Page 24 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Tension knots my shoulders. “Whose signature?”

His eyes come to me. “Mine, until the council formalizes a safer structure.”

There it is. The grab dressed as caution. Adran raises a hand before anyone can speak.

“Do not mistake me. I heard the same warning you did. Do not gather proof. Do not expose resonance. Do not open the source. That requires authority, not improvisation.”

“It requires trust,” I say.

“It requires obedience before trust kills us.”

The words bite because they’re not empty. The worst arguments always bring a sharp point. Somewhere above us, families are moving out of lower rooms because I told Ila to lie gently and fast. Somewhere below us, a wounded system may be listening for our feet. Adran is wrong in the way locked doors are wrong during a fire, but that doesn’t mean the fire isn’t real.

Rosalind folds the cloth back over the sphere.

“No single person controls access,” Rosalind says.

“No single person should,” Adran says. “But someone must, until panic stops making decisions for us.”

“Panic isn’t the only thing making decisions,” I say.

His gaze hardens.

“You felt the rhythm before others did. Rhazek noticed that and he’s not wrong. The warning named resonance as danger. If enemies can track sensitivity, then we need every responsive person identified and protected.”

“Protected.” I taste the word. It tastes like a lock someone polished. “You mean listed.”

“I mean guarded.”

“You mean used.”

“I mean for us not to be dragged from our beds by off-world hunters because we were too proud to admit some people have become strategic vulnerabilities.”

Heat climbs my neck. I want to snap back. I want easy villainy, someone I can throw my fear at and watch it stick, but Adran doesn’t give me that. He stands there with his terrible, accurate points and his hand halfway closed around the City’s throat.

I glare at him, but I can’t hold it because beneath his austere, demanding façade I see the truth. He’s afraid. I may not like him, I don’t. I may not trust him, I don’t. But I’ve lived too long with fear to not recognize its haunting glint in someone’s eyes.

Rhazek’s voice cuts in low beside me. “On Krix, they called cages protection too.”

Adran looks at him. “And yet you are the one who brought the cage to our door.”

Rhazek smiles without humor. “No. I brought news that it was being built.”

Syin’s blade shifts. “Enough.”

“No,” I say.

Every eye turns to me. Lovely. Apparently my mouth has applied for leadership without consulting the rest of me.

“No,” I say again, because the first one is already loose and might as well have company. “We are not being counted into cages. Sera isn’t a sample. Kavor isn’t access.

“Rhazek isn’t clean, and I don’t trust him farther than I can throw this entire cistern, which is not far because I have noodle arms and a terrible attitude. But we don’t save the City by becoming the thing the warning told us to fear.”

Adran’s mouth thins. “That is a fine speech, but not a plan.”

“Right. Well good news is I brought both.” I point toward Penr, who looks alarmed to become part of anything. “You take two runners and tell Ila to rotate source-watch guard by mixed pairings. One City Zmaj, one human, no proof moved without Rosalind and Virn both present. No names listed for resonance sensitivity until we decide what that even means, and nobody touches Sera, Kavor, or anyone else because they glowed, heard, felt, or dreamed something inconvenient.”

Penr blinks. “Me?”