Page 96 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

A hatch opens.

Cold air spills out.

Voices follow.

Not Krixian.

Not Zmaj.

Off-world consonants scrape the heat flat.

A weapon rises from the dark and points at my chest.

I lift my bloody hand with the shard glowing in my palm.

“I have what you want,” I say.

The relay inside me flares hard enough to steal the edges from the world.

Behind me, somewhere in the City’s wounded dark, Kessa will find the mark.

She will understand.

Or she will not.

Both possibilities hurt.

The weapon fires.

Pain blooms white.

I fall forward before the ground reaches for me, not away from the hatch, toward it.

Toward the cage.

Toward the trap.

Toward the blade I have pulled from her throat.

Hands catch me before I hit the sand.

I let them take me.

23

Kessa

I pace the room he shouldn’t have been able to get out of and refuse to think about why I’m scared.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Rhazek, you stupid man.

The chamber smells of hot stone, bitter-root paste, old blood, and fear dressed up as discipline. Everyone else is running around the City, doing whatever they think might help or prepare us for the inevitable.

The other survivors who showed up, and if I’m being honest kicked off this sandstorm, have told us about the Invaders. They’ve said how it got so bad that they had to retreat to some ancient bunker then set off a bomb. It was big enough that we felt it. We thought it was a meteor striking the planet though. For us it was a bright flash on the horizon followed by a minor quake.

We had no idea how bad it’d been for them. Or how bad it’s going to be for us now.

He’s gone.