Page 28 of Dark Mate

“Who did this to you?”

The hum stops dead.

His throat works under my fingers. A sound climbs it and breaks apart halfway—a low snarl with no word in it, aimed at nothing I can see. Whatever he wants to say, his mouth won’t make it. Then nothing.

The quiet is enormous. I’ve hit something. I pull my hand off the line and lay it flat over his heart instead, and his heart is going hard and fast, and that’s an answer too.

His hand comes up. Closes over mine—swallows it, my whole hand gone inside his grip—and holds it there. On his heart. Off the scar. He’s not pushing me away. He’s just moving me. Telling me where he can stand to be touched and where he can’t, the only way he’s got.

“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay. Not there. I hear you.”

The hum starts back up. Shaky, then steady. His thumb drags once across the back of my hand, rough and slow, and stays.

I don’t push it. Whoever you were before all this, somebody owned you. Somebody put a blade on your throat just so you’dnever forget who was holding it. I don’t know the whole story. I know that much.

The Cage told me his kind are divine instruments. Weather with teeth. Things that happen to you, with nothing going on inside.

The Cage lied about the tea. The Cage lied about me. I’m starting to think it lied about him too, and that not one thing they ever taught me is going to make it out of the dark in one piece.

There’s a heat in my chest that wasn’t there this morning.

Small. A coal. It’s not the venom. It’s not the wrongness. It’s under both, in the spot the tea kept flat for thirteen years. It’s warm. It’s mine. I don’t have a name for it. It lit while my fingers were on his broken horn. It got brighter when I worked out what the line on his throat was.

Some of it’s for him. Some of it, I think, is for me.

His arm tightens over my ribs. The hum drops lower, like he can feel the coal catch, like some part of him knows something’s changing in me and he’s holding steady while it does.

I breathe with the sound and the coal glows.

I keep the beetle shell behind my eyes, the empty, whole thing on the windowsill, the shape a body leaves when it climbs out and goes on as something else. I think I’ve been the shell a long time. Smooth. Whole. Hollow. Checked every morning by hands that liked me best when there was nothing in me.

Something’s climbing out of me down here.

I don’t know what it’ll be yet. But it’s awake, and it’s mine, and it is not going back in the cup.

13

STALKER

The rut’s in a lull, and I’m still inside her, knotted, sealed, the way I’ve been since I took her and the way I’ll be until the dark is done with us. She sleeps against my chest with her hand on the worst of my scars, and the question she asked today goes around in me where I can’t set it down.

Who did this to you.

I couldn’t give it to her. The words for it aren’t in my mouth yet. Maybe they never will be, maybe some things stay in the old languages and rot there. But she asked, and the asking pried something open, and now the dark behind my eyes isn’t the nest. It’s before.

I was a man once.

I have to reach for that the way I reach for any old word—past the change, past the riverbed of stones, down to where the man is kept. He’s still there. Smaller every year. But there.

He had hands that didn’t end in claws. A voice that could make every sound a mouth can make. Three tongues in it, and the gift of moving between them, standing in the gap where one people’s words ran out and another’s began, building the bridge that let them meet. That was the work. That was the wholeof him. He loved it the way I love the dark now: completely, without needing anyone to understand why.

There was a city. Stone and glass and light that came on at night without fire. Rooms full of people who didn’t share a word and needed to, and he stood in the middle of them and made it possible. There was a woman who laughed at the way he talked in his sleep—three languages at once, she said, arguing with himself in tongues she didn’t know. I don’t have her face anymore. The change took faces first, before it took words. But I kept the laugh. I kept the laugh longer than I kept her name.

She died when the sky came down. So did the city. So did the rooms and the people and the light that came on without fire. The asteroid took the world mid-sentence. I was working a trade, a word that meantgiftandobligationboth, deciding which to carry across—and then there was no across. No other side. No sentence. Just the long roar of everything ending at once.

What it left of me, it changed. I’ve felt the shape of that part before, in the dark, the way you turn a thing over when there’s no one to tell it to. The grammar coming apart. The words going off the shelf one by one until I reached and found dust. Then the body, the bones splitting, wings tearing their way out of my back over weeks while I lay in the ruin of a dead world and couldn’t even scream, because screaming needs a throat that still remembers how. By the time I was this, I was already silent. A whole mind, howling, locked in a mouth that could only growl.

My cock flexes inside her where she’s wrapped around me, warm and soft and asleep, and the small movement pulls me halfway back into my body, into the rut, into the only thing that has ever made the silence bearable. I hold there. I let the memory keep going, because she asked, and because no one ever asks.