Page 72 of Dark Mate

“That,” I say, “was mine.”

His eyes focus. The gold sharpens. Something moves across his whole face—not a smile, bigger, something that cracks him open from the jaw up.

He lifts me. Both hands under my arms, hoisting me off the furs the full distance to his mouth in one motion, my feet leaving the ground, my weight nothing to him, and he kisses me with the taste of himself still on my lips, and takes it back. Hard. Not the careful press from before. His mouth claims mine, and the growl that runs out of his chest into my mouth is the sound of a male who just got unmade and is putting himself back together by taking his mate apart.

He holds me there, high off the ground, cradled against the furnace of him, my mouth devoured by a jaw that could split my lip and chooses, barely, not to.

The kiss bruises. I let it.

When he pulls back, my lips are swollen, my chin still wet, my heart slamming where he can feel it against his chest.

“The tea didn’t make you that, either,” he says. Low. Rough.

I laugh, broken, half a sob, the sound of a woman who just took the most power she’s ever held from the most undefended place there is. A mouth the Cage trained foryesandthank youandof course, Sister.I aimed it somewhere of my own choosing for once.

He folds me into his chest, my face in the hollow under his collarbone where my head fits, where I’ve slept for weeks, where his heartbeat is loudest. The hum finds me, not the sex-hum, the holding one, low and constant, the one that saysminein a language older than the three he lost.

Kind: mine. Manageable: theirs. I carry both. The whole difference is which one I aim.

38

ELLIE

The supply route runs through the canopy-edge territory like a vein through tissue—regular, predictable, essential.

Brin told me about it, through the careful broken relay the network’s become, woman to woman, nest to nest, carried by flight and territorial handoff until the whole route took shape in my head. Two Eunuch handlers. A cart pulled by a beast I’ve never had described to me, wrong in its proportions, made-wrong like the Eunuchs themselves, obedient the way a thing is obedient when it was never given anything else to be.

The cart carries crates with the Ordained sigil on them. Inside: the doses. Fresh stock. The thing that keeps forty-one women dim and sweet and asking nothing.

The route crosses ground held by a Shade called Kael—Tael’s neighbor east. Tael sent word to Kael’s mate, a woman named Daris, quiet, rarely seen, but in the network enough to pass me what I need. Kael’s territory sits across the route like a tollgate. If Kael fouls the cart, the doses don’t reach the Cage on time.

I don’t ask Kael to fight. I ask Kael to exist.

The plan’s Riven’s, given to me his way, three sentences, each one carrying a strategy that took him a minute to build and would’ve taken me an afternoon.

“Kael marks the route as his. Scent. Claw-marks. The boundary grammar.” He says it the way he once must have set down a clause, every piece weighed. “The handlers won’t cross claimed ground. They’ll reroute.”

“And the reroute?”

“Four days longer. Open canopy. No cover.”

Four days. The doses come late—not stolen, delayed. No violence, no confrontation, no risk to anyone in the web. Just a Shade doing the one thing Shades do: claiming ground. And the Ordained can’t complain about a Shade marking his territory without admitting they’ve been running supply through claimed canopy, which means admitting they know where the territories are, which means giving up something they’d rather keep.

It’s clean enough that I exhale through my teeth.

I send the word through the net. Daris to Kael’s mate. Kael’s mate to Kael. Two days later it comes back through Brin in one syllable: done.

I never see it happen. This isn’t my kind of story. I’ll never hold a wall, never run a patrol, never stand between the Ordained and the women they want kept quiet. I’m the one who plans, not the one who fights. It happens in a territory I’ve never set foot in, done by a Shade I’ve never met, and I hear about it the way everything travels out here: slow, through people who trust each other, women passing words between nests like seeds between trees.

The shipment doesn’t arrive on schedule.

And somewhere behind walls I’ll never walk into again, forty-one women are about to have a very strange week. The tea won’t come on time. The morning will break its shape. Some of them will feel the fog thin and not know why. Some will feel the firstsharp edge of their own mind cutting through the gauze. Some will panic. Some will rage. Some will sit in the light from their barred window and feel the exact terrifying thing I felt—a clear head, for the first time in years.

I stand at the nest entrance when the word comes back. The canopy spreads out in front of me, all that green dropping away into shadow below, climbing into gold above, the world that used to be a rectangle through bars and is now justeverything,running on past where my eyes can follow. My hand’s on my belly. Four months along, the curve plain under the fur now. The baby shifts when I press—a flutter, a small stubborn insistence:here.

And I understand, standing barefoot and pregnant in the mouth of a monster’s nest a season out of a cage I thought was the whole world, that I just reached back inside those walls without touching them and broke something the Ordained needed.

I built it. Not a wall. I’ll never build walls. Not a weapon. I’ll never hold one. A thread, strung woman to woman through the canopy, pulled hard enough to snap a supply line miles long. They spent thirteen years making me sweet and soft and useful. I used every bit of it to take something of theirs.