Page 72 of Dead Drop

I don't cry. I grip the branch until my knuckles are white and I hold my breath until the feeling passes. The fur collar is against my cheek. His scent. The smell of the place I've been through all of it, while Petra was here, fighting, surviving, doing the work I trained her to do.

"She's alive," I say. My voice doesn't break. Barely.

"Yes." His voice is quiet behind me. Not the flat monosyllable of the rut. Something with weight in it, the weight of a male who understands what he's telling me.

"You knew."

"I checked before you woke up." He says it the way he says everything now—directly, without flinching from what the words mean. He left the aerie while I was sleeping. He flew here. He looked for her. He came back and said nothing until I was ready to see for myself.

I turn to look at him. The branch shifts under my weight. His hand is there—catching my elbow, steadying, the claws careful,gone again before I've processed the contact. His amber eyes are level with mine for once, both of us crouched in the canopy, and the expression on his face is the one I'm learning to read. Not pity. Attention. The look of someone who has lost people and knows what the finding looks like.

"You went and checked," I say. "While I was sleeping. You flew to the settlement and checked if she was alive."

"You needed to know." Three words. Simple. He doesn't say: I could smell the grief on you in the furs. He doesn't say: I know what it costs to not know. He says you needed to know and leaves the rest in the space between us, where the things we understand about each other have started to live.

"I'm going in," I say.

He goes still. Not the rigid stillness of refusal—the held-breath stillness of a male deciding how much of his instinct to override. His tail tightens once against his calf. His wings shift behind him, the membranes rustling.

"Alone," I add. Because a nine-foot crimson Shade walking through the gates of New Reach would cause the kind of problem that doesn't get solved with conversation.

He knows this. I can see him working through it—the territorial drive that wants me in his sightline at all times fighting the part of him that was an officer, that understands what I'm doing and why it needs to be done without him. His jaw clenches. Releases.

"Two hours," he says. Not a negotiation. A boundary—his, not mine. Two hours is what his restraint will hold. After that the officer loses to the instinct, and he comes for me regardless.

"Two hours," I agree.

He lowers me from the canopy. His hands under my arms, his grip careful, his wings braking our descent through the branches until my boots touch the canopy floor. The impact is solid. Real. My legs on the ground, the earth under meinstead of his arms. The difference is enormous. Weeks of the world existed at canopy height—the aerie, the branches, the vast green architecture of his territory seen from above. Down here the canopy is a ceiling, not a floor. The trunks are walls. The undergrowth is dense, waist-high in places, the old sidewalk barely visible beneath the ferns.

His hand releases my arm. His tail brushes my wrist—one circuit, a brief squeeze—and then he's gone. Up through the branches in a rush of air and displaced leaves, his wings catching the light for a moment before the canopy closes behind him. He's up there. Watching. The weight of his attention on my back like sunlight through glass.

I walk.

The approach to New Reach from the canopy side is different than the approach from the road. I'm coming in from the direction nobody comes from, through undergrowth that was a residential street once. The houses on either side are swallowed—green to their gutters, the porches collapsed under the weight of vine. A mailbox stands at an angle on the corner, its red flag still raised. Thirteen years of waiting for mail that will never come.

The outer wall rises through the canopy like a cliff face. From the ground it looks bigger than I remember. Fifty feet of reinforced concrete and rebar, the surface stained with rust in long vertical streaks. My wall. The one I patrolled for four years. I know every crack in it, every repair, every spot where the rebar has swollen with moisture and split the surface. The breach on the north side is ugly—the gap ragged, the rubble still piled at the base, the scorch marks from the Ordained's incendiary rounds still black on the gray concrete.

I walk through the breach. Not the gate. Through the hole the Ordained made when they came for Petra.

The inside smells wrong. Not wrong—different. The settlement smells like people. Like grain cooking and wood smoke and the chemical sharpness of the fire-starters and sweat and damp concrete. It smells like four hundred bodies living in close quarters, like laundry drying on lines strung between the walkways, like the med building's antiseptic tang that always carries on the breeze when the wind comes from the south.

Three weeks ago this was the only smell I knew. Now my body flinches from it. My nose has adjusted to canopy air—wet bark, mineral warmth, the deep green of growing things. For his scent underneath all of it. It smells like what it is: people surviving. It doesn't smell like home anymore.

I push through.

The east block corridor is the same. The concrete walls sweating in the morning cool, the solar-strip lights humming their thin blue hum. My boots on the floor make the sound they always made—the echo of this corridor, the one that bounces off the ceiling and comes back flattened. I've heard this echo a thousand times. I used to count my steps by it: forty-seven at a jog, thirty-one at a flat sprint.

The Ordained collection room is closed. The door is shut, which it never was during my time—the Ordained liked the door open, liked the names visible to anyone walking past, liked the flowers reaching the corridor with their complicated sweetness. Someone shut the door. Someone decided that the dead don't need an audience.

I pass the kitchen. Through the open doorway I can see the morning shift—six women working the grain stores, the reconstituted porridge bubbling on the flat-top stove that we salvaged from a restaurant three blocks east. The smell hasn't changed—bland, filling, the taste of survival rather than pleasure. One of the women is humming. I don't recognize the tune.

A month ago I ate this food every day. I ate it standing up, between rotations, spooning it from a metal cup while I read supply reports. It kept me alive. It kept all of us alive. Now I can still taste the canopy fruit on my tongue—the sweetness of it, the real flavor, the food he brings me that tastes like the world is supposed to taste instead of the world as it turned out.

I keep walking.

The main courtyard is bright with morning sun. The light falls through the broken upper windows in slanted columns, the dust motes turning gold where they pass through. The morning shift is mustering—eight on gate watch, four on supply run prep. I can hear Dov's voice from the far side, giving orders. The same rhythm. The same tired authority. The same shoulders bowed with the weight of keeping four hundred people breathing.

The faces are the same and they're not. I've been gone for three and a half weeks. That's enough time for the bruises from the raid to heal, for the grief to settle into something that lives in the posture rather than the eyes. The women move differently. Harder. The raid changed them the way raids always change people—not by breaking them but by removing the possibility that it won't happen again. They carry themselves like people who know the wall can be breached.