Page 73 of Dead Drop

Petra sees me first.

She's crossing the courtyard with a bundle of rebar on her shoulder, her dark hair tied back, her arms bare despite the morning chill. She sees me and the rebar hits the ground. The clang of it echoes off the courtyard walls.

"Ada."

Her voice breaks on it. Not a question—a fact she's confirming with her own mouth because her eyes aren't enough. She crosses the courtyard at a run. Not the fighter's measured sprint—a flat-out, arms-pumping, reckless run.

She hits me hard enough to stagger us both.

Her arms around me, her face against my neck, her whole body shaking with the tremor of someone who has been holding it together for weeks and just found the person they were holding it together for. I grip her back. She's thinner. The bones of her shoulders through her jacket.

"You're alive," she says into my collar. "You're alive, you're alive, you're?—"

"I'm alive."

She pulls back. Holds me at arm's length. Her eyes move over my face, my body, tracking damage the way I taught her—throat, wrists, ribs. Looking for the marks of what was done to me. Looking for the proof of the thing every woman in the wasteland has been told about since the first Shade claimed the first mate. She's looking for the ruin of me.

She doesn't find it.

"You look—" She stops. Recalculates. Her brow furrows. "You look good. You look better than when you left."

"I know." I don't explain. Not yet. The courtyard is filling—people drawn by the clang of dropped rebar, by Petra's shout, by the fact of me standing here in clothes that smell like canopy and a collar lined with fur I can't explain.

Dov reaches me next. He looks old. Older than when I left—the lines around his eyes deeper, the gray at his temples spreading. He's in his late sixties, the oldest surviving male in the settlement, and the weeks since the raid have cost him more than they've cost anyone. He was the one who had to hold the settlement together after the breach. He was the one who had to count the dead.

"Commander," he says. The word is careful. He's not sure if it still applies.

"Dov." I grip his forearm. The old gesture, the one we used on the wall. His hand closes around mine. His grip is weaker than I remember. "I'm here to report."

He searches my face the way Petra did. Looking for damage. Finding something else instead—the cleared skin, the straighter posture, the way my hand doesn't shake anymore. Twenty-one days of a Shade's cum rebuilding me, and the result is a woman who looks healthier than anything the settlement can produce on reconstituted grain and rationed sleep.

He doesn't ask about the Shade. Not here, not in the open courtyard with people watching. He nods. "Council room. Give me ten minutes."

The ten minutes give me time to walk.

I walk the corridors I know from years of walking them. The east block, where the barracks are—the narrow bunks stacked three high, the personal items hung on nails in the concrete, the smell of close-quarters living. My bunk is still there. Someone folded the blanket. The book I was reading is on the shelf beside it—a water-damaged paperback, pre-asteroid, something about a woman who sailed around the world alone. I'd read it three times. The pages are soft as cloth.

I touch the blanket. The fabric is rough. Scratchy. My skin flinches the same way it flinched from the jacket collar. Everything in the settlement is rough now. Everything is hard edges and cold concrete and the thin hum of solar strips. The aerie is woven branches and furs and the warmth of a body nine feet tall curved around mine. The contrast sits in my chest like a splinter.

The mess hall is serving breakfast. I stand in the doorway and watch. The tables are the same—long, metal, salvaged from a school cafeteria. The benches are crowded. The food is the same gray porridge, served in metal cups, eaten with metal spoons that have been sharpened on one edge because in the wasteland everything is a blade if you need it to be.

The women eat with the focused efficiency of people who have learned not to waste time on meals. Eat, clear, move. Therotation doesn't stop for flavor. Some of them are talking—low voices, the murmur of people who live too close together to need volume. A few laugh. The sound startles me. I haven't heard laughter in weeks. Corvin doesn't laugh. He does the almost-smile, the thing that lives in the territory adjacent to a smile, but laughter is something the mutation took and hasn't given back.

I think about the canopy fruit. The dark purple sweetness of it. The charred meat with the fat rendered crisp. The clean water from the stream, cold enough to make my teeth ache. The food in this mess hall will keep you alive. The food in the aerie makes you want to be.

I turn away before anyone sees me staring.

The council room is where it's always been—the windowless interior room on the second floor, the table we built from a conference table we dragged up two flights of stairs my first year. The map on the wall is mine—hand-drawn, updated weekly, the territorial grid marked in colored pins. My pins. My grid. Nobody's moved them. Nobody else knows the grid the way I do.

The way I did. Now I know it better. I've seen it from above.

Dov is there. Petra beside him. The others file in. The debrief begins.

I give them the intelligence—the supply routes, the patrol patterns, the territorial markers. I tell them what I've seen from the air. I tell them about the Stained, the Ordained's movements, the vulnerabilities in the grid that are invisible from the ground. I tell them what I am now: mated, pregnant, living in the Apex's territory. I tell them I'm not coming back.

The council conversation is hard. The questions are harder. But I've already written those scenes in my head during the flight here—the looks, the disbelief, the slow shift from she was taken to she chose to stay. The details of that conversation belong in a different chapter, after I've had time to sit with them.

What matters now is this: I walked through the breach in the wall I built. I walked the corridors. I sat at the table where I made four years of decisions. I looked at my bunk, my book, my porridge. I held Petra and felt her shaking.