Page 39 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

The refusal comes too fast. She notes that as well. Rot take her listening. Renn shifts. His claw scrapes stone, and the fragment brightens.

“Stop,” I say.

Everyone freezes except Kessa, who freezes half a breath before the word leaves me. She felt it coming. The green threads lift from the metal like hair rising in wind. One reaches toward the scrape in the stone, tasting vibration.

“Back,” I say.

Syin pulls Renn away with one arm. The thread drops, unsatisfied, and burns a black groove across the rock as it retreats.

The human runner makes a sound through his nose that he probably meant to keep private. Kessa breathes out slowly.

“Nobody step on anything pale, cracked, shiny, humming, green, black, warm, cold, interesting, or suspiciously quiet,” Kessa says.

“That leaves sky,” the human runner whispers.

“Don’t step on that either,” she says.

Renn laughs before he can stop himself. Even Syin lets the joke pass.

I crouch because standing has become expensive. My side pulls. The bandage sticks to the wound beneath, and for a moment the world dims around the edges. Kessa takes one step toward me, then stops herself.

Good. No. Rot take it. Not good. Necessary.

“The core is under the ridge,” I say before anyone can ask whether I am weak. “The visible fragment is a tooth. The core is the root.”

“How far under?” Kessa asks.

“Far enough that digging will wake it. Not far enough that leaving it will keep you safe.”

“Everyone is very committed to terrible options today.”

“She asks how to break it,” Syin says. “Answer that.”

I point to the black edge beneath the stone.

“The green threads feed from the root. Break the root and the tooth dies. Strike the tooth and it screams. Cut a thread and it tastes the blade, then the hand, then the blood.”

Renn swallows. “What happens if it tastes blood?”

“It sends what it learns.”

The silence after that belongs to all of them.

Kessa looks at the old channel scars in the stone, then the slope, then the fragment. Her mind works visibly, not because her face gives much away, but because she examines the world like it must confess if she stares accurately enough.

“It’s not trying to reach the City,” she says. “Not directly. It’s using the old channels to find a clear line upward.”

“Yes.”

“If we block that route, it may search another.”

“Yes.”

“If we break it wrong, it screams.”

“Yes.”

She exhales through her nose. “You are a festival of yeses and doom.”