She’s there.
Ruby.
Sitting on the narrow ledge of the kitchen window with the particular composure of a creature who has navigated the exterior wall of a Savage Knot residential unit—two stories of aged stone and questionable mortar—and considers the achievement unremarkable. She’s small. A kitten still, technically, though the wordkittensuggests a fragility that Ruby has never possessed. Her fur is pure black—a comprehensive, light-absorbing darkness that makes her nearly invisible against any surface that isn’t white, which in Savage Knot is almost every surface. The black is complete, uninterrupted, covering every inch of her small frame except for one location.
The scar.
It runs along her left eye—a thin, raised line where the fur refuses to grow back, leaving a strip of exposed skin that has healed to a vivid red against the surrounding black. It gives her face an asymmetry that most people would call a flaw and that I call a credential. The scar says she’s been hurt and survived the hurting and carries the evidence without apology. The scar says she understands the cost of existing in a place that does not accommodate softness.
Ruby.
Named for the scar.
Named for the red that persists against the black.
Her eyes are extraordinary—silver as a base, layered with hints of gold and brown that shift depending on the light and her mood and the angle from which you’re looking, producing an iris composition so unusual that the first time I saw it, through the kitchen window on a night that smelled like rain and loneliness,something behind my sternum moved in a direction I didn’t authorize.
A little survivor.
In this unforgiving Academy.
Just like me.
I smirk.
The expression is the closest thing to a smile that my face produces in the presence of anything other than Hawk, and the kitten sitting on my windowsill is, according to Hawk’s running commentary on my emotional life, the only creature on the planet capable of extracting it reliably. He says this with a mixture of jealousy and affection that I find privately amusing and publicly ignore.
I’ve wanted a pet.
The wanting is old—older than Savage Knot, older than Vivian, old enough to belong to a version of me that existed before the void moved in and converted my emotional landscape from a living ecology into a managed vacuum. A pet. Something warm and alive and dependent on my continued existence in a way that isn’t conditional on my designation or my utility or the particular configuration of social currency that determines who survives in the Academy’s ecosystem.
But I never let the wanting become having.
Because pets are collateral.
Anything you love in Savage Knot becomes a weapon that can be used against you by anyone who identifies it as a pressure point.
Hawk is already that risk.
I can’t afford another.
So Ruby is not my pet. Ruby is a stray kitten who visits my windowsill when she chooses to and leaves when she chooses to and exists in the liminal space between connection andindependence that allows me to enjoy her presence without the vulnerability of claiming it.
I try to act like it’s no big deal when Ruby visits.
But it is.
Usually it means the night is going to be good. Either in the sense of Hawk arriving with the particular energy that results in my back against the mattress and his hands on my hips and the specific, temporary obliteration of the void that occurs when his body drives mine past the threshold where numbness can’t maintain its hold—or in the sense of a raid. The solo excursions into Savage Knot’s outer territories that I conduct when the stillness becomes oppressive and my body needs the release that only physical combat provides.
Both options involve blowing off steam.
The methods just differ in their violence-to-intimacy ratio.
I walk to the upper cabinet where the cat treats are hidden—concealed behind a box of tea that I don’t drink, positioned with the deliberate casualness of someone who absolutely does not keep a supply of premium cat treats for a kitten she insists she doesn’t own. The package crinkles as I open it, and Ruby’s silver-gold-brown eyes track the sound with the laser focus of a predator who has identified the location of her objective.
I’m halfway through feeding her—the small treats placed on the windowsill one at a time, Ruby’s delicate teeth extracting each from my fingertips with a precision that makes her jaw work look like a surgical instrument—when I notice the movement.
Not inside.
