37. Maeve
MAEVE
We walk for six hours before I let them stop.
The fifteen move in a tight cluster, the way camp women move when they’re frightened, bodies pressing close, the herd instinct of people who learned that isolation means being picked off.
They trip on root ridges. They flinch at every sound—the crack of branches, the shifting of mutated vegetation, the call of birds that don’t sound like any bird that existed before the asteroid.
One woman jumps sideways when a mushroom cap the size of a dinner plate drops from a trunk and hits the forest floor with a wet thud, releasing a burst of something thick and earthy that catches in the back of my throat.
Another grabs the arm of the woman beside her and doesn’t let go for the next mile.
“Is it always this loud?” The voice comes from near the back, thin, barely more than breath. “The trees.”
“It gets quieter,” I say. Not comfort exactly. Just true. “Give it a day.”
They don’t know how to walk in canopy. Four years behind fences—some of them longer—and the only time they left the compound was on the clearing lines, hacking vegetation under Eunuch guard, the canopy something to be fought, not moved through, not lived in.
The branches that Red navigates like hallways are walls to them.
The root ridges that my feet find automatically are tripping hazards.
The sounds—the creak of living wood, the distant call of something large and winged—are all potential death.
Red walks at the back. Fifty yards behind.
His gait is wrong. The Unmade’s blow to his ribs has changed his walk, a hitch on the right side, the wing membrane on that side not folding flat.
He’s bleeding still. The gash on his cheek has crusted, the dark line bisecting the crimson skin, but the wound on his side is seeping, darkening the already-dark skin with something wetter, warmer.
He doesn’t slow. He doesn’t ask to stop.
The predator’s discipline—you don’t show weakness in open territory.
You walk until you can’t walk. Then you walk more.
I know because I did the same thing three months ago, going the other direction.
Starving, feverish, shoulder dislocated, ribs cracked.
I walked until I blacked out. Crawled until I blacked out again.
Woke up and kept moving because stopping was dying.
The difference between us: I was running away from a cage.
He’s walking back from tearing one open.
Lisa walks beside me. She hasn’t spoken since the camp.
Her hands are still red with Ruth’s blood, dried in the creases of her fingers, under her nails.
She carries it the way she carries everything, silently, efficiently, the weight stored in the part of her brain that tracks costs.
Lisa keeps a ledger. She won’t tell you it exists.
But I’ve known her for four years. I’ve seen her face after women died on the clearing lines, after women were transferred to Gilded Cages and didn’t come back.
She tallies them. Ruth is in the ledger now, and Lisa will carry that number for the rest of her life.
Gretchen is on Red’s back. He shifted her there an hour in, the burned hands making walking unbearable, each step jolting the blistered palms that seized on the electric fence.
The smell of scorched skin still clings to her, faint now, but there, a smell that pulls me straight back to the fence line every time the wind shifts.
She rides between his wings with her face pressed against the back of his neck, her arms looped over his shoulders, her legs not quite reaching around his waist. The wire pattern is burned into her palms. I saw it before he picked her up, the fence she grabbed because she was running toward me and didn’t see the current.
That’s on me too. Ruth is on me. Gretchen’s hands are on me. The twenty-five behind the barracks door—on me.
The women behind us watch Red carry Gretchen.
Some of them watch the way you watch something that can’t be real, a Shade, the thing they were told would rape them to death, carrying a woman on his back through the canopy like a father carrying a child.
Some of them watch the way you watch a door opening in a room you thought had no doors.
I find the stopping place when the light starts to fail.
A root hollow, not Red’s elegant overnight nest, just a depression between two massive trunks where the ground is soft with leaf litter and the canopy provides overhead cover, the air here cool and green, thick with the smell of wet rot and growing things.
The women sink into it like water into sand.
Some of them are asleep before they’re horizontal, the exhaustion of adrenaline crash and miles of walking on bodies that have been underfed for years.
Their breathing changes, from the tight, shallow camp-breathing to something deeper, slower.
The first real sleep some of them have had outside the barracks.
Red sets Gretchen down gently, his hands cradling her burned ones, lowering them to the ferns without letting anything press the blisters.
He steps back. Takes a position at the perimeter, twenty yards out, his back against a trunk, his gold eyes scanning the canopy.
Even injured, even bleeding, the territorial instinct runs.
He’ll guard while they sleep, the same way he guarded me every second I wasn’t conscious enough to know he was doing it.
Gretchen catches my sleeve before I can follow him, her burned fingers stopping just short of my skin. Her voice is wrecked, barely there, but it’s the first thing she’s said since the fence.
“You came back.”
Not asking. Just disbelief, still settling into fact.
“I told you I would.”
“Nobody comes back.” Her hand hovers, not quite touching, protecting the raw skin. “Nobody ever comes back.”
I don’t have an answer for that except to be standing here.
I go to him.
“Let me see,” I say.
“I’m—”
“Don’t.” I put my hand on his arm. The muscle hard under the crimson skin, the warmth of him familiar against my palm. “Don’t say fine. Let me see.”
He leans back against the trunk. Lifts his arm on the injured side. The movement costs him. I see it in the tightening of his jaw, the way his breath catches. The sound that doesn’t make it past his teeth.
The bruise has spread. A deep, angry purple-black covers most of his right side, from the bottom of his ribs to his hip—his blood pooling under the skin, the damage visible.
The skin is hot to the touch. Underneath, the muscle is swollen, rigid with the guarding that the body does automatically around a break.
The Unmade hit him twice in the same spot—the full force of those disproportionate thighs driving into already-damaged tissue.
“Cracked,” I say. I know cracked ribs. I lived with them for months after the claiming. The shallow breathing. The careful way you hold yourself, the body building a cage of tension around the break to keep it still.
Guilt lands hard and sudden, a fist under my sternum. I did this. I asked him to walk into a fight for women he’d never met, and now his ribs are the same wreck mine were three months ago. I swallow it down. Falling apart over it does nothing for him right now.
He nods, short, saving his breath.
“The cheek?”
“Surface.” He touches it. Winces. “The—the thing’s claws. Not deep.”
I press my palm flat against the bruise on his side. He hisses. But he doesn’t pull away. The same way I didn’t pull away when his venom burned through my cracked bones during the rut—you hold still because the hand touching you is the hand that heals.
“When we get home,” I say, “you’re resting.”
His gold eyes drop to mine. The ghost of the almost-smile, the tiny curve of his mouth that I’ve been seeing more often since the feral wall came down. “The women need—”
“The women need you alive. You rest.”
The canopy is silent around us, the women sleeping in the hollow, their breathing mingling, the sound of fifteen bodies exhaling at once in the dark.
Lisa sits at the edge of the group, awake, her back straight, her eyes on the tree line, keeping watch, because Lisa doesn’t trust anyone else to do it right.
“Twenty-five,” I say. Quiet. Just for him. “We left twenty-five.”
He doesn’t answer. He covers my hand with his where it rests on his side, the crimson fingers folding over my knuckles, claws retracted, the grip careful even though his ribs are screaming.
“We’ll go back,” he says.
“I know.”
“When I can—fight.” The words come slow, not from injury, from the effort of admitting the limitation.
The male who tore an Unmade apart and ripped cattle fencing open with his hands can’t go back tomorrow.
His body needs days. Maybe a week. The cracked rib, the gash, the deep bruising.
Even Shade healing takes time when the damage is this real.
I lean my forehead against his arm, the crimson skin warm against my face.
His smell—blood-warm, mineral, the musk of a mated Shade underneath the iron tang of his wounds—fills my breath.
The twins kick. Both of them, the synchronized double-thump that I’ve started to feel as conversation.
His free hand settles low, over the curve of me.
Feeling the kicks. Counting them the way he counts everything, with the attention of a man who lost three children and will not lose these.
“Ruth,” I say.
“I know.”
“She was twenty-two. She sang in the barracks. After lights out. Quiet enough that the Eunuchs wouldn’t hear.
She had a voice that—” My throat closes.
The camp-trained part of me clamps down on it—you don’t cry about the dead, you count them and you move.
But the part of me that isn’t camp anymore, the part that grew in this territory with this man’s venom in my blood, his hands on my body, his patience rewriting the rules I learned behind fences—that part breaks through.
“She just wanted out. She was running toward the gap. She was almost through.”
His hand presses gently against my belly. Holding. The way he holds everything, with the full weight of attention that a nine-foot body can bring to a single point of contact.
“We’ll bury her when we go back,” he says. “Properly.”
I nod against his arm. The tears come—not camp-tears, not the swallowed, silent kind, but something else, loud enough that my shoulders shake, wet enough that his arm is damp under my face.
The tears of a woman who walked into a camp and carried fifteen people out and lost one and left twenty-five behind and is sitting in the canopy with her injured mate trying to figure out how to go back and do it again.
He holds me. One arm around my back, the injured side braced against the tree.
The massive body curved around mine, the wings folding forward to block the wind and the night.
I cry against his chest. It’s the kind of crying that happens when you stop moving, when the adrenaline is gone and the walking is done and the only thing left is the weight of what happened.
When it stops, I wipe my face on the fur over my belly. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t tell me it’s okay. Doesn’t promise it gets better. He holds me. That’s enough.
We reach the territory the next evening.
The warren rises from the canopy like a body surfacing from water, the root walls catching the last light, the reinforced structure solid and familiar against the mutated trees.
Home. The word still startles me. Three months ago this was a prison.
The place a monster dragged me. The cage where the rut happened.
Now it’s where the food is. Where the furs are warm.
Where the fire burns and the man reads by its light and the walls he carved with letters catch the morning sun.
Even from the clearing I catch it, the smell of home—smoke and fur and roasted meat—and my whole body loosens toward it before I’ve taken another step.
Red carries Gretchen up to the warren. Sets her in the sleeping hollow with furs piled around her.
His movements are stiff, the cracked rib protesting every step, every lift.
He doesn’t stop. He builds a fire. Heats water.
Puts food on the cooking surface. The need to feed the people in his territory overrides the pain.
The other women—thirteen of them, scattered below in the clearing—stand in the fading light and stare. At the warren. At the trees. At the territory of a Shade who just tore open their cage and is now making dinner.
Lisa takes charge. Of course she does. She walks the perimeter, counts the women, identifies the ones who need immediate attention, four, the worst of it.
Malnutrition, infections, injuries from years of clearing work.
She finds the secondary shelters Red built—the structures he made years ago.
She assigns sleeping spaces. She lights fires. She makes a schedule.
From the warren, I watch her work, my hands on the root wall.
Below, Lisa moves through the clearing with the efficiency of a woman who has been organizing survival her entire adult life.
The camp women follow her. Not because they trust her more than they trust me—because Lisa speaks their language.
The language of structure. Of schedules. Of knowing what happens next.
Something in me loosens watching it happen, a tightness I didn’t know I was still carrying since the gate. I don’t have to be the one holding all of it. Camp-brain doesn’t believe that until it sees the help working with its own eyes, and even then it takes a minute to trust the ground under it.
Red comes up behind me. His good arm around my waist. His jaw settles into my hair, heavy and warm against my scalp.
“She’s good,” he says. About Lisa.
“She kept us alive.”
“She’ll keep them alive too.”
I lean back against him, his heartbeat through my spine, the twins shifting. The canopy darkens over a clearing that used to hold one man and one woman and now holds seventeen.
Pride and grief sit in my chest at the same time, close enough to feel like the same thing. Seventeen people are alive tonight who wouldn’t be if I’d stayed quiet. Twenty-five are still behind a door I couldn’t open fast enough. I don’t know how to hold both numbers without one of them winning.
“How long?” I ask. “Before you can fight.”
He’s quiet. Working through it. What’s broken, what’s healing, what needs time. “Five days. Maybe—four if—”
“Five,” I say. “You take five.”
He doesn’t argue. He presses his mouth to my hair and holds me and we watch Lisa build a settlement in the clearing below.
Five days. Five days to heal. Five days before we go back for the twenty-five women still behind Shayla’s door.
I start counting.