40. Ellie
ELLIE
Dawn, before the light’s reached the forest floor. I smell them before I hear them.
Something wrong. Sharp, antiseptic, the smell of a room with clean walls and no windows—cutting through the green-rot morning of the canopy like a blade through silk. My whole body seizes before my head names why. The smell isn’t alive. The smell was made.
My stomach knots. The baby kicks, hard, sudden, a fist against the inside of me, like even the thing growing in me recoils from it.
Riven’s already awake.
I feel him change before anything else—every muscle locking against my back, his arm tightening over my ribs, not holding me now.
Pinning me. His wings snap open, the rush of air cold on my bare skin, the membranes filling the hollow and blocking the gray light from the entrance.
His hand presses me flat to the furs in one motion.
Stay.
No word. A snarl, low, from the base of his throat. “Grrrhh.” It goes through me like a hand closing on my spine, no human sound in it, not even a Shade sound, the sound of a thing that is going to kill whatever made that smell or die in the passage trying.
He drops off the nest. The dark swallows him.
Silence.
I lie there, hand on my belly, my heartbeat so loud it fills the hollow, fills the space against the wood where his body just was. The baby pressing back against my palm—I’m here, the same flutter his hand finds every night.
I count my breaths. One. Two. Three.
Then, from the south passage, a sound I have no name for.
Clicking. Off-rhythm. Like bones tapped together underwater. Not footsteps—not the careful gait of the Eunuchs. Looser. Wronger. Too fast for walking, too ragged for running—the sound of limbs that don’t agree on a pace. And from the east passage, the same sound answers. Two directions.
I crawl to the nest edge, my belly dragging the furs, my knees shaking against the wood floor, and press my face to a gap in the lattice.
The gray pre-dawn comes through in pale shafts, and what it shows me empties my head out.
Shapes, moving through the passage below.
Tall—near as tall as Riven. But wrong. The word rings in me like a struck bell.
Too thin through the body, too thick through the thighs and shoulders, the proportions all misplaced—like something took a body apart and built it back from bad instructions.
Right pieces. The arrangement catastrophically off.
The first one passes under me and I see its back.
A horn juts from between its shoulder blades, one horn, from the wrong place, curving up like a rib that got loose from the chest. The next drags a tail that hangs off the base of its ribs instead of its spine, scraping the floor.
The third has shoulders too high, arms too long, hands nearly brushing its knees.
Naked, all of them. Pale skin pulled tight over wrong angles.
One passes through a shaft of light and where its sex should be there’s nothing—not shrunk like the Eunuchs.
Gone. The body unmade in the deepest way there is.
My stomach heaves. I swallow it down.
Their mouths don’t close. The clicking comes from there—hissing, percussive, language stripped to bone. Crossbows lashed to their forearms, the bolt tips glinting wet. Six of them. And behind, one white shape—a Eunuch, hunched, pointing them on with small flat gestures, the way you’d aim a dog.
My knuckles ache on the lattice.
Riven hits the first two from above.
His full wingspan throws across the passage, the dark membrane blotting out the dawn—his dark, his ground, the whole space gone to shadow.
The impact shakes the wood. I feel it through the floor, through my hands, through my belly, my teeth clacking together.
The wet crack of a body into the wall. A thin high hiss from something that should be dead.
The one he threw gets up.
My breath stops. The torso’s caved on one side, an arm swinging loose from a shattered shoulder, the back-horn cracked—and it stands. The hissing climbs. With the arm that still works, it reaches for its crossbow.
The sound Riven makes isn’t a roar. “Hhrraaghh.” It’s deeper, from the same place the hum lives but turned inside out, revulsion and recognition. He knows what these are, or his body does, the way mine knew the smell was wrong before I did.
He kills it again. The claw takes the skull. Wet. Final. It stays down this time.
But killing twice takes time, and there are five more.
They spread through the passage, the clicking rising into something that sounds coordinated, too fast for any human mouth.
A bolt flies out of the dark—Riven twists, wings folding tight, and it buries in the wood wall three feet under my face, the wet tip sizzling, the wood darkening, the sour smell rising till I gag into my hand.
He catches the next shooter with his tail, drags it into the shadow, breaks it twice.
My fingers go numb on the wood. Everything in me is screaming to run, to hide, to curl around the baby and vanish into the darkest corner of the nest. I don’t move. I watch. Looking away would mean not understanding what this is costing him.
The third gets close while he’s busy with the second kill. Faster than the others, low, belly almost on the floor, the long arms hauling it forward quicker than running. It fires from below, close.
The bolt punches into his shoulder—between the wing-joint and the spine, the one narrow place the muscle’s thin. The tip hisses going in. Steam comes off the wound. I see the steam. I see the dark blood.
Something in me breaks open.
Not a thought, a sound, a cry that tears out before I can stop it, high and raw, the sound of a woman watching the only thing between her and the dark take a bolt through the shoulder. I clamp my hand over my mouth. Too late.
What punches out of him isn’t a roar. A sharp breath through his teeth. “Hgh.” The grunt of a thing that didn’t know it could be hurt, finding out.
Then the pain lands, and his body answers it with everything it has. The hurt arm swings anyway, the claw opening the thing chest to hip; it drops, gets up, and he takes it by the horn jutting from its chest and crushes its skull on the wall.
Three left, and the bolt’s working in him now.
I watch it take hold, a hitch in his hurt side, the wing on that side not snapping as wide, a half-beat of slowness where there was none. The Unmade don’t tire. They don’t bleed the way a living thing bleeds. And they’ve stopped coming one at a time.
The last three hit him together.
One takes the wounded side, claws hooking into the wing-joint where the bolt went in, and the sound he makes is one I’ve never heard from him—not rage, not the hum turned inside out.
Pain with the bottom dropped out of it. A second clamps onto his tail and fouls it, dragging it down so it can’t whip.
The third goes low for his legs. For one horrible stretch the biggest thing in my world is buried under wrong-built bodies, wings half-pinned, tail trapped, three of them swarming him in the narrow dark—and the gray light shows me his knees starting to buckle.
He goes down to one knee.
I have never seen him kneel to anything.
He gets a claw into the one on his tail and tears it half open, and it keeps clutching, the way they do, no body-sense left to tell it to let go.
He has to peel it off piece by piece while the other two work at him, and that costs him the seconds.
In those seconds the low one quits his legs and comes for the nest.
For me.
It hauls itself up the wood wall, the long arms faster than any legs, the clicking close now, close enough that I smell it, that clean made-nothing smell right on top of me—and it crests the lattice and it’s in.
In the hollow. Between me and the back of the nest where he carved the nursery.
And Riven is twenty feet down and pinned, roaring my name in the only word he has for it, which is no word at all. “RRRAAAAGHH!”
Something the Cage spent thirteen years putting to sleep stands all the way up in me.
Neve’s knife is where it’s lived since the night he took me, the dull little ceramic blade she pushed into my hand with if something comes through the wall, use it. My fist closes on it before I decide to move.
Something came through the wall.
The thing reaches for me with an arm that bends a joint too many.
I don’t run. There’s nowhere to run, and there’s the small curve of my belly between us, and that does the deciding.
I go in under the reach, close, inside the angle where the crossbow lashed to its forearm is useless, and I drive the knife into the side of its throat with everything thirteen years of stored-up nothing has turned into.
It doesn’t die. Of course it doesn’t. It hisses, the sound climbing wrong, and the wrongness nearly stops my hand.
But I’ve watched him kill these twice, every one, and I know the truth of them now: the first wound is never enough.
So I tear the blade loose and drive it again, up under the misplaced jaw, and the thing’s own weight drags it down the edge, and the ceramic bites a cold line across my hip on the way.
I feel the heat and the wet of it. The pain hasn’t come yet.
It comes down on top of me. We go down together, and I’m under it for a second that lasts a year, the made-nothing smell in my mouth, the clicking against my ear, and I get the knife up between us one more time and find something soft where a soft thing shouldn’t be, and shove.
It stops clicking.
Then the weight rips off me all at once, flung, and he’s there.
Free. The other two dead in pieces behind him, all of him slick with blood, his and theirs.
He takes the thing I stabbed and finishes it the only way these die, the second death, the skull, the wet, the done, and he does it without once looking away from me, the amber gone wild, asking the thing he can’t say.
“I’m okay.” I’m shaking so hard my voice comes apart in my mouth. “It’s down. I’m okay.”