Epilogue 2 Dead Zone
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The web Ellie built out of bark-strips and stolen charcoal is bleeding the Ordained dry. Eleven women. Eleven nests. One map only she can read — and one woman, Lira, dragged back behind stone while Ellie couldn't reach her.
Now the name the Cage corridors only ever whispered is reaching back across the canopy.
Ada — the one who jumped, the one who lived — has a plan to cut a supply line and wake a Cage full of women.
It needs two apex males who've never shared a border, two women who've only ever spoken in code, and one strike on neutral ground that doesn't exist between predators.
And in the dead zone between territories, something that's held its silence for thirteen years has started to listen.
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"Your male is blocking the entrance," she says.
"So is yours."
We look at each other. Then at the wall of male between us. It's absurd. Twenty feet of combined apex predator standing in a doorway conducting a silent territorial negotiation while two women wait to have a conversation.
Ellie ducks under Riven's arm. The movement is practiced. She's done this before, figured out how to live with someone three times her size. I sidestep Corvin's wing. Same skill, different geometry.
We meet in the hollow. Two women who have been communicating through bark-strips for weeks, seeing each other for the first time.
"You're shorter than I imagined," I say.
"You're more armed than I imagined." Her eyes move from the blade strapped to my thigh to the baby sleeping against my chest. The juxtaposition sits between us like a shared joke neither of us planned.
I laugh. Ellie is looking at me with an expression I haven't seen since Petra, the recognition of someone who understands what it costs to be standing here, alive, armed, holding a child fathered by a monster she chose.