Page 31 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Rhazek lets go of my arm as if my skin burned him.

Rosalind sees. Syin sees. Merra definitely sees.

And this time, so do I.

7

Kessa

For three breaths, nobody says anything.

That might be a City record. We are excellent at fear, suspiciously talented at argument, and practically festive when it comes to blaming the nearest bleeding person for whatever has gone wrong. Silence usually has to fight for space around here. But apparently when an enemy alien’s throat starts glowing in the same rhythm as an off-world death sphere, even Adran can find a moment to let the universe be awful without commentary.

Rhazek’s hand is gone from my arm, but my skin remembers it anyway. Hot. Careful. Too fast for thought. He pulled me away before the green line snapped up from the drain, before I understood I needed saving, before anyone else moved. The burned mark across the stone smokes faintly between us, a thin black lash where the light touched and decided stone was something it could eat.

My wrist aches in sympathy for what did not happen. I hate that. I hate him. I glare from my wrist to him, then shake my head.

Syin recovers first, raising his lochaber until the blade points at Rhazek’s throat, which is still glowing under the dark plates. The light is thinner now, less flare and more ember, but it’s there. A toxic glow keeping the old three-beat measure. Not on his skin. Under it. Like something beneath the armor of his body has heard its name called from a very long distance.

“What is that?” Syin asks.

Rhazek’s face closes so hard I can almost hear the lock.

“Voraxxian,” he says.

“That is a species, not an answer.”

“It is both.”

Syin’s blade creeps closer. “Try again.”

Rhazek slowly looks at the point of the lochaber, then, just as slowly, up at Syin. He doesn’t step back or otherwise react, seemingly undisturbed by the deadly point ready to run him through. That seems unwise from a wound-management perspective, but I’m beginning to understand that Rhazek views his body as a rented structure with questionable maintenance and no tenant rights.

“The markings react,” Rhazek says. “Stress. Threat. Blood. Combat. Sometimes signal noise. Voraxxians are not stone.”

“No,” Adran says from the arch. “Stones are less evasive.”

I whirl on him.

“Did your better judgment fall into a hole on the way here?”

“My better judgment is asking why this alien who brought a tracking system into the City is physically answering it,” Adran says, cool and collected in the face of my snapping.

I hate that that isn’t a stupid question. Truly unfair of him. Rosalind steps between the argument and the blade without raising her voice.

“Lower the weapon, Syin.”

Syin doesn’t. Visidion shifts one foot. Nothing more, but somehow the room changes around that single movement. Syin’s jaw tightens, but the lochaber lowers by a handspan. Not enough for comfort. Enough for breathing.

Merra moves in before anyone can stop her. She plants herself directly in front of Rhazek and grips his chin with one hand, tilting his face up as if he’s a feverish child who has offended her by growing horns.

“Hold still,” she says.

Rhazek stops moving, but he’s not surrendering, even to her. Merra ignores the threat he represents with the confidence of someone who has bullied larger idiots back from death. She studies the green shimmer beneath his throat plates and narrows her eyes.

“Is it poison?”

“No.”