Page 100 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Adran’s nostrils flare. “Or if he wished to signal his allies.”

I look at him. Really look.

His face is calm and stoic, but that mask is thin and I see his fear, but he’s also pleased to have been right about something, and that combination makes me want to put him in a storage room with Merra and a list of inventory discrepancies until dawn.

“Adran,” I say, “if I have to spend another breath dragging your suspicion behind me like a broken sled, I’m going to assign you to fever-row blanket washing for the next six months.”

Renn makes a choking sound.

Adran goes rigid. “You do not have the authority.”

“No,” Rosalind says. “But I do, and I am feeling generous.”

For one heartbeat, the chamber remembers we are alive. Then the floor hums. The token in my hand gives a tiny, cold twitch. Not enough to move. Enough to make my skin know it wanted to.

Everyone feels the shift. Syin reaches for his lochaber. Renn looks at the blood mark and the old drain. Virn turns toward the corridor, counting how many people stand between this passage and panic. Rosalind closes her face into the look she wears when leadership becomes heavy.

The hum is faint. Farther away than before. It’s moving. Rhazek is already beyond the first reach of the City.

I have to stop myself from looking toward the east again. Good. I can worry about him while I work.

“He is not alone,” Syin says.

“No,” I say.

The word comes out too quickly, but I know it. Everyone else knows it too.

Syin studies me. “Kessa.”

I do not like the way he says my name. Like a warning wrapped in a request. Like he knows I am about to do something sensible people will call reckless because they have the luxury of pretending the two are opposites.

I step around him and head for the corridor.

Rosalind moves with me. “Talk while you walk.”

Relief fills my chest for the first time since this nightmare began.

“Ash Seven if he wants sky-eyes to see him. Drainage slit under the salt shelf if he wants to leave a line I can read. But if he means to pull them far enough from the City before they close around him, he will not stop at either. He will cross the low ridge, follow old quake glass north of the dead cistern, then angle toward the split canyon.”

Renn follows, already pale. “The split canyon is unstable.”

“Yes.”

“Zemlja ground.”

“Yes.”

“Signal shadow too,” he adds, catching up. “The old metal deposits make the watch-stones unreliable there.”

I glance at him. “Useful brain. Keep bringing it.”

For half a second he looks proud in a sickly way, then remembers everything is terrible. Syin catches my shoulder before we hit the main passage.

“You cannot go after him alone.”

“I know.”

That actually surprises him. Surprise, Syin, I’m full of them.