Wounded Wings

If you want to know what a severed mate bond looks like, don’t look at the tears. Look at the sheets.

I woke up this morning—or maybe it was evening, I’d stopped tracking—and the cotton was soaked. Not blood. Blood is honest. This was something else. Thick, black, seeping from the hairline fractures in my sternum like a building weeping through its mortar.

The smell hit me before I could sit up. Caramelized sugar. Burnt dough. That bakery on Fjordgata she used to drag me to at two in the morning, when the city was empty and she said the croissants tasted better if nobody else was awake to claim them.

I pressed my palm to my chest. The residue came away warm between my fingers.

Six months of this. Six months since Sigrid stood in our hallway, her green light dimmed to something flat and exhausted, and told me she couldn’t breathe.

I remember the silence before that. Not the comfortable kind we used to share—the kind that meant we didn’t need words. This was a different animal. A silence that had to be navigated, that could swallow you if you moved wrong.

It started at dinner. I’d finished the new elevations for the conservatory. Curved supports. Glass panels angled to trap and amplify light. I slid the drawings across the table, proud of them, certain she’d see what I saw.

She glanced at them. Folded her hands. Stared at the grain of the wood between us.

“Do you ever feel trapped?”

I turned the word over, examined it from every angle the way I would a stress fracture. “Trapped how?”

She gestured vaguely. At the apartment. At the drawings. At me. “Like there’s no air. Like the walls are getting closer. Like you’re living inside something that was supposed to be beautiful but—”

She stopped. Pressed her lips together.

“I would never lock you in,” I said.

“I need to know that I can leave,” she whispered. “That there’s a door. That if I walk through it, you won’t build another room to catch me.”

“There’s always a door. There. And there.” I pointed. “Every wall has one.”

“Doors close.”

“So do windows. So do—”

“Doors lock.”

The word hung between us. Lock. I had never thought about locks. I had designed the conservatory to be open, to let the light circulate without obstruction. But locks were different. Locks were choices. Locks were the difference between a home and a cage.

I just didn’t know which one I’d built until it was too late.

I pushed myself off the mattress, joints popping, and walked to the bathroom. The light was dead. Not burned out—drained. The stutter in my chest had been feeding on the ambient light for weeks now, pulling energy from every bulb in the apartment to keep itself from winking out. I unscrewed the glass shell. Cold. Grey. I dropped it into the trash bag by the door, where it joined the graveyard of a dozen others.

My phone buzzed on the kitchen counter. Third time in an hour. The caller ID read Magnus.

I didn’t answer. I let it ring until it went to voicemail, then pressed play. His voice came through tinny and clipped, the way it always did when he was trying not to sound afraid.

“Torsten. Stop draining the bulbs and get a grip. Cleanup crew is sweeping the grid tonight. They’re sniffing for unregistered leaks. If they catch you, they won’t bother with paperwork. Move.”

Through the grime of the window above the sink, I could see why he was nervous. The sky above the lower districts was bruised purple from the perimeter floodlights. Sirens pulsed in the distance—a constant, low-grade hum that hadn’t stopped in weeks. A digital billboard across the street cycled through its usual mandate in red text: CURFEW ENFORCED. UNREGISTERED SHIFTERS SUBJECT TO REMOVAL.

Removal. The Council’s favorite euphemism. They never said “kill” on the billboards. They said “removal,” like we were mold on a load-bearing wall.

I turned off the phone. The kitchen smelled like old coffee and ozone and something faintly sweet that I refused to identify.

The stain on my shirt had spread. I could feel it moving against my skin—slow, warm, indifferent to my opinions about it. I’d tried everything in the first two months. Rags. Solvents. Prayer, once, though I’m not sure who I was praying to. Nothing worked. The substance came from somewhere below the skin, somewhere structural, and no amount of surface cleaning reached it.

But I’d stopped trying to be reasonable about it months ago.

I reached under the sink and pulled out the steel wool.

Just the surface, I told myself. Just make it look normal.

I tore off a piece and dragged it across my sternum. The pain was sharp, clean, immediate. The metal caught on the ridges of raw skin, pulling away the top layer and the black residue with it. Blood welled up, thinning the tar to a sickly grey.

I scrubbed harder. My knuckles split against the porcelain. I welcomed the sting. It was a pain I understood, a pain with a clear cause and a clear boundary. It had nothing to do with the door, or the lock, or the woman who had walked through it.

The phone buzzed again. I ignored it.

“Torsten!”

Not the phone. The hallway.

I froze, steel wool still pressed to my chest, blood and black running down my forearm.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

The door frame rattled. Real fists. Real wood.

“Open it. Now.”

Magnus. And he wasn’t using his voicemail voice anymore.

I dropped the steel wool into the sink. It hit the porcelain with a wet slap. I stumbled out of the bathroom, bare feet sticking to the floor, and pulled the deadbolt back.

Magnus stood in the hallway, chest heaving, his silver cleaner’s badge catching the dim emergency light. He looked at my split knuckles, the stains on my shirt, the raw skin of my sternum, and his jaw tightened.

“You look like a condemned building,” he said, flipping a heavy coin between his fingers—his tell, the one he couldn’t quit. “Tell me you haven’t been scrubbing again.”

“Where is she?” I said.

He blinked. “What?”

“The cleanup crew. You said they’re sweeping. You said they’re sniffing for leaks.” I pushed past him into the hall. The air was colder out here, and my chest stuttered—a sharp, electric pull that had nothing to do with my actual heartbeat. “If they’re tracking her—”

Magnus grabbed my shoulder. His grip was the kind that left bruises, the kind that said I have done this before and I will do it again.

“She’s not being tracked, Torsten.”

The stutter in my chest flared. Hot. Insistent. The pull was directional now, yanking me toward the stairwell, toward the street, toward something moving three blocks south.

“Then what is she?”

Magnus didn’t answer right away. He looked at me with the expression of a man who had spent his career cleaning up other people’s disasters and was deeply tired of adding mine to the list.

Then the stairwell answered for him.

Heavy, clicking claws on concrete. Multiple sets. Ascending fast. And beneath the sound of the hounds, something else—a scent, sharp and green and unmistakable, cutting through the ozone and the old coffee and the burnt sugar.

Sigrid.

Magnus’s grip tightened. “She’s not the prey,” he said quietly. “She’s the one holding the leash.”