Page 79 of Dead Drop

I stand at the territorial boundary and breathe. My hands are shaking—not from the withdrawal this time, but from the adrenaline of holding myself still while Brother Lief's smile tried to convince me that the Cages were a kindness. The canopy is quiet around us. A bird calls from the upper branches.

The mist is burning off, the sun breaking through in long gold shafts that turn the moss on the boundary trees into something luminous.

"He'll be back," I say.

"Yes." Corvin's voice is behind me, low and certain. He steps forward until he's beside me—not behind me, not in front of me, beside me—his massive body a wall of warmth at my left shoulder. His tail finds my wrist and wraps it once, loosely. The contact is brief but deliberate. "And I'll be here."

Not comfort. A fact. The way a soldier states a position: this is where I am, this is where I stay.

Corvin understands positions. He held one for six years before the mutation took it from him. He's holding one now.

Somehow that's better than any promise he could have made.

We climb back to the aerie. I sit in the furs with my arms around my knees while the adrenaline drains and the shaking settles into something manageable. Corvin crouches across from me, cleaning his claws with the slow deliberate strokes he uses after patrol—a grooming habit, half-conscious, the kind of thing soldiers do with their weapons when their hands need something to hold.

"Tell me about the Cages," I say.

He goes still. Not the defensive stillness of a subject he doesn't want to discuss. The careful stillness of a male choosing his words, pulling them from the place inside him where language lives like a foreign currency—valuable, limited, spent like they cost him.

"Holdings," he says. "Each grid. One or two."

"How many women in each?"

His jaw works. The muscles in his neck shift, the tendons standing out against the deep red of his skin. "Eight. Twelve. Depends."

"On what?"

"Supply."

The word sits between us. I let it.

The Ordained run the Cages the way they run everything—with clean hands, careful language, the veneer of administration laid over something brutal. The settlements call them "cooperation agreements." The Ordained call them "sanctioned partnerships." The women inside call them nothing because the women inside don't speak to anyone who isn't Ordained.

I've known the shape of this since New Reach's first contact with Brother Lief four years ago. He came to the gates with that same smile, the same warm modulated voice, the same reasonable explanation for why cooperation served everyone's interests. The settlements needed protection from the Stained, from the Unmade, from the wasteland itself. The Ordained could provide that protection. All they asked in return was a small number of women—volunteers, he said, always volunteers—to participate in the pairing program.

Nobody volunteered. The Ordained took them anyway.

"The venom," I say. "In the Cages. Where does it come from?"

Corvin's tail curls tighter around his ankle. "Harvested. From mated pairs."

I feel my stomach drop. "The Ordained take venom from mated females?"

"From mates. From Shades. They take from both." His voice is harder now. The careful word-by-word delivery is giving way to something that sounds closer to anger, though the anger is old—settled into his body like scar tissue, built over years. "Unmated males need venom to function. The Stained take it raw. The Ordained... refine it."

The picture assembles. The Ordained sit at the center of a venom economy that touches every part of the wasteland. Mated pairs produce venom naturally—the bonding creates it, the rutamplifies it, the ongoing mate-bond sustains it. The Ordained harvest the surplus. They sell the refined product to unmated males, who need it to stay coherent, to keep the mutation from consuming what's left of their minds. The Stained are the ones who can't afford the refined version, or who've been cut off, running on black-market dregs that rot them from the inside.

The Cages are the production floor. The women inside aren't just paired—they're farmed. The Ordained drug the males or catch them when they're weak, starved, desperate. They pair them with females who aren't scent-matched—women who would never have triggered the feral switch on their own. The prehensile cock can penetrate soft. The Ordained know this. They use it. Force the body through the motions of a mating that the instinct never sanctioned, and the bond takes—thin, wrong, but enough to produce venom. The women survive it. The venom doesn't kill them. It just keeps them compliant, keeps the bond active, keeps the supply flowing.

"How many grids?" I ask. My voice is steady. The wall voice. The command voice that doesn't let the horror show.

"Seven in this region." He pauses. Thinks. "More beyond. Lief's order—not the only one. Others in the east. In the south."

Seven grids. If each grid has one or two Cages, eight to twelve women each—that's somewhere between fifty and a hundred and seventy women in this region alone. Taken from settlements, from scavenging parties, from the edges of the human world where the protection is thinnest. Held in facilities the Ordained call "partnership centers" with the same bland institutional language they use for everything.

"The children," I say. "From the Cages. What happens to them?"

His expression changes. Something crosses his face—not pain, not anger, something that might be closer to grief if a nine-foot apex predator allowed himself grief. "Taken. The horned ones. The ones who show."