Page 3 of Dark Mate

“Theology at ten,” she says. “Brother Cassian’s got a new lesson ready.”

“Is it the divine union again?”

“Every lesson is the divine union, love. That’s rather the point.” She smiles. The smile is real. It always is. That’s the thing about Mora—she isn’t pretending. She believes every piece of this the way the walls believe in holding up the roof. The belief iswhat keeps her standing. You couldn’t pull it out of her without the whole of her coming down.

I dress. The linen’s cool on my arms, warm where it touches the places the sun’s already heated through the window. My hair’s long—past my shoulders, past my ribs, honey-blonde and heavy. They keep it oiled with something that smells like almonds. I braid it myself, a plain plait down my back, my hands doing it without me. Three strands, under, over, the rhythm as automatic as breathing. The braid is what mornings feel like, the same way the tea is what mornings taste like.

After Mora leaves—Tessa’s tea to bring, other rooms to visit, the whole round of morning kindness that’s her one purpose in this building. I go to the window.

The courtyard’s down below. The three olive trees throwing the long morning shadows they always throw. The fountain catching the sun and tossing it back in little coins of light against the far wall. Two women crossing the garden toward the dining hall—Ireth and a girl I don’t know by name, hooked at the elbow, Ireth’s humming carrying up even through the bars.

Past the courtyard. Past the walls. The canopy.

I can see it from up here, the top edge of the tree line pushing against the perimeter wall, branches grown so thick they’ve shoved the ironwork outward in places. The leaves are dark and waxy, packed so close they look like one solid green thing instead of a thousand growing ones. The canopy is a sea and the Cage is an island sitting in it. The whole world out there is green and wet and moving in ways I have never felt on my own skin.

I’ve never been outside these walls. Not once in thirteen years. They brought me here in a covered cart. I remember the dark of it, the canvas smell, the jolt of the wheels on broken road. I remember getting here. I don’t remember leaving anywhere.

The scratch is new.

On the outside of the wall, where I can just catch it from my window at an angle, a deep gouge dragged through the pale stone, higher than I could reach with both arms up. The stone’s old, weathered to a gray that goes almost silver in the right light. The scratch looks like bone showing through skin. Raw, pale, the surface torn open to show something underneath that’s never met air.

It wasn’t there yesterday.

I press my palm to the bar. The iron’s cold. The scratch is three floors down and forty feet to my right, on the stretch of wall that faces the thickest part of the canopy. Something came close enough to touch the stone, and strong enough to mark it. Something with reach. Something with claws.

I look at the scratch until the breakfast bell goes. Then I go and eat porridge with honey, and the scratch sits in the back of my head like a splinter I can’t quite get at.

The rest of the morning is the schedule.

Breakfast in the dining hall—long wooden tables, ceramic plates, food that shows up made by hands I’ve never seen. The porridge is grain the Ordained bring in on the monthly shipment. The honey’s from hives the sisters keep in the garden. Everything in the Cage is provided. The word the lessons use issustained.We are sustained by the Ordained’s grace. Clothed in their care. We eat what we’re given and learn what we’re taught and get ready for the day we serve our divine purpose.

The purpose is the Nethershades.

I know the shape of it the way I know the shape of the bars. The teaching never changes: we’re chosen women, gathered and kept safe so that one day we can be given to the divine instruments, the things that came out of the asteroid’s wreck, huge and winged and driven by an instinct the lessons call the sacred bond. When a Shade claims a woman, it’s holy. Shecarries the next people into the world. The children are the future.

The theology is tidy. It’s as old as I am, built in the years after the sky fell by Eunuchs who needed a story that made sense of what had been done to them. They built the story, then they built the Cages. The women came after. Some chose it. Some didn’t. Thirteen years in, that line’s worn down to nothing.

The men are the part the lessons touch lightly. The sky fell hardest on them; everyone knows that much. The asteroid took the men—most of them it killed, and the rest it changed. The strongest and the wholest it made into the divine instruments, the winged ones the whole Cage is built to serve. The others it softened into the gray-robed brothers who carry our trays and keep the gates, the gentle sexless ones I’ve called Eunuchs my whole life without ever once wondering what the word meant. Only the oldest men stayed men—Brother Cassian and the few like him, already too old, when the sky came down, for the change to take them. The women it left whole. The lessons say that’s the mercy in it: the world needed remaking, and we were the ones left able to carry it. I’ve never thought to ask why a mercy needs walls.

I eat my porridge. The honey’s sweet, not the wild, tangled sweetness of a thing that grew on its own, but the careful sweetness of hives kept by people who know exactly what they’re doing. I eat slow. The spoon’s ceramic, smooth, warm from my hand. The women at my table talk about the jasmine blooming, about the cloth shipment due next week, about whether Ireth’s new embroidery is too much for the silk she’s working it on.

“She’s trying chevrons,” says Pria, twenty, round-cheeked, her dark hair pinned in the fancy coil the sisters taught us last month. “On silk. With that thread. It’ll pucker.”

“Let her try,” says Lissa, across the table. Lissa’s loud the way sunlight is loud—she fills a room without meaning to. Copperhair that won’t take the sisters’ pins, wild curls springing loose inside an hour of any style. She eats with the spoon in her left hand because she broke her right wrist falling off the garden wall as a girl. The bone set crooked. Nobody here knew enough to break it again and set it right. The Cage gives you everything except anyone who knows how to fix the things that matter.

“If it puckers, she’ll pick it out. She always does.”

The talk is warm. The talk is the same talk we’ve had in a hundred different shapes for thirteen years. I listen to it the way I listen to the fountain, as background, as proof the place is still running, that the world inside the walls is the world it was yesterday. The hall smells of grain and honey and the herb soap we wash with, a mix so familiar I’ve stopped being able to smell it at all. The light through the high windows falls across the table in bars. Always bars. Even the light gets divided up in here.

The scratch on the wall isn’t part of this talk. The scratch doesn’t belong to any talk I’ve ever heard in the Cage. It belongs to the outside—the green, wet, moving thing past the walls I’ve never touched. Something out there put its hand on us last night. Something with claws and reach and a reason.

I finish my porridge. I wash my bowl. I go to theology.

After the lesson—Brother Cassian’s careful voice laying out the holiness of giving yourself up, the same lesson in new words, always the same lesson. I find myself in the east corridor.

I’m not supposed to be here on my own. The east corridor runs to the outer wall, the stretch closest to the thick canopy, where the ironwork’s been pushed out by the weight of the trees. The sisters never call it forbidden. They say there’s nothing to see. They say the east corridor’s drafty, that the stone sweats there, that the footing’s bad. They say it the way you say anything you’ve said so many times the truth of it got replaced by the saying.

The corridor’s narrow. The stone is sweating—Mora had that part right. Damp beads on the surface, catching the light from the one window at the far end. The air’s different here. Cooler. Heavier. The smell of growing things pushing through the stone—wet dirt, bark, something green and alive the rest of the Cage’s clean air never carries. My skin prickles. The hair on my forearms stands up.