Page 8 of Dead Drop

The big mutations keep to the lower levels. I've encountered them twice in four years. I don't plan to encounter them again.

I go out. I come back. Every time.

The territory markers in this sector are fresh. New gouges in the bark—not the Apex, too small, wrong claw spacing. A lower-tier Shade staking a secondary claim on the canopy edge. Opportunistic. The marks are shallow, tentative—the kind a Shade makes when it's testing how far it can push before the dominant territory holder takes issue. The sap in the gouges hasn't dried yet. It beads along the cuts like amber tears.

I commit the position, the depth, the direction of the gouges to memory. Southeast, away from the Apex's range. This Shade is smart enough to claim away from the thing that will kill it.

The sun is going down by the time I slip back through the eastern gate. The watch changes. My second-years take the wall.

I eat alone in the mess—rice, reconstituted protein, a handful of dried fruit that someone bartered from a southern trader. The fruit is chewy, too sweet, the kind of sweet that means it was preserved with more sugar than the fruit itself contained. Then I climb to the upper level and sit in the window where I can see the canopy darkening.

The Apex's territory is a black shape against the last of the light. The crown of the tallest tree, where the aerie is. I've never seen it up close. I've seen the silhouette—massive, winged, the crown horns visible even at this distance—once, two years ago, at dawn, when the light was right and he was airborne.

A shape that made the air move differently around it.

He hasn't taken a mate in the recorded history of this territory. The Ordained's records go back eight years. Eight years of peak rut seasons, eight years of presentations laid in the clearing, and he has never claimed.

An unmated Shade that old accumulates—the rut cycles without release, the feral drive compounds. By any measure heshould be the most volatile thing in the grid, most likely to move unpredictably, to take what the cycle demands wherever he can find it. Instead he holds his ground and waits.

I don't know what for. What I know is the territory data, the patrol pattern, the fact that in twenty-six months his boundary has not moved. I work with what I can measure.

I pull my jacket closer. The cold is coming. Below, in the courtyard, someone is singing—low and rough, a song I don't recognize. The sound carries up through the concrete and glass and settles somewhere in my chest where I keep the things I don't have words for.

Tomorrow the Ordained come. Brother Lief with his silver tongue, his clean hands, his smile that measures women like inventory.

Tomorrow I stand in a room with that and keep my mouth shut.

I sleep with my boots on. I always do.

3

ADA

Brother Lief arrives at midday with four attendants and the kind of smile that expects to be welcomed.

The cloaks are white. Clean white, bright against the dust and rebar of New Reach's courtyard—the kind of white that someone spends time maintaining because the appearance of purity is worth the labor. The fabric is fine-woven, a tight weave that catches the light differently than anything we produce in the textile building. The attendants carry nothing except their hands folded in their sleeves. Brother Lief carries a leather satchel embossed with the Ordained's sigil—the gilded bloom, petals open, supposedly representing divine union.

I've always thought it looked like a mouth.

Dov meets them at the inner gate. I'm on the upper walkway, leaning against the railing where I can see the courtyard without being part of it. Petra is beside me, her jaw tight. Below, Brother Lief crosses the courtyard with the unhurried stride of someone who considers every space he enters to be his. His boots are clean. The cleanliness is its own kind of violence—a statement that the dust of this place does not touch him, that his world operates on a different surface than ours.

"He's shorter than I expected," Petra says.

"They always are."

She means shorter than a Shade. Not shorter than a man. Brother Lief is taller than any surviving male I've seen—six foot two, maybe three—but that height is wrong. Stretched. His arms hang past his hips, the forearms too long for the torso, the fingers extended so that his hands look like something drawn by a child who hasn't learned proportion yet. His legs have the same quality—elongated shin bones that give his walk a strange loping gait, each step covering more ground than it should, the knees bending at an angle that's just off-center from human.

He's thin. Not lean the way a fighter is lean—thin the way something is thin when the muscle has been replaced by sinew and the sinew has been stretched over bones that grew after the rest of the body stopped. His skin is sallow, a yellowish pallor beneath the clean white of his robes that catches the light like old paper. His hair is silver at the temples. His hands, when they emerge from his sleeves, are pale and uncalloused—long-fingered, smooth, the hands of someone whose violence is exclusively administrative.

The robes cover the rest. They always do. The Ordained's white vestments aren't just ceremony—they're concealment. The fabric falls loose from the shoulders, hiding the hunched curve of the upper spine, the concave chest, the place between the legs where the mutation took everything that made them male and pulled it inward. I've seen a Eunuch without robes once. A dead one, on a supply run, face-down in the canopy undergrowth. The body was wrong in ways I still think about on nights I can't sleep—the rib cage slightly too wide, the pelvis narrowed, the crotch smooth and tight as a closed fist.

The mutation reached for them the way it reached for all men. It just didn't finish the job.

His voice, when he speaks, carries the warmth of someone who has practiced sounding kind until the practice became indistinguishable from the real thing. That voice is the Ordained's best weapon—it comes out of a body that is visibly not human and sounds like everything human used to be. Trustworthy. Gentle. Concerned. I've met three Ordained delegates in my time at New Reach. Brother Lief is the most dangerous because he believes what he's selling—or he's so good at performing belief that the distinction has stopped mattering.

"Dov." That warm voice, pitched to carry without shouting. "Thank you for receiving us. The road was long."

It's an hour's walk from the nearest Ordained outpost. The road wasn't long. The pleasantry is a frame—it says we came a great distance for you, remember that when we ask for what we want.