Bride of the Enemy Alien (Survivor Brides of Tajss #6)

1. Kessa

Kessa

The City doesn’t wake, it flinches.

Every morning starts with the same sounds.

Stone shutters dragged open. Children coughing behind curtain walls.

Ladles scraping the bottoms of ration pots.

Zmaj claws clicking against old tile in the guard corridors.

Human voices stay low, because once we say the hunger out loud, everyone starts counting what is left.

Survival math always sounds clean until a name lands on the wrong side of it. Then it stops being math and becomes a room, a fever cot, a mouth gone dry, someone I couldn’t move fast enough.

I learned young that being useful is safer than being important. Useful people get called before the doors close. Important people get argued over. Useless people vanish between one count and the next.

Wanting something for myself never made it onto the slate. There was always someone hungrier, sicker, younger. I learned not to ask unless the answer could help someone else too.

I’m in the west ration hall with a slate board pressed to my hip and three lines of numbers that do not want to become food. They never do.

“Two measures missing from Second Stillness,” Ila says, leaning over my shoulder. “Three if we count what spoiled in the lower storage collapse.”

“We count it,” I say.

“If we count it, the numbers look worse.”

“The numbers are worse.”

She gives me a look sharp enough to shave stone.

Ila is older than me by maybe six years and has a memorable kind of face.

Plain at first glance, impossible to ignore after that.

She sees too much and trusts too little.

Since the west chamber opened beneath our feet and tried to eat half the City, those traits have become virtues. They’ve also made her my shadow.

Around us, the ration hall moves in tight, careful currents. Nobody runs. Nobody shouts. Nobody drops anything if they can help it. We learned fast after the wrong rhythm started waking old machines under the City.

Once.

Pause.

Again.

That rhythm lives in my bones.

The direct throat under the City closed after Sera and Kavor stopped the machine. Everyone says closed like that means safe. I don’t believe that. Closed is like a sealed door. Closed is like a wound scabbed over, but wounds itch before they split and doors re-open.

“Move one emergency jar from north heat shelter to Second Stillness,” I say, tapping my stylus against the slate.

“Adran signed those jars under civil reserve,” Ila says, her mouth tightening.

“Then he can civil-reserve himself into explaining to Merra why fever row didn’t get broth.”

“I’d pay one ration token to see that,” she says with a tiny snort.

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“No,” she agrees. “I wouldn’t.”

We don’t joke loudly. Jokes are luxuries, and just as strictly rationed as food.

Across the hall, a little boy with sandy hair watches the ladle dip into his bowl. He’s trying very hard not to look worried. His mother has one hand on his shoulder and one hand curled around the edge of the counter, as if she can hold the whole world in place by gripping stone.

The ladle comes up thin. Too thin. Nausea knots low in me.

I write another note on the slate. Rotate root mash from eastern store. Cut guard portion by one quarter measure tonight. Increase hot water in third line so bowls look fuller. A lie with steam on it. That’s what survival is some mornings no matter how much I hate it.

A low vibration shivers through the floor. Every voice in the ration hall stops at once. One heartbeat, the City is scraping and breathing and pretending not to starve. The next, hundreds of people stand frozen with bowls in their hands.

I turn my head, listening. The stone under my boots trembles.

One beat. A gap. Ila goes pale before the next one sounds.

“Quiet,” I say, even though nobody is making a sound.

The third pulse doesn’t come.

For three breaths, no one moves. Then a baby cries behind the second line, and her mother clamps her close, whispering into her hair.

“It was small,” Ila says.

“Small still counts.”

A Zmaj guard at the western arch looks over. As if the look on his face wasn’t enough, the tight fold of his wings screams tension and worry.

“Route check?” he asks.

“Now,” I say.

“Keep the lines moving. No rush orders. No panic. If anyone asks, old stone settles in the morning,” I say, handing Ila the slate.

“That’s a terrible lie.”

“It has tradition on its side,” I say, shrugging.

“If you die, I’m telling Merra this was your idea,” she says, taking the slate.

“If I die, steal Adran’s civil reserve.”

“That was already the plan.”

I leave before she can see me smile.

The west corridor smells of dust, broth, and the bitter metal tang that has haunted the City since the machines woke up under us.

The lamps along the wall aren’t electric.

We haven’t had electricity since the ship crashed onto Tajss.

We burn oil where we can spare it, glow-pod resin where we can’t, and shame when both run low.

The Zmaj guard stays at my side. His name is Renn, and he’s young enough that his horns look too sharp for his face.

“Did you feel direction?” I ask.

“Below,” he says. Then, after a pause, “Maybe above.”

I meet his stare. He flexes his jaw.

“I do not like saying it.”

“Well that’s good because I really don’t like hearing it.”

We move fast, but not too fast. Speed has rules. You don’t thunder down corridors. You don’t send loose stones skittering. You don’t let a crowd hear your fear. Fear spreads better than any signal.

We pass the sealed west stair where Sera almost died.

The new brace stones are lighter than the old wall, a pale scar running down the corridor.

Someone has set a shallow bowl beside the seal, a few drops of water glimmering at the bottom.

Not an offering exactly. Not a prayer either.

We don’t have enough water for either. A reminder, maybe.

The City remembers in strange little ways.

At the junction, Penr comes skidding around the corner, favoring one leg and pretending he isn’t. He’s all elbows and panic, with dust in his hair and a route-runner sash tied crooked over one shoulder.

“I was coming to you,” he says.

“You found me.”

“Sky-watch saw fire.”

I blink, his words not making sense. Renn’s wings rustle, jerking halfway open then closing.

“Fire? What? Where?” I ask.

“East ridge. Past the broken cistern markers,” Penr says, swallowing hard. His eyes are wide and his face is pale. He blinks several times then leans forward and says in a whisper. “It came from above.”

He points one trembling finger up.

Above.

For a moment, all I can think of is Sera standing in the council chamber after the source throat closed, her face white, her hand in Kavor’s, both of them saying the same impossible thing in different ways. Something answered. The sky was not empty.

I shake off my surprise and move fast. Penr stumbles after me and Renn keeps pace.

“Rosalind’s already been sent for Virn. Syin is at the east watch.”

“Adran?”

“Someone told him.”

“Unfortunate.”

Penr makes a strangled sound that might be a laugh if there was time for such things.

By the time we reach the outer passage it’s clear that the news is spreading.

There’s no public alert, or bells, but I feel the tension in the air.

Guards move with controlled urgency. Runners slip through side routes.

Zmaj speak in low, clipped phrases. Humans gather at door curtains, eyes wide, mouths shut, knowing better than to ask.

I push them all aside before their fear can feed my own.

At the eastern gate chamber, heat pours in like an opened furnace. The canyon beyond glows under the twin suns, all red stone, hard shadow, and a sky too clear and too bright. A thin smear of black smoke marks the horizon beyond a distant ridge.

Syin stands at the gate with six Zmaj warriors and three human guards. His scaled face is carved into the expression I’ve learned to hate most on him, the one that says he has expected disaster all along but is too magnanimous to find satisfaction in being right.

“Stay inside,” Syin says when he sees me.

“No.”

“This is not a route matter,” he says, narrowing his eyes.

“Everything is a route matter if people may need to run from it.”

“This came from the sky.”

“Then we definitely know its route.”

Renn makes the mistake of breathing too loudly beside me. Syin’s tail snaps once against the stone and he turns all his attention on the young Zmaj.

“You are not command,” Syin says.

I step in front of Renn.

“No. I am a route runner. I’m the one who knows where to walk and where not to. This is, literally, my job.”

Syin stares. I stare back.

I’m afraid. Of course I am. Fear has become my second spine. But I’ve learned something practical about fear. If I give it a job, it stops trying to eat me from the inside.

Syin looks away first.

“Do not slow us,” he says.

A protest rises, but rational thought catches it. I could knit the warmth of his acceptance into a blanket. This is typical for Syin and this isn’t the time to take issue with his demeanor so I nod agreement.

We leave through the eastern gate in a tight group. I take the lead and Syin is smart enough not to argue. I lead us down a carved path toward the ridge. Outside the walls the air is even hotter and sharper. It’s so dry it peels the inside of my nose. Dust sticks to the sweat on my neck.

The path winds through the unused ruins of the City.

I avoid the weak areas that are likely to collapse, especially with so many of us.

Travel outside with a group this large is a bad idea.

The ground on this side of the City is less than stable at the best of times.

Beneath us is a criss-cross of old tunnels, carved by the monstrous-sized zemlja, the giant sandworms that burrow their way around Tajss.