Page 79 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Pain?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He looks amused.

Nope. Not going to forgive you. Good try there, but no.

Except I am extremely glad he’s alive. Which I don’t want to admit. Not even to myself.

“We return,” Syin says. Renn crouches beside the crushed receiver and pries one cracked black sliver from the housing. He wraps it in salt cloth before we leave.

I don’t argue. I don’t have the energy to even if I had a good one to give, or even a half-assed one. I look up at the visible star in the sky, down at the shattered remnants, and that same sick feeling settles into my stomach. At this point the only option left is to report we failed.

The eyes of dozens of hungry children haunt my thoughts. A feeling of absolute helplessness swamps over me. There is only one option when you can’t do anything. Find something you can do. Anything is better than nothing. The one steady rule of my life.

We don’t run straight home. That would hand any watching eye a line from the receiver to the City. We leave false trails first. Orek and Renn drag torn pack cloth south. Lio and Maro scatter mineral dust toward the dead canyon road. Syin climbs a ridge and cuts wing marks into a shelf that points nowhere useful. I mark three routes on my slate and take none of them.

We return by a route I would never choose unless I wanted to annoy myself. Too much glare. Too many broken steps. A narrow cut that forces the Zmaj to fold their wings tight and makes Rhazek’s bad wing drag twice. I choose it because it’s ugly and inefficient and nothing about it feels like one of mine.

The City doesn’t appear all at once. Tajss hides her like an old wound hides under cloth. First the broken cistern markers. Then the ridge shadow. Then the stone color changes by a shade only runners and desperate people notice.

Lio spots the gate signal first.

“East watch,” he says. “No alarm flag.”

“No alarm doesn’t mean no disaster,” Maro mutters.

“No,” I say. “It means the disaster is waiting for a better entrance.”

Syin gives me a look and I ignore it.

At the outer marker, Penr waits with two guards and a face full of questions. He starts toward us, sees Rhazek’s bandages, Orek’s arm, and the blood darkening my sleeve.

He starts to speak and I stop him before he can ask.

“No public alarm,” I say. “Find Rosalind, Virn, Merra, and Adran. East council room. Not the central chamber. No crowd routes. No bells. Tell Ila to keep ration lines normal and move children out of lower east quietly.”

Penr blinks. “What happened?”

“The sky answered.”

His face loses color.

“Run,” I say.

He runs.

There. City involvement, properly earned. A message carried by legs through gates because that is how information moves when the world is not allowed to panic. Rhazek watches Penr vanish.

“That answer may not have gone only to Krix,” he says.

“I figured.”

“Krix may be the nearest hand. Not the only one.”

“Wonderful.”