Page 69 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“You have a gift for making honesty irritating.”

“I have practiced.”

“Stop.”

“Yes.”

A smile flirts with her lips but does not fully form. My heart betrays me.

The salt flats widen ahead, pale streaks cutting through red earth. Kessa slows. Her gaze moves over the ground, not searching for beauty. She searches for anything useful enough to be ugly.

“There,” she says, pointing to a low white ridge half-collapsed around a shadowed hollow. “Old salt wash.”

Syin frowns. “Unstable.”

“Everything is unstable. That one is useful.”

Renn crouches and presses two fingers to the crust. “Dry.”

“Salt, ash, dead stone,” Kessa says. “No living root, no damp channel, no obvious path back to the City. If the receiver pings again, this should muffle the answer.”

I look at the hollow. Too narrow for wings. Too easy to trap. A bad place, but a useful place. Kessa sees both.

“We do not all go in,” she says. “Renn and Orek hold outside. Lio and Maro stay above with sight lines. Syin, you can come in because otherwise you’ll argue until the receiver dies of boredom.”

Syin bares his teeth. “I would be faster.”

“Deeply unlikely.”

The hollow smells of old mineral and dead heat. Salt glitters in seams along the walls. Kessa takes ash from Lio’s packet and draws a line on the stone without flourish.

“Sit,” she tells me.

I sit.

The relay resents the salt before she finishes the circle. The line under my ribs contracts so sharply my breath leaves through my teeth.

Kessa stops. “Pain?”

“Memory.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the accurate one.”

She presses her lips together at the echo of my earlier words. Good. Let her stay angry. She kneels outside the salt line, not crossing it.

“You said the receiver is a dead drop.”

“Yes. Built for a pilot who may not survive. If the hull relay fails and the carried tracker fails, the blood relay can still provide proof of contact.”

“Through you.”

“Yes.”

“And through me if I stand too close.”

My silence is answer enough. She absorbs it without flinching. That may be the cruelest part of competence. It leaves no room to pretend a truth did not arrive.