Page 48 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Fine.

Small things still cut.

I jam the blade into a seam where green glass meets black casing. The shock up my arm is hard enough to make my shoulder scream. For one second I’m not in the desert. I’m on tan sand under white lights, blood in my mouth, collar biting, crowd roaring for a kill I don’t want to make.

Then Rhazek’s voice cuts through it.

“Kessa.”

Not an order. Not a warning.

An anchor.

I twist the knife.

The core cracks.

Green light explodes upward. Rhazek slams the copper sphere over the split like he is sealing a wound with his bare hand. Syin and Renn throw their weight into the pinned filaments. Someone curses. Someone else yells my name. I don’t know who because the world is full of light and heat and the awful feeling of something vast outside the sky turning its attention toward us.

Then the core dies.

It dies with a shriek that rips across the channel and buries itself in the sand, sending a ripple through the ground strong enough to knock me backward.

Rhazek catches me.

Again.

This time neither of us pretends not to notice.

His burned hand is wrapped around my wrist. My shoulder is pressed against his chest. His heart is beating too fast beneath dark plates that shift against my cheek. The green light at his throat fades, but not all the way. A thin line remains, pulsing weakly under the skin.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

I lift my head. His face is inches from mine, carved tight with pain and fury and something worse because it’s not aimed at me.

“You touched the core,” he says.

“You told me to break the glass.”

“I told them.”

“I was available.”

“You were reckless.”

“You were on fire.”

His burned hand tightens around my wrist for one heartbeat, then releases as if he remembers he has no right. The loss of his grip feels stranger than the grip itself. I’m absolutely not prepared to examine that. My examination schedule is closed. Permanently. Due to emergency structural failure.

Syin appears over us, blade up and eyes furious. “Both of you, away from it.”

I look past him.

The fragment has gone dark. The green glass is cracked open, bleeding a sluggish black smoke into the sand. No pulse. No hum. No call.