Page 74 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Her gaze snaps to the ridge beside the cut. “High path?”

“Too exposed.”

“Low crawl?”

“Too narrow for wings.”

“Conveniently, I don’t have wings.”

“No.”

She purses her lips and narrows her eyes.

“Don’t start.”

I hear the old command in my voice then. No. Stay. Back. Words owners use because they are shorter than fear. I swallow them.

“The low crawl fits you and the runners,” I say. “Not me. Not Syin. Renn maybe, if he folds. Orek no.”

“Then we split.”

“Bad idea.”

The kedi reappear, closer.

“Most of mine are.”

A kedi yowls when Syin slams his lochaber haft into the sand in front of it. The little creature ricochets away in a blur of stripes and insult. The receiver pings again three quick pulses.

The kedi jerk toward the sound. Not thought. Signal. Nerve. Meat.

Kessa signs to Lio and Maro. They move at her command.

I understand her plan too late. The runners drop low and vanish into the crawl cut. Kessa follows. Syin snarls her name. She ignores him because she is wise in many forms of survival and foolish in several others.

I step toward the cut, but the blood relay under my ribs seizes as the receiver finds me.

Green light runs beneath my skin, rib to throat, not bright enough to blind but sharp enough to taste. My legs threaten to buckle. I lock them.

Renn swears. Kessa’s voice comes from inside the crawl, muffled but close.

“Do not bleed on anything important.”

“Define important,” I force out.

“You. Annoyingly.”

The receiver pings again. This time, the relay answers through my hand. Green flickers beneath the burned edge of my bracer and leaps toward the salt crust at my feet. Not a line with thought behind it. A contact seeking circuit. Power looking for completion.

I drive my claws into the rock wall instead of the ground. Pain clears the command. Syin sees and understands. Good. Let him see that restraint is work.

In the crawl cut, stone scrapes. Lio curses. Maro says something about hating every profession he has ever admired. Kessa shushes them both. Then the salt shelf lights.

Green threads crawl beneath the crust, showing every place we stepped, every pause, every retreat, every route choice since the tracker broke. A map, but not of the City. Of us.

The crash basin. The burn flat. The kedi chase. The salt hollow. The false dust path. The split. Our mistakes.

Kessa emerges from the far side of the crawl with dust in her hair and fury in every line of her body. She sees the lit salt shelf and stops. For three breaths, no one moves except the kedis.