Chapter 30
ADA
The fire is low. The canopy dark above us, the stars visible through the gaps in the aerie ceiling—not the sharp pinpoints I remember from before the asteroid, but the hazy spread that the dust layer left behind, a pale wash across the sky that makes the dark look thinner than it should.
Somewhere in the ruins below, a night creature calls—a long warbling sound that echoes off the old concrete and comes back changed, stretched by distance, barely recognisable as the same voice.
I'm sitting across from Corvin. My legs are crossed.
I'm wrapped in furs that smell like him, the warmth of the fire on my face, the warmth of his proximity on everything else.
He's watching me eat the last of the canopy fruit—small, purple, sour-sweet, the juice running down my chin.
His tail is doing the slow sweep behind him that means he's thinking, the tip brushing the aerie floor in long arcs.
I know him now. Not the way I knew him during the rut—from inside, from the feeling of his cock and his heartbeat and the vibration that never stopped.
I know him from the outside. The way he builds a fire with the same care he uses for everything else.
The way he checks the aerie walls before dark, every night, his hands running along the woven branches, testing joints.
The way his tail curls around his own ankle when he's absorbed in something, the idle self-soothing gesture of a male who's been alone for a very long time.
"Tell me about the switch," I say.
He goes still. Not his body—his body is always still when something costs him, the way a soldier goes still before answering a debrief question he doesn't want to answer. His tail stops its sweep. The tip curls once against his calf and holds.
I wait. The fire shifts—a log settling, sparks lifting into the dark air and winking out against the canopy ceiling.
Through the gaps in the aerie wall I can see the wasteland stretching under starlight.
The old towers are silhouettes against the sky, their shapes softened by thirteen years of vine and fern.
A river catches the starlight in the distance—a silver thread running through the dark canopy, following the path of what used to be a highway.
"The first one was Kael," he says. His voice is low, rough around the name, the way a voice gets when it hasn't said a name in years. "Three days. Fast. He was—young. The young ones went faster."
I stop eating. The fruit juice is sharp on my tongue but I've stopped tasting it. The night breeze moves through the aerie, carrying the smell of wet bark from the canopy below, cool against the skin of my forearms. I pull the furs tighter.
"We tried to hold them," he says. "When the first few switched. We thought—" A long pause. The fire pops. His jaw works around the words. "We thought it was a disease. That if we restrained them, kept them contained, it would pass."
"Did it pass?"
"No." The word is flat. Final. His hands are on his knees, the claws pressed into his palms the way they pressed earlier when he told me about his unit.
"It doesn't pass. It changes you. Everything about you—the skin, the bones, the way the brain works.
I could feel them in the cells. My people.
I could hear them thinking, like a sound below sound.
But they weren't thinking anymore. Not the way we think. Something else."
He stops. The silence is long enough that the night sounds fill it—the insects, the distant water, the creak of branches under the weight of things that move after sunset. His tail uncurls from his calf and starts to sweep again, slowly, the motion of something that needs to move to keep going.
"How many switched before you?"
"All of them." His amber eyes find mine across the fire. The light moves in them. "Thirty-nine. Over four months. I held command structure through the first twenty. After that there was no structure. Just me, in a room, waiting for something I couldn't stop."
I try to hold that image. A soldier—an officer, a male who'd held territorial command for six years—sitting alone in a room while the world he'd built dissolved around him, one body at a time. Counting the ones who were left. Knowing the count only went one direction.
I know something about that kind of counting. I did it for four years on the wall.
"The language goes first," he says.
He's not looking at me now. He's looking at his hands—the claws, the red skin, the hands that used to be something else.
"Before the body changes. Before the rest of it. The words—they start to break apart. Sentences lose their shape. I could feel it happening. Like watching a wall crack."
His tail sweeps faster.
"I kept a record. For as long as I could write. I wrote down everything I needed to remember. Names. Coordinates. What I was. What I had been." He pauses. "The handwriting got worse. The last entry is just—" He stops.
"Just what?"
"Marks," he says. "Lines that aren't letters anymore."
The fire crackles. I press my palms against my knees and breathe.
The air is cool in my lungs, tasting of smoke and canopy sap.
Thirteen years ago, everything changed. The asteroid, the dust, the silence.
And then the mutations, slower, working through the population in ways nobody understood until it was too late to understand anything.
"You got the language back," I say.
"Some of it." He looks at me. The amber eyes are steady, the firelight shifting in them. "It came back slowly. Years. The words are still—smaller than they were. I used to think in paragraphs. Now I think in pieces and have to build them before I say them."
"You're building them well."
Something moves in his face. Not quite a smile. The space where a smile lives in someone who has lost the habit of making them. "You make me want to build faster."
I don't have a response for that. I finish the fruit. Wipe my chin with the back of my hand. The juice stains my fingers purple in the firelight.
His tail reaches across the fire's warmth and brushes my ankle. I let it stay. The contact is light—just the tip, warm against my skin, the idle touch of a male who has been alone for years and is learning how to be near someone without urgency.
"Tell me about the settlement," he says. "Your people."
The question surprises me. Not because he asked—he's asked before, during the rut, in fragments I wasn't sure he'd remember.
Because of how he asks it. Full attention.
His gaze on me with the same focus he gives the canopy when he's reading the territory.
He wants to know. Not as intelligence. As something that matters to me, which means it matters to him.
I tell him. The words come easier than I expected—the wall, the rotations, the four years of keeping everyone alive one day at a time.
I tell him about the solar panels we stripped from the warehouse roof, how the light changes when you're fifty feet up on a metal surface that's been baking in the sun all day.
The way the generators sound when a cylinder misfires—the hitch in the rhythm that wakes you from sleep because your body knows what it means before your mind catches up.
The east block stairwell when the wind comes from the south, the way it moans through the cracks in the concrete like something trapped.
I give him training fighters too—Dov, who held the gate when I couldn't. About what survival cost—the supply runs that came back short, the mouths that needed feeding, the decisions that never had a good answer, only a least-bad one.
I don't tell him about Petra. Not yet. He already knows—he told me that, checked before I woke—but I keep it anyway. Some things I need to give in my own time.
He listens the way he does everything. With his full attention, his body still, his tail against my ankle. The fire between us burns low, the coals glowing orange in the dark, making shadows on the canopy wall that shift when the breeze moves the leaves overhead.
"I want to go back," I say.
He doesn't flinch. "I know."
"Not to leave. To see them. To know they're alive." I watch his face while I say it, looking for the refusal, the possessive tightening I've seen in every powerful male I've ever dealt with. The look that says you're mine and you stay where I put you.
It's not there.
"Tomorrow," he says. Simply. Like it was always going to happen and he was just waiting for me to name the day.
I look at him across the dying fire. His crown horns catching the last of the light, his amber eyes steady, the enormous careful stillness of him.
The male who caught me when I fell. The male who held me for three weeks and let me stand at the aerie edge and didn't move to stop me.
The male who lost forty people, lost his own language, rebuilt both out of fragments.
Who sits across from me now, building his sentences one word at a time because he wants them to be right.
"Corvin."
He looks up.
"Thank you."
His tail tightens fractionally against my ankle. He doesn't say anything. The night sounds fill the space—the insects, the water, the breathing canopy. He doesn't need to say anything. The tail against my ankle says it.