Page 120 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Kessa’s eyes cut toward him. “Nobody invited you into this conversation.”

I have been wrong since the moment they dragged me into this cage. I thought the enemy built a prison, and Kessa saw a trap. We both missed the truth.

A cage is only one kind of arena.

Every arena has rules. Every master believes the rules belong to him.

Every fighter who survives learns where those rules are weakest.

I stop pulling.

The command crashes into the sudden absence of motion and finds no purchase for one breath. Pain blooms through me, confused and savage. The handler’s wand lifts.

“Compliance drop,” he says.

Kessa narrows her eyes. She has seen the shift. Of course she has. She sees routes where others see walls.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Making a bad choice.”

“Try being more specific. I have several shelves for those.”

Despite the blood in my mouth, despite the burning hook in my throat, something dangerously close to a laugh moves through me. It does not escape. I keep it where it is, a small ember under ash.

“I cannot break the anchor from the outside,” I say. “It was built to punish that.”

She glares at me. “No.”

“You do not know the plan.”

“No, but I know that tone.”

The handler’s gaze flicks. He senses a change, but not the shape of it. He watches obedience and disobedience. He does not know how to read choice. Men who own cages rarely do.

I lower my head, letting the command think it has bent me. Green light crawls up my neck. The machine drinks the surrender and brightens. The handler’s smile returns.

Kessa goes pale beneath the red dust on her cheeks.

“Rhazek.”

The command leaps at my name.

This time, I let it.

Pain opens the anchor fully. The old hook under my throat blossoms like a star made of knives. The machine rushes in, eager, stupid with hunger. It expects resistance. It expects panic. It expects the same shape Krix carved into me: fight, submit, obey, break.

I give it memory instead.

I give it the first bell in the arena, when I was too young to know a crowd could sound like weather.

I give it the second bell, when I refused to kneel and they drove the first tooth down my throat.

I give it the years of sand, blood, burned wings, iron collars, dead fighters dragged out before the crowd finished cheering.

I give it the day Arcan’s people cut the visible collar from my neck and I did not understand why my hands would not stop shaking.

I give it the moment I fell from the Tajss sky and Kessa stood over me with terror in her eyes and a knife in her hand, then chose the living problem over the simple corpse.