Page 47 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Kessa.”

There it is. My name in his mouth. A warning. A plea bitten in half because he doesn’t know what to do with the other part.

The core flares. The green line shoots straight toward me.

Rhazek moves faster than anyone wounded should. He slams the copper sphere into the path of the light. The line hits the sphere, splits, and scatters in a spray of sparks. Heat slaps my face. The smell of burning copper fills the air.

Rhazek roars.

The sound is not Zmaj. Not human. Not anything I know. It tears out of him like something caged finally found a seam.

His throat markings blaze.

The core answers.

And beneath the sound, beneath the glow, beneath the impossible terror of standing in a desert while a broken piece of alien machinery tries to crawl into my bones, I understand what is happening with awful clarity.

It can’t reach me cleanly unless it goes through him.

“Rhazek!”

He drops to one knee, still holding the sphere against the green line. The copper shell blackens under his palm. Smoke curls around his fingers. Heat crawls past his wrist and bites beneath the edge of his forearm bracer before he can shift his grip.

Syin lunges, but Rhazek snarls, “Core. Now.”

I don’t know if Syin obeys because he understands or because he hates taking orders so much that violence becomes the fastest way to end the experience. Either way, he moves. He grabs the fallen lochaber from the sand, spins it, and drives the butt end into the rock beside the core, pinning two filaments against stone.

Renn and the second warrior follow, using broken metal scraps instead of blades, trapping the whipping lines long enough for the core to hang exposed.

The pulse builds again.

I feel it before anyone else. Wider this time. Deeper. The core is going to scream upward, not outward. Skyward.

“It’s going to send,” I shout. “Now. It’s sending now.”

Rhazek’s head snaps toward me. “Break the glass.”

“With what?”

“Stone. Blade. Anything.”

Everyone is too far. Syin is holding filaments. Renn is braced low with both hands on a scrap of hull metal. The other warriors are pinned by the core’s thrashing green lines. Rhazek is burning his hand on the sphere to keep the call from reaching me.

Which leaves, obviously, the least qualified idiot in the channel.

Me.

I draw my tiny practical knife.

Rhazek sees it and reacts immediately. “No.”

“I thought you liked assessment.”

“No.”

“Try not to enjoy being wrong.”

I move before the next pulse finishes gathering. I hit the ground on my knees beside the crack, keeping my sleeves tight against my arms, staying low under the whipping filaments. Heat crawls over my cheek. The green glass core shudders inches away, slick and bright and wrong. My knife looks insultingly small.