Page 74 of Dead Drop

Then I walked back out through the breach.

Corvin is in the canopy. Exactly where I left him—crouched on the branch, wings folded, his eyes tracking me from the moment I clear the wall. His tail drops from the branch and finds my wrist before I've climbed three feet. The relief in the contact is mutual—my skin settling at his warmth, his tail tightening once in the grip that means you're here, you came back.

He lifts me. I press my face into the smooth red skin of his chest, my forehead at his sternum—that's where I reach, that's where I always reach—and breathe. His scent fills my lungs. The mineral warmth of him, the canopy, the deep green of the territory. The settlement's smells fall away from me like a coat I've taken off.

Below us, New Reach disappears. I make myself look. The wall first—my wall, every crack and repair and four years of knowing its weak points like I know my own. Then the rooftops. Then the smoke. Then green.

Dov's grip on my forearm, weaker than I remembered. The book on my shelf, soft-paged, still waiting. The curtains in the mess hall windows that I carried through two miles of contested route because someone decided the settlement needed curtains and I agreed with my feet. The light through the barracks window at 0600—four years of waking to it, which I won't wake to tomorrow.

There is something in my chest that wants to tell him to turn around. To take me back. To put me down on that wall and let me hold it one more season.

I don't tell him to turn around.

Then he takes me home.

I catch the word after I've already thought it. Home. The aerie. His nest. The furs that smell like him, the canopy ceiling, the view of the wasteland from the edge where I stood and chose to come back to him.

I don't correct myself.

32

ADA

They come at night.

But the night goes wrong hours before they arrive, and I feel every minute of it.

Corvin leaves at dusk for the late patrol—the long hunting run he makes after dark when the canopy prey moves to the lower levels and the larger kills are available. I've learned the rhythm of his absence the way I learned everything else about him: by lying in his furs and counting the minutes until his wings come back through the canopy. Forty minutes, sometimes an hour. He always comes back with food and the faint copper smell of something else's blood on his claws.

Tonight is warm for once. One of those still evenings where the canopy holds the day's heat and releases it slowly, the air thick with the smell of earth and growing things. I sit cross-legged in the furs with my knife on my thigh and my back against the aerie wall. Through the gaps in the woven branches, the wasteland spreads under a half-moon—the canopy crown silver-edged, the old towers dark shapes against a sky that never fully darkens anymore.

The insects are loud. The stream is a low murmur far below. A nightbird calls from the ruins—the two-note song I've been hearing for days, always from the same direction, always unanswered. The ordinary sounds. The safe sounds. My body is tracking them the way it tracked watch rotations for four years: the pattern of the baseline, the hum that tells me when something shifts.

I run the whetstone along the blade. Not because it needs it. Because the sound is mine, steady and rhythmic, something I control. The venom in my blood has settled to a low warmth—always there, always humming, like a second pulse that runs a beat behind my heart. I'm getting used to it. Getting used to a lot of things I never planned for.

The baby is the size of a plum. I don't know how I know this. Something in the venom, maybe—the same system that bound me to him is tracking its own consequences. My hand goes to my belly sometimes without my permission. There's nothing to feel yet. Flat stomach, hard muscle, the same body I've always had. But something in the warmth of my skin there tells me yes, here, growing.

I pull my hand back and pick up the whetstone again.

Through the aerie wall, the canopy is doing what it does at night—the insects layering their songs over one another, the stream threading underneath, the occasional crack of a branch as something heavy moves through the mid-levels. Corvin's territory is well marked. The venom warnings on the perimeter trees are fresh—I watched him renew them yesterday, dragging his claws along the bark in slow deliberate lines, the scent glands in his wrists leaving marks that say Apex, mated, occupied in the chemical language that every Shade reads without thinking. Nothing comes through the boundary without knowing whose ground it's crossing.

That's what I tell myself.

The nightbird sings again. Two notes, a pause, two notes. I've been counting the intervals—twelve seconds, give or take. Steady as a metronome. The bird doesn't know it's keeping me company, but it is.

Twelve seconds. Two notes.

Twelve seconds. Two notes.

I'm halfway through the next count when the silence hits.

Not all at once. The insects go first—the high-pitched layer, the one I think of as the canopy ceiling, drops away. Then the mid-range drone thins. Then the clicking beetles near the stream stutter and stop. It's like watching sound drain from a glass: the top goes, the middle follows, the bottom holds for a moment and then it's gone too.

The nightbird is still singing.

I set the whetstone down. My fingers find the knife handle. I don't stand yet. I just listen, my head tilted, my breath slowing the way it does before contact—that place where everything else gets quiet so the important sounds can come through.

Rain, maybe. Storm pressure dropping, and the insects going silent the way they do before weather. That's what it could be. That's the easy answer.