Page 122 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

The command says protect.

I answer choose.

The command says claim.

I answer never.

The command says home.

I answer mine, and this time the word has claws.

The receiver convulses. The ring around Kessa’s ankle shatters into green sparks. She moves before the light has finished dying, throwing herself sideways as a floor plate buckles upward where she stood. Syin surges up with a roar, slamming his shoulder into Renn to knock him clear when another arc of green light tears across the chamber. Renn finally throws the knife, not at the receiver, but at the handler’s wand hand.

The blade strikes leather and bone. The wand spins away.

The handler screams.

I tear one bar from the cage.

Kessa reaches the receiver before I reach her.

She has no weapon left but a shard of bone-handled knife, a torn water skin, and the sort of fury that should be listed as a controlled substance. She drops low under the whipping green light and drives the bone handle into the exposed seam beside the receiver rail.

“Kessa, back!” Syin shouts.

“Busy!” she snaps.

The damaged receiver jerks against its floor mounts. A strip of metal tears loose beside the track and slams back down hard enough to shower sparks across the chamber.

The cracked panel bucks against its mount, fighting to keep the direct line open even as the rest of the receiver fails.

Kessa sees it in the same heartbeat I do.

“Well,” she says, breathless and furious, “that’s rude.”

Kessa does not run toward me. She does not wait to be seized or saved or lifted out of danger by a male making terrible decisions on her behalf. She slashes the torn water skin open and flings the last of the water across the exposed seam.

Steam bursts.

The green line flinches.

“Rhazek!” she shouts. “Not me. The seam!”

This time my name does not command.

It calls and I move.

I drive the torn cage through the wet seam and into the receiver’s exposed floor conduit. The shock hurls me sideways, but I hold the bar and shove every remaining piece of the command down through it.

The machine takes my pain.

I make it choke on my choice.

A pulse shoots away from us. A war call.

Far beneath the red earth, something heavy closes.

Kessa staggers to my side as the machine tears itself apart. She grabs my arm, and the contact nearly brings me down. Not pain. Not command.