1. Kessa #3
“Then keep your secrets and die with them.”
I step toward him, bold or stupid is up for debate, but I do it anyway.
“Listen, sky trash, you don’t get to fall on our planet, bleed on our sand, insult our escape routes, and act like you’re the only person here with a working brain.”
Behind me, Renn makes a small choking sound. Syin looks briefly delighted, which is just weird. The alien stares, then he laughs once before it turns into a cough. Blood spots his teeth.
“Good,” he says. “You have anger. It may keep you alive longer than obedience.”
“I’m going to let Syin stab you.”
“No,” he says, and his voice changes.
One word. Flat. Certain. Commanding enough that every weapon tightens.
The clicking inside the ship speeds up. It doubles, each three-beat pattern crowding the next.
The sand under my boots trembles in answer and cold races over my skin despite the heat.
“The basin,” I say. “Now.”
Syin hears it in my voice and acts. He snaps an order, and the warriors back toward the cut between rocks. The alien sways.
I hate what happens next because it’s stupid, predictable, and apparently I’ve learned nothing from watching other women ruin their lives around dangerous males with excellent shoulders. I move toward the enemy alien.
“Kessa!” Syin snarls.
Rhazek’s eye narrows as I duck under his arm and take some of his weight. One damaged wing drags close enough to brush my shoulder, hot and leathery, the torn edge trembling against my sleeve. He’s hot from fever and smoke, heavy as sin, and made of more muscle than sense.
“You are small,” he says.
“You’re bleeding on me.”
“You should leave me.”
“That was my first idea.”
“Return to it.”
“Shut up and walk.”
For one second, his weight eases, as if he could still choose to spare me the burden. Then the ship behind us screams. The sound slices through the basin, thin and bright and wrong. The sand jumps under our feet. Somewhere beneath us, something vast answers with a low, hungry groan.
Shit. Zemlja.
“Move!” Syin roars.
We run. The alien stumbles and I nearly go down with him. His arm clamps around my shoulders, not crushing, but not gentle. He keeps me upright even while his blood slicks my sleeve.
The ground behind us bulges.
I don’t look back. Looking back is for people who want their last sight to be educational.
We enter the rock cut as the basin erupts. Sand blasts against my back. Stone chips sting my neck. Something enormous breaks the surface behind us with a wet, grinding roar that shakes my teeth in my skull.
The alien twists, dragging me against the wall as a wave of hot sand and broken metal slams through the gap. He covers me with his body. One scarred wing flares around us before it buckles. His breath tears out beside my ear.
For one impossible heartbeat, all I know is heat, blood, armor, and the hard pound of a heart that isn’t human. Then the noise fades enough for screaming to return.
“Get off,” I demand, shoving at him.
He moves immediately, which pisses me off. Arrogant jerk. Obedience would be easier to despise if it were slower.
Syin is shouting orders. The warriors are alive, but one is down on a knee.
Renn has a cut across his cheek. All the humans who came along for whatever reason of their own are injured, but no one is dead, which is a miracle in itself.
As the Zmaj would say, thank Tajss. Or my personal preference, the luck that follows those too stupid to appreciate it.
The ship is gone. Where it lay is a churned pit of sand, smoke, and black metal scraps. A zemlja ridge rolls under the surface, then disappears again, dragged by whatever signal screamed through the wreck.
My ears are ringing and I’m shaking uncontrollably. Aftermath of adrenaline. That’s all it is. Anything else, I refuse to accept.
Rhazek pushes himself upright. He looks worse. Gray under the deep bronze skin. Bleeding too much. One wing hangs lower than the other, the torn edge trembling before he locks it still. Despite how badly he’s injured, his one eye is alert and watching everything.
Syin strides toward him with anger and violent intent in every line of his body.
“Speak,” Syin says. “Now.”
The alien looks from the ruined basin toward the City. Fear breaks through his control.
He reaches into the torn armor at his chest, between the dark plates that move like living armor when he breathes. Every weapon lifts again. Slowly, carefully, he pulls out a small copper sphere no larger than his palm. Rhazek holds it out.
“Arcan sent me,” he says.
I don’t know the name, but Syin stiffens. Renn whispers something under his breath in Zmaj. I stare at the copper sphere. At the blood on the alien’s hand. At the smoking pit where his ship used to be. Then he looks at me.
“The galaxy knows Tajss lives,” he says. “And they are coming.”
The twin suns burn overhead. The City waits behind us, hungry and wounded and pretending stone walls are enough. The enemy bleeds into our sand.
And now a terrible certainty settles through me. I know, with the cold of suppressed terror, that everything has changed.