Page 109 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

A thin red line slides along my lower lip. The cage hook warms in answer. Green light curls under my throat plates, down my forearm, and across the restraint holding my wrist.

The console answers in three notes.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

Then a fourth note slides under it, lower, rougher, almost human in its stubborn wrongness.

No. Curse the Grey Widow that is Kessa.

The gray-armored male stops moving and the guard by the passage lifts his weapon.

Outside the chamber, beyond stone and sand and ugly borrowed metal, something shifts through the connection between us. Anger. Heat. Calculation. A dry, furious steadiness that belongs to one woman in all the galaxy.

I know she is close enough for the receiver to taste and now he does too. The male looks at me, and this time his smile is real.

“Excellent,” he whispers. “She followed.”

I pull against the restraints, not to escape. I pull because sometimes cages tell the truth by what they refuse to let move. The right wrist bites first. Then the left shoulder. Then the floor bolt by my damaged wing gives the smallest shudder.

A weak point.

The receiver hums again, gathering itself.

It does not need to send everything yet. It only needs one clean confirmation. A living source. A bond-path response. A human female. A Voraxxian messenger carrying Krix hooks and Arcan’s warning. A City beneath the sand.

The proof packet forms in the air above the console, green threads wrapping blue-violet dust-light.

The gray-armored male touches the command panel. I bare my teeth. The cage is not only holding me. It is waiting for her.

27

Kessa

The cage seals around Rhazek and then the transport begins to sink below the sands.

I push up from the stone before I realize I am moving. Syin catches my forearm and jerks me down, pulling me back below the ridge.

“Wait.”

“He’s going down,” I say, pulling free of his grip.

I barely keep myself from shouting. Syin has one hand on my back, holding me down against the rock and sand.

“I can see that.”

Below us, one of the masked figures turns toward the ridge. I stop breathing. Renn flattens beside me. Syin does not move at all.

The figure turns its head, scanning along the ridge. My chest tightens until it feels like my heart can’t beat because of it.

“We need to attack,” I whisper.

“No,” Syin says.

The figure’s eyes pass over where we’re hiding again as Rhazek disappears below the ground. Anger burns hot but reason threads its way through the blind rage. We don’t know how many of them there are. There could be an entire army waiting below. The most likely result of charging in now would not be rescuing him, but us needing someone to rescue us.