Page 66 of Dead Drop

The morning light comes pale through the aerie walls, catching the bare vines where the white flowers used to be. The bloom that arrived during the last week of the rut is gone now, the petals scattered through the furs, the vines dark and naked against the woven branches.

Below the aerie, the canopy is waking up—birds calling in the lower layers, the rustle of something large moving through the undergrowth, the distant sound of the stream running over stones. A breeze carries the smell of wet bark up through the gaps in the floor.

I'm wrapped in furs. He's wearing almost nothing—a strip of hide at his waist, a loincloth that covers what it needs to and nothing else.

I've spent three weeks with his body against mine, inside mine, and I'm only now seeing the full shape of it from a distance. The scarred red skin. The density of the muscle—not built for show but built for use, the kind of body that fights, climbs, kills, and has been doing all three alone for years. His hands are enormous on his knees. His crown horns catch the firelight, casting shadows that shift across the aerie floor when he turns his head. His dark red hair cascades past his shoulders—thick and curled, falling in waves that catch the firelight like embers. Deeper than his skin, almost wine-dark where the light does not reach.

He told me he was a soldier, back during the rut. Fragments—a southern territory, a different world. Now the rest of it is coming through.

"My unit had forty," he says. He's staring at the fire, not at me. The words come slow, each one costing him something, but they come in order. In sentences. "Held a sector for six years. Structure. Chain of command. Officers who—" He pauses. His jaw works. "Officers who knew every name."

Six years. I held a wall for four and it nearly killed me. Six years of something that sounds like what I had—a unit, a purpose, people depending on you to keep them alive.

"You were an officer," I say. Not a question. I heard it in his voice during the rut, in the way he makes decisions—the quiet certainty of someone who's been responsible for other people's lives. I just didn't have the words for it then.

He nods. The tail behind him sweeps once, slow. "Territorial command."

"What happened to your unit?"

His jaw tightens. The tail goes still—the restless sweep stopping, the tip curling once against his calf and holding. I've learned what that means over three weeks of watching him. He's deciding how much to give me.

"The switch." He says it flat, the way I'd say the breach or the raid. A word that holds everything. "One by one. Some faster than others. I watched them—" A long pause. The first light through the aerie walls is strengthening, the pale gold warming to amber as the sun clears the upper canopy. A bird calls from somewhere nearby—two notes, rising. "I watched them go. Some were fast. Three days, gone. Some held on for weeks. Tried to stay." His hands curl into fists on his knees, the claws pressing into his palms. "I was last."

He watched his unit go feral. One by one, forty of them, the people he'd led for six years. He was the last to turn, which means he watched all of them change into something that couldn't say his name, and then it happened to him anyway.

I stare at the fire. The coals are shifting, the wood underneath crumbling into ash. I can hear the canopy breathing around us—the rustle of leaves, the creak of branches adjusting under the weight of new growth, the world that grew over the old one while people like him and people like me were trying to hold on to what was left.

"I'm sorry," I say. It's not enough. I know it's not enough. But I'm sitting across a fire from a male who watched forty people dissolve and then lost his own language, and I'm sorry is what I have.

He looks at me. The amber eyes steady, the firelight moving in them. Something in his expression shifts—not surprise, not grief. Something quieter. As if no one has said that to him in a very long time, and he'd forgotten it was something people said.

"You had my name on a list," I say after a while. My voice is steadier now. "The Ordained's records."

He looks at me. Steady. "Eight months."

"Eight months before I jumped."

"Yes."

"You were going to come for me." I watch his face while I say it. The fire crackles between us, sparks lifting into the morning air. Below the aerie, something splashes in the stream—a heavy sound, an animal drinking.

"Yes." No hesitation. No qualification. Just the word, given to me the way he gives everything. Directly.

I let that settle. Eight months. He's had my name for eight months—has known what I look like, what I do, how long I've survived outside the walls. He's had time to think about me. Time to decide. While I was running supply routes and training fighters and lying awake on my barracks cot listening to Petra breathe, he was somewhere in this canopy with my name in his head.

"I jumped first," I say.

"Yes."

"Did that ruin it for you?"

Something moves in his face—not quite a smile, but the territory adjacent to one. The firelight catches the edge of it. "No."

The fire crackles. I eat. The meat is good—charred at the edges the way I like it, warm all the way through. He's noticed how I eat, the way he's noticed everything else. The rut didn't stop him paying attention. It just stopped him being able to show it.

"Why me," I say.

He considers this. His amber eyes on me across the fire, the light shifting in them as the flames move. His tail uncurls from its held position and starts to sweep again—slow, thoughtful, the tip brushing the aerie floor in long arcs. His cock shifts beneaththe loincloth, the prehensile flex that never fully stops, the idle seeking that means he's aware of me. He's always aware of me.