Page 68 of Dark Mate

They’ve found a nest. Not mine. The network’s. North ridge—Sola’s ground, or close. The made-things have a trail bent toward it. The handler-stink is fresh. The Ordained are already moving through my canopy toward a woman who spent nine months gathering everything she knew with no one to give it to.

It isn’tlateranymore. It isn’t even soon.

It’s started.

I go home fast and silent, the kill still on my hands, my side burning where the thing’s claws found it.

She’s where I left her. Curled small, the comb in reach, her brow smooth. She kept her word and stayed warm.

I clean the gore off in the stream before I let myself touch her. Then I fold down around her, careful, and the hum starts on its own, out of my chest, the way it always does for her.

She stirs. Doesn’t wake. “Cold,” she mumbles, and burrows back into my heat.

“I know,” I tell her. “Sleep. I’ve got you.”

In the morning I’ll tell her. We’ll plan, she’s better at plans than I am now, a thing I never thought I’d think about anyone. And then the dead men and their made-things will come up out of the dark for what’s mine.

And they’ll learn what I learned the night I stopped being something they could hold.

36

ELLIE

He came back from the perimeter before dawn with another shade’s blood on him and a cut along his side, and he told me what he found.

The soft ones deep on his ground. The made-things—more than one, moving in a pattern something’s steering. The Ordained have quit circling and started hunting, and they’re not hunting one taken woman. They’re hunting the thing I’ve been building.

I sat with that a while. Then I asked him to teach me how to survive out here.

Because that’s what changed between yesterday and this morning. Yesterday the canopy was a beautiful enormous thing I was learning to live inside. Today it’s the ground I might have to run across, or fight on, or hide in. So I want to know it. All of it. The way he does.

He teaches the way he does everything—by showing, not telling. His words are full now, weeks past the rut, but the canopy doesn’t live in words. It lives in his hands.

He strips bark off a root and holds it out. The underside’s fibrous, pale, rough as linen. “Fiber.” He tears a strip clean,one downward pull, the bark coming apart into threads I could braid. “This kind only. The dark bark shreds. You’ll know by touch.”

I tear a strip. It resists, then gives. Stronger than it looks—my fingers know it before my head does.

The Cage taught me textures. The Sisters dressed me in fabrics I learned by hand—silk, cotton, the coarse weave of the shifts. My fingers know materials. They just never once touched anything useful.

He moves deeper into the wood. I follow, barefoot on warm wood. The light thins as we drop, green to green-brown to almost none, and the air goes cool and wet with it, thick with loam and the mineral breath of water moving somewhere close. The deep dark has its own smell. I know it now the way I used to know the smell of the morning tea. This is the world he came up out of after the change: down here, where nothing looks, where a thing that had lost its words could learn to listen instead.

He ducks under an overhang; I walk under it standing up. The size of him in these corridors is almost funny—ten feet of male folding himself small, wings flat, horns scraping the ceiling. He wasn’t built for closed spaces. He chose to live in them anyway, same as he chose to rebuild a language in a mouth that wasn’t made for it.

He kneels at a stream and works a pale green bulb out of the wet soil without disturbing the ones around it. “Tuber. Grows where water meets root. Sweet when it’s fresh. Bitter after two days—still food, but your stomach won’t thank you.”

I bite it. Crisp, faintly sweet.

“Good?”

“Good.” I chew. “Show me more.”

He shows me more. Three hours of it. Which grubs are protein, he cracks one and the inside’s pale and rich, edible raw, and I eat it and don’t make a face, which earns me a lookI’d swear is approval. Which water’s clean—the streams over mineral stone, not the standing pools where things breed. Which bark makes cord. Which leaves wrap food. Which roots hold weight and which crack under it.

And all of it is too big. I keep catching on that. The grubs are the length of my finger. The beetles trundling the root-bark wear shells I could eat a meal off. A moth ghosts through the lantern-dark with wings spread wider than both my hands, patterned like a watching eye, and drifts right past ten feet of predator without a care. I ask him why everything down here is so much more than it ought to be, and he takes his time, the way he does when the answer reaches back into the before.

“The change didn’t only take the men,” he says. “It went through everything that was alive when the sky came down. The trees. The grubs. The cats that hunt the high crown.” A pause. “Most of it grew. Some of it grew wrong.” He turns the bitter leaf in his fingers. “The thing that came for you in the rut. In the dark, while I was still knotted in you.” A pause. “That was a beast once. Something small, I think. The change made it into that instead.”

I think of the rot-and-old-kills smell of it, the wet drag of its body through the passage, and I understand the canopy a little better. It isn’t just a forest that got large. It’s the old world’s animals, remade the same brutal lottery the men were, most bigger, some monstrous, all of it loose out here with no walls to keep any of it back.