Page 41 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“No.”

“Do you know another small person?”

The human runner takes one careful step backward.

Kessa looks at him. “Not you. You have the spine of cooked root mash.”

“I accept that,” he says quickly.

I stare at the slit. The space beneath will be narrow, dark, and close to the core. Too close. If the green line touches her skin, it will take blood and heat and whatever strange listening lives in her bones. If it tastes Kessa, it may learn the City faster than it could from me.

“No,” I say.

Kessa turns on me. “We are not accepting votes from sky trash.”

“It wants blood. You already hear it. That makes you not merely blood.”

Her expression shutters. I have made an error. Syin hears it. Renn hears it. Even the human runner hears enough to look terrified in a new, more educated way.

Kessa steps closer to me, and I hate that everyone else fades for half a breath. The suns burn above. The fragment calls. Her eyes are tired and angry and too alive.

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“It means you should not go under that stone.”

“That is an answer shaped like a locked door.”

“Yes.”

“Open it.”

“No.”

She presses her lips together. “Rhazek.”

My name in her mouth should not do this. It should not strike low beneath the ribs, deeper than the wound, deeper than the old command trying to drag my body toward the fragment. It should not make the green beneath my plates pulse, hot and bright.

Kessa sees it. The fragment sees it too. The threads lift all at once, turning toward us.

“Down!” I shout.

I grab Kessa before she can obey, because she is fast but the fragment is faster. I twist, taking her to the ground beneath me as green light lashes over us and cuts through the air where her throat was.

The smell of burned dust fills my mouth. Syin roars. Stone cracks. Kessa’s hands slam against my chest plates, not helpless, not soft, pushing for space where there is none.

“Get off me,” she snaps.

“In a moment.”

“Now would be traditional.”

The fragment shrieks.

The call tears through my scar and into the buried metal in my wound. My vision whites out. For one breath, Krix has me again. Sand under my knees. Collar at my throat. A master’s voice telling me to rise, to kill, to obey, to prove that freedom is a story fools tell before the gate opens.

Then Kessa’s fist hits my shoulder.

Hard.