Page 62 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Not the sphere.”

“No.”

She sets her jaw. “The thing under your skin.”

I do not answer quickly enough. Syin’s blade lifts an inch.

Kessa steps without looking, putting herself where Syin would have to decide whether he is threatening me or cutting through her authority. She has a talent for becoming a wall at the worst possible moment.

“What do you mean?” Syin asks.

“The kedi carried a tracker,” she says. “We broke the tracker. Something in him still answered. That is what we are dealing with.”

“We are dealing with him,” Syin says.

“No,” she says. “We are dealing with whatever someone put in him.”

She separates me from what was done to me. I do not know what to do with that. The burn under my ribs spreads in a thin line. Not pain. Pain belongs to the body. This is instruction, written beneath flesh in a language I hate because part of me still understands it.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

Kessa hears my breath change.

“Sit down,” she says.

“I can stand.”

“That wasn’t a survey of your dreams.”

Maro coughs into his fist. Lio kicks his ankle without taking his eyes off me.

I lower myself onto a slab of red stone because refusing would waste strength and prove nothing but old training. The damaged wing drags before I catch it. Kessa sees. She pretends not to, which is a kindness I am sure she would deny under interrogation.

She crouches in front of me. Knife still in hand, but angled down. She is angry enough to shake and disciplined enough not to give anger a road out.

“Show me,” she says.

Syin growls. “Kessa.”

“Not you.”

Her gaze never leaves me.

There is no soft way to obey. I unfasten the charred composite strap across my ribs. The buckle sticks. My fingers hesitate over it for one heartbeat too long because Krix hands once fastened different straps there, and the body is stupid about remembering old cages.

Kessa sees that too and says nothing.

I pull the strap aside and peel Merra’s field bandage back from the edge of the wound. The cut should be ordinary by now, one more torn place among many. Instead, a thin green thread burns under the skin between two ribs, not on top of flesh but beneath it. Buried. Waiting. It pulses again, faint and precise.

Lio whispers something under his breath.

Maro answers, “Do not say that out loud.”

“What is it?” Kessa asks.