26. Maeve
MAEVE
He tells me about them in pieces—not a story, not a speech, just fragments that come loose over the course of a day, shaken free by whatever is happening behind his eyes as the feral wall crumbles.
He’ll be tending the fire, or sitting in the furs with his hands on his knees, and a piece will surface.
“Billy was the oldest.” His voice catches. Comes back. “Eight. He was—he liked to climb.”
Silence, minutes of it. The fire cracks, throwing orange light up the sharp planes of his face, catching wet at the rims of his eyes without ever spilling over. My hands keep moving through the greens.
Eight. Six. Four. My chest tightens around the numbers before he even finishes the sentence, my mind lurching somewhere I didn’t send it—how many years I’d get before whatever’s inside me now could climb a tree or draw in the dirt with a stick.
The thought scares me more than it should.
I push a leaf between my fingers and don’t let my hands stop moving.
“Sam was six. Quiet. Drew things in the dirt with sticks.” A pause so long I think he’s done. Then: “Dickie was four. He followed Billy everywhere. Everywhere.”
The tremor comes back, through his whole body this time, not just his hands.
The massive frame that held me through weeks of rut, that drove into me with a force that shook the root walls, that carried three women’s worth of weight without breaking stride—a tremor that starts in his chest and radiates outward through his shoulders, his arms, the tips of his folded wings.
I’m learning the difference between rut-shaking and grief-shaking. The rut shook him toward something, toward the drive, toward the next cycle. This shakes him apart. The vibration isn’t building to a peak. It’s the sound a structure makes when the thing holding it up gets pulled out.
“The asteroid,” he says. “They were—small. Too small.”
He means too small to survive the mutation.
I know this the way I know who gets picked for the clearing line and who doesn’t, the grim rule of who lives and who doesn’t, measured in body weight, age, and distance from the nearest shelter.
His boys were under ten. The mutation took males under forty-five.
Children that young didn’t transform. They just died.
He doesn’t say how. He doesn’t need to. The shake in his body says enough. The fire’s gone smoky, untended, and the smell of it thickens the air between us until it’s almost something I could touch.
I sit with him, present but not touching.
The camp-women didn’t know how to be gentle—we knew how to be here.
Gretchen sat with me the night after my mother’s anniversary, the night I couldn’t sleep, the night the shaking came and wouldn’t stop.
She didn’t hold me. She sat on the barracks floor with her shoulder against the wall and her breathing steady, and the steadiness was enough.
I could find the rhythm underneath the shaking and follow it out.
I breathe, steady, slow, for him—giving him a rhythm to follow if he needs one.
He breathes, ragged at first, then slower, matching.
“I was a teacher.”
The sentence comes that evening. Full. Subject, verb, object. The longest construction he’s managed since the rut broke, and it sits in the air between us with the weight of something excavated.
“Third grade.” He pauses. Frowns. “No. Fourth. I think fourth.”
His eyes are distant. Focused on a point somewhere past the root walls, past the canopy, past the thirteen years of feral silence. Seeing a room I’ll never see. Desks, maybe. Chalkboards. Things from before that I barely remember existing.
“What did you teach them?” I ask.
The question surprises him. His eyes come back to me, the gold sharp, present. Like he expected me to sit in silence, and instead I asked a question. Asking a question means I want to know, and wanting to know means something he doesn’t have a word for yet.
“Reading,” he says. “Math. But reading—that was the thing.” His hands move in front of him, shaping something invisible.
“The moment when the letters stop being shapes. When they become words. When a kid goes from looking at marks on paper to hearing a voice in their head.” He stops.
His hands drop. “I lived for that moment.”
The teacher. Under the crimson skin, the horns, the nine feet of muscle, the cock that filled me for a month—a man who taught children to read. Who lived for the moment when shapes became words.
The feeding. The tending. The patience that outlasted the feral wall. The utensils carved from bone. The nest deepened and rebuilt, season after season. Thirteen years of building a home for no one.
Not just instinct. The muscle memory of a man who spent his life taking care of small things—children, letters, the fragile, breakable process of learning. The mutation stripped his mind, stripped his language, stripped everything that made him Alexander. It couldn’t strip the part that tends.
“Billy could read,” he says. Quiet. “He was—good at it. Sam was almost there. Dickie was too little.” A pause. His jaw works. “Sam would’ve gotten it. That year.”
The tremor comes again. His wings shift against his back—the membranes rustling, catching what’s left of the daylight in dull red flashes, the involuntary movement of a body that doesn’t know what to do with the thing inside it.
I move closer, just a foot, close enough that if he reached, he’d find me.
He doesn’t reach. He sits in the grief the way I sat in the camps, enduring because the alternative is worse.
The feral brain held this for thirteen years.
Held the territory, held the instinct to provide and tend and keep, and for the last eight of them, held the grave.
The holding is over now. The wall is down.
What was behind it is pouring out, and it looks like a nine-foot male shaking in the furs while the fire burns low and the names of three dead boys fill the air.
“Billy,” he says again. “Sam. Dickie.”
He says them like a list. Like attendance. Like a teacher calling names in a classroom, waiting for the small voices to answer.
No voices answer.
My palm finds his—not near, but on, flat against the back of his massive hand, my fingers barely covering the first knuckles. The contact is deliberate. A choice—the way shifting my hips in the rut was a choice, the way saying Red was a choice.
He turns his hand over. Wraps my fingers in his. The grip is careful. The claws retracted. In the firelight his crimson skin swallows my dark hand whole, my fingers disappearing past the second knuckle inside his palm. The heat of his palm spreading through my skin.
He holds my hand in the firelight and grieves for the children who never grew up.
“Your—” He stops. His thumb moves once across my knuckles, the smallest stroke. He tries again. “Your people.”
The question sits in the firelight. Nobody has ever asked me that. In the camps, your people were whoever slept in the next bunk, until they weren’t.
“My mother,” I say. “The settlement. Until I was fourteen.”
His gold eyes stay on me. He waits the way I waited for him—no pushing, no filling the quiet.
“She grew things.” The words come out slow, rusty from disuse.
“Herbs in cracked pots. A vine she trained up the shelter wall. She gave the plants names—silly small names, like they might come when called.” My throat tightens.
I keep going, because he said three names into this fire and I can manage one.
“She used to oil my hair on the ground outside our shelter. She hummed while she worked. I can’t remember the song anymore.
Just the feel of it in her chest, against my back. ”
“Fourteen,” he says. Careful. Already braced, because he knows how these stories end now. Everyone’s story ends the same way.
“The Ordained came at night. She didn’t make it past the first hour. I got the intake line.” Camp-speech, flat and short, because flat and short is the only way it comes out at all. “Five years back. It doesn’t feel like five.”
His hand closes around mine, careful of his own strength.
He doesn’t tell me he’s sorry. He doesn’t say she’s somewhere better, or that it wasn’t my fault, or any of the soft useless things.
He holds my hand and lets her be in the room with his boys, four dead people at one small fire, and the fire burns on anyway.
“Her name?” he asks.
“Denise.” Saying it out loud cracks something in my chest, a hairline thing, not all the way through. Her name hasn’t been in the air since the settlement. “The other women called her Dee.”
“Denise,” he says. Slow. Whole. He says it the way he lays flowers down.
Her name settles into the warren like it found somewhere warm to sit. His boys have names. My mother has a name. The woman under the mound has flowers instead, because flowers were all he had to give her. I hold his hand tighter and let the fire do the talking for a while.
Later.
The grief is still in the room—heavy, damp, the way the warren smells after rain, mixed now with the smoky char that’s soaked into every fur we own.
It won’t leave for a long time, I think.
You don’t hold something for thirteen years and let it go in a single day.
It’ll come in waves, the way the rut came in waves.
Grief-peaks and grief-lulls. I know this because I’ve been grieving my mother for five years, and the waves still come.
But the body has its own answers.
I put my hand on his chest. Over the heartbeat. Over the scars. Over the place where the grief lives, where the names sit, where Alexander is buried under Red.
I push, not hard—my strength against his is nothing, a breath against a wall—but the intent is clear. I push and he goes still, his gold eyes on my face, reading the signal.