Page 42 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Pain snaps the vision apart.

“Stay with me, doom statue,” she says, voice tight with fear she refuses to make pretty. “I need the part of your brain that knows horrible things.”

I breathe. Once. Pause. Again.

The rhythm is mine this time. Not the fragment’s. Mine.

I lift my head. The green threads have burned a circle around us, not touching. Waiting. The crash site lies. The fragment is not calling me. It is using me to call her.

9

Kessa

The fragment calls me, but not directly. It’s coming through Rhazek.

I don’t know how I know that and I hate not knowing how I know anything. Knowing is supposed to be sturdy. It should have steps, measurements, reasons, little scratches on a slate, some annoyed person to blame if it fails. This knowing has none of that. It slides under my skin with the green light and the wrong rhythm, cold and bright and far too intimate for something made of alien metal.

Rhazek is a few steps ahead, half turned toward the buried fragment, his shoulders locked and his damaged wing held tight against his back. The glow beneath his throat plates pulses once, pauses, and pulses again. Each flare pulls through me in the same rhythm, impossible to ignore.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

The buried fragment answers from the split in the rock, green light bleeding through sand like poison through cloth.

Syin sees Rhazek, sees me, then his blade comes up with the kind of speed that makes every human instinct in my body vote to be elsewhere.

“Back away from her,” Syin says, his voice low and dangerous.

Rhazek doesn’t move.

It’s not defiance. I know defiance. I’ve been accused of keeping emergency reserves of it myself. This is different. His body is standing still because every piece of him is fighting something that wants him to step forward.

“Rhazek,” I say.

His unswollen eye finds mine. For one breath, the desert narrows to that single black-and-gold stare. Heat shimmers around him. The twin suns burn the tops of my shoulders. Sand slides beneath my boots. Renn breathes too loudly somewhere behind me.

None of it matters the way his voice does when he says, very softly, “Do not answer it.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You are listening.”

“That’s usually how ears work.”

He presses his lips together. “Not like this.”

The fragment pulses again and the world tips sideways.

Not enough to drop me, but enough that my stomach tries to climb into my throat as it files a formal complaint. The green light in the crack doesn’t shine outward so much as reach. It combs over the sand, over the stones, over the line of us standing half-hidden in a shallow channel east of the first crash basin.

It touches Rhazek first.

Not physically. I would understand physical. Physical gets a knife, a shove, a bandage, a map. This isn’t that. The light hits the markings in his throat and they flare under his skin, thin lines of toxic emerald threading beneath bronze and dark natural armor.

Then the pulse slides to me.