Page 28 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Rosalind gives me a dry look. “Yes. Tragically defective.”

Some of the pressure eases in my chest, which is unfair. I’m trying to stay angry. It keeps my edges sharp. Then Rosalind looks at Rhazek.

“Can the fragment be destroyed?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Find it. Break the core. Do not touch the green line if it is active. Do not let it cut skin. Do not let it taste blood.”

Taste blood. Excellent. Fine. Wonderful. The day had been missing a phrase that made my soul try to crawl into a storage jar.

“You know too much about the device,” Syin says, his tail scraping the stone.

“I know enough not to pet it,” Rhazek says.

I hate that I almost laugh.

“Who sent it?” Rosalind asks.

Rhazek shutters his expression. There. Another door. Another lock. He chooses where to place his answer with the care of a man setting a blade.

“I do not know which hand held the chain,” he says. “Krixian loyalists use old arena equipment. Arena houses use Krixian codes. Buyers buy whatever opens the cage fastest. The tracking rig is ugly, cheap, and effective. That narrows the list to most of the galaxy.”

“Convenient,” I mutter.

His eye comes to me. “Truth often is not.”

“That is the least comforting thing anyone has said in a room actively trying to glow at me.”

This time the green lines at his throat flicker under the dark plates, so quick I could pretend I didn’t see them. I do pretend, but only because pretending is one of the few hobbies left that doesn’t require extra rations.

Merra sees it too and focuses on his throat.

Rhazek notices her noticing and shifts, angling his shoulder so the torn wing and burned armor hide more of his throat. Too late, sky trash. The City is full of people trained by misery to notice small things.

The second point on the light-map brightens.

The cistern wall answers with a low scrape that comes from inside the stone. Dust falls in a fine gray curtain. Penr squeaks, then pretends it was a cough. I respect the attempt.

“The second tracker is waking,” Rhazek says.

“How long until it screams?” Rosalind asks.

“I do not know,” Rhazek says, and Syin growls. Rhazek looks at him. “Would you prefer I invent confidence?”

“I would prefer you had not brought this to us.”

“So would I.”

That stops the room colder than the cistern air.

The words aren’t an apology. He doesn’t bend them that way. They come out stripped and flat, and I believe him anyway. That annoys me more than an apology would have. For one breath, he looks less like an enemy and more like someone who knows exactly what a cage costs.

I don’t forgive him. That would be stupid, and I have a full schedule. But the truth beneath the words reaches me.

“We need the bright fragment destroyed before the second fully wakes,” Rosalind exhales.