Page 43 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

I suck in a breath and stumble backward before my pride can stop me.

Rhazek moves. Fast, wounded, ugly with pain. He steps between me and the glow, his wing dragging, his hand half lifted as if he wants to shove me behind him and knows I might bite him for it.

“Do not stand in the line,” he says.

“What line?” Syin demands.

“The one she can feel.”

I want to argue. The argument is already forming, hot and offended, because I do not appreciate being discussed as if I’m a cracked cistern marker. Then the fragment pulses and the words vanish. It isn’t pointing at the sky anymore. Not only the sky. The buried piece is pushing up a thin green strand through the stone, and somehow I know the strand is not trying to find a route.

It’s trying to make one.

Through Rhazek.

Toward me.

That thought is so awful and so absurd that I almost laugh. The sound catches in my throat and comes out wrong.

Renn shifts closer. “Kessa?”

“I’m fine.”

“Everyone who says that is usually bleeding or lying,” he says.

“I’m spiritually bleeding and emotionally lying. It counts less.”

He looks baffled. Sweet boy. Horrible day to have to put up with me.

Syin steps around Rhazek, but Rhazek’s arm shoots out, blocking him. Syin’s blade moves before I can blink, stopping a breath from Rhazek’s throat.

“Remove your arm,” Syin says.

“No.”

The word is flat. He is not challenging Syin. Giving ground here feels too much like obedience, and I can see how hard he is fighting that.

Syin’s lips peel back. “You do not command this mission.”

“If you cross that line with a blade, it may ride the metal into your blood.”

Syin’s tail stops mid-swing. The others freeze with him. One of the human route runners behind me whispers a word I can’t catch, probably a prayer or a curse. On Tajss, those are close relatives.

“Explain,” Syin says.

“I would if everyone stopped trying to be brave near the hungry device.”

“Hungry,” I repeat.

Rhazek’s eye flicks to me. “Not alive.”

“That was not my concern.”

“It should be.”

The fragment whines, low and thin. A crack spreads in the stone around it. Sand drains into the slit, pouring down as if the desert has sprung a leak.

My skin crawls. “It’s opening.”