Page 53 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“No.”

Syin makes a low sound. “Enough delay.”

Kessa ignores him, focused on me with a precision that strips hide. “Why not?”

All the reasons fill my head. All the things I could tell her. Because on Krix, water from a stranger’s hand was chain, drug, debt, or performance. Because thirst belonged to owners. Because being given anything in front of witnesses meant the witnesses would later agree you owed more than you had understood. Because some lessons burrow so deep they become bone.

“Rhazek,” she says, quieter.

My name in her mouth is a problem. It strikes where the call is and does not cut.

I take the flask.

Only because refusing wastes time.

Her eyebrows rise a fraction. She knows that is not the whole answer. She does not ask. That is another problem.

The water is warm, flat, faintly bitter from the skin. It is also the best thing I have tasted in two days. I drink once, then hand it back before my body can reveal greed.

Kessa accepts it without comment. “See? Civilization. Occasionally useful.”

“Debt,” I say before I can stop myself.

She looks at me sharply. “No.”

The word is immediate. Hard. She closes the flask and tosses it back to Lio.

“Water isn’t debt. Not here. Not from me.”

Not from me.

The green beneath my throat burns. The second tracker hums from far away, sensing the change in my pulse. I turn before Kessa can see how badly those three words land.

“We move,” I say.

Syin does not like obeying my timing. He likes less that Kessa is already rising, knife in hand, eyes on the route. The group forms around her plan. Warriors front and rear. Humans in the middle. Me where Syin can watch and where Kessa can pretend she is not adjusting pace for my wound.

We leave the dead core behind, cracked and smoking in its shallow pit. I should destroy the fragments of the casing too. I should scatter the remains. I should cut every possible echo from the sand. There is no time, and survival is a ledger written in losses no one will forgive you for choosing correctly.

The spillway entrance hides behind a tilted stone shelf half-buried in red grit. Kessa finds it by counting cracks in the ridge face and muttering at old markers too worn for me to see. The opening is low enough that the Zmaj have to fold themselves into discomfort. My wing brace catches on the stone lip. Pain claws white across my back.

I make no sound, but Kessa turns anyway.

“Caught?” she asks, arching an eyebrow.

“No.”

She looks at the wing, then at me.

“That was a partial answer wearing no cloak at all.”

“Your metaphors are strange.”

“They’re free. Don’t complain.”

Before I can stop her, she steps close and lifts the trailing edge of the brace clear of the stone. Her fingers do not touch the torn membrane. They slide under the support strap, careful and efficient. Heat rolls through me at the nearness. Not desire. Or not only desire. Something older in my blood recognizes hand, threat, shelter, proximity.

We Kharon imprint under pressure, my mother once said, long before Vorraxis became a memory I could not afford. War makes fools of the lonely. Do not confuse survival-bonding with fate.