Page 12 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Rhazek says nothing. That silence isn’t denial.

I clench my fists until my fingers ache. Rosalind doesn’t look surprised. Visidion doesn’t either. That’s the scariest thing of all.

“How much time?” Rosalind asks.

Time? Until what?

My head is spinning. There are too many things here that I don’t understand. Questions piling on questions swirling around this strange alien. Rhazek returns his gaze to her.

“Before full confirmation? I do not know.”

“Before the next contact?”

“Soon.”

“That’s not an answer,” Adran laughs, a sharp bark devoid of humor.

“It is the only honest one,” Rhazek says.

His phrasing stays formal. Controlled. Like every softer word was beaten out of him years ago and never invited back.

“What does the galaxy believe?” Virn asks, speaking for the first time.

Rhazek breathes in. Merra presses something into the wound and he goes rigid, but doesn’t make a sound.

“That Tajss is not dead,” he says through pursed lips. “That there are surviving Zmaj. Human survivors. Hybrid bloodlines. That there is active resonance beneath a dead City. And that epis is in play. Again.”

Sera’s face loses all color. My chest tightens around one awful word.

Epis.

We’ve only just learned about the plant and some of its properties. Sera and Kavor discovered it growing under the City and that it was being farmed by ancient machines. It’s the thing that is making it possible for us humans to survive the heat, if not the lack of food.

Of course the galaxy would come for something that can be counted, stored, traded, stolen. Water. Grain. Medicine. Epis.

Give hungry people a rare enough thing, and lives turn into columns. Someone always stands over the slate pretending the numbers are cleaner than the mouths attached to them.

Adran looks at Sera’s covered arm. So does half the room. Kavor’s low growl rolls through the stone.

“Eyes off her.” Rosalind’s voice cuts clean through it.

Everyone obeys. Even Adran, though his mouth thins. Rhazek watches that too.

“Arcan tried to kill the rumor,” he says. “For years. He buried ships, bought silence, broke slaver routes, fed false maps to Krixian remnants. The Zzlo sold pieces faster than he could cut throats.”

“Zzlo,” Visidion growls, shaking his head, his jaw hardening.

“They are not the only ones.”

“Who else?” Rosalind asks.

Rhazek looks at the copper sphere.

“Arena houses that survived Arcan’s revolution. Krixian loyalists who want their king’s death repaid. Buyers who believe Zmaj blood, human bonds, and epis can open what the old war failed to keep.”

Cold drains into my hands. I don’t understand all of it by any means, but I understand enough.

The source. Sera. Kavor. The children. The City. Epis. And if that’s not enough, war is pretty damn clear.