Page 16 of Dark Mate

ELLIE

Idon’t know it’s my last day. That’s the cruel part, that this morning looks like every other morning, tastes like every other morning, runs the same old track of tea and light and schedule that’s held my life together for thirteen years. The last morning ought to feel like something. It ought to come in with a weather of its own, a thing the body can sense, the way the air changes before a storm. It doesn’t. It comes in like a Tuesday.

Mora brings the tea. I watch her make it—something I’ve done a thousand times without once seeing it. She takes my cup off the tray. My name on the bottom. But before she fills it, she checks the tablet. The small dark screen that lives in her robes, the one with the names and numbers I can’t read. She looks at the screen. She looks at my cup. She picks one thermos out of the three on the tray.

Three thermoses. Not one. Three, each with a little mark on the lid I’ve never noticed—or noticed and never questioned, which is the same thing in here. The marks are ink dots: one, two, three. Mora picks the one with two dots. Fills my cup. The amber pours in a smooth stream, the floral scent lifting right away, and I watch it fill to the same line on the ceramic it alwaysfills to. Measured. Not poured till the cup looks full—poured till the cup holds exactly what it’s meant to hold.

The doses are one to a woman. Forty-one women, forty-one cups, forty-one names, forty-one blends measured with a pipette out of a leather case. Mixed to a schedule I’ve never seen. The tea isn’t chamomile and valerian and some local flower. The tea is a recipe. My recipe. Written for my blood.

I take the cup. Mora smiles. The smile is real. The love behind it is real. The cup is warm in my hands and the warmth is real, and not one bit of that changes what’s in the cup.

I drink.

The warmth settles. The clarity I’ve been hoarding—the half-dose leftovers, the missed evening’s sharpness—gets shoved down another layer. But not gone. Not all the way. I’m carrying it lower now, somewhere the tea can’t quite reach, the way you can press a bruise under the surface and the ache still doesn’t leave.

“Mora,” I say. “Tessa’s been moved to preparation.”

“She has. Isn’t that wonderful? Brother Cassian felt she was ready.”

Tessa, who got here three weeks ago. Tessa, who asked why the women scream. Tessa, who walked like she carried her own weight and was offended anyone offered her a chair. Three weeks in the Cage and she’s been moved to the wing where Lissa stopped arguing, where Hanne forgot how to raise her voice, where women go in with questions and come out with the glazed calm of things that have been hollowed out and filled back up with something quieter.

I saw Tessa this morning. At the breakfast table, in a different seat than usual, the preparation wing eats at the far end, three empty seats between them and us that look like nothing and work like a wall.

Tessa was eating. Slow. Her movements had that careful quality I watched in Lissa’s feet, the deliberate set-down ofsomeone working a body that isn’t all the way hers anymore. She held her spoon the way Hanne held her spoon, gripped too high, fingers loose, the wrist doing the work because the finer muscles have been numbed back to nothing.

Her jaw moved in even, steady chewing. She stared at her porridge. Not eating with any appetite—fueling.

Three days ago Tessa was asking Brother Cassian pointed questions about screaming. This morning she hums while she eats. The tune is shapeless. The tune is the same one Ireth hums. The same one they all hum, the prepared ones, the same note, the same rhythm, like the preparation rubs out a woman’s own music and drops a single shared sound in where it used to be.

I look at Tessa and I see myself. Not the self I am now—the self I’ve been for thirteen years. The settled self, the smooth self, the one who drinks the tea and braids her hair and watches the light cross the floor because there’s nothing else to do, and the light is beautiful, and the beauty is enough because the tea says it is.

“Mora. Am I going to be presented?”

She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t blink. The question lands on her the way rain lands on stone—without marking the surface.

“Brother Cassian has raised your fertility reading,” she says. “Preparation will begin within the week. This is an honor, Ellie. The highest the Ordained can give.”

“Within the week.”

“Yes.”

“And the tea. During preparation. Does the dose change?”

Her smile doesn’t waver. But something behind it shifts—a settling of its own. She takes my hands. Her grip is warm, sure, the grip of a woman who loves me enough to walk me to the edge of something terrible and call it holy.

“Everything changes during preparation, love. The sisters will guide you. You’ll feel at peace.”

I pull my hands free. Gently. Not a shove—a drawing-back. The difference matters. In the Cage, pulling away is an event. I’ve never done it before.

“Thank you, Mora.”

She looks at me a long moment. Whatever she sees, the bruise under the surface, the clarity I’m carrying lower than the tea can reach—she names it something else. Nerves, maybe. Pre-presentation jitters, the kind of thing the sisters know how to handle. She’ll note it in her tablet. She’ll adjust the evening dose.

She goes. I sit on my bed. The cup’s empty. The silk is smooth under my hands.

Neve gives me the knife at midday.

We’re in the garden. The jasmine’s heavy, the scent almost too much, the bushes so thick with bloom the petals have dropped onto the bench, the path, the rim of the fountain. The air smells sweet and bruised, the way jasmine smells when it’s hit its limit—all the way open, already starting to turn.