Page 84 of Dead Drop

"How long have you been marking this?" I ask.

He glances back at me. His wings shift, a subtle adjustment of balance on the branch. "Since I came here."

"After what?"

"After the Ordained were done with me."

The canopy is loud with afternoon insects—the whir and click of things that have reclaimed the world after the asteroid. The light comes down in fragments, scattered and complex. Below us, the stream catches it in bright silver pieces, the water moving relentless toward whatever comes next.

I think about six years. Six years of climbing through these trees alone. Six years of maintaining a territory no one was testing, an aerie no one was coming home to.

Six years of marking boundaries that existed only for him. The discipline of it. The loneliness of it.

The way he must have kept moving just to keep breathing.

"Before it mattered," he says quietly, finishing a conversation we started somewhere in the aerie, a conversation about why he bothered marking anything at all when no one was listening.

I map the territory in my head as we move. The southern boundary along the stream, defensible but exposed on the banks. The western edge where the canopy thins and the old highway cuts through the ruins like a scar—old, but the wound never healed completely.

The northern approach, steep, the terrain naturally funneling any ground attack to single file. The eastern ridge, where I'm already redesigning defensive positions that don't exist yet.

By midafternoon my head is full of sight lines and choke points and the quality of light that tells me where shadows would fall at different hours. The canopy here is older than around New Reach, the trees fat with decades of unopposed growth. Some of them are over a hundred feet tall.

He navigates them with the certainty of someone who's walked every branch a thousand times.

"Here," he says, and points with a claw. I follow his arm to a patch of bark where something has scored deep gouges. "Stained, fifteen days ago. Solo hunter, hungry."

"You didn't engage."

"I was hunting something faster."

"What?"

"Deer," he says, and there's the smile again—dangerous, knowing, the thing that pulls my chest tight. "We need to eat."

He has a particular humor about his predatory nature. It's not apologetic, just factual. He hunts. The territory feeds him. He's made peace with both things and trusts me to do the same.

I share my opinions about the defenses as we move. He listens, argues the southern approach with reasoning that's sound and specific—flood patterns from the spring rains, howthe Stained move differently when the water runs high, the weeks when the stream becomes impassable. I argue for relocating his primary observation point.

We circle the same tactical problem from different angles.

I concede the southern approach because he's right. The flooding data changes my proposal. I don't have six years of territorial knowledge behind my proposal.

He concedes the eastern ridge without argument, his tail doing a single slow sweep that I'm learning means fair enough. The negotiation feels like something I haven't done since the gate watch: two people with overlapping expertise finding the overlap, trusting the other's knowledge where it exceeds their own.

It matters that he lets me argue. That he changes positions when I'm right. That he doesn't pull rank or size or years of solitary knowledge.

We don't make it back to the aerie.

We're in a clearing I identified an hour ago—good sight lines, defensible from three approaches, the canopy overhead thick enough to screen from aerial observation. I'm crouched over a patch of disturbed earth, reading the tracks. Stained, three of them, moving in a loose formation, at least a week old, no blood in the dust.

They came through, passed over, kept moving.

His breathing changes behind me.

I know that sound. Three weeks of the rut taught me every variation: the deep steady rhythm of sleep, the quickening before a peak, the held breath before he comes, the harsh panting of the drive. This is different.

This is a choice being made twice over.