Desmond walked the south deck in the grey before dawn, one palm flat against each rib as he passed, and for the first time in a month, the pier didn’t lie to him.
The note came up through his boots and his hand and his teeth, low and steady — no sour quarter-tone, no brittleness — just the deep cold hum of Set Marrow holding what it was supposed to hold.
Forty-three ribs in the wall.
Another twenty-seven latticed under the deck, bracing the joins where the old timber had rotted through.
Seventy ribs total, grown slow and locked strong, carrying forty-six tonnes of salvage and shed and crew like it had been built to do exactly this.
He stopped at the wall’s end and faced east.
The harbor was still dark.
The cordon lights made a ragged chain along the piers, and beyond that, the grey gap where the ruined towers stood like broken teeth against the sky.
Cold.
Quiet.
The smell of the water and old smoke and, faintly, the struck-flint scent of the Marrow under his hand.
The deck was stable.
Crew fed.
The refinery had bled twelve ribs this week — positive Flow, first time since he’d started — and the Roost, sated and sleepy in his chest, kept showing him things.
Not the city-vision.
Smaller.
A shelter.
Walls around the Hatchery.
A place for people to sleep that wasn’t a tarp lashed to salvage.
He could see it in his head — lattice-braced, coral-grown, a housing Brood raised where the north end sagged.
Ninety ribs, maybe.
First binds.
A reason for strangers to believe this wasn’t just a squat that would fold the day the cordon came knocking.
The warmth at his sternum pulsed.
More, the voice said, quiet and possessive.
Bind them and I grow you taller.
You want it.
I want it.
Stop waiting.
He rubbed his chest.
The node was always warm now — a coal that wouldn’t bank — and the ache underneath had settled into something he only noticed when he stopped moving.
A month of sleeping four hours and working sixteen and eating standing up because sitting felt like stopping.
His knee read the weather.
His hands were scabbed with welder’s burns he didn’t remember getting.
But the deck held.
He tracked the crew without looking like he was tracking them.
Marce asleep in the shed, one arm over his eyes.
Bram curled on a crate near the refinery, snoring.
Tomas somewhere below, running his hands along the mooring lines the same as every morning, reverent as a man at prayer.
All present.
Still breathing.
Still his.
The Roost purred.
He turned back to the wall, put both hands flat against the nearest rib, and asked it the question he’d been asking himself for three days.
Do I let strangers in?
The rib hummed, but the platform said nothing — the dead who’d built it had no opinion on the matter.
The Roost did.
Yes, it said, warm and certain.
Ours.
More of them.
I want more.
“You want everything,” he muttered.
You want this too.
Stop lying.
He did.
God help him, he did.
Not just the crew — real people, families, the displaced the city had spat out and forgotten the moment the smoke cleared.
He could make shelter, grow it out of dead alien bone and his own bleeding hands, and maybe that would be enough to call it a home instead of a lie he was living inside.
The warmth spread.
He pulled his hands back, shoved them in his pockets, and turned toward the ladder.
Every outsider was a mouth.
A witness.
A way to be found.
His survival instinct — two deployments and a decade of off-the-books work — screamed that more people meant more risk, more chances for someone to sell him to the cordon or SHIELD.
But the Roost wanted population the way it wanted Marrow — more bodies, more bonds, the lever it pressed against every time he touched it.
And he was tired of being the only one holding the weight.
He climbed down to the water-level catwalk and checked the lines himself, because Tomas was good but Tomas wasn’t him.
Tide coming in.
The platform rode it smooth, no list, no creak.
Integrity sixty-four percent.
Another month of bracing and he could raise the housing Brood and stop sleeping on salvage.
One month.
Maybe two.
He was still thinking it when he heard footsteps on the pier above — light, careful, two sets — and a woman’s voice, low and annoyed.
“I’m telling you, it’s here.
The man with the rib.”
He went very still.
“You said it was reinforced,” a second voice said, older, raspier.
“This looks like a pile of scrap someone’s squatting in.”
But it’s a pile of scrap that doesn’t fall down when you stand on it, and that’s more than the shelters have right now.
You want a roof or you want to freeze?”
Desmond climbed the ladder slowly, one hand on the rail, and surfaced onto the south end just as Del Mercer stepped off the pier and onto his deck.
She stopped.
One eyebrow up.
“Morning,” she said.
He straightened.
Wiped his palms on his trousers.
Tried to look like he’d expected company at five in the morning and not like his heart had just tried to climb out of his sternum.
“Del.”
“Desmond.” She jerked her head toward the pier.
“Brought you a problem.
You got a minute?”
“Depends on the problem.”
She stepped aside.
The second woman was older — sixty, maybe, grey hair pulled back tight, a face that had seen enough to stop being surprised by most of it.
She carried a canvas bag over one shoulder and a rolled tarp under her arm, and she studied the deck bottom-up, weighing what held and what didn’t, the same eye Desmond used on joins.
Behind her, half-hidden in the pier’s shadow, two smaller shapes.
Kids.
One maybe ten, the other younger.
Del crossed her arms.
“Rosa Iniguez.
Red Cross shelter on Eighth since the battle — they’re closing it end of the week.
Nowhere to go.
I heard about a reinforced squat that doesn’t charge rent, so I told her I’d ask.”
Rosa’s eyes flicked to the wall, then back to him.
“I don’t take charity.”
“Wasn’t offering any,” he said.
“Good.” She set the bag down.
“I cook.
I clean.
I sew.
I can make a dollar last three days.
You let us sleep under a roof that doesn’t leak, I’ll work for it.”
Desmond glanced at Del.
She held his gaze, blank and waiting.
The warmth at his sternum spiked.
Ours, the Roost said, sudden and hungry.
Let them stand on us.
Bind them and I grow you shelter.
Do it.
Do it now.
He rubbed his chest.
The ache underneath sharpened.
Rosa was still watching him.
“I’m not asking for a handout.
I’m asking for work.”
The kids behind her hadn’t moved.
The younger one — a girl, maybe six — had her hand knotted in the older boy’s jacket, and she was staring at the wall like she’d never seen steel before.
Forty-six tonnes of Load.
Seventy ribs of Marrow.
Integrity sixty-four percent, enough for four men and salvage and not much else.
If he let them stay, the housing Brood would have to go up sooner — grow faster, bleed more, burn through ribs he hadn’t grown yet on walls and a roof and the lattice-bracing that would keep a grandmother and two kids from falling through a deck held together by alien coral and his own stubborn hands.
Every person was a new way to be seen.
A new mouth to feed.
A new witness to the coral and the humming and all of it he couldn’t explain and didn’t want to.
And the Roost wanted them so badly it was making his chest hurt.
“One week,” he said.
“You work, you eat, you sleep under a roof.
End of the week, we see where we are.”
Rosa nodded once.
“Fair.”
“Shed’s tight.
You’ll be on the north platform under a tarp until I can grow you something better.”
“Grow?”
“Build,” Del said, smooth as silk.
“He means build.
Desmond’s particular about his words.”
Rosa held his eyes for a long moment, then picked up her bag.
“North platform.
Under a tarp.
Better than the street.
Show me.”
He led them across, boots loud on the lattice-braced planks, and the whole way the Roost purred and pressed and wanted, warm and possessive.
By sunrise Rosa had the tarp lashed tight, kids settled, a pot of something that smelled like actual food on Bram’s camp stove.
Tomas stared at her like she’d appeared out of smoke.
Marce muttered “a bloody orphanage now, is it” and went to check the ropes again. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Desmond stood at the south rail, watching the harbor wake up grey and cold, and tried to convince himself this wasn’t the mistake that got a man found.
Del leaned on the rail beside him.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
“Didn’t say I did.”
“She’ll work.
She’s not lying about that.”
“Figured.”
Del was quiet for a moment.
Then: “You lied to me about the rib.
The one I bought off you.
You said it was welded.
It wasn’t.”
He didn’t look at her.
“No.”
“You going to tell me what it was?”
“Not yet.”
“Fair enough.” She pushed off the rail.
“I’ve got a line on a buyer for scrap timber.
Off-the-books.
Cash, no questions.
You interested?”
He turned.
She shrugged.
“You sheltered people.
I’m not an idiot.
Someone who does that when he doesn’t have to — I can do business with him.
You want the introduction or not?”
The trade relationship.
Reopened.
Not because he’d apologized — he hadn’t — but because he’d sheltered strangers when he didn’t have to.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m interested.”
“Good.
I’ll set it up.” She started toward the ladder, then stopped.
“One week, you said.
What happens at the end of it?”
Rosa crouched by the stove, talking low to the girl.
The boy stood at the north edge, staring at the wall like he was trying to figure out what held it up.
Bind them, the Roost said.
I want them.
I want more.
Grow me shelter and I’ll hold them all.
Trust me.
Do it.
“Don’t know yet,” he said.
Del nodded.
Climbed down.
Gone.
He stood there until the cold worked its way through his jacket, then walked back to the Hatchery and put his hand flat on the core.
The note came up warm and certain.
[The Roost] — STANDING: a squat becoming something.
LIFT 46 t / LOAD 42 t.
INTEGRITY 64%.
ALT 0 m (bolted, hidden).
MARROW 70 ribs.
FLOW +12 / wk.
BOUND 0 (workers, not yet bound).
BROODS: Hatchery (proto — stable at last).
LOCKED (next): WINGWARD (housing) — needs first binds, 90 ribs, a reason for people to believe.
IT SAYS: You let strangers stand on us.
Good.
More of them and I grow taller.
Feed me and shelter them and I stop being a rumor and start being a place.
Don’t let them take us in the night.
The wall.
The crew.
The family under the tarp.
His oldest instinct — stay unseen, stay unfound — cracked a little wider.
Because the home he wanted was starting to need other people in it.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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