Page 91 of Dead Drop

Silence. The kind that has texture—thick with everything no one wants to say out loud. Sorrel's face has gone rigid. Thess is staring at my belly like it might open. Even Ellis, the old general who's seen everything, has gone still in a way that tells me he's recalculating something fundamental about the world.

I smell like a Shade's nest. I'm carrying his child. The addiction is written into my blood. I am not one of them anymore in any human way.

But the intelligence I'm offering them is real. The tactical advantage is real. The maps I've drawn are real. The information that could save lives—that's real too.

Dov understands this. The council understands it. I see it settle across their faces, one by one: she's not ours, but she's useful. She's not safe, but she's valuable. In the wasteland, valuable is the same as essential.

"We'll meet again in five days," Ellis says. "Same time. You'll bring updated intelligence?"

"I'll bring what I can observe. The patterns shift. The guard rotations change. But yes. I'll bring intelligence."

Marci nods slowly. "Your knowledge of their operations is valuable. Your tactical sense is valuable. We'll trust that for now."

It's permission wrapped in caution. It's alliance wrapped in suspicion. It's exactly what I deserve, and exactly what I need.

Petra finds me in the corridor outside the council room.

She's alive. She's whole. She's thinner than I remember, the edges of her face sharper, the kind of thin that comes from being caged and still choosing to fight.

But her eyes are the same—bright, quick, the alertness I trained into her over two years of dawn drills.

The Cages didn't break her. They dented her. Dents repair.

She moves slowly. There's something wrong with her left leg—I see it immediately, the way her weight shifts slightly off it. An old break, maybe. Or torture damage that's settled into her bones.

She looks at my belly first. I can see the moment she understands—the slight widening of her eyes, the way she processes the curve beneath the jacket. The understanding. The implications.

Then she looks at my face. At my hair—the long brown braid running down my back, thick and tightly wound, the way I've worn it since the wall. At my hands, uncallused compared to how she remembers them. At the fur-lined collar of the jacket and whatever she reads in my posture that tells her I'm not the same anymore.

She doesn't ask if I'm okay. She knows me better than that. "Is he good to you?"

I almost laugh. The question is enormous. It contains the entire three weeks, the rut, the knotting, the venom that rewired everything from the inside out. The answer should be simple. It isn't.

"He hurt me," I say. Petra's face goes still. "Not the way you're thinking. Not cruelty. Not punishment. He was in rut—the mating drive that hits when a Shade finds his match. Three weeks. He couldn't stop it any more than I could stop breathing." Her expression shifts. "He didn't choose to force me. The mutation chose for both of us. He was as trapped in it as I was."

"That's a hell of a way to dress up what you're describing."

"I know how it sounds." I lean against the wall beside her. "But I've had weeks on the other side of it to watch who he is when the drive isn't controlling him. He builds me climbing hooks because my hands are too small for the branches. He adjusts his patrol routes based on my observations. He listens when I tell him something matters." I pause. "The male he is now—mated, clear-headed—he wouldn't force me."

My mouth twists. I can't help it. "He wouldn't have to."

Petra stares at me. I watch her assemble the meaning of that—the wry admission underneath it, the wanting I'm not bothering to hide. Her eyes widen slightly.

"I feel safe with him," I say, and it surprises me how steady my voice is. "I can't tell you he'd never hurt me, because he has. But it was never without end. Never as himself. Never of his own choosing." I press my hand against my belly. "When I was small—before the asteroid, before any of this—my mother used to tell stories about how love was supposed to feel. All-consuming. Immeasurable. Something you'd burn the world down for." I shrug. "I barely remember. But I think this might be what she meant. Not the clean version. The real one."

Petra is quiet for a long time. Her breathing whistles faintly—the Cage damage, the ribs that never set right.

"You're telling me you love a Nethershade."

"I'm telling you I have a drive to be with him that I've decided can't be too different from what the old world called love. He protects me. He chose me before the rut—read my name on an Ordained list and decided. The rut just made him unable to wait."

She's quiet for a while. Then she shifts her weight off the bad leg, and the motion reminds me of what the Cages cost her.

"I spent six weeks in the dark," she says. "No light. No company. Twice a day they'd bring food and water and check to see if I was still alive. I had nothing to do but think." She looksat me. "I thought about you. About how you walked on that wall like you owned it. How you made us believe we could hold it."

"I jumped off a building, Petra."

"And then you came back. You're here, carrying a monster's child, telling me you chose it." Her mouth quirks—not a smile, but something close. Something complicated. "The child inside you—that's a choice?"