Page 45 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

A crowd roaring.

Metal around my throat.

No, not my throat. His.

I stumble back, choking. Renn grabs my elbow. The world snaps into place, red and hot and wrong.

Rhazek is staring at Syin, but his mind is not here. I don’t know how I know that either. The device shoved something through him and brushed it against me. A scrap. A shard. Arena sand and locked collars and a body ordered forward because refusing meant pain.

“Syin,” I say, and my voice comes out scraped. “Give him the sphere.”

Syin doesn’t look away from Rhazek. “No.”

“It’s using the chain language. Or the collar language. Or whatever implanted commands they put in him. You just said the wrong word and it pulled harder.”

Rhazek’s eye cuts to me and I recognize the horror that flashes through it. Not at the device. At me knowing even that much about him.

Good. Let him hate it. I hate it too.

Syin looks at me then, and for once his anger has no place to go. “You saw this?”

“I felt it.”

Admitting that costs me something. I don’t know what, only that it leaves my chest colder.

The fragment pulses again. This time Rhazek’s knees buckle.

He catches himself on one hand, claws digging into the sand. His damaged wing flares halfway, trying to balance him, then crumples with a sound that makes my stomach twist. The green lines at his throat crawl higher, not just under the plates now but toward his jaw in thin branching veins.

Rhazek bares his teeth. “Sphere.”

Syin rips it from the pouch and throws it.

Rhazek catches it against his chest. The copper sphere flares dull gold, then green, then an ugly dead gray. He presses his thumb against one seam and twists. For a second nothing happens.

Then all sound drops away.

The silence hits so hard my ears pop. The fragment’s scream cuts off. The wind vanishes. Even the tiny scrape of sand against stone dies. It’s not quiet. Quiet has texture. This is absence.

My heart slams once.

Pause.

Again.

The fragment cracks open.

Inside is a core no bigger than both my fists together, suspended in a nest of black filaments and wet-looking green glass. It beats. Not like a heart. Worse than that because it’s imitating a heart badly.

“Do not let the filaments touch skin,” Rhazek says.

His voice is rough. Too rough. I look him over quickly and see blood sliding under Merra’s wrap at his side.

Syin signals two warriors forward with hooked blades. They move carefully, one on each side of the cracked stone. The first filament lashes out before either gets close. It snaps across one warrior’s lochaber, and the metal hisses green. He drops the weapon with a curse. The second warrior stabs down, but the filament wraps the blade and pulls.

The weapon is pulled into the crack.

“That went well,” I say, mostly because fear is trying to climb up my throat and I need to shove words at it.