Page 85 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

Pause.

Again.

The copper sphere gives a tiny answering click from its salt cloth. Every guard in the doorway shifts.

“Stop,” I say, because panic has a scent and the room is starting to sweat it. “No one moves.”

Rhazek’s shoulders settle. His bound hand turns palm-down on his knee. Deliberate. Visible. A message to all the nervous weapons around him.

Merra limps closer to the table and glares at the sphere as if it personally insulted her lineage.

“Argue quieter. It likes sharp things.”

“Voices?” Ila asks.

“Fear,” Rhazek says. “Command. The moment before a room chooses violence.”

“Lovely,” Renn mutters. “So it feeds on council meetings.”

Despite myself, I laugh. It comes out thin and reedy. Not better, exactly, but less likely to get me exiled from my own crisis.

Rosalind looks at the bowl, then at Rhazek. “Can you make the local listener reach for you without giving it more proof?”

“Yes.”

“No,” I say at the same time.

Rhazek’s gaze finds mine again. “Kessa.”

“No.”

“You asked for a choice.”

“I asked for a real choice.”

“This is one.”

“This is you picking the version where everyone else survives because your body is already ruined enough to be expendable.”

He shuts me out. Not empty. Controlled. Armored. He looks less like an enemy and more like a man standing very far away on the other side of a bridge he burned because he thought no one should cross it.

“My body is not ruined,” he says.

The chamber goes quiet in a new way.

His voice is still even and formal, but it’s also almost gentle, which makes it dangerous.

“It has been used. It is damaged. It was trained to answer what it should not answer. None of that makes it useless unless I let Krix keep naming it.”

I have no quick answer. No sharp one either. My anger snags on the edge of something I cannot cut through without cutting him too.

Rhazek looks around the room.

“You fear turning me into a weapon. That is wise. Weapons do not choose where they are pointed. I am not asking you to point me.” His eyes come back to mine. “I am asking you to let me choose where I stand when the enemy reaches.”

I hate how much I want to tell him no.

Adran seizes the opening because of course he does. “Then we have consent.”