Page 83 of Dark Mate

And I plan.

EPILOGUE: THE NEST

Two months later.

The belly’s big enough now that I map from a half-step back, leaning in to reach the bark-strips, one hand braced on the wood wall. Riven carved me a lower shelf for it and never said why. He just built it, the way he heats the water, the way his eyes go to the entrance even while his hands are busy with something else.

The network’s grown. Nine women now. Nine nests strung together by territorial vibrations, by scent-marks scored into boundary trees, by messages passed mate to mate across the deep canopy. Three supply lines disrupted, the doses arriving later each time. One Cage gone fully dark, six weeks without its tea, two women slipped out into the canopy in the confusion and got claimed by Shades whose instincts pulled them the way Riven’s pulled him toward me. Two more nests. Two more threads in a web the Ordained can’t see, because they’re still looking for roads and I’m building roots.

And Lira.

I carry her name the way I carry the scar on my hip from Neve’s little ceramic knife, the night I put down the thing thatcame through the wall, and the same edge that saved me cut me on its way down. Not a wound that heals—a wound that teaches. She was the newest link I’d made, the last before the assault. They took her three territories east while I was fighting for my own life, with no one in reach to stop it. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know what they’re doing to her.

I know that when I get her back—when,not if—she’ll be one more thread in a web the Ordained can’t burn fast enough.

The message comes at dusk. Not through the territory channels—hand-carried, six handoffs, two weeks in transit. A strip of bark with claw-marks scored deep, a language the Shades had long before women came into the canopy, written in the depth and the spacing of the scratches. Riven reads it the way he once read text.

His face changes.

“What is it?”

“A woman,” he says. “Three territories north. An aerie held by a Shade the network’s never touched.” He turns the bark, reading. “Not a node. A woman with training. She’s organizing—not a network. Something faster. She moves through the canopy with her mate. She has maps. Routes. She speaks like someone who held a weapon before she ever held a male.”

My skin prickles. Not cold. Recognition.

“The message isn’t to the network,” he says. “It’s to you. By description.The woman in the deep stalk territory who broke the southern supply route.She wants contact.”

My heart’s going hard. “What’s her name?”

He reads it one more time, the marks, the spacing, the language he once would have spoken and now reads in scratches on wood.

“Ada.”

The name goes through me like the hum. Not a sound—a frequency, a recognition so deep it doesn’t live in my head butin my body. Ada. The woman Neve whispered about in the Cage corridors. The one who jumped. The one they said was dead, broken, lost to the canopy and the thing that caught her.

Not dead, not broken. Organizing.

Two women. Two webs. Two kinds of strength built in two kinds of dark.

Riven sets the bark down. His hand finds the curve of my belly, the absent track his thumb has worn there over the months. Guin kicks against it, hard, like she heard her own future being written on a strip of wood.

“We’ll write back,” I say.

His hum starts. The deep one. The one that saysminein the language older than every language he lost.

She comes three months later,in the cold.

And she is so small.

I knew she would be. I felt her grow, the slow stubborn stretch of my belly over the months, the flutter turning into a kick turning into an elbow shoved against my ribs at three in the morning while her father’s hand chased the movement across my skin. I carried her through a supply-line disruption, through the long correspondence with a woman three territories north, through the weeks of rebuilding after the bolt went through his shoulder. I carried her through arguments about expansion routes, through long quiet evenings of braiding bark fiber, through the nights his hum ran through my back and she kicked in time with it, like she already knew the sound.

I knew she’d be small. I didn’t know she’d be this small.

She fits in his hand. One hand—his palm cupping the whole of her, skull to hips, his fingers curling past her feet. The first time he held her, the claws retracted so fast I heard them click against the bone. He stared at her face. She stared back. Theamber eyes—his eyes, in a face the size of my fist—locked onto his and held.

He didn’t speak for two hours.

Not the rut’s silence, and not the hurt-silence of the wound. This was the silence of a male holding something so fragile that even the vibration of his own voice felt dangerous. He sat with his back to the wall, his wings tucked flat, so still that only the rise and fall of his chest said he was breathing. His thumb—the pad wider than her whole hand—rested against her cheek. She slept.