Page 29 of Dark Mate

The world didn’t stay empty long. The ones who lived through it crawled out of the wreck and started building again, and some of them built walls, and behind the walls they started collecting.

They found me half-feral in the deep, drawn to a fire I couldn’t make myself leave—even unmade, even wordless, the man in me still wanted the light. They were robed even then. Soft-handed. Smiling. They didn’t fight me. They didn’t have to. They had a net, and a drug in the meat they left out, and I was starving, and I ate it, and I woke in a pen.

A pen smaller than this clearing. A chain the weight of my own arm. And a keeper who fed me by hand and called the feedingcare.

I learned their faces. Their patience. The way they’d stand at the bars and watch me with the calm interest of men studying a thing they meant to use. I was strong—the strongest thing they’d caught. So they kept me, and they studied me, and they went looking for the lever that would make me theirs.

They cut my throat to teach me the lever was them. Drew the blade slow, left to right, not deep enough to kill—only deep enough that I’d wear the line and know whose hand had drawn it. When I fought, they didn’t beat me. They starved me. When I went quiet, they fed me, and smiled, and the smiling was worse than any beating, because the smiling taught the thing they wanted me to learn: that the hand on the chain was the only hand, and the only mercy in the world came through it.

It nearly worked. That’s the part I’ll never put in her mouth. There were days I waited for the keeper. Days the sound of his step at the bars was the best thing in the dark. They almost made me grateful. A season more and they’d have had me smooth, the heat gone out of me, the man gone quiet, a kept thing that thanked the hand that kept it.

The rut surges up through the memory like it heard me.

My cock goes from soft to iron where it’s buried in her, the want climbing from banked to blazing in the space of a breath, and she wakes the way she’s learned to wake—a sound, a stretch, her thighs falling open before her eyes do. I roll her under me and take her. Hard. A snarl tears out of me, “Hrrah,” because the rut wants it, and because the pen wants it dead. Every time I drive into this woman in the dark I am answering the thing that tried to make me into something that couldn’t. They starved the man out of me and called it care; let them see what they didn’t finish breaking. I fuck her with my mind still in their pen and my body all the way out of it. And when I spill into her, my knot swells and locks us, and I am further from that chain than I have ever been.

She sighs. Goes loose. Settles back against my chest, full of me, my mark in her, her hand finding the scar again like it never left.

And down the row of pens, they were making other things.

I heard them. Smelled them. Males like me, caught like me, that the robed ones took apart and built back wrong—the ones that came out hissing, clicking, the fear bred clean out of them. I didn’t know then what they were for. I know now. I’ve killed enough of them on my own line to know exactly what the robed ones were practicing in the dark, two pens down, while they decided what to do with me.

They were learning to unmake us. I was one of the whole ones they kept to study, to learn the shape of the thing before they broke it. If they’d finished, I’d be one of the things that clicks. One of the things you have to kill twice.

My horn broke the day I got out.

A keeper got careless, left a chain unset, leaned in too close, soft-handed and sure the way men get sure of a thing they think they own. I took the carelessness, and I made it the last one he ever had. I went through the bars, through the pen, througheverything between me and the open, and somewhere in it I put a body through a wall and broke my horn against the stone, and it healed crooked because there was no one left in the world who cared to set it straight.

I came out of that place with a crooked horn, a cut throat, and one word that climbed up out of the wreck of all my languages and stayed.

Kept.

I dug my nest deeper into the high wood than any I’d made—up past where anything climbs by accident—and told myself it was for the cold. It was for this. So that if I ever had a thing worth keeping, really keeping, not the robed ones’ kind, no hand could ever reach down and take it the way hands reached for me.

And now she’s in it. Knotted to me, full of me, the drug they kept her dim with bleeding slow out of her skin. They kept her the way they kept me. Same robes. Same patience. Same smiling.

She doesn’t know yet how close they still are. I won’t tell her tonight. Let her have the dark a while longer, where it’s only me and the hum and the small warm weight of her sealed around what I put in her.

But I have been in their pen. I know what they do to a thing once they have it. And I have decided, with the whole of the man that’s left and the whole of the monster he became, that they will take her back over a canopy full of my dead.

She stirs against me. Her fingers move on the scar.

“…stay,” she says, to no one. To me.

I bring my mouth to the crown of her head. The word I find is rusted, barely shaped, but it’s true, and it’s the first one I ever clawed back out of the dark, and it’ll be the last one I ever let them take.

“Here.”

14

ELLIE

The tea’s gone. All of it.

I know it the way you know a tooth’s missing—not by looking, by the empty spot your tongue keeps finding. For thirteen years there was something sitting in me, smoothing everything down, and now there’s just a hole where it used to be and the hole doesn’t hurt. It rings.

Everything’s turned up past where it’s ever been.

His skin against my back is an event. I’ve known the feel of it for days now—warm, the texture of it, the hard grain that isn’t quite skin. But this morning, if it’s morning, his arm across my ribs is so loud my breath catches. Every place we touch reports in. The weight of his forearm. The heat of his thigh behind mine. His cock, still in me, flexing in those slow idle rolls I feel now in my back teeth.