby.

The hindbrain talks in your sleep. I had the dreams too, my first year. Now I sleep like something dead and wake like something isn't. In between there's nothing.

"Wall's quiet," I say. "Eastern markers unchanged. The Apex territory is holding."

"The Apex." She says it the way everyone says it—half dread, half the reluctant respect you give something that has earned its name by being the last thing standing in every room it enters. "He's been in that range for what, two years?"

"Twenty-six months."