Page 71 of Dead Drop

He's not worried. Not because he trusts me—because it's simple. He outweighs me by hundreds of pounds. His reflexes are faster. His reach is longer. His tail alone could pin me before the blade cleared its first arc. He's not giving me a weapon because it's a concession. He's giving me a weapon because it makes no difference to what he can do, and he knows what it means to me.

I take the knife. I clip it to the belt of my new trousers. A weapon on my hip. The first thing that's felt right since the wall.

"The settlement," I say. "I need to see them."

"Today," he says. He's already moving—rising to his full height, the loincloth settling, his wings unfolding behind him in the practiced way that means he's calculating weight and wind. He looks at me. "Ready?"

One word with a question mark. Three weeks ago, his vocabulary during the rut gave me mine and stay and good. Now he's asking if I'm ready, the way an officer asks before a sortie. Checking. Not ordering. The difference is everything.

"Ready," I say.

He carries me through the canopy. Not knotted—not claimed, not sealed. Just carrying. My back against his chest, his arms around me, his wings working in long powerful strokes that catch the thermals rising off the canopy crown.

The morning air is cold against my face, sharp with the smell of high altitude—the clean bite of it, the thinness, so different from the warm dense air of the aerie. The fur-lined collar of my jacket is warm against my throat. The knife is at my hip. I smell like his furs. I'm dressed, armed, going somewhere I chose to go.

The canopy scrolls past below us. The ruins look different from the air in daylight—not the dark shapes I saw during the rut's night patrols but something wider, greener, more beautiful than a wasteland has any right to be.

The old highway is completely gone now, buried under vine and fern, the median strip a long ridge of flowering bushes that nobody planted. A church steeple rises from the canopy like a finger, its white paint peeling, a bird's nest visible in the belfry. The stained-glass windows are broken but the lead framing still holds, catching the sun.

Below the church, the canopy has swallowed a parking lot whole—the asphalt cracked and heaved by root systems, a tree growing through the split in the asphalt. The river I've been hearing from the aerie is bigger than I thought—wide, slow, running through what used to be a six-lane road, the old lane markings still faintly visible beneath the clear shallow water.

We pass over what used to be a neighborhood. The rooftops are still there—just barely, their shingles green with moss, the gutters choked with fern. One house has collapsed entirely, the roof caved into the living room, and through the gap I can see wallpaper. Faded blue. Flowers on it, some pattern a woman picked out in a store that doesn't exist anymore. A child's swing set stands in a backyard, the chains rusted solid, the seat tilted at an angle that says the ground shifted underneath it and nobody was left to fix it. The grass around it is waist-high. Wild.

Farther out, the scale of the loss gets bigger. A shopping district, the storefronts dark, the glass long gone, the signs bleached to illegibility by thirteen years of sun and rain. Aparking structure that looks like a ribcage—the concrete floors intact but the walls crumbled, each level visible from above like the cross-section of something that died standing up. Trees are growing on the third floor. A fox darts across the second, quick and copper-bright, and vanishes into the stairwell.

The world didn't end. That's the thing nobody says. The world just stopped being ours.

The canopy took it. The vines and the ferns and the root systems that had been waiting under the pavement for a chance—the asteroid cracked the surface and the green came through, patient, relentless, swallowing the concrete the way water swallows a stone. Thirteen years was enough. The old world is still here if you look for it—the bones of it, the steel and the glass and the wallpaper with blue flowers—but it's buried under something alive that doesn't care what came before.

Thirteen years. The asteroid hit when I was eleven. I remember the sky going wrong—orange, then gray, then nothing for weeks. I remember the silence after, the way the world held its breath while the dust settled. The world before that is a collection of impressions: a kitchen with a window, traffic, a school bus that smelled like vinyl and peanut butter. Things that don't exist anymore. Things the canopy ate, one building at a time, while the dust was still falling.

I remember my father. Not clearly—the way you remember warmth, not fire. Big hands. A voice that was lower than my mother's, which isn't saying much since every voice was lower than hers. He smelled like engine grease and the soap he used, something pine-scented that came in a green bottle. My brothers were louder than him. Three of them, all older, all made of noise and sharp elbows. The house was never quiet.

Then it was. Then it was the quietest place in the world.

He changed first. My oldest brother was already gone—dead in the first wave, the impact itself, a building collapse downtownwhere he worked after school. My father changed over two weeks. My mother kept us in the back bedroom and told us not to look. I looked. Through the crack in the door, in the hallway light. The shape of him wasn't right anymore. Too tall for the ceiling. His hands on the wall, leaving marks in the plaster. The sound he made—not a voice, not anything that belonged in a house with blue-flower wallpaper and a green soap bottle on the sink.

My mother got us out. She knew before the rest of the neighborhood. She packed one bag, took my hand and my brothers' hands, and walked us out the back door in the dark. We never went back.

My brothers changed later. Different cities, different shelters, different timelines. I didn't see it happen. My mother told me after—her voice flat, the way voices go when there's nothing left to protect you from. "They're gone, Ada. Not dead. Gone."

Gone is worse than dead. Dead is a door that closes. Gone is a door that stays open and you can never stop looking through it.

He descends through the upper canopy, angling his wings to catch the gaps between the branches. The leaves brush my arms as we drop—wet, cool, the morning dew shaking loose in a shower of tiny droplets. Below, through the layers of green: New Reach.

The outer wall is breached. The north section—the part I reinforced two years ago with rebar from the old parking garage—has a gap in it wide enough to drive through. Rubble in the street. Scorch marks on the concrete. The raid that took Petra did this. The raid I wasn't there to stop because I was on a building ledge choosing to die.

The inner structure is intact. The covered walkways connecting the blocks are visible, the solar panels on the warehouse roof catching the early light. Smoke from the kitchenfires—thin, white, the smell of grain cooking. People moving. Small figures at this distance, working on the breach, carrying materials.

He lands in the upper canopy, a hundred yards from the wall. Sets me on a branch thick enough to stand on. His wings fold. He crouches behind me—enormous, crimson, his crown horns visible above the leaf line. Anyone looking up would see him. He doesn't hide.

I lean forward. My hands grip the branch. My eyes find the wall.

Petra.

She's on the wall. Working the breach repair, hauling rubble, her dark hair tied back the way I taught her. She's moving the way fighters move—efficient, aware, her weight balanced. She's alive. She's on her feet. She's working.

She made it back.