Page 36 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“You’ve never met a good curtain.”

For a moment he looks confused. Excellent. I’ll take whatever small victories I can get.

We move toward the broken cistern markers. The terrain is ugly in a specific, deliberate way, as if the planet once tried to fold this whole section into itself and then got distracted. Red shelves jut from sand. Old channel grooves cut through stone in pale curves. Blackened pieces of ship metal glitter here and there, but none are big enough to be the fragment we need. Every few steps, the pulse travels through the ground and a sickly glow answers beneath Rhazek’s throat.

He keeps pretending it doesn’t. I keep pretending I don’t see. We’re both liars. Mine is more polite.

The first true warning comes from the sand.

It’s not a tremor or the roll of a zemlja I know too well. This is smaller. A fine skittering under the surface, like grit being pulled in one direction. I drop to one knee and press my palm against the ground.

Hot sand. Sharp stone. A whispering vibration.

Rhazek crouches beside me, too fast for someone who should be fainting somewhere under Merra’s supervision.

“Do not touch the ground near active signal,” he says.

I lift my hand and show him my palm.

“No green light. No bleeding. No death. Very dull by today’s standards.”

He focuses on the shallow scrape on the heel of my hand from the cistern wall earlier. Not bleeding. Barely pink. His attention still catches there with an intensity that makes me grip the edge of my shirt.

“Cover it,” he says.

“It’s nothing.”

“Cover it.”

The order is too close to a command. My temper rises, bright and grateful for something familiar.

“You don’t get to order me.”

His face goes blank, which is becoming one of my least favorite things on an entire list of least favorite things about him.

“Then choose not to be foolish.”

“That’s still bossy, only sideways.”

“Kessa,” Syin snaps from ahead.

“Everyone is very committed to saying my name today.” I pull a scrap of cloth from my belt and wrap it around my palm with more force than necessary. “There. My tragic wound is hidden from the blood-hungry alien rock.”

Rhazek’s gaze stays on the wrap for one heartbeat longer than it should. Then he rises.

We find the fragment ten minutes later.

At first, it looks like another piece of black hull wedged into a cracked cistern post. Then the pulse comes again, and the marker around it lights from the inside. Not blue-white like the old waterlines. Luminous veins run out from the metal into the marker, up through the dead marker, and toward the open air above it.

The fragment is small. Which is stupid. Big disasters should at least have the courtesy to look impressive. This is no larger than my forearm, hooked and ugly, with dark plates folded around a core that opens and closes like a mechanical eye trying to blink sand away.

Rhazek is rigid. I look at him.

“That’s bad,” I comment.

“Yes.”

“On our scale or your scale?”