Page 54 of Dark Mate

I step in.

Crates. Wooden, metal-banded, stamped with the Ordained sigil—that clean geometric shape I saw on everything in the Cage. Stacked along the walls. The wood’s weathered but thesigils are crisp. Not scavenged from ruins. Taken off supply routes.

He intercepted these. Eight months at the Cage’s wall, and he wasn’t only learning the building. He was learning what fed it.

I open the nearest crate.

Glass vials packed in straw. Thirty, forty of them, wax-stoppered, the liquid inside pale gold—almost the color of his eyes, which turns my stomach for no reason I can name. I pull one free and hold it to the thin light. A label, in neat little handwriting.

Settling blend. Daily dose 10 to 15 milligrams, set by weight and how well she takes it. Stir into the morning tea. Never past 20 without leave. At the right dose: eases the nerves, smooths the temper, makes her easy to lead, dulls the hunger. Past that: fogs the wits, takes the memory, loses her somewhere she can’t be reached.

Takes the memory.There it is, in tidy little letters, the reason the years between eight and the Cage are a smear of Mora’s smile and floral steam. They didn’t just keep me quiet. They reached in and took the parts they didn’t want me carrying.

My hands are steady. They stopped shaking last night, in the dark, with his cum settling behind my navel and my head going clear. Steady hands, sharp mind, and I’m standing here reading the recipe for the thing that tasted like morning for thirteen years.

Makes her easy to lead.

I set the vial down, careful, the way you set down something that might go off if you handle it wrong.

Behind the vials, paper. Real paper, not the lesson-tablets. Same neat hand. The first folder’s thick, stamped with the sigil and one word:Inventory.

Of course. Of course that’s the word.

I open it.

Names. Ages. Dates taken. Compliance scores—percentages, tracked four times a year, inked into little climbing graphs. Some steady. Some rising. A few dipping, marked in red.Slipped. Dose raised. Keep watching.

Lissa. Age twenty-four. Compliance 91%. Taken at nine.Fought it hard at first. Heavier dose the first eighteen months. Settled since. No slips in three years. Presentation-grade.

I knew Lissa. She braided my hair on feast days and hummed while she did it, this tuneless little sound I always took for happiness. Ninety-one percent. Stabilized. The humming was the sound of a woman managed so thoroughly she’d forgotten she was being managed.

I keep turning. Tessa. Brin. Katya. Names I know, names I don’t. Every one a woman. Every one a row in a ledger.

Then my own page.

Ellie. Age 23. Compliance 94%. Taken at 8. Daily dose 12mg. Settles easy. Rarely slips. Presentation-grade—the best face we have this year. Hold her back for the high ceremonies.

I read it three times.

Presentation-grade.The way you grade fruit at the market.The best face we have this year.The way you’d talk up an animal before the auction. The 94% is just a number for how completely the tea erased the girl underneath. They gave me a cup with my name painted on the bottom and called it special. It was a dose. The tea went in, Ellie went quiet, and ninety-four percent of the time Ellie was exactly what they’d ordered: sweet, soft, pretty,easy to lead.

The other six percent was me. The scratch on the wall I noticed and didn’t chase. The question about the east wall I swallowed before it finished forming. The mornings I woke restless before the tea smoothed it flat. Six percent of a person, blinking through the fog for thirteen years, never awake long enough to understand what she was looking at.

The fury doesn’t come up hot. It comes up cold. The kind that settles into the bone and stays, the kind that rebuilds a person from the ground because the first one was never allowed to finish getting built. The coal in my chest catches all the way.

I don’t throw the folder. I don’t tear it. I stand there holding my own file and I shake. It isn’t the withdrawal, or the cold, or fear. It’s this.

A sound comes out of me that might be a laugh. Nothing funny in it.Of course.Of course the tea tasted off some mornings. Of course Lissa quit arguing the year her dose went from twelve to fourteen. Of course Neve came back from a week out in the wasteland with sharp eyes and fury in her jaw—she’d missed her doses, same as I missed mine when he took me. Shewoke up.She tried to warn me. She put a knife in my hand because a knife was the one thing she could give me that the tea couldn’t swallow.

Riven stands behind me. Not touching. Just there. He lets me burn. He doesn’t tell me it’s all right, because it isn’t, and he doesn’t waste a word on a lie.

“How many?” My voice comes out flat. Not empty—packed.

He counted. Eight months of watching gave him numbers.

“Forty-one.”

It lands in the hollow like a dropped stone. Forty-one women. In the Cage I just walked out of. Still being managed.