Page 103 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

I know where he meant to go and for a while, that certainty keeps my fear useful.

Renn reads the ground while we run. He points without wasting breath. A deeper heel mark where Rhazek stumbled. Blood on the lee side of a stone. Another long wing scrape through crusted sand.

“He was slowing,” Renn says.

“I know.”

Syin glances at me and I ignore him.

At the base of the low ridge, the trail is still exactly where I expected it to be. Rhazek should cross here, pick up the old quake glass on the far side, then keep moving toward the dead cistern.

Instead, his prints drive up the lower slope and stop well below the crest.

I stop so fast Renn nearly runs into me.

“No,” I say.

Syin comes up beside me. “What?”

“This isn’t where he was supposed to stop.”

Renn crouches over the last clean print. “But he did.”

This... this changes everything. Frowning, I kneel and study the tracks. This doesn’t make sense. The back of my neck itches but I don’t know if it’s some sense of being watched or irritation that I don’t understand.

The last few prints are shorter and deeper where Rhazek stumbled. I follow where one knee hit the sand. Blood darkens the crust beside a narrow scorched line in the stone. Then his tracks stop being the only ones.

Renn works carefully around the churned ground. “Boots.”

I crouch beside him. The tread is even, manufactured, repeating in hard little angles that Tajss didn’t make.

“Off-world,” I say.

Renn nods. “More than one.”

The unfamiliar prints close around Rhazek’s last steps. No body. No trail continuing toward the canyon. No sign he walked away from here under his own power.

A black line catches the light beneath the disturbed sand.

Too straight.

I brush sand and dust away. Smooth metal sits under the crust, dark enough to swallow the red glare. The seam runs along the base of the broken ridge and disappears beneath stone.

This is the thing that answered the dead drop. The thing Rhazek dragged away from us.

Syin sets his jaw. “They took him.”

“Alive,” I say.

He looks at me.

“There isn’t enough blood for dead, and they surrounded him instead of leaving him here.” I point to the clustered boot marks where they vanish at the metal seam. “They came out of that.”

Renn stares at the buried metal. “We open it?”

“No.”

Both of them look at me.