Page 97 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

My thoughts keep coming back to that. And I hate it. I’m sure he thinks he’s being all noble and sacrificing himself. Because he’s an idiot. My plan would have worked and now it’s in shambles. I don’t know where the dead drop’s last path leads. I don’t know what answered it. How strong their forces will be.

I don’t know.

“Damn it!”

I kick the stool he was sitting on. It screeches across the floor and slams against the wall, then falls on its side.

“Kessa?” Lio says softly from behind me.

I whirl, hands balled into fists, face burning both from anger and because he saw what just happened. Syin stands behind him, silent and judging.

“What?” I snap. He looks startled and hurt, and I’m instantly a full pot of regret. I close my eyes, just for a second, and take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. What is it, Lio?”

He holds up a chipped clay route token clenched in one fist. His arm trembles as he holds it out to me.

“Second junction,” he says. “Old drain. Kessa, it’s one of yours.”

He left a message.

Of course he did. The stupid man runs into the desert with alien murder-metal in his hand and still stops long enough to talk to me in route marks. I want to hit him. I want to shake him until his teeth rattle. I want him back in this room where I can call him every kind of fool to his face and make sure he is still breathing while I do it.

That last part is the problem. He’s running into danger and I don’t know if he’ll survive it. I don’t know if we will.

I take the token from Lio. It’s warm from his fist, rough along the chipped edge, and far too familiar.

“Show me.”

Syin starts to say my name.

“Do not.”

He shuts his mouth. Bless him and his survival instincts.

Lio leads me to the second junction at a half-run. Syin follows because Syin would rather swallow a hot coal than let me sprint toward danger without a witness.

The old drain sits where three service throats meet, half hidden behind a cracked storage wall and a smell like wet ash trapped under stone. No one uses this route unless they have a reason or a death wish. Rhazek had both.

The blood comes first.

A palm smear beside the drain. Three fingers dragged across the obvious path, not with panic, not with collapse, but with intention. My mark. My denial mark. Do not take the obvious route.

The chipped clay token rests on its edge beside the blood. Not dropped. Placed. The broken point angles down into the old service throat.

He learned that from me.

The thought should make me angry. It does. Unfortunately, the anger is tangled with something else, something hot and scared and embarrassingly tender that has no business surviving inside my chest when the City is in so much danger.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Only this time I do not know if I mean him or me.

“He left me a route,” I say.

Syin’s eyes narrow. “A route to what?”

I look at the blood, the token, the black salt dust caught in the cracks, the old throat waiting under our feet. I want the answer to be simple. I want it to be betrayal because then I know what to do with it. You can hate betrayal. You can organize against it. You can put it on a slate, underline it twice, and assign guards.

This is anything but simple. This is Rhazek trusting me to understand him while refusing to trust me enough to stay.