Page 62 of Dark Mate

“Somebody should,” I say.

He looks down at me, and there’s something in the amber I haven’t seen before. Not the rut or the guard. Surprise. And not at the idea, but at me, for having it.

I hold onto it the rest of the way home. The Cage trained me to be warm. To make people feel safe with a smile the tea made effortless. The tea’s gone now and the smile’s mine, and the warmth’s mine, and the thing where I can sit with somebody and make them feel less alone, that was their tool, built for their purposes, and I’m taking it the same as I took everything else. The way I took the comb and the files and the flight over wallsthat used to hold me. You take what was done to you and you decide what it’s for.

He sets me down in the furs. Curls around me, the arm over my ribs, the tail along my thigh, the dark that smells like him.

I don’t close my eyes. I lie there and think about the women I can’t see, in nests I’ve never been to, each one alone in her own dark learning her own version of what I learned.

Somebody should connect them. Somebody trained to make people feel safe. Somebody who knows what being managed looks like from the inside—both kinds, the Cage’s sweet and the canopy’s honest. Somebody who was kept for thirteen years and learned, in the keeping, exactly how to reach the kept.

The plan puts itself together in the dark. His hum runs through my spine. The shaking doesn’t come. The clear holds, my mind lit from inside by a fire that forty-one names keep fed.

33

ELLIE

He knows where they are.

His own territory and the ones next to it—a patchwork of claimed canopy that runs for miles. He knows it the way the translator knew border dialects: through patient attention, scent-marks, claw-marks on bark, the low vibrations that travel through the roots too deep for me to hear. A claw-mark saysmine.A scent-trail saysI passed here.A vibration through the root system saysI’m here, I have a mate, the ground is held.

He draws it for me, a claw dipped in the dark juice of the fruit that stains everything, marking out the territories on a flat root shelf. His own, big, centered on the nest. Five more around it. Inside each, a mark for the nest, and inside each nest, two lines. A Shade. A woman.

Five women within reach. All claimed in the last couple of years. All from Cages or settlements. All alone in their paired dark, the way I was alone in mine.

“This one.” He taps the nearest mark, north, where the canopy thins. “The male is—” A pause, hunting a word thatdoesn’t live in any tongue he carries. “Burgundy. Ram’s horns. Younger than me. His language is further gone.”

“How far?”

“Two hours by canopy. Less by air.”

“Take me.”

Brin is smaller than me.

That’s the first thing I clock when we land—carried through the canopy at speed, forty minutes for what would’ve taken hours on foot. Her nest is built into the fork of three trunks, open on one side to let the light in. More aerie than cocoon.

Her shade crouches between us and her—the burgundy male, ram’s horns lowered, every muscle coiled. A foot shorter than Riven, skin the color of dried wine, his eyes closer to copper than amber, fixed on Riven with the flat focus of one male reading another in front of a claimed woman.

Riven stops. Doesn’t spread his wings, doesn’t shift his weight. Every line of him saysI’m not a threat to yours.The burgundy male’s nostrils flare, reading my scent on him, his on me, the unmistakable signature of a mated pair—and the coil eases a notch. Not trust. Recognition.You have yours. I have mine. No challenge here.

I step around both of them.

Brin watches me come. Mid-twenties, dark hair cut short, skin gone pale from months in filtered light. Her belly’s round under the furs. Pregnant, far enough along that the curve shows.

It’s her eyes that stop me. Wide. Wary. The particular wariness of somebody who hasn’t seen another woman in months and can’t tell yet whether this one’s safe or a new kind of danger. I know that look. I wore it my first week in the dark, when every touch was a question of survival.

I sit down. Five feet from her, on the furs, making myself small—not because I am, the rut saw to that, but because I was trained to. The Cage taught me exactly how to walk into a roomand make a scared person feel safe. The soft eyes, the patience, the sitting and waiting instead of reaching. The Sisters called it warmth. The files called itpresentation-grade—pretty, and easy, and good at making frightened people feel safe. I call it the one useful thing thirteen years of management ever gave me.

“I’m Ellie.” Quiet. Not a whisper, just the volume you use with someone who’s been alone long enough that loud feels like a hand raised.

She doesn’t answer. Her hand goes to her belly.

“I was in a Cage,” I say. “The eastern compound. He took me three weeks ago. Through the wall.” A flicker in her eyes—recognition, or the start of it. Not of me. Of the story. “I drank the tea. Every morning. For thirteen years.”

Her mouth opens. Closes. The wariness cracks, the way ice cracks when holding gets harder than breaking.

“Eight months.” Her voice is rough, unused—a throat that hasn’t made a whole sentence since the last time it screamed. “I drank it eight months. I was new. They brought me from Voss Hold.”