Page 55 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Kessa presses her palm flat against the wall. I watch her feel the truth arrive through stone before I speak it.

“The second point moved,” I say.

Syin’s blade lowers toward the dark ahead.

“Fragments do not move.”

I think of cheap arena rigs. Of crawling hook-mines with bone needles. Of devices built to follow heat, blood, fear, resonance. Of a green line tasting the air for the person it wants most and finding, through me, the human woman who keeps refusing to be owned by need.

“No,” I say. “Fragments do not.”

A scrape answers from deeper in the spillway.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

Kessa’s face drains of color.

The second tracker is moving.

11

Kessa

The second tracker moves again.

Not far or fast and not in a straight line. That bothers me the most.

A machine should lie like a machine. It should sit where it fell, half-buried in hot sand, leaking its terrible little pulse into the world until we find it and crush it. A machine that moves should do so with a pattern. Roll downhill. Drag with wind. Bounce when stone shifts under it.

This one darts.

The copper sphere shows the motion in ugly little flickers. A blink near the broken cistern marker. A silence long enough for me to taste hope. Then another blink farther south, not along any slope that makes sense. Then another behind a tumble of red stone where nothing larger than my hand should be able to pass.

I stare at the sphere until the glow burns a ghost behind my eyes.

“Something picked it up,” Maro says.

He says it like he has discovered a new horror and would like the rest of us to admire it with him.

“Something small,” Lio adds, crouched with both hands on his knees as he studies the sand. “Or something that knows how to keep its weight off the ground.”

“That is not comforting,” I say.

“I wasn’t offering comfort.”

“Clearly.”

The seven of us have spread across the edge of the wash in a shape that would make sense to anyone who has ever hunted, fled, or been hunted while wishing very hard to become someone else’s problem.

Syin stands on the highest shelf of stone, wings folded tight, lochaber in hand. Renn keeps to my right, young face grim enough to age him ten years. Orek has taken the left, broad shoulders angled toward the open desert. Lio and Maro read the ground because human feet notice different lies than Zmaj claws. Rhazek stands too close to the broken path and too far from everyone’s trust.

His throat plates remain dark. For now at least.

The last time the tracker pulsed, the faint green under his skin answered. He said nothing. I said nothing. Syin noticed, because Syin notices danger the way hunger notices an empty bowl.