Page 69 of Dead Drop

I know something about that kind of counting. I did it for four years on the wall.

"The language goes first," he says.

He's not looking at me now. He's looking at his hands—the claws, the red skin, the hands that used to be something else.

"Before the body changes. Before the rest of it. The words—they start to break apart. Sentences lose their shape. I could feel it happening. Like watching a wall crack."

His tail sweeps faster.

"I kept a record. For as long as I could write. I wrote down everything I needed to remember. Names. Coordinates. What Iwas. What I had been." He pauses. "The handwriting got worse. The last entry is just—" He stops.

"Just what?"

"Marks," he says. "Lines that aren't letters anymore."

The fire crackles. I press my palms against my knees and breathe. The air is cool in my lungs, tasting of smoke and canopy sap. Thirteen years ago, everything changed. The asteroid, the dust, the silence. And then the mutations, slower, working through the population in ways nobody understood until it was too late to understand anything.

"You got the language back," I say.

"Some of it." He looks at me. The amber eyes are steady, the firelight shifting in them. "It came back slowly. Years. The words are still—smaller than they were. I used to think in paragraphs. Now I think in pieces and have to build them before I say them."

"You're building them well."

Something moves in his face. Not quite a smile. The space where a smile lives in someone who has lost the habit of making them. "You make me want to build faster."

I don't have a response for that. I finish the fruit. Wipe my chin with the back of my hand. The juice stains my fingers purple in the firelight.

His tail reaches across the fire's warmth and brushes my ankle. I let it stay. The contact is light—just the tip, warm against my skin, the idle touch of a male who has been alone for years and is learning how to be near someone without urgency.

"Tell me about the settlement," he says. "Your people."

The question surprises me. Not because he asked—he's asked before, during the rut, in fragments I wasn't sure he'd remember. Because of how he asks it. Full attention. His gaze on me with the same focus he gives the canopy when he's reading the territory. He wants to know. Not as intelligence. As something that matters to me, which means it matters to him.

I tell him. The words come easier than I expected—the wall, the rotations, the four years of keeping everyone alive one day at a time.

I tell him about the solar panels we stripped from the warehouse roof, how the light changes when you're fifty feet up on a metal surface that's been baking in the sun all day. The way the generators sound when a cylinder misfires—the hitch in the rhythm that wakes you from sleep because your body knows what it means before your mind catches up. The east block stairwell when the wind comes from the south, the way it moans through the cracks in the concrete like something trapped.

I give him training fighters too—Dov, who held the gate when I couldn't. About what survival cost—the supply runs that came back short, the mouths that needed feeding, the decisions that never had a good answer, only a least-bad one.

I don't tell him about Petra. Not yet. He already knows—he told me that, checked before I woke—but I keep it anyway. Some things I need to give in my own time.

He listens the way he does everything. With his full attention, his body still, his tail against my ankle. The fire between us burns low, the coals glowing orange in the dark, making shadows on the canopy wall that shift when the breeze moves the leaves overhead.

"I want to go back," I say.

He doesn't flinch. "I know."

"Not to leave. To see them. To know they're alive." I watch his face while I say it, looking for the refusal, the possessive tightening I've seen in every powerful male I've ever dealt with. The look that says you're mine and you stay where I put you.

It's not there.

"Tomorrow," he says. Simply. Like it was always going to happen and he was just waiting for me to name the day.

I look at him across the dying fire. His crown horns catching the last of the light, his amber eyes steady, the enormous careful stillness of him. The male who caught me when I fell. The male who held me for three weeks and let me stand at the aerie edge and didn't move to stop me. The male who lost forty people, lost his own language, rebuilt both out of fragments. Who sits across from me now, building his sentences one word at a time because he wants them to be right.

"Corvin."

He looks up.