Page 68 of Dead Drop

He enters me standing. One thrust. Deep. Gravity pulls me down onto him while his hands hold me up, and the angle is different from anything during the rut—sharper, deeper, all of him stretching inside me, pressing against every wall at once. A sound leaves me. The sound goes out into the morning canopy, carrying, and I don't care.

He drives up into me. Hard, deliberate, the full power of his body behind every stroke. My face is at his chest—that's wheremy face reaches on him, pressed against the smooth red skin over his sternum, his heartbeat hammering under my cheek. The scale of it from this position, my legs around the waist of something that could break the aerie apart, his arms holding me like I'm nothing, his cock buried inside me while the canopy spreads below us and pale light through the vines turns gold through the gaps—my mind can't hold it. My body doesn't care about holding it. My body is busy.

His wings spread behind him. The membrane catches the light, throwing shifting shadows across us both that move with every thrust. His tail wraps my waist for stability—the coil tight, possessive, keeping me in place while his hips drive.

The wet sounds of our bodies fill the aerie, drowning out the morning birds, the wind, the creak of the branches. His grunts land against the crown of my head on every stroke. I'm moaning. I'm loud. The sounds come out of me without permission, the way they did during the rut, except now they're mine. I'm choosing to make them.

I come over and over. The peaks stacking, each one rolling into the next. His cock finds the spot on every stroke because he knows where it is—he's always known where it is, learned it from inside during the span of the rut, and now he's using every piece of that knowledge with the deliberate attention of a mind that was awake the entire time.

This is what he wanted to show me. This is what it looks like without the rut holding the leash.

He's awake. He's aware. He wants me. He's showing me by fucking me against the wall of his own aerie while the sun rises through the canopy below.

"Corvin—" My voice breaking on it. His name in my mouth while he's inside me, while my walls clench around him, while my fingers dig into the muscle of his shoulders. His groan is wrecked. Something breaks behind it—not pain, not release,something closer to the sound a male makes when he hears his name from a woman he chose and wanted and waited for. His hips slam up into me—one, two, three strokes that shake the aerie wall, that rattle the woven branches against my back.

He comes. His forehead drops against mine—the only position where our faces align, him folded down, his spine curved, the effort of that closeness visible in every muscle. His amber eyes are open. Watching my face the entire time.

The heat of his cum fills me. My body takes it. Holds it. The warmth spreading through me the way it always does—deep, settling, the feeling of something my body has decided is home whether my mind has caught up or not.

He holds me against the wall while the last pulses fade. His cock still inside me, still twitching, the curl of him jerking against my walls. His breath ragged against my lips. The light is full around us now—warm gold through the canopy gaps—and somewhere below a bird is singing the same two notes over and over, the sound rising up through the branches like it's trying to reach us.

"Again," I say.

He does it again.

30

ADA

The fire is low. The canopy dark above us, the stars visible through the gaps in the aerie ceiling—not the sharp pinpoints I remember from before the asteroid, but the hazy spread that the dust layer left behind, a pale wash across the sky that makes the dark look thinner than it should. Somewhere in the ruins below, a night creature calls—a long warbling sound that echoes off the old concrete and comes back changed, stretched by distance, barely recognisable as the same voice.

I'm sitting across from Corvin. My legs are crossed. I'm wrapped in furs that smell like him, the warmth of the fire on my face, the warmth of his proximity on everything else. He's watching me eat the last of the canopy fruit—small, purple, sour-sweet, the juice running down my chin. His tail is doing the slow sweep behind him that means he's thinking, the tip brushing the aerie floor in long arcs.

I know him now. Not the way I knew him during the rut—from inside, from the feeling of his cock and his heartbeat and the vibration that never stopped. I know him from the outside. The way he builds a fire with the same care he usesfor everything else. The way he checks the aerie walls before dark, every night, his hands running along the woven branches, testing joints. The way his tail curls around his own ankle when he's absorbed in something, the idle self-soothing gesture of a male who's been alone for a very long time.

"Tell me about the switch," I say.

He goes still. Not his body—his body is always still when something costs him, the way a soldier goes still before answering a debrief question he doesn't want to answer. His tail stops its sweep. The tip curls once against his calf and holds.

I wait. The fire shifts—a log settling, sparks lifting into the dark air and winking out against the canopy ceiling. Through the gaps in the aerie wall I can see the wasteland stretching under starlight. The old towers are silhouettes against the sky, their shapes softened by thirteen years of vine and fern. A river catches the starlight in the distance—a silver thread running through the dark canopy, following the path of what used to be a highway.

"The first one was Kael," he says. His voice is low, rough around the name, the way a voice gets when it hasn't said a name in years. "Three days. Fast. He was—young. The young ones went faster."

I stop eating. The fruit juice is sharp on my tongue but I've stopped tasting it. The night breeze moves through the aerie, carrying the smell of wet bark from the canopy below, cool against the skin of my forearms. I pull the furs tighter.

"We tried to hold them," he says. "When the first few switched. We thought—" A long pause. The fire pops. His jaw works around the words. "We thought it was a disease. That if we restrained them, kept them contained, it would pass."

"Did it pass?"

"No." The word is flat. Final. His hands are on his knees, the claws pressed into his palms the way they pressed earlierwhen he told me about his unit. "It doesn't pass. It changes you. Everything about you—the skin, the bones, the way the brain works. I could feel them in the cells. My people. I could hear them thinking, like a sound below sound. But they weren't thinking anymore. Not the way we think. Something else."

He stops. The silence is long enough that the night sounds fill it—the insects, the distant water, the creak of branches under the weight of things that move after sunset. His tail uncurls from his calf and starts to sweep again, slowly, the motion of something that needs to move to keep going.

"How many switched before you?"

"All of them." His amber eyes find mine across the fire. The light moves in them. "Thirty-nine. Over four months. I held command structure through the first twenty. After that there was no structure. Just me, in a room, waiting for something I couldn't stop."

I try to hold that image. A soldier—an officer, a male who'd held territorial command for six years—sitting alone in a room while the world he'd built dissolved around him, one body at a time. Counting the ones who were left. Knowing the count only went one direction.