Page 44 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Yes,” Rhazek says.

“Can it do that?”

“It is doing that.”

“I’m going to become violent about your answer quality.”

He exhales through his nose. I’m absurdly pleased that I got a reaction out of him, but then the glow in his throat brightens and the moment is gone.

He staggers.

I’m moving without thinking. Again. Because apparently my survival instincts are broken in a very specific male-shaped direction. I catch his arm, and he hisses as if my touch hurts. His skin is hot beneath my fingers, the armor plates shifting with his breath, and something electric bites through my palm.

I yank my hand back as Rhazek’s eye goes blacker.

“Do not touch me when it calls.”

The words land like a dropped blade. Syin hears. Renn hears. The other guards hear. Worse, I hear how frightened Rhazek is beneath the order.

“I was keeping you upright,” I snap, because anger is close and useful and doesn’t ask me what the spark through my palm meant.

“Do not.”

“You prefer falling?”

“I prefer you not become part of the circuit.”

Circuit. Fine. Good. A word from old ship lessons, half remembered from before the crash, when screens and lessons and lights were normal and I was young enough to believe the universe had rules made for people instead of razor sharp teeth ready to consume the unwary.

I swallow. “Too late?”

He does not answer quickly enough. That’s becoming his worst habit.

Syin snarls. “We end this now.”

He signals with two fingers, and the Zmaj warriors spread across the channel. The plan we made before leaving the City had been simple in the optimistic way all stupid plans are simple. Rhazek identifies the core. Syin, Renn, and Orek keep the tracker contained. Renn and the route runners secure retreat. I stand back, feel the pulse, and avoid becoming public equipment.

That plan, though, is already lying in the sand with its throat cut.

The fragment is wedged under a slanted shelf of black rock half-buried in red grit. Only a crescent of it shows. Curved metal the color of wet bone, threaded with green lines. Not copper like Arcan’s sphere. Not the same black hull from the ship. This is inner machinery. Something that should never have seen the sun.

It pulses again.

The copper sphere wrapped in Syin’s belt pouch hums in answer. We brought it because Rhazek said the dampener might slow the relay if the core woke. Might. Another word I would like to throw into a pit.

Rhazek turns toward Syin. “Give me the sphere.”

“No.”

“I need it.”

“You need a chain.”

Rhazek’s face empties.

The green light flares so violently every hair on my body rises. The fragment screams, and this time the sound comes with a memory that is not mine.

Sand. Not red sand. Black sand under white lights.