Page 12 of Dark Mate
“Tessa,” I say. “What does that look like to you?”
“Sedation,” she says. “Heavy sedation. I’ve seen women walk like that after surgery, after losing a lot of blood, after the kind of thing that makes the brain check out. That’s not serenity. That’s a woman with her edges sanded off.”
I think about the tea. My tea. The morning tea that smooths the restlessness, takes the sharp edges off waking and rounds them into something easy to hold. I think about Mora’s leathercase with its vials and pipette. I think about the locked kitchen annex where the sisters make the blends. I think about thirteen years of drinking something I never questioned, because questioning was never a thing the Cage gave me the tools for.
“Neve,” I say. “What’s in the clearing?”
She doesn’t answer right off. Her thumb presses the inside of my wrist, against the vein, like she’s counting my pulse.
“A male,” she says. “Dosed. The Ordained catch the weak ones—unmated, starving, sick with the rut. They drug him with something that keeps him still. Then they stand a woman in front of him and wait.”
“And if the scent doesn’t match?”
“They make it happen anyway.” Her voice is flat. Careful. The voice of someone describing a thing she’s seen and can’t unsee. “He doesn’t need to be hard for it. The body moves on its own. The Ordained know that.”
The courtyard air is warm, still, holding the jasmine and the fountain and nothing else. Three women just walked into the jungle in white dresses with flowers in their hair, and what’s waiting in the clearing is a drugged male who’ll be forced through a mating his body never chose.
The gate’s closed. The women are gone. Brother Cassian’s chant fades out.
Neve’s hand is still on my wrist. I can feel her pulse, or maybe mine. They’re close enough to the same beat that I can’t tell them apart.
“The ones who come back,” I say. “The ones who got claimed and returned. Where are they?”
“North wing,” Neve says. “Second floor. The sisters say they’re resting.”
“Have you talked to them?”
“Once. For a minute. A woman named Shirin—claimed two years ago, came back seven months on with a belly the size ofa harvest pumpkin. She told me she missed the canopy. Said it smelled like rain.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all she said. Then her minder came and took her back to the north wing, and I never saw her again.”
I look at the closed gate. The wood’s dark, old, banded in iron. The gilded bloom of the Ordained’s sigil is carved into the crossbar—the same open flower that’s on every room, every paper, every theology book in the Cage. The bloom that’s meant to stand for divine union.
It looks like a mouth.
“Neve. The scratch on the wall.”
“I know.”
“It’s getting closer. Lower. Whatever’s making them is learning the wall.”
“I know.”
“What happens if it gets through?”
Neve lets go of my wrist. She looks at the gate a long moment. The morning light catches her gray eyes and turns them silver.
“I don’t know,” she says. “But I’ll tell you this much—whatever comes through that wall will be the first thing that ever came here because it wanted to. Not because the Ordained set it up.”
She walks off. The jasmine’s dropping petals. The courtyard’s filling with women coming in for breakfast, their voices warm, their morning faces soft with the tea’s first settling. The schedule starts back up. The place holds.
I stand in the courtyard and feel the ghost of that unfiltered air still on my skin from those few seconds the gate was open. Warm. Wet. Heavy with everything the Cage doesn’t allow.
And in the canopy past the wall, just before the gate shut—a shape. High up, fast, silent. Not a bird. Too big, too sure of itself.Near-black, sliding into the shadow between branches the way ink slides into dark water. I saw it for less than a second.
My breath caught. Not fear, not the fear the theology warns about, the fear that fights the change, the fear the body’s meant to grow out of through surrender. Something else. Something that sat in the space between my ribs and knew what it was looking at without having one word for the knowing.
