9. Kessa #2
Syin signals two warriors forward with hooked blades.
They move carefully, one on each side of the cracked stone.
The first filament lashes out before either gets close.
It snaps across one warrior’s lochaber, and the metal hisses green.
He drops the weapon with a curse. The second warrior stabs down, but the filament wraps the blade and pulls.
The weapon is pulled into the crack.
“That went well,” I say, mostly because fear is trying to climb up my throat and I need to shove words at it.
Rhazek pushes himself upright. “It is learning.”
“Wonderful. We found alien metal with ambition.”
He turns to me. “Can you feel the next pulse?”
I stare at him. “I’m sorry, are we pretending this is normal?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Can you?”
I want to say no. I want to be useless. Just for one beautiful, decorative moment, I want to be the wrong person for a horrible job.
The ground trembles under my boots.
Once.
Pause.
The next beat builds under the sand, gathering pressure. I feel it pushing toward the core, toward Rhazek, toward the place in my chest that answered when his markings flared.
“Again,” I whisper. “It’s going to lash again on the next pulse. Wider.”
“Where?” Syin asks.
I look at the core. I don’t see the answer so much as feel where the pain will open.
“Left side. Low. Toward Renn.”
Renn moves without arguing. Bless his increasingly survival-oriented heart.
The pulse hits. Three filaments whip out where he had stood a heartbeat before, slicing empty air. Syin snarls an order, and Renn and Orek shift formation.
Rhazek is watching me in a way I cannot afford to understand.
“Stop,” I say.
“I did not speak.”
“Your face is speaking.”
“My face has no useful information.”
“It’s annoying anyway.”
Somehow, impossibly, he looks amused. Then it’s gone.
The next pulse gathers.
The core’s green light turns brighter, thinner, hungry enough to make my teeth ache. This one is different. Not a lash. A reach.
“For me,” I say.
Rhazek’s expression goes lethal. “Run.”
“No.”
“Kessa.”
There it is. My name in his mouth. A warning. A plea bitten in half because he doesn’t know what to do with the other part.
The core flares. The green line shoots straight toward me.
Rhazek moves faster than anyone wounded should. He slams the copper sphere into the path of the light. The line hits the sphere, splits, and scatters in a spray of sparks. Heat slaps my face. The smell of burning copper fills the air.
Rhazek roars.
The sound is not Zmaj. Not human. Not anything I know. It tears out of him like something caged finally found a seam.
His throat markings blaze.
The core answers.
And beneath the sound, beneath the glow, beneath the impossible terror of standing in a desert while a broken piece of alien machinery tries to crawl into my bones, I understand what is happening with awful clarity.
It can’t reach me cleanly unless it goes through him.
“Rhazek!”
He drops to one knee, still holding the sphere against the green line. The copper shell blackens under his palm. Smoke curls around his fingers. Heat crawls past his wrist and bites beneath the edge of his forearm bracer before he can shift his grip.
Syin lunges, but Rhazek snarls, “Core. Now.”
I don’t know if Syin obeys because he understands or because he hates taking orders so much that violence becomes the fastest way to end the experience.
Either way, he moves. He grabs the fallen lochaber from the sand, spins it, and drives the butt end into the rock beside the core, pinning two filaments against stone.
Renn and the second warrior follow, using broken metal scraps instead of blades, trapping the whipping lines long enough for the core to hang exposed.
The pulse builds again.
I feel it before anyone else. Wider this time. Deeper. The core is going to scream upward, not outward. Skyward.
“It’s going to send,” I shout. “Now. It’s sending now.”
Rhazek’s head snaps toward me. “Break the glass.”
“With what?”
“Stone. Blade. Anything.”
Everyone is too far. Syin is holding filaments. Renn is braced low with both hands on a scrap of hull metal. The other warriors are pinned by the core’s thrashing green lines. Rhazek is burning his hand on the sphere to keep the call from reaching me.
Which leaves, obviously, the least qualified idiot in the channel.
Me.
I draw my tiny practical knife.
Rhazek sees it and reacts immediately. “No.”
“I thought you liked assessment.”
“No.”
“Try not to enjoy being wrong.”
I move before the next pulse finishes gathering.
I hit the ground on my knees beside the crack, keeping my sleeves tight against my arms, staying low under the whipping filaments.
Heat crawls over my cheek. The green glass core shudders inches away, slick and bright and wrong. My knife looks insultingly small.
Fine.
Small things still cut.
I jam the blade into a seam where green glass meets black casing. The shock up my arm is hard enough to make my shoulder scream. For one second I’m not in the desert. I’m on tan sand under white lights, blood in my mouth, collar biting, crowd roaring for a kill I don’t want to make.
Then Rhazek’s voice cuts through it.
“Kessa.”
Not an order. Not a warning.
An anchor.
I twist the knife.
The core cracks.
Green light explodes upward. Rhazek slams the copper sphere over the split like he is sealing a wound with his bare hand.
Syin and Renn throw their weight into the pinned filaments.
Someone curses. Someone else yells my name.
I don’t know who because the world is full of light and heat and the awful feeling of something vast outside the sky turning its attention toward us.
Then the core dies.
It dies with a shriek that rips across the channel and buries itself in the sand, sending a ripple through the ground strong enough to knock me backward.
Rhazek catches me.
Again.
This time neither of us pretends not to notice.
His burned hand is wrapped around my wrist. My shoulder is pressed against his chest. His heart is beating too fast beneath dark plates that shift against my cheek. The green light at his throat fades, but not all the way. A thin line remains, pulsing weakly under the skin.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
I lift my head. His face is inches from mine, carved tight with pain and fury and something worse because it’s not aimed at me.
“You touched the core,” he says.
“You told me to break the glass.”
“I told them.”
“I was available.”
“You were reckless.”
“You were on fire.”
His burned hand tightens around my wrist for one heartbeat, then releases as if he remembers he has no right. The loss of his grip feels stranger than the grip itself. I’m absolutely not prepared to examine that. My examination schedule is closed. Permanently. Due to emergency structural failure.
Syin appears over us, blade up and eyes furious. “Both of you, away from it.”
I look past him.
The fragment has gone dark. The green glass is cracked open, bleeding a sluggish black smoke into the sand. No pulse. No hum. No call.
For three blessed breaths, the desert is only desert.
Then the copper sphere in Rhazek’s burned hand gives one tiny, miserable click. Rhazek looks down and his expression locks.
“No,” he says.
I push myself upright, every muscle shaking. “No what?”
The sphere cracks along one seam. Inside it, a point of green light blinks once.
Not from the dead fragment.
Farther away.
The second point.
Rhazek closes his hand around the sphere, but the light leaks through his fingers anyway.
“The first core did not send,” he says.
The relief hits so hard I nearly sway. Then he keeps talking.
“It woke the second,” he says so softly only I hear it.