Page 37 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

His good eye doesn’t leave the fragment. “There is no meaningful difference.”

The green veins brighten. Three patient beats.

The glow under Rhazek’s throat answers. Stronger this time. The fragment’s mechanical eye turns, slow and blind, until it faces him, then the world drops through the sand.

The fragment isn’t calling the sky. It’s calling him.

8

Rhazek

It calls in no language, which is worse.

Words can be fought. Words can be refused, twisted, ignored, spat back into the teeth of the one who sent them. This is older than words. Simpler. A hook dragged through blood and nerve, pulling against the scar tissue where Krix left more than memory.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

The fragment calls, and my body tries to answer.

I lock my knees before they bend. I keep my damaged wing tight against my back though pain sparks white along the torn membrane. I keep my hands loose. That matters most because hands give away obedience before the mouth admits it. Krix taught that. Arena masters watched hands first. Collars second. Eyes only if they enjoyed watching a male discover he was not his own.

I am my own.

The line tastes like iron inside my mouth.

Kessa does not rush toward the fragment. She does what I have seen her do with danger before. She starts issuing instructions.

She makes a low cutting signal. Back. Wider. Quiet.

Syin obeys before he can argue. Renn shifts with him. The others spread, not fleeing, not crowding. Kessa remains closest to the broken marker, sharp-eyed and furious, placing each of us like stones around a sinkhole.

She has not looked at my throat since we left the cistern. Not once. She is pretending she did not see the green light beneath my plates answer Arcan’s sphere, which means she has stored the memory somewhere sharp and will use it later. Now the fragment’s pulse hits the thing inside me in front of her, and I watch the memory cut deeper.

Nobody shifts farther than Kessa tells them to. Syin holds left of the broken marker. Renn holds right. I remain where she can watch my hands, my throat, and the little machine half-buried in dust. The shard keeps blinking from the split stone. Small. Too small for the amount of obedience it drags out of my blood.

“Your hands moved,” Kessa says without looking away from the shard.

“I stopped them.”

“That wasn’t praise.”

Renn makes a small sound. Syin looks ready to remove the fragment, my head, or both from the planet by force. Kessa lifts one hand, a small motion that quiets both of them better than command.

She should not have that kind of power without title. It makes her difficult to predict. It makes others trust her before they decide to do so.

Krix would have tried to own her first. I dislike how quickly I can imagine it. I push it aside and focus on the pull beneath my skin.

The fragment is east-south-east of the first basin. Close enough that the ship’s breaking pattern could explain it to desperate minds. Too far for truth. The wreck did not scatter this cleanly. It seeded. That is the word I do not give them.

Seeded fragments are meant to wake in sequence. One screams. One listens. One carries whatever the others feed it.

Arcan feared a loud beacon. He did not know about the blood relay. Or he knew and sent me anyway.

Pain tightens around the gash in my side. Merra’s bandage holds, but the wound beneath it has begun to throb in rhythm with the call. I feel the metal dust in the cut answering like ground glass remembering the hand that made it. My body wants to turn toward the sound. My blood wants to become a road.