40. Maeve #2
The barracks is smaller than the one I slept in for four years.
Or maybe it’s the same size, the walls just feeling closer when the air is thick with the smell of venom and the bodies inside are still, watching.
Some glazed, some sharp, all of them carrying the exhaustion of women who have been kept alive against their will by someone else’s definition of survival.
I know that exhaustion. I wore it for four years.
Shayla stands beside the girl’s bunk, her hand on the hanging cloth, the administrator presenting her project.
“The male’s venom heals. You know this. Your bones, your teeth, your hair—all repaired by venom.” Shayla’s voice is steady. Clinical. “These women are sick, Maeve. They’re malnourished, injured, infected. The male’s venom could heal them. I facilitated the application.”
The anger comes up so fast it scares me a little, a heat behind my sternum that wants to be my hands around Shayla’s throat instead of words in my mouth.
I don’t let it out that way. Four years of camp taught me what happens to women who let their hands do the talking.
I let it come out as words instead, low and flat and shaking at the edges no matter how hard I try to hold them still.
“You forced a girl onto a feral Shade’s cock.”
“I facilitated a soft mating. The venom is delivered through the knot. The male is feral but compliant when the—when the female is presented.” Shayla’s composure holds. Barely. “The girl volunteered. I explained the benefits. She accepted.”
“Volunteered.” Lisa’s voice is ice. “She volunteered to be knotted by a chained feral Shade in a supply building.”
“She was in pain. Her leg was infected. The infection was spreading. She would have died within the week.” Shayla meets Lisa’s eyes. “I offered her a choice. She chose to live.”
My eyes go to the girl—the venom haze I recognize from the inside, the drugged warmth, the floating distance from pain.
She looks like I looked. During the rut. When I was being healed against my will.
Looking at her is looking at a mirror that’s been left out in the rain, warped, wrong in the details but unmistakably my own shape underneath.
My skin goes cold everywhere at once, a prickling that starts at my scalp and runs down both arms. I want to be sick.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth for a second, just to have something to do with the nausea climbing up from my stomach, and I make myself put the hand down before Shayla sees it and calls it weakness instead of what it is.
The difference is that Red was my mate. The venom worked because the bond was real.
This girl is lying on a bunk in a barracks, soft-knotted to a chained feral who was delivered by the Ordained as a replacement asset, and the venom in her body is not a bond—it’s a drug.
Administered by a woman who needed leverage.
“The other women,” I say. “You gave them venom too.”
“Small doses. Skin contact—his saliva, his sweat. I diluted it.” Shayla has the decency to look uncomfortable for the first time. A flicker. Gone in a breath. “They’re healthier than they were a week ago. The infections are responding. The malnutrition symptoms are—”
“You’re harvesting a chained male’s body fluids and drugging your prisoners with them.” I keep my voice steady. Camp-steady. The voice that doesn’t break. “That’s what you’re doing. Put whatever words you want on it.”
Shayla’s mouth thins. The brittle composure cracking further. “I kept them alive. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done.”
“You keep them dependent. That’s what you’ve always done.”
The barracks is quiet. Twenty-three women listening. The glazed girl on the bunk breathing slowly, her eyes on the ceiling, her body somewhere else, in the warm chemical distance from pain that I remember and that makes my stomach turn because I know how good it feels and I know how much it costs.
Red is outside. He won’t come into the barracks. The space is too small, the women too frightened. But he’s there at the door, filling it, his rage held in check, the nine feet of violence waiting for me to tell him what to do.
“The male in the supply building,” I say. “He needs to be freed.”
“If you free him, the women lose the venom. The girl—”
“The girl needs a real bond or no bond at all. Not this.” I gesture at the bunk, the hanging cloth, the glazed eyes. “Not a chained feral in a cage pumped for venom by a woman who can’t let go of power.”
Shayla doesn’t answer. The barracks is silent. The women watching me, watching her. The two versions of survival standing face to face—mine, which says walk into the canopy and trust the thing that terrifies you, and hers, which says stay behind the walls and let me manage the danger.
From outside, Red’s voice. Low. Urgent.
“Maeve.”
I go to the door. He’s standing in the compound, his head turned south. The same posture as last night at the warren—the rigid lock, the wings half-spread, the tail stiff.
“The Stained,” he says. “Close. An hour. Maybe less.”
The word drops through my body like a stone through water.
The Stained. The thing Red described three nights ago with his hands shaking and his voice flat, the ruined Shade, the venom-sick, the one that hunts bonded females for the fresh venom in their blood.
Coming here. To a camp that reeks of forced venom, that has been broadcasting the scent of a chained male’s excess for weeks.
An hour. A Stained, drawn by the venom scent that’s soaking this camp like smoke. A caged feral Nethershade chained to a wall. Twenty-three women, one of them drugged and soft-bonded. A dead generator. No fences. No guards.
And Shayla, standing in the barracks doorway behind me, watching her world collapse for the second time in a week.
“Get the women out,” I say to Lisa. “Now. All of them. Into the canopy.”
Lisa moves. She’s through the barracks door before I finish the sentence. Her voice carries, sharp, commanding, the camp-voice that women obey because Lisa’s voice has never led them wrong. “Everyone up. Now. We’re moving. Grab nothing. Move.”
The barracks stirs. Slowly. Women rising from bunks, from the floor, moving with the automatic obedience of bodies trained to respond to authority.
Some are shaky—the venom-dosed ones, their limbs loose, their eyes still glazed.
Lisa grabs the nearest by the elbow, steadies her, keeps moving.
Her hands touching shoulders, arms, backs, the camp-touch that says I have you, keep going.
She’s done this before. Not this exactly, but the bones of it: getting women moving when the world is falling apart around them.
I turn to Red. “The Shade in the cage. Can you free him without a fight?”
His jaw works. “He’ll challenge me. Feral—a feral male, caged, another male entering his space. He’ll challenge.”
“Can you handle it?”
The gold eyes find mine, steady, the answer already there before he speaks: I can handle anything. Point me.
“Free him. Don’t kill him. He’s a victim, not a threat.”
Red nods. Crosses the compound toward the supply building.
His stride purposeful, his wings folding tight, making himself smaller—the body language of a bonded male approaching a feral one.
It might not work. The caged male might see nothing past his own rage.
What I know is this: Red walked into a supply building that smells like captivity and rot to free a male who will try to kill him, because I asked.
Because I said don’t kill him, he’s a victim.
Because somewhere in the man who used to teach children, the word victim still carries weight.
From inside the supply building comes the roar—the territorial challenge, the caged male seeing another male enter his space.
Then a crash. Then silence. Then Red’s voice, low, speaking in fragments I can’t make out—to the feral on the chain, not to me.
A voice that carries presence more than meaning.
Another crash. Smaller. The chain rattling. Then: a sound I’ve never heard a Shade make. A whine. High, thin, broken. A male’s rage running up against something bigger than his cage. The whine continues, and underneath it, Red’s voice. Still low. Still present.
I turn back to the barracks. To the women. To Shayla.
“You too,” I say to her. “Move.”
“I’m not leaving my—”
“Your camp is about to be hit by a Stained that can smell the venom you’ve been farming from a chained male. Move or die. Your choice.”
For the first time, Shayla’s composure breaks completely. The face underneath isn’t the administrator’s—it’s the face of a woman who is afraid.
I wait for it to feel good. Watching her crack, watching the woman who ran my whole world for four years finally look small.
It doesn’t feel good. It feels like nothing sitting on top of something heavier I don’t have time to name right now, so I push it down and shove it in with everything else I can’t afford to feel yet.
She moves.