Page 52 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Your alternate?” Syin asks.

“Old spillway. It runs under the south shelf and comes up behind the lower marker field. Narrow. Bad footing. Cooler. More cover.” She looks at me. “Can the fragment hear through stone?”

“Yes.”

Her expression says she would like one day with less bad news.

“Better through open air or old channels?” she asks.

“Old channels, if they contain conductive stone or water memory.”

“Water memory,” she repeats. “Of course water can have memory. Why not? Even the floor has opinions.”

“It leaves mineral trace from old flow paths.”

“I liked it better when it was poetic and stupid.” She taps the rough line she drew. “The spillway is dry. Mostly. The old channel curves. If the fragment is listening along straight signal routes, the stone bend might make us harder to mark.”

It might be, and that is the best answer we have.

“That route is better,” I say.

She looks up at me, surprised before she can hide it. “You agree?”

“Yes.”

“That feels unnatural. Are you dying?”

“Yes.” She looks ready to argue. The others freeze. I let the word sit for half a breath, because if they are going to drag me through the desert, they should understand the problem. Then I add, “Slowly.”

Merra is not here to curse at me, so Kessa does it for her under her breath. The words are inventive. I catalogue none of them and remember all of them.

“We all die slowly,” she snaps. “Try not to make it a scheduling problem.”

“I will attempt courtesy.”

“Start by not bleeding on my route.”

“That may be ambitious.”

The tug pulls through the scar again. My knees almost bend. Almost. I lock them before anyone but Kessa sees.

She looks worried for a breath. It is not softness. Soft would be simple and she is not. It is the look of someone finding a weak beam in a ceiling crowded with children. Concern sharpened into irritation because irritation is easier to carry.

“You need water,” she says.

“I need the second core broken.”

“You need both, which is inconvenient because I only packed one and it wasn’t alien disaster.” She jerks her chin at one of the route runners. “Lio, water.”

The young human hesitates with his skin gone pale under dust. He looks at me as if my teeth may detach from my face and chase him. Sensible. Still, he unhooks a flask and passes it to Kessa, not me.

Kessa holds it out. I do not take it. I keep refusing the water. She narrows her eyes.

“It’s water, not a marriage contract.”

“I know what it is.”

“Then take it.”