Page 92 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

All eyes turn. Kessa’s expression shutters. She does not like that word from me. Not because she dislikes refusal. Because she hears goodbye underneath it, and she should.

“No?” she asks.

“The team is known. The pattern is known. The local listener has learned that when the City is threatened, you go where the route breaks and Syin follows with violence.”

Syin bares his teeth in a way that proves my point.

Kessa’s voice lowers. “Then we change the team.”

“You will still be the choice-maker,” I say.

“Fine. Then I won’t go.”

The words cost her. I hear it. Everyone hears it, though most of them misunderstand what it costs her. Kessa can choose not to go. She can make that sacrifice. She can hand the route to someone else if the City needs it.

But it will not matter. The enemy will still know she is the place decisions bend around.

“You must send someone in your shape,” I say.

“My shape?”

“Practical. Careful. Carrying three plans and four insults.”

Renn makes a strangled noise that he hides badly. Kessa does not laugh. Good. I would not be able to hold strong in the face of that.

“What are you saying?” she asks.

“I am saying the enemy needs to believe it has forced your hand,” I say. “Not watched you choose. Forced you.”

Adran’s eyes sharpen. “A staged escape.”

Kessa turns on him. “No.”

“The concept has merit,” Adran says.

“No,” she repeats, colder. “Not if it requires Rhazek to run into a trap with the relay active and whatever is waiting at the end of the line ready to chew through his bones.”

“It is my choice,” I say.

She turns on me. “Not if you make it in a room full of people pressuring you to be useful.”

Her refusal unsettles me more than the room’s suspicion. She is angry because she wants me alive, and I do not know what to do with that.

“Kessa.”

“No.”

“I know traps.”

“You know cages. That doesn’t mean you should keep walking into them.”

Rosalind looks away first. I do not believe it is out of tenderness, but because she knows what comes after, when there is no room left for soft things.

I lower my voice. “If I stay, it hears you through me.”

“Then we dampen you better.”

“It has learned the salt.”