1. Kessa #2
The smoke column thickens ahead, but that’s the only sign we’re getting closer. We travel in silence. Climbing dunes. Working our way around rocky outcroppings. After almost an hour, the first piece of metal breaks the horizon.
It juts out of the sand at an angle, blackened and curved. There’s a symbol along one side, barely visible through the scorching, but it’s not a language I know. I move close and crouch near it, trying to understand more about it.
“Do not touch,” Syin says.
“I wasn’t planning to lick it,” I mutter.
Syin hears me and his glare competes with the twin red suns blasting us. I flash a smile, just to piss him off if nothing else. His frown deepens and I take a little satisfaction in it before rising and continuing toward the source of the smoke.
We travel another thirty minutes or so before the path is blocked by a cliff. Either we climb it or spend the time traveling where it slopes low enough to not be a problem. I glance at Syin. He frowns, measuring me, the other humans, and then the ridge.
“I can make it,” I say.
Syin frowns. He annoys me, but I also know that he’s not a bad person. He’s calculating the risks, considering the naturally weaker bodies of the humans. The cliff is high enough that it isn’t going to be an easy climb.
“Renn, lift Kessa as high as you can,” Syin says.
“Uhm, no,” I say, shaking my head, but Syin looks at me with steel in his eyes and calm on his face.
He arches one eyebrow slowly, which is all it takes for me to realize he’s right. Arguing is stupid and only makes me look like a fool. I sigh and nod my agreement.
Renn grabs me by my waist and lifts me over his head without ceremony. I know I’m thin, starvation does that, but he lifts me as if I’m nothing. He gets me high enough that I’m able to grab onto the top of the ridge and scramble over with a minimum of new scrapes and bruises.
It doesn’t take long to get the others up too. Once we’re gathered I get my bearings and resume the lead. The ground is rough. Sand, rock, dips and rises. We have to move carefully to avoid catastrophe.
Finally we reach the edge of a basin and the ship is below us.
For a few seconds, no one speaks.
It’s definitely a ship.
It’s smaller than I expected. As if I have anything to compare it to, really. It’s a broken black wedge half-buried in red sand. The hull is split open like a seed pod gone rotten. Smoke leaks from three places. Blue-white sparks crawl over one torn stabilizer and die in little pops.
My mouth is too dry to speak. My experience with ships is limited to the generation ship, which I never really knew was a ship until we crashed, and the Invader ships.
I did watch a lot of vids before we crashed.
They showed ships as grand things. Generation ships.
Warships. Smugglers’ ships. Pirate ships.
Things with names and crews and destinations.
This looks like a weapon that lost an argument with the sky.
“Spread,” Syin orders. “No crowding. No noise.”
The warriors move at once.
I scan the basin the way I would scan a corridor. Entry points. Cover. Slopes. Loose sand. Stone shelves. Heat shimmer. Possible retreat.
“There,” I say, pointing to a narrow cut between two rock walls. “If it explodes or calls something, we move through that gap.”
Syin follows my finger. He tightens his jaw, but nods. I accept this as thunderous praise, then we descend into the hollow.
It smells of burned metal, bitter chemical smoke, and blood. Something dark and sharp, with a mineral bite under it.
Three body lengths from the ship, the hairs on my arms rise. There’s a faint vibration shivering through the sand, so soft I might have imagined it if the last few weeks hadn’t taught me exactly how much disaster can hide in almost nothing.
One beat, a gap that rolls my stomach, then another.
“Syin,” I whisper.
“I feel it.”
A sound comes from inside the wreck. The Zmaj warriors lower their lochabers. For one breath, the basin is all sun, smoke, and held violence. Then something moves in the split hull.
A hand appears.
Large. Long-fingered. Clawed at the tips, but not like a Zmaj. The skin is dark bronze under the soot, crossed with pale lines that look too deliberate to be scars and too cruel to be decoration. The hand grips the edge of the torn hull and metal bends.
The alien who comes out of the wreck isn’t Zmaj. That’s the first thing I know.
He has wings, but not like theirs. No broad desert membranes, no familiar sweep of bone and scale. His are darker, heavier, folded tight against his back, the edges torn and scarred as if someone once tried to cut the sky out of him.
His horns are wrong too. Shorter than Zmaj horns, black as burned glass, sweeping back close to his skull instead of rising from his brow. No tail. No familiar scale pattern.
He’s tall, though. Taller than any human by a head and broad through the shoulders in a way that makes the broken ship look too small to have held him.
Dark, almost ebony plates of natural armor trace his throat, chest, and forearms, something between scales and shell fitted to his body like a violent world made him for storms and war.
Over that, he wears actual armor, though it takes me a breath to separate one from the other.
Charred black composite plates are strapped across his ribs and shoulders in overlapping bands, fastened by dull copper buckles and torn harness straps that disappear beneath his damaged wings.
One side has been crushed inward by the crash.
Another hangs open, exposing the living armor beneath and the blood sliding between them.
His hair, if it is hair, is black and braided tight against his skull in rows bound with tiny rings of dull copper.
Blood runs down one side of his face from a cut near his temple.
Beneath the soot and blood, faint green lines flicker under the dark plates at his throat, there and gone so fast the heat might have put ghosts in my eyes.
One of his eyes is swollen and almost shut. The other is open. Black, ringed in molten gold, with a thin green spark buried so deep I almost miss it. It lands on me first.
The look is so direct it feels like a hand closing around my throat. Then he looks past me to the ridge, the smoke trails, the warriors, the sky. Measuring.
I hate him.
Instantly.
It’s a clean hate. Practical. The kind that arrives with reasons lined up in formation. He looks at us and our City like he’s deciding how it dies.
“Do not move,” Syin says, stepping forward.
The alien smiles. It’s a terrible expression. A flash of teeth to prove he has them and is probably willing to use them in a pinch.
“I have already fallen from orbit and survived,” he says. His voice is rough, low, scraped raw by smoke. “If I wished to move, your warning would not prevent it.”
Three Zmaj growl. I should probably be frightened. I am frightened. My stomach is a hard knot and goosepimples rise across my flesh, but I’m also annoyed.
“Good,” I say. “He’s arrogant. That should make everything easier.”
The alien’s black-and-gold eye returns to me and something flickers in it. Pain, maybe. Or interest. No. Pain. I prefer pain.
“Name yourself,” Syin says, flexing his claws.
The alien shifts his weight. For half a second, his knees threaten to give. He grabs onto the edge of his ship for balance. One torn wing jerks in a failed balancing reflex. He straightens, pressing his other hand against his side. Blood leaks between his fingers, dark and thick.
From inside the ship, something clicks.
Not the tired tick of hot metal cooling. Too even. Too deliberate. Once. Pause. Again.
All the breath leaves my lungs. The alien closes his eye as if he knows exactly what that sound means.
“You need to leave this basin,” he says.
“Name yourself,” Syin says, raising his blade.
The alien opens his good eye.
“No time.”
“Then you die without one,” Syin says.
“Rhazek,” he says, his mouth twisting.
He looks past Syin, back to me, and I have an awful feeling he understands more about our position than he should. The slope. The gap I marked. The number of guards. The way I’ve shifted my weight toward the safest retreat path.
“You,” he says.
I stiffen, shaking my head.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
“You know the way out.”
“I know many things. None of them are for you.”
He gives a short, disbelieving huff.