Page 23 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“No. Quieter than it should be.”

I don’t like that. I especially don’t like that my instinct believes him before reason gets a vote. The cistern does feel quiet. Too quiet, as if the old stones are holding their breath around the sphere. Rosalind sets it on the broken lip of the central drain.

“Open it,” she orders.

Rhazek’s jaw tightens.

“It may not answer to my touch.”

“It came with you.”

“Krixians often send many things with a male that do not belong to him.”

The sentence is cold and made worse because he says it as fact, the way I might say a lower corridor is impassable in heat storms. Something true, inconvenient, and already accounted for.

That takes some of the heat out of my anger. I don’t want it to. Being angry is easier when I know exactly where to point it. Rosalind looks at him for one long breath, then places two fingers against the sphere herself.

“Arcan, if you built this to be annoying, I am going to haunt you while alive,” she says in a low mutter.

Light crawls through the copper seams. Every weapon rises. The sphere hums, low and round, but the cistern doesn’t answer at first. No tremor. No pulse beneath my boots. Just the hum and the taste of metal thickening on my tongue.

A voice spills into the air, broken by static and distance.

“Rosalind. Visidion. If this reaches you, the lie has failed.”

Rosalind holds perfectly still. Whatever hope she had for the message disappears.

The voice continues, rough and layered, as if the sphere is grinding the message through damaged gears.

“The signal from Tajss was not a call. It was an answer. More than one listener may have heard it. I have smothered rumors for years, but Zzlo sellers, Krixian loyalists, arena houses, and buyers with long memories are circling the ashes. They do not need certainty to hunt. They need only the scent of proof.”

Proof.

The word slithers through me. Sera’s covered arm. Kavor’s burned hand. The source below. Children in ration lines holding bowls with both hands. The City, hungry and patched and stubborn, reduced to evidence for people who have never loved one stone of it.

Rhazek’s gaze stays fixed on the sphere. His face has gone hard in a way that makes him look less like a person and more like a closed gate. Arcan’s voice crackles again.

“Trust the warning. Do not trust anything that followed it. The sphere carries only this message and a dampener. It was not built to call anyone here. The ship left me clean. If either one answers the sky, someone marked them after Rhazek escaped my line. He will likely have to fight to reach you. Krix leaves hooks in gifts, wounds, debts, and mercy. The messenger is Voraxxian, not Krixian, but Krix owned him long enough to learn his shape. That may make him valuable. It may also make him dangerous.”

Rhazek stiffens beside me, like a blade caught between ribs. Syin lowers his lochaber towards Rhazek.

I take a step forward on instinct. Just enough that Syin would have to look at me before deciding how badly he wants to test Rosalind’s patience. Unsurprisingly, Rhazek notices. I swear he notices the shift of air when someone thinks about lying. I regret moving immediately and also don’t move back.

The sphere flickers.

“Do not gather proof in one place. Do not expose bond resonance. Do not open the source for speed. If confirmation leaves Tajss, the war that buried the planet will wake hungry.”

The light dies.

For a moment, nobody speaks. The silence presses so hard against my ears that my pulse becomes thunder. I hate its speed. Then Adran’s voice comes from the arch behind us.

“Then we finally agree on something.”

I turn so sharply my shoulder brushes Rhazek’s armor. Adran stands just outside the cistern with two civil guards and Penr hovering behind them looking like he would rather crawl into a pipe and become plumbing. Of course Adran followed. Of course his idea of usefulness meant being independently terrifying. Rosalind’s expression goes flat.

“I told you to be useful.”

“I was. I ordered the source-watch access sealed and the proof stores guarded. No movement in or out without a signed council order.”