Page 55 of Dark Mate

“Ages?”

“Fourteen to thirty-two.” A pause. He weighs it. “The youngest has been there since she was six.”

My chest seizes.

I was that girl. Eight years old, brought in by someone I can’t even picture, because the tea smeared those first years into Mora’s smile and morning light and the taste of something floral they told me was love. Six. She’s six. She drinks her tea every morning out of a cup with her name on the bottom and shethinks it’s sweet, because sweet is the only thing she’s ever been handed.

Forty-one cups. Forty-one names. Forty-one women with compliance scores and dosage charts and tidy little notes about how well the drug is taking, how completely the person inside got swapped out for the product the Ordained need her to be.

“I’m keeping these.” I hold up the file. Mine. And a vial. The whole cold record of what they did to me, written out in the careful hand of somebody who thought of it as paperwork.

He nods once. Not permission—he’s agreeing with something already true. He took these and stored them down here and waited for the woman they describe to come read them with her own eyes.

I look at the rest of the crates. The vials. The files. Forty more names.

“I’m going to need all of them.”

The amber holds my eyes, and something moves behind it. Not surprise. Something warmer—the same look he had when he said my name the first time. A translator catching a language he didn’t expect to hear.

He stacks four crates on one arm like they weigh nothing and finds the way back up. I follow with my file against my chest and two vials of the lie that tasted like love, the pale gold of them catching the thin light as we climb.

The fury doesn’t cool on the way up. It doesn’t need to. It’s the first honest warmth I’ve had in thirteen years, and it burns right alongside the other fire—the one that started when he saidEllie—the two of them feeding each other.

By the time we reach the nest I don’t have a plan. I have the need for one. The certainty thatforty-oneis going to take more than being angry. That the six-year-old drinking her morning tea out of a cup with her name on the bottom needs more thana woman shaking in a root hollow with a stolen file against her heart.

I set the vials on the shelf next to the comb he carved me. Two things and two vials. A small, growing pile of what’s mine.

Forty-one.

I’m going to remember every one of them.

30

ELLIE

The fire’s low—contained, efficient, like everything he builds. The light finds the hollows of the nest and turns the dark wood gold.

I’m sitting across from him, close enough to feel his heat, which is always there—the furnace under his skin I’m starting to understand isn’t just warmth. It’s something the change gave him, something that runs hotter than any man ever did. The fire between us is almost pointless. He’s his own. The fire’s just for light.

“Tell me,” I say. “The whole thing.”

No fragments this time, no single words handed out one at a time. I want the story. Who he was before the change turned a man who lived in words into a thing that couldn’t make one.

He’s quiet a long time. The amber holds the fire. His tail traces slow patterns in the furs—the motion I’ve learned means he’s sorting through something.

When he talks, his voice comes from lower down than usual. Not softer. Deeper. Like the story lives somewhere he doesn’t go often.

“Three languages.” He starts there. Not his name, not the asteroid. The thing that made him him. “I spoke three. Fluent in two. The third I was still learning. The work needed all three. A post between groups who didn’t share a word of each other’s tongue.”

His jaw works—the muscle shifting, the search for the right build.

“Translation isn’t swapping one word for another.” Each word set down with the weight of a man who spent years on the thought. “You take the meaning and build it again inside a different structure. The rooms move around. But the thing living in the rooms—what the speaker needs the listener to feel—that has to survive the move. If it doesn’t, you failed.”

He lived in the gap between meanings. Held it open. Made it a place people could meet. A wrong word could bring a whole negotiation down, so he chose every syllable like it mattered, because it did.

“The last sentence I was working on.” Lower still. “A trade. The third language. The speaker used a word that meantgiftandobligationboth. I was deciding which to carry across. Whether the offer was generosity, or debt.”

He stops.