7. Kessa
Kessa
For three breaths, nobody says anything.
That might be a City record. We are excellent at fear, suspiciously talented at argument, and practically festive when it comes to blaming the nearest bleeding person for whatever has gone wrong.
Silence usually has to fight for space around here.
But apparently when an enemy alien’s throat starts glowing in the same rhythm as an off-world death sphere, even Adran can find a moment to let the universe be awful without commentary.
Rhazek’s hand is gone from my arm, but my skin remembers it anyway.
Hot. Careful. Too fast for thought. He pulled me away before the green line snapped up from the drain, before I understood I needed saving, before anyone else moved.
The burned mark across the stone smokes faintly between us, a thin black lash where the light touched and decided stone was something it could eat.
My wrist aches in sympathy for what did not happen. I hate that. I hate him. I glare from my wrist to him, then shake my head.
Syin recovers first, raising his lochaber until the blade points at Rhazek’s throat, which is still glowing under the dark plates.
The light is thinner now, less flare and more ember, but it’s there.
A toxic glow keeping the old three-beat measure.
Not on his skin. Under it. Like something beneath the armor of his body has heard its name called from a very long distance.
“What is that?” Syin asks.
Rhazek’s face closes so hard I can almost hear the lock.
“Voraxxian,” he says.
“That is a species, not an answer.”
“It is both.”
Syin’s blade creeps closer. “Try again.”
Rhazek slowly looks at the point of the lochaber, then, just as slowly, up at Syin.
He doesn’t step back or otherwise react, seemingly undisturbed by the deadly point ready to run him through.
That seems unwise from a wound-management perspective, but I’m beginning to understand that Rhazek views his body as a rented structure with questionable maintenance and no tenant rights.
“The markings react,” Rhazek says. “Stress. Threat. Blood. Combat. Sometimes signal noise. Voraxxians are not stone.”
“No,” Adran says from the arch. “Stones are less evasive.”
I whirl on him.
“Did your better judgment fall into a hole on the way here?”
“My better judgment is asking why this alien who brought a tracking system into the City is physically answering it,” Adran says, cool and collected in the face of my snapping.
I hate that that isn’t a stupid question. Truly unfair of him. Rosalind steps between the argument and the blade without raising her voice.
“Lower the weapon, Syin.”
Syin doesn’t. Visidion shifts one foot. Nothing more, but somehow the room changes around that single movement. Syin’s jaw tightens, but the lochaber lowers by a handspan. Not enough for comfort. Enough for breathing.
Merra moves in before anyone can stop her. She plants herself directly in front of Rhazek and grips his chin with one hand, tilting his face up as if he’s a feverish child who has offended her by growing horns.
“Hold still,” she says.
Rhazek stops moving, but he’s not surrendering, even to her. Merra ignores the threat he represents with the confidence of someone who has bullied larger idiots back from death. She studies the green shimmer beneath his throat plates and narrows her eyes.
“Is it poison?”
“No.”
“Is it contagious?”
“No.”
“Is it going to bite me?”
His gaze flicks down to her.
“Not unless you cut it out.”
Merra sniffs. “I haven’t ruled that out.”
Rhazek blinks once. I look away before I laugh, because finding any part of his throat glow funny feels like taking sides in a war I don’t understand and wasn’t consulted about joining.
“Does the fragment control it?” Rosalind asks, looking at him over Merra’s shoulder.
“No.”
“Does the sphere?”
“No.”
“Does Krix?”
That one makes him react. He pauses before answering. The glow dims and then returns, thin as a buried wire.
“Krix owned many things,” he says. “Not this.”
The words should be reassuring, but nothing about this room is reassuring. The cistern is ugly, the sphere is glowing, the floor wants attention, and I am two emotional steps away from sympathizing with the enemy because he looked like someone put a knife into an old wound and twisted.
Nope. Absolutely not. Not going to feel sorry for him.
My sympathy is rationed. I have a list and he’s nowhere on it.
Probably.
“Then why did it answer?” Adran asks, folding his arms.
Rhazek’s gaze shifts to the burned line across the stone.
“Because the fragment asked a question broad enough to wake anything taught to listen.”
Cold moves through the cistern.
I do not like that “taught to listen”. It sounds too much like children learning when to be quiet around hungry adults. It sounds like collared animals and locked doors and arenas full of sand that speaks to warriors who survived long enough to resent it.
Rosalind hears it too. I know she does because all her attention snaps to him.
“Can the fragment use that reaction to find you?”
“I do not know.”
Syin makes a sound of disgust.
Rhazek looks at him. “Would you prefer a prettier lie?”
“I would prefer answers before we place you beside one of ours.”
“One of yours is standing beside me because she moved before your blade did.”
Oh, wonderful. We’re involving me again. My favorite local disaster.
“I was not beside you on purpose,” I say.
“You were exactly where you chose to be.”
“Yes, and I choose many regrettable things under pressure. That doesn’t make them policy.”
His one eye is on me and my stupid heart stutters for some ignorant reason of its own. The glow under his throat flickers once, quick and treacherous. The flicker pulls my attention, and he catches me watching.
For one ugly second, the cistern disappears around us. It’s only his one open eye, black ringed in gold, heat under bronze skin, a warning I keep mistaking for a question. Then Syin steps between us, and I remember to breathe like a normal person with plans to survive the afternoon.
“Enough,” Rosalind says. “We don’t have time to solve everything in this room.”
“That has never stopped us from trying,” I mutter.
She glances at me. I look at the floor. A mature response, and therefore suspiciously rare. Merra releases Rhazek’s jaw and starts digging through her healer’s roll.
“He needs the wing braced.”
“No,” Rhazek says at once.
“Yes,” Merra says.
“No.”
“Rosalind, tell the off-world slab that I can still remove fingers,” I offer.
Rhazek’s eyes narrow. “The wing must move.”
“The wing is already moving badly. I’m offering it the dignity of failing in one direction,” Merra says.
Despite everything, a small sound escapes me. Rhazek looks over. I pretend it was a cough, which fools no one and least of all him.
Merra pulls out a narrow brace made from old black composite and pale woven straps. It’s not City work, so it must be scavenged from some pre-crash storage. We never throw away anything that might someday keep a body alive, which is either practical or grim enough to count as religion.
Rhazek watches the brace like it’s a trap. Despite myself, I’m trying to figure out what his problem is. Why doesn’t he want the brace? The wing has to hurt like hell. Then understanding arrives before I can refuse it.
It’s not the brace. It’s being held. Strapped. Adjusted by hands that don’t ask. Restraints have taught him to remember. His face gives nothing away, but his breathing changes. It’s too measured. Too obedient. That kind of control isn’t calm. It’s a cage with manners.
I step closer before caution and general good sense can rebuild the distance.
“She’s not restraining you.”
He cuts a look toward me, sharp enough to draw blood. “I know.”
“No, you don’t. You know the shape. Not the intent.”
A tiny muscle works in his jaw.
Merra pauses with the brace in her hands, eyes moving between us. For once, she doesn’t say the perfect rude thing. Mercy from unexpected directions. We should mark the day.
Rhazek’s jaw tightens, then he looks away.
“Do it,” he says, his voice soft and low.
Merra does. Efficiently if not exactly gently, because Merra believes gentleness is for people with spare time and good choices.
But she tells him before every pull of the strap, and somehow that matters.
His torn wing flexes once, trembling along the scarred edge, then settles higher against his back.
Better enough to walk without scraping every stone between here and doom.
The sphere pulses again.
The bright point on the map flares so hard green light crawls over Rosalind’s fingers even through the cloth. She doesn’t drop it, which surprises me. The woman could probably hold a live coal and make the coal question its commitment.
“Go,” she says.
Just that. The room breaks into motion.
Syin assigns warriors with short, clipped orders.
Renn ends up on the team, his cheek bandaged and his expression determined in the way of young males who haven’t yet learned that bravery and stupidity often wear each other’s shirts.
Penr is sent to fetch two route runners and looks relieved until I tell him he’s not one of them.
“But I’m fast,” he says.
“You’re limping.”
“I’m fast while limping.”
“You squeaked when dust fell.”
“That was a cough.”
“Your cough said mother.”
His ears go red. “I can help.”
“You are helping. You’re staying here, carrying messages, and making sure Ila knows I’m not dead unless I’m actually dead. Don’t improvise my death. She’ll blame me for the paperwork.”
Penr’s mouth tightens, but he nods. He’s young and dumb enough to hate being assigned somewhere safe. I remember that feeling, but I’m old enough to know safe is usually a temporary rumor.
Ila appears before we leave the cistern because Ila appears wherever there is trouble, carrying two waterskins, a packet of dried root mash, and the expression of a woman who has already decided everyone else is incompetent but is willing to support us in our tragic condition.