Chapter 2 #2
She's sitting on the bench beneath the gilded flower arrangement, her hands folded in her lap, her face composed with the composure of someone who has already made a decision and is waiting for the courage to follow through with it.
She is twenty-four, a third-year fighter—fast on her feet, the best grappler in her cohort.
The Ordained chose well, which means they've been watching the training yard.
Her dark hair is braided back from her face, the braid is neat, the neatness of it breaks something in me—because she braided her hair this morning like any other morning, like the day ahead was going to be any other day.
Her sister, Mol, has been sick for six weeks. A lung infection that started as a cough and has become someone drowning one breath at a time. I've heard it through the walls at night—the wet, tearing sound of Mol trying to breathe. The silence between each attempt stretches long enough to wonder.
The Ordained promised medicine. The kind we can't make, can't steal, can't barter for—antibiotics, antivirals, sealed vials with their sigil pressed into the wax.
Some of it is old-world stock, hoarded from hospital ruins before the canopy swallowed the medical districts.
But some of it is new. The formulations too clean, the quantities too consistent for scavenging.
The working assumption in New Reach is that the Eunuchs manufacture somewhere—that they have the facilities, the enslaved labor, the technical knowledge to keep production running.
We can't confirm it. The Ordained's supply lines don't lead anywhere we can follow.
The price is Senna. This is how they do it—they watch, they learn what a woman loves, and then they make an offer that turns coercion into something that looks like choice. By the time Brother Lief sits across from Dov tomorrow, Senna will have already said yes.
I sit next to her. The bench is worn smooth by other women who have sat here with the same decision already made.
Smooth the way the parapet is smooth under my feet—shaped by repetition, by the weight of bodies doing the same thing over and over until the surface remembers.
The flowers smell like something cultivated in a place where people have time to cultivate flowers.
They smell like a world that doesn't exist anymore.
I reach over and take her hand.
Neither of us says anything for a while. There's nothing I could say that she hasn't already turned over in her head a hundred times. I know because I have too.
After a while she says, "Mol figured out how to make the grain paste taste like something. Last month. She was very pleased with herself."
"What did she put in it?"
"She won't tell me." The corner of her mouth moves—not quite a smile, but the shape of one. "She said she'd tell me when I got back."
I hold her hand a little tighter. She lets me.
Mol dies without the medicine. Senna loves Mol more than she's afraid of the Cages. None of it changes.
The light shifts through the room as the morning turns.
Thin gold coming in through the high window, moving across the floor in a slow crawl, touching the edge of the bench and then our joined hands.
The calluses on her fingers from the textile work—rough where the needle has built up ridges of skin.
A living woman's hand, warm and present.
When I stand to go, she says, "Ada."
"Yeah."
"The one who said it was beautiful. Do you think she meant it?"
I consider lying. I consider the truth. I consider the space between them where most of us live.
"I think she meant something," I say. "I don't know if beautiful is the right word for it."
Senna nods. She folds her hands again. She's going to go.
She's going to walk into that room, give her name and her body so that Mol can breathe.
She's going to do it the same way she braided her hair this morning—with care, with neatness, with the composure of someone who has decided that love is a thing you prove with what you're willing to lose.
I leave. Some things I can't fix by being better at them. I've been learning that lesson for four years. It doesn't get easier to carry.
The afternoon run takes me outside the walls.
The eastern gate opens onto a rope bridge I built with two others in my second year—salvaged cable and split plank, spanning the gap between the outer wall and the first major branch of the canopy.
The branch is as wide as a car, the bark scaled and dark, worn smooth where I land every time.
Forty feet above the canopy floor. Below, the light doesn't reach.
Things moving in the undergrowth comes up in waves—the creak of root systems that have broken through the old pavement, the low calls of the dog-things moving somewhere to the north.
The paths through the upper canopy are part rope, part plank, part memory.
I've lashed connections between major branches where the gaps are too wide to jump, marked decision points carved into the bark, built what amounts to a trail system two stories above the old city.
The growth reclaims it constantly. I spend part of every run with a blade, cutting back new shoots that would close a path in a week if I left them.
The canopy doesn't care about my infrastructure. I maintain it anyway.
Today's run is northeast: check the supply caches, read the territory shifts since the last storm.
Three caches—salvage points where we've wedged waterproofed containers into branch forks, compressed food and basic medical supplies that would take the settlement weeks to replace. The seals are intact.
The wildlife is loud today. Birds that evolved fast enough to navigate the new growth, small mammals following the vegetation, things harder to name.
I give the dog-things wide berth. They're not interested in humans unless we're moving slow or injured, and I'm neither.
The new growth itself is the more constant hazard—half of what the canopy produces is toxic on contact, vine sap that raises blisters, black-leafed ground cover that causes nerve damage if it touches bare skin.
I know the safe paths. They took a season of carefully documented mistakes to establish.
I move through them without thinking now, the way you stop thinking about where you put your feet on a wall you've walked a thousand times.
The big mutations keep to the lower levels. I've encountered them twice in four years. I don't plan to encounter them again.
I go out. I come back. Every time.
The territory markers in this sector are fresh.
New gouges in the bark—not the Apex, too small, wrong claw spacing.
A lower-tier Shade staking a secondary claim on the canopy edge.
Opportunistic. The marks are shallow, tentative—the kind a Shade makes when it's testing how far it can push before the dominant territory holder takes issue.
The sap in the gouges hasn't dried yet. It beads along the cuts like amber tears.
I commit the position, the depth, the direction of the gouges to memory. Southeast, away from the Apex's range. This Shade is smart enough to claim away from the thing that will kill it.
The sun is going down by the time I slip back through the eastern gate. The watch changes. My second-years take the wall.
I eat alone in the mess—rice, reconstituted protein, a handful of dried fruit that someone bartered from a southern trader.
The fruit is chewy, too sweet, the kind of sweet that means it was preserved with more sugar than the fruit itself contained.
Then I climb to the upper level and sit in the window where I can see the canopy darkening.
The Apex's territory is a black shape against the last of the light.
The crown of the tallest tree, where the aerie is.
I've never seen it up close. I've seen the silhouette—massive, winged, the crown horns visible even at this distance—once, two years ago, at dawn, when the light was right and he was airborne.
A shape that made the air move differently around it.
He hasn't taken a mate in the recorded history of this territory. The Ordained's records go back eight years. Eight years of peak rut seasons, eight years of presentations laid in the clearing, and he has never claimed.
An unmated Shade that old accumulates—the rut cycles without release, the feral drive compounds. By any measure he should be the most volatile thing in the grid, most likely to move unpredictably, to take what the cycle demands wherever he can find it. Instead he holds his ground and waits.
I don't know what for. What I know is the territory data, the patrol pattern, the fact that in twenty-six months his boundary has not moved. I work with what I can measure.
I pull my jacket closer. The cold is coming. Below, in the courtyard, someone is singing—low and rough, a song I don't recognize. The sound carries up through the concrete and glass and settles somewhere in my chest where I keep the things I don't have words for.
Tomorrow the Ordained come. Brother Lief with his silver tongue, his clean hands, his smile that measures women like inventory.
Tomorrow I stand in a room with that and keep my mouth shut.
I sleep with my boots on. I always do.