Page 9 of Dark Mate

I close my eyes. Mora hums. Not a tune, just a sound, low and easy, the buzz of it carrying through her hands into my scalp. My shoulders drop. My breathing slows. That tight band at the base of my skull loosens by degrees under her fingers. She knows right where it lives. She finds it every evening without being told, and works it like clay, pressing until the knots soften, until my head tips forward and my breath comes slow and full.

This is the part of the day I feel most held. More than the tea, more than the schedule, more than all the theology’s careful comforts. Mora’s hands in my hair, working the oil, working the tangles, working me into something smooth and cared-for and ready for whatever the Cage has next.

The lantern flickers. The room smells of almonds and warm stone and the faint herb note under the oil. Through the window the canopy’s a black mass against the darkening sky, the shape of the branches just catching the last of the light.

“Mora.”

“Mm?”

“What happens to the women who get claimed?”

Her hands don’t stop. This is the worn version of the question. I’ve asked it before, she’s answered it before, and the answer is always the theology. But tonight I’m asking it different. Tonight the scratch on the wall is three days old, the warmth in the east corridor is getting stronger, and Neve’s gray eyes are sitting in my head like something I can’t set down.

“They are cherished,” Mora says. “The bond is complete. They carry the next generation.”

“Have any of them come back?”

“Some visit. When the bond is secure.”

“What do they say?”

Her hands slow. Not stop—slow, the brushing dropping to half-time, the strokes longer, more careful. She’s choosing. I can feel the choosing in the way the brush moves.

“They say it’s unlike anything,” she says. “Beyond words. The bond completes them in ways they can’t describe.”

“Do they say it hurts?”

The brush stops. One full second of stillness. Then it starts again, the same slow rhythm, and her voice hasn’t changed at all when she speaks.

“The body adjusts. As it does with every change.”

She sets the brush down. Reaches for the leather case. I’ve seen this case a hundred times—it lives in her robes, comes out for our evening ritual, goes back when she leaves. She opens it on the bed behind me. I hear the soft clink of glass. A vial, maybe two. The little sound of a cap unscrewing.

“Your fertility reading is strong,” Mora says. She says it the way she saidyour ends are dry, a flat little fact about my body, sitting in the same easy place as hair condition and skin. “Brother Cassian looked it over this morning.”

The words land in my body before they reach my head. My stomach tightens. The muscles across my lower back pull taut.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re healthy. Ripe.” She saysripethe way she says everything—warm, no edge to it, like the word belongs to a garden and not to me. “The kind of reading that draws attention come presentation season.”

Presentation season. She says it the way the sisters say everything—gently, like it’s weather and not a sorting. Like being ripe is the same thing as being cared for.

I turn on the stool. Her hands fall away from my hair. She’s holding a tablet, small, dark-screened, the kind of thing I’ve seen the sisters carry and never been let to touch. The screen’s got a list on it. Names, numbers, dates. My name near the top. Beside it a row of marks I don’t understand—letters and symbols that could be medical or scheduling or something else entirely. The screen’s blue light catches her face from below, deepening theshadows under her eyes, making her look older and less gentle for the half-second before she fixes her expression.

She sees me looking. The tablet goes back into her robes.

“It’s nothing to worry over, love.” The smile. The warmth. “It only means you’re well cared for. That’s all.”

I want to believe her. The wanting is a real pull in my chest, thirteen years of practice at taking Mora’s words and laying them like stones over whatever dark water runs underneath. I want the reading to mean what she says. I wantwell cared forto be the whole sentence.

I turn back around. She picks up the brush.

The leather case is still open on the bed. In the mirror across the room—a small oval of polished metal, not real glass. I can see what’s in it. Two glass vials. A measuring pipette. A folded paper with writing I can’t read from here.

The tools of something. Not grooming—grooming is oil and brush and comb. These are the tools of something more careful than that.

“Mora.”