Page 78 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

The receiver pings once more. This time, it uses no wrong rhythm. It uses my silence around her. It uses the restraint I keep around her. It uses wanting without a voice. The blood relay under my ribs opens.

I do not know I am moving until Syin slams into me from the side.

We hit stone. My wounded wing folds wrong. Pain blanks the world white. For one breath I am in the arena again, sand in my mouth, crowd above, command bell in my bones.

Then Kessa’s voice cuts through it.

“Left hand,” she says.

Specific. Practical. I open my left hand. The receiver’s line snaps toward the blood in my palm instead of toward her chest. Kessa throws the bone knife at the salt seam above it.

The seam breaks. White crust collapses in a hard sheet, smashing down over the black lens. Syin drives his blade through the edge to pin it. Orek throws his full weight on the stone. Renn hooks the folded plate with his lochaber and twists.

The receiver cracks and green light flashes upward too thin to be a full signal, too bright to be nothing.

For one breath, the desert is silent. Then high above us, where the red sky should be empty, a star answers in daylight.

My blood turns cold. Kessa sees it too. So does everyone.

The receiver dies under the salt sheet, but its last partial packet is already gone. Not enough to tell the galaxy everything. Enough to tell someone where to start looking.

Kessa turns toward the hidden City beyond the ridges.

For once, she has no dry answer. Neither do I. The receiver did not open a lock beneath the City. It opened one above us.

19

Kessa

The star appears in daylight.

That should be impossible. Daylight belongs to the suns, to heat, to glare so bright it scrapes thought out of your skull. Stars are for night. For old navigation stories. For things the generation ship used to chase before it broke us against Tajss and left us learning how to survive under two red eyes.

This is not a star. It’s too steady. Too deliberate.

A pale point above the eastern sky, visible for three breaths before the glare swallows it. Long enough for all seven of us to understand the same thing. The receiver sent something. And something answered.

None of us speak. Even Maro manages silence, which is how I know the world has become deeply unreasonable.

I stare at the reddish sky with its single cloud drifting carelessly along as if nothing disruptive just happened. Nausea comes in waves, but I don’t have time for it. I lower my eyes and they land on Rhazek. He’s staring up too. Worse, he’s afraid.

There’s no mistaking it for anything else. It’s not something specific that I can point to and certainly nothing I’m going to call out. I just know it and that’s enough. No, it’s too much.

He’s standing beside the crushed receiver with blood in his palm and green fading under his throat.

“You should bind that,” I say.

“You should not look at the sky.”

“I can do two stupid things at once.”

“I have noticed.”

The answer is too close to teasing. I hate that it helps.

I wrap his hand because leaving it open is worse than touching him. That’s the sort of logic that gets people killed in songs, but in real life it gets salt cloth tied properly and blood kept off alien devices. The glow at his neck flickers when my fingers brush his palm.

I stop. He stops breathing. I tie the knot harder than necessary.