Page 7 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Shut up and walk.”

For one second, his weight eases, as if he could still choose to spare me the burden. Then the ship behind us screams. The sound slices through the basin, thin and bright and wrong. The sand jumps under our feet. Somewhere beneath us, something vast answers with a low, hungry groan.

Shit. Zemlja.

“Move!” Syin roars.

We run. The alien stumbles and I nearly go down with him. His arm clamps around my shoulders, not crushing, but not gentle. He keeps me upright even while his blood slicks my sleeve.

The ground behind us bulges.

I don’t look back. Looking back is for people who want their last sight to be educational.

We enter the rock cut as the basin erupts. Sand blasts against my back. Stone chips sting my neck. Something enormous breaks the surface behind us with a wet, grinding roar that shakes my teeth in my skull.

The alien twists, dragging me against the wall as a wave of hot sand and broken metal slams through the gap. He covers me with his body. One scarred wing flares around us before it buckles. His breath tears out beside my ear.

For one impossible heartbeat, all I know is heat, blood, armor, and the hard pound of a heart that isn’t human. Then the noise fades enough for screaming to return.

“Get off,” I demand, shoving at him.

He moves immediately, which pisses me off. Arrogant jerk. Obedience would be easier to despise if it were slower.

Syin is shouting orders. The warriors are alive, but one is down on a knee. Renn has a cut across his cheek. All the humans who came along for whatever reason of their own are injured, but no one is dead, which is a miracle in itself. As the Zmaj would say, thank Tajss. Or my personal preference, the luck that follows those too stupid to appreciate it.

The ship is gone. Where it lay is a churned pit of sand, smoke, and black metal scraps. A zemlja ridge rolls under the surface, then disappears again, dragged by whatever signal screamed through the wreck.

My ears are ringing and I’m shaking uncontrollably. Aftermath of adrenaline. That’s all it is. Anything else, I refuse to accept.

Rhazek pushes himself upright. He looks worse. Gray under the deep bronze skin. Bleeding too much. One wing hangs lower than the other, the torn edge trembling before he locks it still. Despite how badly he’s injured, his one eye is alert and watching everything.

Syin strides toward him with anger and violent intent in every line of his body.

“Speak,” Syin says. “Now.”

The alien looks from the ruined basin toward the City. Fear breaks through his control.

He reaches into the torn armor at his chest, between the dark plates that move like living armor when he breathes. Every weapon lifts again. Slowly, carefully, he pulls out a small copper sphere no larger than his palm. Rhazek holds it out.

“Arcan sent me,” he says.

I don’t know the name, but Syin stiffens. Renn whispers something under his breath in Zmaj. I stare at the copper sphere. At the blood on the alien’s hand. At the smoking pit where his ship used to be. Then he looks at me.

“The galaxy knows Tajss lives,” he says. “And they are coming.”

The twin suns burn overhead. The City waits behind us, hungry and wounded and pretending stone walls are enough. The enemy bleeds into our sand.

And now a terrible certainty settles through me. I know, with the cold of suppressed terror, that everything has changed.

2

Kessa

Rhazek should be dead before we reach the gate.

I’m not being dramatic. It’s a practical assessment based on the amount of blood soaking through his torn armor and dripping onto the sand, leaving a trail behind us. Dark drops. Too dark. Almost black where they hit red dust. Anyone losing that much blood should have the basic decency to collapse before I have to decide whether he’s a prisoner, a patient, or a problem with shoulders.

Somehow he keeps walking anyway. Weaving, slowly, but walking.