Rhazek
The tracking device is broken, but my body does not believe in silence.
The final pulse did not leave through the sky. It did not need to. A crude tracker sends position. A better one sends position and waits. A cruel one sends position and tests whatever answers nearby.
This one tested me.
The burn flats spread around us in hard red stone and white light.
The cracked tracker lies under Kessa’s cloth, broken into ugly black pieces no larger than teeth.
Above us, the kedi sits on a ridge with Kessa’s route token trapped under one paw, purring at the disaster it helped create.
Kessa stands beside the broken device with her knife low, her expression too sharp to be called calm.
She has already understood half of it and I hate it. Not because she is wrong. Because understanding any of it makes her harder to protect from the other half.
Syin studies me with his weapon still in hand.
Renn keeps one eye on the kedi and one on my throat.
Orek stands with the grim patience of a male who would rather face a real predator than negotiate with a striped thief.
The two runners hold exactly where Kessa’s hand signal put them.
Lio watches the broken tracker. Maro watches the horizon and tries not to touch the claw marks in his hair.
At least someone is watching the horizon.
“What did it do to you?” Kessa asks.
The question is too precise for a lie.
“It pinged something inside me.”
“Not the beacon.”
“No.”
“Not the sphere.”
“No.”
She sets her jaw. “The thing under your skin.”
I do not answer quickly enough. Syin’s blade lifts an inch.
Kessa steps without looking, putting herself where Syin would have to decide whether he is threatening me or cutting through her authority. She has a talent for becoming a wall at the worst possible moment.
“What do you mean?” Syin asks.
“The kedi carried a tracker,” she says. “We broke the tracker. Something in him still answered. That is what we are dealing with.”
“We are dealing with him,” Syin says.
“No,” she says. “We are dealing with whatever someone put in him.”
She separates me from what was done to me. I do not know what to do with that. The burn under my ribs spreads in a thin line. Not pain. Pain belongs to the body. This is instruction, written beneath flesh in a language I hate because part of me still understands it.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
Kessa hears my breath change.
“Sit down,” she says.
“I can stand.”
“That wasn’t a survey of your dreams.”
Maro coughs into his fist. Lio kicks his ankle without taking his eyes off me.
I lower myself onto a slab of red stone because refusing would waste strength and prove nothing but old training. The damaged wing drags before I catch it. Kessa sees. She pretends not to, which is a kindness I am sure she would deny under interrogation.
She crouches in front of me. Knife still in hand, but angled down. She is angry enough to shake and disciplined enough not to give anger a road out.
“Show me,” she says.
Syin growls. “Kessa.”
“Not you.”
Her gaze never leaves me.
There is no soft way to obey. I unfasten the charred composite strap across my ribs. The buckle sticks. My fingers hesitate over it for one heartbeat too long because Krix hands once fastened different straps there, and the body is stupid about remembering old cages.
Kessa sees that too and says nothing.
I pull the strap aside and peel Merra’s field bandage back from the edge of the wound.
The cut should be ordinary by now, one more torn place among many.
Instead, a thin green thread burns under the skin between two ribs, not on top of flesh but beneath it.
Buried. Waiting. It pulses again, faint and precise.
Lio whispers something under his breath.
Maro answers, “Do not say that out loud.”
“What is it?” Kessa asks.
“A blood relay,” I say.
Syin’s face hardens. “Krix.”
“Krix used it.” My voice is rougher than I want. “Krix did not invent every cruelty in the universe.”
“Did Arcan know?”
That comes from Kessa. She cuts to the door that matters even while the room is on fire, though we have no room and the fire is inside me.
“He knew there were remnants,” I say. “He did not know which ones were still alive. Neither did I.”
She catches the hesitation. There it is. The part that will cost.
“You suspected.”
“Yes.”
Maro exhales. Lio looks away. Syin’s tail scrapes the sand.
“That is a coward’s word,” Syin says, his voice so low it is almost a growl.
The fact that I understand Syin is the only thing that keeps me from wanting to end him. If the arena has taught me nothing else, I did learn humility. Or at least to wait until the right moment to take on someone.
“No,” I say. “It is an accurate one.”
Kessa does not look at Syin. She looks at me.
“You came anyway.”
“The warning had to arrive.”
“You came with a hidden relay in your body and didn’t tell us.”
“I did not know for sure what remained, whether it would wake, or whether they could activate it.”
“You didn’t know it wouldn’t.”
I could speak of the flight from Krix. Of Arcan’s people cutting the visible collar from my throat with stolen med knives while alarms screamed through the walls.
Of the arena surgeon who told me the deep hook could not be removed without killing me.
Of years spent waiting for a signal that never came, then convincing myself silence meant death.
All those thoughts crowd my head. Any of them would explain, but none would excuse. None of them changes what I brought here.
Noise. Nothing more. I push it down and answer with the simple truth.
“No,” I say. “I did not.”
The desert gives us only heat and blood and the quiet clicking of cooling metal. Then the broken tracker on the stone gives one last faint spark. Kessa whips toward it.
No pulse follows. No line. No call. Only the mark under my ribs responding with cold heat. The device is dead. The relay is not.
Kessa rises. The movement is smooth enough to frighten me.
“Wrap it,” she says. “Salt cloth if we have it. Ash if we don’t. Nobody bleeds near the tracker. Nobody touches Rhazek’s wound. Nobody repeats his rhythm by accident, and if that sounds impossible, congratulations, you understand today.”
Maro lifts one hand. “I understood hours ago and would like credit.”
“Denied,” she says, shaking her head. Then her gaze cuts to me again.
There is hurt under the anger. A small, sharp thing she has no time to name. I know because I have spent years giving nameless things jobs. A mechanism of survival when you are locked in a cage and waiting.
“Can it still send?” she asks.
“The tracker cannot. The relay can answer if something stronger calls.”
“From where?”
I look past her to the south, where heat makes the horizon ripple. The kedi ran that way before the tracker broke, but the creature was not choosing the path. The device was broadcasting through the line of least resistance.
“Dead drop,” I say.
Syin’s nostrils flare. “Meaning?”
“A receiver,” I say. “A place built to collect what the tracker gathered if the pilot died.”
Kessa frowns, narrowing her eyes, then rolls her shoulders. She is calculating. Thinking it through. That is good. Anger will keep her alive for a little while. Calculation will keep everyone else alive longer.
“Then we find it,” she says.
I look at the green thread under my ribs. It answers her voice. And this time, she sees the thing beneath my skin answer.