Page 1 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

1

Kessa

The City doesn’t wake, it flinches.

Every morning starts with the same sounds. Stone shutters dragged open. Children coughing behind curtain walls. Ladles scraping the bottoms of ration pots. Zmaj claws clicking against old tile in the guard corridors. Human voices stay low, because once we say the hunger out loud, everyone starts counting what is left.

Survival math always sounds clean until a name lands on the wrong side of it. Then it stops being math and becomes a room, a fever cot, a mouth gone dry, someone I couldn’t move fast enough.

I learned young that being useful is safer than being important. Useful people get called before the doors close. Important people get argued over. Useless people vanish between one count and the next.

Wanting something for myself never made it onto the slate. There was always someone hungrier, sicker, younger. I learned not to ask unless the answer could help someone else too.

I’m in the west ration hall with a slate board pressed to my hip and three lines of numbers that do not want to become food. They never do.

“Two measures missing from Second Stillness,” Ila says, leaning over my shoulder. “Three if we count what spoiled in the lower storage collapse.”

“We count it,” I say.

“If we count it, the numbers look worse.”

“The numbers are worse.”

She gives me a look sharp enough to shave stone. Ila is older than me by maybe six years and has a memorable kind of face. Plain at first glance, impossible to ignore after that. She sees too much and trusts too little. Since the west chamber opened beneath our feet and tried to eat half the City, those traits have become virtues. They’ve also made her my shadow.

Around us, the ration hall moves in tight, careful currents. Nobody runs. Nobody shouts. Nobody drops anything if they can help it. We learned fast after the wrong rhythm started waking old machines under the City.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

That rhythm lives in my bones.

The direct throat under the City closed after Sera and Kavor stopped the machine. Everyone says closed like that means safe. I don’t believe that. Closed is like a sealed door. Closed is like a wound scabbed over, but wounds itch before they split and doors re-open.

“Move one emergency jar from north heat shelter to Second Stillness,” I say, tapping my stylus against the slate.

“Adran signed those jars under civil reserve,” Ila says, her mouth tightening.

“Then he can civil-reserve himself into explaining to Merra why fever row didn’t get broth.”

“I’d pay one ration token to see that,” she says with a tiny snort.

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“No,” she agrees. “I wouldn’t.”

We don’t joke loudly. Jokes are luxuries, and just as strictly rationed as food.

Across the hall, a little boy with sandy hair watches the ladle dip into his bowl. He’s trying very hard not to look worried. His mother has one hand on his shoulder and one hand curled around the edge of the counter, as if she can hold the whole world in place by gripping stone.

The ladle comes up thin. Too thin. Nausea knots low in me.

I write another note on the slate. Rotate root mash from eastern store. Cut guard portion by one quarter measure tonight. Increase hot water in third line so bowls look fuller. A lie with steam on it. That’s what survival is some mornings no matter how much I hate it.

A low vibration shivers through the floor. Every voice in the ration hall stops at once. One heartbeat, the City is scraping and breathing and pretending not to starve. The next, hundreds of people stand frozen with bowls in their hands.