8. Rhazek
Rhazek
It calls in no language, which is worse.
Words can be fought. Words can be refused, twisted, ignored, spat back into the teeth of the one who sent them. This is older than words. Simpler. A hook dragged through blood and nerve, pulling against the scar tissue where Krix left more than memory.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
The fragment calls, and my body tries to answer.
I lock my knees before they bend. I keep my damaged wing tight against my back though pain sparks white along the torn membrane.
I keep my hands loose. That matters most because hands give away obedience before the mouth admits it.
Krix taught that. Arena masters watched hands first. Collars second.
Eyes only if they enjoyed watching a male discover he was not his own.
I am my own.
The line tastes like iron inside my mouth.
Kessa does not rush toward the fragment. She does what I have seen her do with danger before. She starts issuing instructions.
She makes a low cutting signal. Back. Wider. Quiet.
Syin obeys before he can argue. Renn shifts with him. The others spread, not fleeing, not crowding. Kessa remains closest to the broken marker, sharp-eyed and furious, placing each of us like stones around a sinkhole.
She has not looked at my throat since we left the cistern.
Not once. She is pretending she did not see the green light beneath my plates answer Arcan’s sphere, which means she has stored the memory somewhere sharp and will use it later.
Now the fragment’s pulse hits the thing inside me in front of her, and I watch the memory cut deeper.
Nobody shifts farther than Kessa tells them to.
Syin holds left of the broken marker. Renn holds right.
I remain where she can watch my hands, my throat, and the little machine half-buried in dust. The shard keeps blinking from the split stone.
Small. Too small for the amount of obedience it drags out of my blood.
“Your hands moved,” Kessa says without looking away from the shard.
“I stopped them.”
“That wasn’t praise.”
Renn makes a small sound. Syin looks ready to remove the fragment, my head, or both from the planet by force. Kessa lifts one hand, a small motion that quiets both of them better than command.
She should not have that kind of power without title. It makes her difficult to predict. It makes others trust her before they decide to do so.
Krix would have tried to own her first. I dislike how quickly I can imagine it. I push it aside and focus on the pull beneath my skin.
The fragment is east-south-east of the first basin. Close enough that the ship’s breaking pattern could explain it to desperate minds. Too far for truth. The wreck did not scatter this cleanly. It seeded. That is the word I do not give them.
Seeded fragments are meant to wake in sequence. One screams. One listens. One carries whatever the others feed it.
Arcan feared a loud beacon. He did not know about the blood relay. Or he knew and sent me anyway.
Pain tightens around the gash in my side.
Merra’s bandage holds, but the wound beneath it has begun to throb in rhythm with the call.
I feel the metal dust in the cut answering like ground glass remembering the hand that made it.
My body wants to turn toward the sound. My blood wants to become a road.
I will burn out my own veins before I allow that.
Kessa stops so suddenly that the young runner behind her nearly walks into her back. She catches his shoulder and nudges him to the side without looking away from the ground ahead.
“There,” she says.
I look past her.
At first there is nothing. Red stone. A low ridge of wind-carved rock. Sand gathered in the cracks. Heat shimmer bending the air into lies. Then the light catches a black edge tucked beneath a slab of stone, and the world narrows.
The fragment is smaller than my forearm, curved and dark, with one jagged side buried in the ridge. Green threads crawl over it, so thin a dull eye would miss them. They are not light exactly. They are signal given hunger, searching over the metal in slow pulses.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
My throat answers.
Kessa turns, then, fast enough to catch the glow before I can hide it.
“Don’t step closer,” she says.
Syin’s blade comes up. “To whom?”
“Everyone.” Her gaze stays on me. “But mostly him.”
“I know what it is,” I say.
“That is not making me feel cuddly.”
“Good.”
She presses her lips together. She wants to look at the fragment. She wants to keep looking at me. She cannot do both and dislikes the limitation. Sensible.
“Tell me where to stand,” she says.
Syin growls. “You do not take position from him.”
“I take information from anyone who has it, then decide whether to insult them later.” She points at the ground without looking away from the fragment.
“That rock shelf is cracked under the sand. The green line crosses there twice. If this thing lashes out like the cistern drain did, the wrong step burns someone. So yes, I’m asking the enemy where not to put my feet. ”
Enemy.
The word should please me. It places distance where distance belongs, but it does not.
“Left of the pale stone,” I say. “Not on it. Beside it. The line travels under the crust.”
She narrows her eyes. “You can see that?”
“I can feel it.”
There. Too much truth. Adran is not here to make a cage out of the answer, but Syin hears enough. His head turns, slow and dangerous.
Kessa hears too. Her expression changes, not softer. She looks at me as if another route has appeared on a map she does not want to carry.
“Same as me,” she says quietly.
“No.”
The refusal comes too fast. She notes that as well. Rot take her listening. Renn shifts. His claw scrapes stone, and the fragment brightens.
“Stop,” I say.
Everyone freezes except Kessa, who freezes half a breath before the word leaves me. She felt it coming. The green threads lift from the metal like hair rising in wind. One reaches toward the scrape in the stone, tasting vibration.
“Back,” I say.
Syin pulls Renn away with one arm. The thread drops, unsatisfied, and burns a black groove across the rock as it retreats.
The human runner makes a sound through his nose that he probably meant to keep private. Kessa breathes out slowly.
“Nobody step on anything pale, cracked, shiny, humming, green, black, warm, cold, interesting, or suspiciously quiet,” Kessa says.
“That leaves sky,” the human runner whispers.
“Don’t step on that either,” she says.
Renn laughs before he can stop himself. Even Syin lets the joke pass.
I crouch because standing has become expensive. My side pulls. The bandage sticks to the wound beneath, and for a moment the world dims around the edges. Kessa takes one step toward me, then stops herself.
Good. No. Rot take it. Not good. Necessary.
“The core is under the ridge,” I say before anyone can ask whether I am weak. “The visible fragment is a tooth. The core is the root.”
“How far under?” Kessa asks.
“Far enough that digging will wake it. Not far enough that leaving it will keep you safe.”
“Everyone is very committed to terrible options today.”
“She asks how to break it,” Syin says. “Answer that.”
I point to the black edge beneath the stone.
“The green threads feed from the root. Break the root and the tooth dies. Strike the tooth and it screams. Cut a thread and it tastes the blade, then the hand, then the blood.”
Renn swallows. “What happens if it tastes blood?”
“It sends what it learns.”
The silence after that belongs to all of them.
Kessa looks at the old channel scars in the stone, then the slope, then the fragment. Her mind works visibly, not because her face gives much away, but because she examines the world like it must confess if she stares accurately enough.
“It’s not trying to reach the City,” she says. “Not directly. It’s using the old channels to find a clear line upward.”
“Yes.”
“If we block that route, it may search another.”
“Yes.”
“If we break it wrong, it screams.”
“Yes.”
She exhales through her nose. “You are a festival of yeses and doom.”
“I have been called worse.”
“I’m sure. Give me time.”
Syin runs out of patience. “Can we collapse the shelf over it?”
“No,” Kessa and I say together.
She looks sharply at me. The fragment pulses.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
My throat answers, hotter this time. Pain drags across the lines beneath my plates. I press one hand to the side of my neck before I can stop myself. Kessa sees. She sees too much.
“Why not?” Syin asks.
Kessa answers first.
“Because the shelf sits over a hollow. Collapse it and the force travels down before it travels in. The fragment reacts to vibration. We might feed it.”
“And,” I say, because the truth is useful when shaped correctly, “if the root cracks instead of dies, it may send a partial signal.”
“What kind of partial?” Renn asks.
I look at the fragment. The green threads crawl toward me by the width of a claw.
“Enough.”
Syin snarls low. “You give half-answers like a male expecting to keep his tongue.”
“I give enough answers to keep you alive.”
“You give enough to keep yourself useful.”
Yes. I do not say that out loud. Kessa steps between the words before they become teeth.
“We need to get under it without waking it. Not dig. Not collapse. Not strike from above.”
Her gaze travels over the ridge, down the slope, then to a narrow slit between two slabs half-buried under windpacked sand. Too small for Zmaj shoulders. Too unstable for brute force. Perfect for something worse.
“No,” Syin says immediately.
Kessa’s eyebrows lift. “I haven’t said anything.”
“You are about to.”
“I appreciate your growing fluency in my bad ideas.”
“No.”
She points at the slit. “That runs under the shelf.”
“No.”
“A small person can get through without moving the top stone.”
“No.”
“Do you know another small person?”
The human runner takes one careful step backward.
Kessa looks at him. “Not you. You have the spine of cooked root mash.”
“I accept that,” he says quickly.
I stare at the slit. The space beneath will be narrow, dark, and close to the core. Too close. If the green line touches her skin, it will take blood and heat and whatever strange listening lives in her bones. If it tastes Kessa, it may learn the City faster than it could from me.
“No,” I say.
Kessa turns on me. “We are not accepting votes from sky trash.”
“It wants blood. You already hear it. That makes you not merely blood.”
Her expression shutters. I have made an error. Syin hears it. Renn hears it. Even the human runner hears enough to look terrified in a new, more educated way.
Kessa steps closer to me, and I hate that everyone else fades for half a breath. The suns burn above. The fragment calls. Her eyes are tired and angry and too alive.
“What does that mean?” she asks.
“It means you should not go under that stone.”
“That is an answer shaped like a locked door.”
“Yes.”
“Open it.”
“No.”
She presses her lips together. “Rhazek.”
My name in her mouth should not do this. It should not strike low beneath the ribs, deeper than the wound, deeper than the old command trying to drag my body toward the fragment. It should not make the green beneath my plates pulse, hot and bright.
Kessa sees it. The fragment sees it too. The threads lift all at once, turning toward us.
“Down!” I shout.
I grab Kessa before she can obey, because she is fast but the fragment is faster. I twist, taking her to the ground beneath me as green light lashes over us and cuts through the air where her throat was.
The smell of burned dust fills my mouth. Syin roars. Stone cracks. Kessa’s hands slam against my chest plates, not helpless, not soft, pushing for space where there is none.
“Get off me,” she snaps.
“In a moment.”
“Now would be traditional.”
The fragment shrieks.
The call tears through my scar and into the buried metal in my wound. My vision whites out. For one breath, Krix has me again. Sand under my knees. Collar at my throat. A master’s voice telling me to rise, to kill, to obey, to prove that freedom is a story fools tell before the gate opens.
Then Kessa’s fist hits my shoulder.
Hard.
Pain snaps the vision apart.
“Stay with me, doom statue,” she says, voice tight with fear she refuses to make pretty. “I need the part of your brain that knows horrible things.”
I breathe. Once. Pause. Again.
The rhythm is mine this time. Not the fragment’s. Mine.
I lift my head. The green threads have burned a circle around us, not touching. Waiting. The crash site lies. The fragment is not calling me. It is using me to call her.