9. Kessa
Kessa
The fragment calls me, but not directly. It’s coming through Rhazek.
I don’t know how I know that and I hate not knowing how I know anything.
Knowing is supposed to be sturdy. It should have steps, measurements, reasons, little scratches on a slate, some annoyed person to blame if it fails.
This knowing has none of that. It slides under my skin with the green light and the wrong rhythm, cold and bright and far too intimate for something made of alien metal.
Rhazek is a few steps ahead, half turned toward the buried fragment, his shoulders locked and his damaged wing held tight against his back. The glow beneath his throat plates pulses once, pauses, and pulses again. Each flare pulls through me in the same rhythm, impossible to ignore.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
The buried fragment answers from the split in the rock, green light bleeding through sand like poison through cloth.
Syin sees Rhazek, sees me, then his blade comes up with the kind of speed that makes every human instinct in my body vote to be elsewhere.
“Back away from her,” Syin says, his voice low and dangerous.
Rhazek doesn’t move.
It’s not defiance. I know defiance. I’ve been accused of keeping emergency reserves of it myself. This is different. His body is standing still because every piece of him is fighting something that wants him to step forward.
“Rhazek,” I say.
His unswollen eye finds mine. For one breath, the desert narrows to that single black-and-gold stare. Heat shimmers around him. The twin suns burn the tops of my shoulders. Sand slides beneath my boots. Renn breathes too loudly somewhere behind me.
None of it matters the way his voice does when he says, very softly, “Do not answer it.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You are listening.”
“That’s usually how ears work.”
He presses his lips together. “Not like this.”
The fragment pulses again and the world tips sideways.
Not enough to drop me, but enough that my stomach tries to climb into my throat as it files a formal complaint.
The green light in the crack doesn’t shine outward so much as reach.
It combs over the sand, over the stones, over the line of us standing half-hidden in a shallow channel east of the first crash basin.
It touches Rhazek first.
Not physically. I would understand physical. Physical gets a knife, a shove, a bandage, a map. This isn’t that. The light hits the markings in his throat and they flare under his skin, thin lines of toxic emerald threading beneath bronze and dark natural armor.
Then the pulse slides to me.
I suck in a breath and stumble backward before my pride can stop me.
Rhazek moves. Fast, wounded, ugly with pain. He steps between me and the glow, his wing dragging, his hand half lifted as if he wants to shove me behind him and knows I might bite him for it.
“Do not stand in the line,” he says.
“What line?” Syin demands.
“The one she can feel.”
I want to argue. The argument is already forming, hot and offended, because I do not appreciate being discussed as if I’m a cracked cistern marker.
Then the fragment pulses and the words vanish.
It isn’t pointing at the sky anymore. Not only the sky.
The buried piece is pushing up a thin green strand through the stone, and somehow I know the strand is not trying to find a route.
It’s trying to make one.
Through Rhazek.
Toward me.
That thought is so awful and so absurd that I almost laugh. The sound catches in my throat and comes out wrong.
Renn shifts closer. “Kessa?”
“I’m fine.”
“Everyone who says that is usually bleeding or lying,” he says.
“I’m spiritually bleeding and emotionally lying. It counts less.”
He looks baffled. Sweet boy. Horrible day to have to put up with me.
Syin steps around Rhazek, but Rhazek’s arm shoots out, blocking him. Syin’s blade moves before I can blink, stopping a breath from Rhazek’s throat.
“Remove your arm,” Syin says.
“No.”
The word is flat. He is not challenging Syin. Giving ground here feels too much like obedience, and I can see how hard he is fighting that.
Syin’s lips peel back. “You do not command this mission.”
“If you cross that line with a blade, it may ride the metal into your blood.”
Syin’s tail stops mid-swing. The others freeze with him. One of the human route runners behind me whispers a word I can’t catch, probably a prayer or a curse. On Tajss, those are close relatives.
“Explain,” Syin says.
“I would if everyone stopped trying to be brave near the hungry device.”
“Hungry,” I repeat.
Rhazek’s eye flicks to me. “Not alive.”
“That was not my concern.”
“It should be.”
The fragment whines, low and thin. A crack spreads in the stone around it. Sand drains into the slit, pouring down as if the desert has sprung a leak.
My skin crawls. “It’s opening.”
“Yes,” Rhazek says.
“Can it do that?”
“It is doing that.”
“I’m going to become violent about your answer quality.”
He exhales through his nose. I’m absurdly pleased that I got a reaction out of him, but then the glow in his throat brightens and the moment is gone.
He staggers.
I’m moving without thinking. Again. Because apparently my survival instincts are broken in a very specific male-shaped direction.
I catch his arm, and he hisses as if my touch hurts.
His skin is hot beneath my fingers, the armor plates shifting with his breath, and something electric bites through my palm.
I yank my hand back as Rhazek’s eye goes blacker.
“Do not touch me when it calls.”
The words land like a dropped blade. Syin hears. Renn hears. The other guards hear. Worse, I hear how frightened Rhazek is beneath the order.
“I was keeping you upright,” I snap, because anger is close and useful and doesn’t ask me what the spark through my palm meant.
“Do not.”
“You prefer falling?”
“I prefer you not become part of the circuit.”
Circuit. Fine. Good. A word from old ship lessons, half remembered from before the crash, when screens and lessons and lights were normal and I was young enough to believe the universe had rules made for people instead of razor sharp teeth ready to consume the unwary.
I swallow. “Too late?”
He does not answer quickly enough. That’s becoming his worst habit.
Syin snarls. “We end this now.”
He signals with two fingers, and the Zmaj warriors spread across the channel.
The plan we made before leaving the City had been simple in the optimistic way all stupid plans are simple.
Rhazek identifies the core. Syin, Renn, and Orek keep the tracker contained.
Renn and the route runners secure retreat.
I stand back, feel the pulse, and avoid becoming public equipment.
That plan, though, is already lying in the sand with its throat cut.
The fragment is wedged under a slanted shelf of black rock half-buried in red grit.
Only a crescent of it shows. Curved metal the color of wet bone, threaded with green lines.
Not copper like Arcan’s sphere. Not the same black hull from the ship.
This is inner machinery. Something that should never have seen the sun.
It pulses again.
The copper sphere wrapped in Syin’s belt pouch hums in answer. We brought it because Rhazek said the dampener might slow the relay if the core woke. Might. Another word I would like to throw into a pit.
Rhazek turns toward Syin. “Give me the sphere.”
“No.”
“I need it.”
“You need a chain.”
Rhazek’s face empties.
The green light flares so violently every hair on my body rises. The fragment screams, and this time the sound comes with a memory that is not mine.
Sand. Not red sand. Black sand under white lights.
A crowd roaring.
Metal around my throat.
No, not my throat. His.
I stumble back, choking. Renn grabs my elbow. The world snaps into place, red and hot and wrong.
Rhazek is staring at Syin, but his mind is not here. I don’t know how I know that either. The device shoved something through him and brushed it against me. A scrap. A shard. Arena sand and locked collars and a body ordered forward because refusing meant pain.
“Syin,” I say, and my voice comes out scraped. “Give him the sphere.”
Syin doesn’t look away from Rhazek. “No.”
“It’s using the chain language. Or the collar language. Or whatever implanted commands they put in him. You just said the wrong word and it pulled harder.”
Rhazek’s eye cuts to me and I recognize the horror that flashes through it. Not at the device. At me knowing even that much about him.
Good. Let him hate it. I hate it too.
Syin looks at me then, and for once his anger has no place to go. “You saw this?”
“I felt it.”
Admitting that costs me something. I don’t know what, only that it leaves my chest colder.
The fragment pulses again. This time Rhazek’s knees buckle.
He catches himself on one hand, claws digging into the sand. His damaged wing flares halfway, trying to balance him, then crumples with a sound that makes my stomach twist. The green lines at his throat crawl higher, not just under the plates now but toward his jaw in thin branching veins.
Rhazek bares his teeth. “Sphere.”
Syin rips it from the pouch and throws it.
Rhazek catches it against his chest. The copper sphere flares dull gold, then green, then an ugly dead gray. He presses his thumb against one seam and twists. For a second nothing happens.
Then all sound drops away.
The silence hits so hard my ears pop. The fragment’s scream cuts off. The wind vanishes. Even the tiny scrape of sand against stone dies. It’s not quiet. Quiet has texture. This is absence.
My heart slams once.
Pause.
Again.
The fragment cracks open.
Inside is a core no bigger than both my fists together, suspended in a nest of black filaments and wet-looking green glass. It beats. Not like a heart. Worse than that because it’s imitating a heart badly.
“Do not let the filaments touch skin,” Rhazek says.
His voice is rough. Too rough. I look him over quickly and see blood sliding under Merra’s wrap at his side.