Page 5 of Dead Drop

She's been my trainee long enough to know the territorial grid is just another thing I maintain—like the gate rotation, like the supply run timing. The data keeps people breathing.

We come out into the main courtyard. Dawn is hitting the upper floors, turning the old glass amber. The light falls through the broken panes in slanted columns thick with dust—the kind of light that looks solid enough to touch, warm where it lands on the cracked concrete of the courtyard floor. The morning shift is mustering—eight on gate watch, four on supply run prep, two on the solar array.

My people. Not officially. Dov runs the council. But the gate watch is mine, has been mine since my second year, because I train them harder than anyone else will. More of them come home.

Dov is on the council steps. Late sixties. The kind of old the wasteland accelerates—his hands marked with the tremor that comes from holding things together too long, his spine carryingthe curve of compromise made flesh. He has the exhaustion of a male who has been holding a settlement together through negotiation and hard choices for a decade—making deals with people he doesn't trust to buy time he doesn't have. He's not tired in a way that sleep fixes. He's tired in a way that only ending the situation fixes. The situation doesn't end.

He sees me. Tips his chin.

"Ada."

"Dov."

"The Ordained are sending a delegation. Tomorrow."

Something in my chest tightens. Not surprise—the opposite of surprise. The feeling of a thing you predicted arriving exactly when you said it would.

I've been waiting for this since the last collection. The Ordained don't collect three women in a single month unless they're positioning for a larger ask. The three names on the wall aren't the endgame. They're the opening offer.

"When?"

"Midday. Brother Lief."

I know Brother Lief. Silver voice. Long pale hands that don't look quite right coming out of white sleeves.

A Eunuch built by a system that made fear someone else's problem—he's never had to be afraid of anything, and it shows. He smiles like grace is something you can pour from a pitcher. Behind the smile, his eyes measure women the way a trader measures livestock—by weight, by health, by how much fight is left in them.

I've met three Ordained delegates in my time at New Reach. Brother Lief is the most dangerous because he believes what he's selling. Or he's so good at performing belief that the distinction has stopped mattering. The result is the same either way.

"What do they want?"

"Expanded protection. Larger offering schedule. Access to our eastern supply routes." Dov's jaw works. He pauses, and the pause is where the worst part lives. "And two combatants for the next presentation season."

The tightness in my chest goes colder.

Presentation season. The Ordained don't simply hand women over—that would be too honest for them. The presentations are ritual: women drugged and arranged in territorial clearings during peak rut season, positioned to attract the highest-status Shades.

The Ordained track which Shades claim which women. They maintain records. They know things about the Shades that the Shades don't know they know.

Now they want two of mine.

"I'll be there," I say.

Dov nods. He doesn't argue. He's known me long enough to understand that I'll be there doesn't mean I'll be helpful. It means I'll stand in a room with Brother Lief and watch him, because I want to see his face when he asks for what he's here to take.

The morning light has hit the courtyard floor. Amber through broken glass, falling in long rectangles across the concrete. Behind me, the wall.

Below, the canopy. The Apex's territory markers catching the first sun—those deep gouges in the bark, visible even from here. The largest, most dangerous thing in the grid, holding its ground for twenty-six months without a mate.

I turn my back on the markers and go to train my people.

2

ADA

The training yard is a cleared basement two floors below the courtyard, shored up with steel beams and lit by solar strips that give everything a flat white glow. The air down here is close—concrete dust, old sweat, the metallic tang of blades that have been sharpened too many times. I've been running sessions here since my second year. The floor is stained in places. Some of it is old rust from the rebar. Some of it isn't.

"Elbows in. If your elbow is wider than your ribs when you strike, you've given me a target. I will take it."