Page 65 of Dark Mate

The third woman is a relief, and her name is Wren.

She cried the second she saw me. Not Brin’s silent tears, her whole body, the sobs filling the deep root-nest, her hands reaching for mine before I’d finished my name. Fourteen months alone, the longest of anyone I’ve found, with a green-black shade big enough to dwarf even Riven, tusks curving up from his lower jaw, and a language that never came back at all.

I held her. She talked for two hours—fragments, mostly. The claiming. The fear. And then the slow, bewildering discovery that the monster who took her was also the thing that heated her water, braided leather into something like shoes, killed an Unmade outside her door—and came back with blood on his tusks to feed her berries out of his hand.

Fourteen months alone with a love story she couldn’t tell anybody, in a language her partner can’t speak.

I left her with the only thing that mattered. She’s not alone. Brin’s to the south. Tael’s above. I’ll be back.

The fourth woman nearly broke me.

She didn’t speak. She sat in a half-built nest—thin pelts, unfinished walls—and stared at nothing. Her rust-colored shade crouched beside her, tending her with the desperate focus of something that knows its mate is broken and can’t find the tool that fixes her.

Eleven months. Her Cage, Riven worked out later from the files, ran the highest compliance scores of any of them. Stronger tea. Higher doses. When her shade took her, the withdrawal didn’t clear her head—it shattered it. Without the tea holding the pieces, her thoughts never came back together. Eleven months on, they’re still scattered.

I sat with her three hours. She didn’t look at me. Her hand, when I put mine over it, was cold. Limp. The hand of a woman whose compliance score got so high that when the tea left, there wasn’t enough person remaining to fill the space it had been holding open.

The Cage did this. The beautiful prison with its approved gardens and its named cups and its Sisters smiling while they erased the women in their care. This is the programworking.Not the showcase girl I was trained to be—the truth of what’s underneath when the management succeeds all the way. When the score hits a hundred. When there’s nothing left.

I held her hand. I told her my name. I told her she wasn’t alone. I told her the tea was a lie.

She blinked once. I don’t know if she heard me.

Riven carried me home without a sound. I put my face in his neck and tried not to think about the cold hand. The network got a node. The node might be past reaching. I’ll go back anyway.

The fifth woman found me before I found her.

Sola. The one whose woven marker Brin found tied to a boundary tree—a strip of patterned fabric, deliberate, a message. She’s waiting at the edge of her shade’s territory when Riven brings me in, standing on a branch forty feet up, watching us come with the still alertness of someone who’s been expecting company and can’t decide whether to be relieved or alarmed.

She’s thin, sharp-featured, hair cropped to her skull. Quick eyes that sweep me, then Riven, then the path of our approach.

“You’re from the eastern Cage,” she says before I’ve even landed. Not hello. A fact, confirmed.

“How did you know?”

“His ground borders the eastern perimeter. Your scent’s in his markers. I’ve been watching them since they changed—three weeks ago his territorial scent went heavier, layered with something human. Female. Sudden. That’s a claiming.”

I stare at her. Nine months in the canopy with no contact and no information past what she could see for herself, and she tracked his scent-markers, clocked the change, worked out the timing, and read a claiming off it.

“I left the marker for Brin’s male,” she goes on. “His ground changed fourteen months back, same pattern. I tied a strip of cloth at the boundary, woven in a Voss Hold pattern, so if the woman came from there she’d know it. She never answered.” Something crosses her face, fast, contained. “I didn’t know if she couldn’t or wouldn’t.”

“She couldn’t,” I say. “She found it. She didn’t know if it was safe.”

Her jaw tightens. One nod, a woman who’s been right about something for two months and gets no pleasure out of the confirmation.

She leads me into her nest—compact, neat, everything in its place, the food sorted by type. And pinned to the bark with thorns: strips of bark covered in dense charcoal handwriting. Three months of patrol patterns. Ordained routes, timed. Boundaries. Marker locations. Settlements within trader-reach and the routes the traders take.

“I had no one to give it to,” she says. Flat. But under the flat I hear the same thing as Brin’s tears and Tael’s hostility and Wren’s sobs. Nine months of building a picture of the world with nobody to show it to.

I take the bark strips. The charcoal smudges my fingers.

“You have someone now,” I say.

Five women in a week.

The network comes together the way his language did—slow, from the foundation up, each connection a word reclaimed. Brin to the south, pregnant and holding onto thirty-nine percent of herself with both hands. Tael to the northwest, hostile and brilliant, already eyeing the information like a builder eyes materials. Wren to the east, talking and starving for contact. The fourth woman, nameless and silent, the hardest visit I have. Sola to the northeast, nine months of intelligence and nowhere to send it until me.

Five nests. Five versions of the same story—stolen, claimed, changed. Each one different. Each one alone until I showed up.