Page 89 of Dead Drop

That we're moving as a unit, not as the carrying and the carried. The blood is drying on our hands—mine and his and the Stained's, all mixing together.

The canopy is loud with afternoon insects above us. His tail settles at my wrist and holds it loosely, the tip resting against my pulse.

He adjusts his stride to match mine. Something enormous being patient. Something patient that chose to be mine.

Underneath it all, something else is settling. The knowledge that I'm not just surviving anymore. I'm building something.

With him. In the canopy. On the boundary between the world I knew and the world I'm becoming.

The eastern boundary is reinforced by nightfall. The new positions are marked. The sight lines are clear.

When we return to the aerie, I'm already thinking about the next vulnerability, the next adjustment, the next layer of defense we're weaving between ourselves and the world that wants us dead. Not because I'm trying to survive. Because I'm trying to stay.

37

ADA

Icome in through the breach the way I always do now.

The hole in the north wall where the Ordained broke through when they came for Petra—wide enough for a body, the ragged edge worn smooth by weeks of use. My climbing hook catches the base of the lip. I pull through and drop into the courtyard, and the smell of New Reach closes around me. People. Smoke. Cook fires and stone and the particular humid press of bodies living close together.

Dov is in the courtyard.

He's grayed since I left, the kind of aging that comes in a chunk rather than a curve. The lines in his face deeper, the way a building settles after the foundation shifts. There's new scar tissue along his left temple, white and smooth.

He comes toward me slowly and stops. I don't move. I've learned that males need the space to approach—the choice to close the distance matters more than the distance itself.

He doesn't say anything for a long time. His eyes move over me. The fur-lined jacket. The climbing hooks that aren't human-made, their design too efficient for human hands to have built. The way I stand differently now—weight settled intomy hips instead of balanced in my shoulders. Looser. Stronger. Something rebuilt at my center out, the kind of building that only happens when the old structure comes down completely.

"You look different," he says finally.

"I am different."

He nods slowly. His right hand comes up, brushes my cheek once, quick and careful. The gesture of someone checking to see if I'm real.

"You're carrying."

"Yes."

"His?"

"Yes."

He lets the hand drop. For a moment, something works across his face—he's thinking through it, the working through of implications. Then it settles.

"How far along?"

"Early. Barely six weeks. But yes."

"And the father?"

"Doesn't want it taken. Doesn't want me coerced about it. Doesn't want me here at all, actually. But he trusts my judgment enough to let me come."

Dov turns away, looking toward the wall. The morning light is hitting the stone at an angle that makes the mortar lines visible—every repair, every reinforcement I ordered, every decision made in the four years I commanded this wall. "I wondered if you'd come back."

"I needed to report. And I needed to see Petra."

"She made it through the Cages." There's something like pride in his voice. Pride and a knowledge of what surviving the Cages means. "Didn't give them anything either. Took the beating. Took the withdrawal when they wouldn't give her the Blessed. Still didn't give them coordinates or supply schedules or anything useful."