Page 84 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

He looks away first. I would have missed that before all we’ve been through. Before, he was an enemy in black plates and blood. Now I know what it costs him to keep standing, and apparently that means I care what happens to him.

Visidion speaks before the silence sharpens or someone says something to make it even worse.

“The receiver beyond the canyon is gone, but its packet opened a second path.”

“We destroyed it,” Renn says from the doorway.

He’s standing beside Ila because the City has learned, at least in the last hour, that sending messages through one person is how disasters gain teeth. Renn has dust in his hair, the bandage still crossing his cheek, and the expression of a man who just ran through half the lower City telling frightened people that the wall-shudder was old stone settling. Ila looks even less convinced by that lie than the people she told it to.

“The dead drop sent before it died,” Rhazek says. “The answer in the sky is beyond our reach. Something closer is not.”

“And if we wait?” Rosalind asks.

“Something on Tajss is listening.” His gaze moves to me, then away. Too late. Everyone sees it. “The blood relay is answering a return path east of the City. Whatever is there has the dead drop’s partial pattern. It can use me to pull for more.”

A sour feeling rolls through my stomach. Name. That is what this all comes down to. The galaxy doesn’t need to love Tajss. It only needs to name us correctly: surviving Zmaj, human women, hybrid children, living epis, active source, bond resonance. Once the wrong mouths have the right names, hunger gets organized.

Adran’s voice is low. “Then we must act before it gets another clean answer.”

“No one is arguing that.” Rosalind’s eyes stay on Rhazek. “The question is how.”

“We lure it,” Syin says.

I close my eyes for half a second.

There it is. The thought all of them have been circling. The simple answer. The ugly line. Put Rhazek where the local listener can taste him. Let the blood relay in his body shine. Let the enemy reach through the return path. Follow the pull. Break whatever is waiting before it can gather enough to finish naming Tajss.

On a slate, it would look efficient. On flesh, it looks evil.

“No,” I say.

Syin’s patience snaps enough to show fang. “You do not yet know what I am proposing.”

“I know exactly what you’re proposing because everyone in this room is using the same silence to avoid saying it. You want to take the most dangerous thing about him and dangle it until the enemy bites.”

Rhazek says, “That is the correct thing to do.”

“Don’t help,” I snap.

He closes his mouth.

He’s truly impossible. He can take a wound through the ribs without making a sound, but one sharp sentence from me and he obeys like I put a blade under his chin.

Rosalind rubs a hand over her mouth. “Kessa.”

I look at her, and shift my argument. Rosalind isn’t Adran. She’s not looking for a cage and calling it stability. She’s been watching, listening, and inventorying. She knows exactly what words cost when someone else owns the list. That is why this is worse, because even if she is considering it, the danger is not theoretical. It’s already inside our walls, eating the beams.

“We just survived a system that wanted to use bonded people as keys,” I say. “We are not building a smaller version because ours has better intentions.”

Visidion flexes his wings. Only once. Adran’s gaze flicks to him, then back to me.

“Intentions do matter when the alternative is destruction,” Adran says.

“Not to the person being opened.”

I feel my words hit Rhazek, like a tremor under my own skin. His throat pulses again, dim and poisonous.

Once.