Page 125 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

He doesn’t argue but joins me, and we push. The joint screams. Once. Twice. On the third try, the locking arm tears free.

Rhazek’s wing drops loose behind him. He hisses through his teeth.

I grab his forearm through the bars. “You with me?”

His fingers close around mine. “Yes.”

Something crashes behind us.

Syin has driven his lochaber into the seam beside the service panel. Renn is pulling at the other side. The panel bends outward a handspan.

“Again!” I shout.

They wrench it wider. The opening behind it is narrow, dark, and slopes upward. Perfect. Almost.

A broken chime sounds behind me. Not the old command rhythm. One sharp note. Then another. Faster.

I turn.

Gray is on one knee beside the receiver. Blood runs from his mouth. One hand is pressed into the cracked console and the other is tearing open a narrow panel beneath it.

Green light crawls through the broken machinery. It races along a cable buried beside the transport track and vanishes into the wall. Rosalind’s warning comes back to me. Proof. Signal. Someone listening above us.

“No.”

Gray smiles through the blood.

“You broke the leash,” he says. “You did not break the send.”

Rhazek doesn’t move toward me. Nothing inside him answers any external command. No green line lights under his throat. My sense of relief lasts less than a breath.

Because the console brightens.

Gray isn’t trying to control him; he’s dumping whatever the receiver still remembers into the only path left.

The City. Epis. Rhazek. Me.

It’s not a complete packet or all the proof of what survives, but maybe enough. I hate maybe.

“Syin!”

He looks over.

“Keep opening that route. Renn, guard him.”

Renn starts to protest.

“That is not a suggestion.”

He shuts his mouth. I run for the receiver.

Gray reaches for the weapon of the guard Syin dropped. I kick it away and slam my shoulder into him. We hit the console together. Pain shoots down my already injured arm, but he loses his grip on the open panel.

The green light flickers.

Rhazek grips the bent cage opening. “Kessa.”

“I know.”