7. Kessa #2
“I moved the lower heat rooms,” she says. “No panic. Three complaints. One minor fight over blankets. Adran’s source-watch order has been countermanded by Rosalind’s mixed pairing instruction, which he is pretending to accept with grace.”
“His face?” I ask.
“Like spoiled milk in a fancy cup.”
“I’m sorry I missed it.”
“No, you’re not. You’re busy walking into danger with a new alien.” She looks Rhazek over, then turns back to me. “Try not to die. I don’t want your job.”
“You’d be better at it.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t want it.”
She shoves the waterskins against my chest, then lowers her voice. “You all right?”
The question is worse because she doesn’t soften it.
I look past her to where Rhazek stands near the arch, Syin on one side, Merra tightening the last strap over his wing on the other.
He looks like he belongs in a nightmare and is somehow still less frightening than the green map pulsing on the cistern wall.
“No,” I say.
Ila nods once. “Good. Honest matters. Bring that back too.”
I want to hug her. There’s an unspoken rule that we don’t hug in a crisis because then the crisis thinks it’s won. Instead, I tuck one waterskin over my shoulder and hand the other to Renn, who accepts it with the solemnity of a sacred blade.
We leave through the east ash route instead of the main passage.
Fewer eyes. Less rumor. More unstable steps and one narrow section where Rhazek has to turn sideways because his braced wing makes him too broad for the old stone passage.
Syin watches him struggle with open suspicion.
I track his progress with irritation that keeps trying to become something else, so I feed it practical concerns until it behaves.
“Left foot higher,” I tell Rhazek.
He pauses. “I see the step.”
“You see the first step. I see the one after it that collapses if you put that much weight on the outer edge.”
He looks down. He shifts his weight inward and the loose tile holds.
“Thank you,” he says.
The words are formal and stiff. Somehow worse than arrogance. At least arrogance gives me something comfortable to punch.
“You’re welcome,” I say. Then, because discomfort has apparently broken my survival instincts, I add, “Try not to make it weird.”
“I do not know your measure for weird.”
“You fell from the sky, bled on me, glowed at a sphere, and made Merra brace your wing while Syin considered murder as a public service. We passed my measure for weird several turns ago.”
Renn makes a strangled sound behind us.
Rhazek looks straight ahead. “Then I will not worry about crossing it.”
I shouldn’t enjoy that answer. I don’t. I refuse to enjoy it in a very firm and official capacity.
By the time we reach the outer ash gate, the twin suns are high enough to turn the world white at the edges.
Heat slams into us. It comes with dust, mineral glare, and the old desert smell of sand that has seen too much blood and kept all its secrets.
The City closes behind us, stone swallowing shadow, and I want to turn back so badly my bones ache.
But fortunately for all of us, I know fear. I know how to handle it so it doesn’t overwhelm. I give it a job, bury it in work.
Route. Ground. Markers. People. Water. Weak shelves. Retreat paths.
Rhazek walks at my right, because Rosalind apparently believes in punishing me with proximity.
Syin leads two paces ahead with Renn and Orek fanned behind.
The two route runners, Lio and Maro, follow my hand signals without talking.
Good runners. Smart enough to listen. Smart enough not to stare too openly at Rhazek, though Lio fails once when the green under his throat pulses faintly as we pass the first cracked cistern marker.
The pulse reaches me at the same time. Not beneath. Ahead. It brushes my teeth and runs under my skin like a thread being pulled through a hem. I stop, raising one hand and everyone freezes.
Rhazek stops half a breath before Syin does.
The pause catches both Syin and me. Rhazek catches us catching it, because he says, “Do not start.”
“I hadn’t even opened my mouth,” I say.
“Your silence was preparing an accusation.”
“My silence is allowed hobbies.”
Syin turns back, glaring and serious as usual.
“Direction?” he asks, or rather, barks.
I close my eyes, which is a terrible thing to do in the open desert with enemies, zemlja tunnels, and a sky that has recently become much too interested in us.
But sight is making too much noise. Heat shimmer.
Red stone. Black marker. Rhazek’s dark shape at the edge of awareness.
I need the pulse without all the world’s clutter leaning on it.
There.
East, then south. Not direct. It bends around old stone like water choosing a crack.
“That way,” I say, opening my eyes and pointing past a jagged line of broken cistern posts. “It’s using the old channel bed.”
Rhazek’s jaw tightens. “That should be dry.”
“It is.”
“But dry does not mean dead,” he says.
I look at him. “I’m starting to dislike how often you say true things in upsetting ways.”
“Truth is rarely improved by decoration.”
“You’ve never met a good curtain.”
For a moment he looks confused. Excellent. I’ll take whatever small victories I can get.
We move toward the broken cistern markers.
The terrain is ugly in a specific, deliberate way, as if the planet once tried to fold this whole section into itself and then got distracted.
Red shelves jut from sand. Old channel grooves cut through stone in pale curves.
Blackened pieces of ship metal glitter here and there, but none are big enough to be the fragment we need.
Every few steps, the pulse travels through the ground and a sickly glow answers beneath Rhazek’s throat.
He keeps pretending it doesn’t. I keep pretending I don’t see. We’re both liars. Mine is more polite.
The first true warning comes from the sand.
It’s not a tremor or the roll of a zemlja I know too well. This is smaller. A fine skittering under the surface, like grit being pulled in one direction. I drop to one knee and press my palm against the ground.
Hot sand. Sharp stone. A whispering vibration.
Rhazek crouches beside me, too fast for someone who should be fainting somewhere under Merra’s supervision.
“Do not touch the ground near active signal,” he says.
I lift my hand and show him my palm.
“No green light. No bleeding. No death. Very dull by today’s standards.”
He focuses on the shallow scrape on the heel of my hand from the cistern wall earlier. Not bleeding. Barely pink. His attention still catches there with an intensity that makes me grip the edge of my shirt.
“Cover it,” he says.
“It’s nothing.”
“Cover it.”
The order is too close to a command. My temper rises, bright and grateful for something familiar.
“You don’t get to order me.”
His face goes blank, which is becoming one of my least favorite things on an entire list of least favorite things about him.
“Then choose not to be foolish.”
“That’s still bossy, only sideways.”
“Kessa,” Syin snaps from ahead.
“Everyone is very committed to saying my name today.” I pull a scrap of cloth from my belt and wrap it around my palm with more force than necessary. “There. My tragic wound is hidden from the blood-hungry alien rock.”
Rhazek’s gaze stays on the wrap for one heartbeat longer than it should. Then he rises.
We find the fragment ten minutes later.
At first, it looks like another piece of black hull wedged into a cracked cistern post. Then the pulse comes again, and the marker around it lights from the inside.
Not blue-white like the old waterlines. Luminous veins run out from the metal into the marker, up through the dead marker, and toward the open air above it.
The fragment is small. Which is stupid. Big disasters should at least have the courtesy to look impressive. This is no larger than my forearm, hooked and ugly, with dark plates folded around a core that opens and closes like a mechanical eye trying to blink sand away.
Rhazek is rigid. I look at him.
“That’s bad,” I comment.
“Yes.”
“On our scale or your scale?”
His good eye doesn’t leave the fragment. “There is no meaningful difference.”
The green veins brighten. Three patient beats.
The glow under Rhazek’s throat answers. Stronger this time. The fragment’s mechanical eye turns, slow and blind, until it faces him, then the world drops through the sand.
The fragment isn’t calling the sky. It’s calling him.