Page 77 of Dark Mate

What punches out of him isn’t a roar. A sharp breath through his teeth. “Hgh.” The grunt of a thing that didn’t know it could be hurt, finding out.

Then the pain lands, and his body answers it with everything it has. The hurt arm swings anyway, the claw opening the thing chest to hip; it drops, gets up, and he takes it by the horn jutting from its chest and crushes its skull on the wall.

Three left, and the bolt’s working in him now.

I watch it take hold, a hitch in his hurt side, the wing on that side not snapping as wide, a half-beat of slowness where therewas none. The Unmade don’t tire. They don’t bleed the way a living thing bleeds. And they’ve stopped coming one at a time.

The last three hit him together.

One takes the wounded side, claws hooking into the wing-joint where the bolt went in, and the sound he makes is one I’ve never heard from him—not rage, not the hum turned inside out. Pain with the bottom dropped out of it. A second clamps onto his tail and fouls it, dragging it down so it can’t whip. The third goes low for his legs. For one horrible stretch the biggest thing in my world is buried under wrong-built bodies, wings half-pinned, tail trapped, three of them swarming him in the narrow dark—and the gray light shows me his knees starting to buckle.

He goes down to one knee.

I have never seen him kneel to anything.

He gets a claw into the one on his tail and tears it half open, and it keeps clutching, the way they do, no body-sense left to tell it to let go. He has to peel it off piece by piece while the other two work at him, and that costs him the seconds. In those seconds the low one quits his legs and comes for the nest.

For me.

It hauls itself up the wood wall, the long arms faster than any legs, the clicking close now, close enough that I smell it, that clean made-nothing smell right on top of me—and it crests the lattice and it’sin.In the hollow. Between me and the back of the nest where he carved the nursery. And Riven is twenty feet down and pinned, roaring my name in the only word he has for it, which is no word at all. “RRRAAAAGHH!”

Something the Cage spent thirteen years putting to sleep stands all the way up in me.

Neve’s knife is where it’s lived since the night he took me, the dull little ceramic blade she pushed into my hand withif something comes through the wall, use it.My fist closes on it before I decide to move.

Something came through the wall.

The thing reaches for me with an arm that bends a joint too many. I don’t run. There’s nowhere to run, and there’s the small curve of my belly between us, and that does the deciding. I go in under the reach, close, inside the angle where the crossbow lashed to its forearm is useless, and I drive the knife into the side of its throat with everything thirteen years of stored-up nothing has turned into.

It doesn’t die. Of course it doesn’t. It hisses, the sound climbing wrong, and the wrongness nearly stops my hand. But I’ve watched him kill these twice, every one, and I know the truth of them now: the first wound is never enough. So I tear the blade loose and drive it again, up under the misplaced jaw, and the thing’s own weight drags it down the edge, and the ceramic bites a cold line across my hip on the way. I feel the heat and the wet of it. The pain hasn’t come yet.

It comes down on top of me. We go down together, and I’m under it for a second that lasts a year, the made-nothing smell in my mouth, the clicking against my ear, and I get the knife up between us one more time and find something soft where a soft thing shouldn’t be, and shove.

It stops clicking.

Then the weight rips off me all at once, flung, and he’s there. Free. The other two dead in pieces behind him, all of him slick with blood, his and theirs. He takes the thing I stabbed and finishes it the only way these die, the second death, the skull, the wet, the done, and he does it without once looking away from me, the amber gone wild, asking the thing he can’t say.

“I’m okay.” I’m shaking so hard my voice comes apart in my mouth. “It’s down. I’m okay.”

He holds my eyes one second longer. Then the predator takes him again, there’s still a white shape down in his passage, and he drops back off the nest to be sure, to put his body between meand whatever’s left. And I’m alone in the wreck: Neve’s knife in my fist, my hip running warm, the understanding only starting to arrive.

The Eunuch waited through the whole of it. It didn’t fight. Didn’t flinch. It watched six things that used to be males die twice with the flat attention of something counting stock, and when the count came out wrong it simply steps back from the wreck the way you’d step around a puddle.

A whistle. One sharp note. The Eunuch turns and walks out the way it came, unhurried. Not fleeing. Leaving on schedule.

The passage goes quiet.

Too quiet. The wet sounds of the fight have stopped. The clicking’s stopped. The Eunuch’s gone—and now there’s nothing down there at all. No breath. No drag of weight. Nothing.

“Riven.” It comes out cracked. I haul myself to the lip of the nest, my hip screaming, Neve’s knife still locked in my fist, and look down into a black I can’t see the bottom of. “Riven.”

Nothing answers.

He went down to one knee in front of me. He took a bolt through the shoulder. He dropped back into that dark still bleeding, and now the dark’s gone silent, and the silence is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’d trade the whole canopy for one wet, ragged breath.

“Riven—” My voice breaks all the way apart, and I’m already over the lip, already climbing down toward the black and whatever’s lying still at the bottom of it, because if he’s down there then I am not going to crouch up here in the nest he built and let him be alone in the dark—not him, not the one who was alone in every dark there ever was until me?—

A sound.