Kessa
Use the weapon.
His words hang in the chamber like smoke from bad oil, thick enough to taste, dirty enough to make everything it touches feel spoiled.
I stare at him with what I hope is a blank look because the words are what I was thinking, but hearing him say them makes me feel wrong for having thought it. My stomach churns acid because hearing him say it makes the thought feel uglier than it did in my head.
No one answers as the seconds interminably stretch towards a minute. Eyes dart to him, to me, back to him, while others look anywhere but either of us.
Rosalind stands beside the long stone table with both hands flat on its surface, one finger softly drumming, shoulders squared like she can hold the City upright by refusing to bend.
Visidion’s wings are folded tight enough to make the edges look carved from shadow.
Syin’s jaw is set so hard I can almost hear his teeth grinding from three paces away.
Adran says nothing either, which is rare enough to make the air feel stranger than the phrase itself.
Rhazek is the only one who looks as if the words have no particular meaning. Just some facts that needed to be acknowledged.
He sits on the low stone bench against the far wall, his damaged wing half-spread behind him because folding it would pull at the wound.
He’s not bound, but he doesn’t have to be.
Syin stands near the door, Renn near the window slit, and Rhazek keeps both hands loose on his knees as if stillness is a bargain he is choosing every breath.
A cage without rope still knows what it is.
A ring of salt dusts the floor around him. Merra made three passes with it while muttering that every person in this room has the sense of a heat-drunk guster, which is not inaccurate and also not helpful.
Rhazek’s throat plates glow faint green beneath the black armor lines of his skin.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
My pulse skips as if it’s trying to answer it. Heat flushes my skin as anger surges. I hate that my body is taking notes from the thing inside him. I’m still angry at him. Or maybe it’s not him, or just him. I’m angry at everything.
We’d finally found a glimmer of hope with the epis. The heat wasn’t killing us, at least not the way it was. And just when things began to get better, here he comes. A warning and a problem at the same time.
It’s easy to blame him, but I know damn well he’s only partly at fault and damn it I’m not going to let myself give in to my own worst nature.
“We are not calling him that,” I say, filling the silence.
Syin’s gaze cuts to me. “Kessa.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. It’s a struggle, but I manage to keep my voice calm. I’m honestly surprised because I’m one sharp touch away from becoming deeply inconvenient. “He is standing right there. Stop calling him a weapon.”
Rosalind is watching me. She has hard eyes, but they’re not lacking in compassion or understanding. Not that that keeps me from wanting to squirm under her unblinking stare. I can’t hold her gaze so I look away.
Adran folds his hands, which I’ve seen him do too many times. It’s a thing he does when he wants to look reasonable, but it’s never worked on me.
“Kessa,” he says, “we are not comfortable with the word, but with survival. There is a difference.”
“Usually the difference is whether the person paying the cost had a choice.”
Rhazek lifts his head, locking his one unswollen eye onto me.
I narrow my eyes, trying to stop the spinning sensation.
This is the problem with him. One look and the room rearranges itself around what I’m trying not to feel.
He doesn’t plead or soften. Doesn’t make himself more harmless to help me argue.
He watches me with that black-and-gold focus like every word matters because he understands what happens when words become orders.
“I have a choice,” he says.
I glare at him. Of course the person in the room I’m trying to help is the one person making me want to throw something heavy at a wall. Or at him. Better at him.
“Do you?”
A tiny flicker crosses his face. I can’t quite read it. It’s not hurt or even surprise. It looks like something older and smaller. A door closing before anyone can see what room is behind it.
“Yes.”
“Well that’s convenient.” I point at the salt, then the green pulse under his skin.
“You’re glowing, accused, terrified of being the trail that led the enemy here, and surrounded by people deciding if your body can bait the thing trying to verify we’re here at all.
Forgive me if I don’t trust the purity of your options. ”
Merra makes a low sound in her throat. Approval, maybe. Or indigestion. With Merra, it could be either one. Rhazek doesn’t look away.
“The choices are bad. They are still mine,” he says.
“They need to be more than ‘be useful or die’, which is all you’ve got right now.”
He looks away first. I would have missed that before all we’ve been through. Before, he was an enemy in black plates and blood. Now I know what it costs him to keep standing, and apparently that means I care what happens to him.
Visidion speaks before the silence sharpens or someone says something to make it even worse.
“The receiver beyond the canyon is gone, but its packet opened a second path.”
“We destroyed it,” Renn says from the doorway.
He’s standing beside Ila because the City has learned, at least in the last hour, that sending messages through one person is how disasters gain teeth.
Renn has dust in his hair, the bandage still crossing his cheek, and the expression of a man who just ran through half the lower City telling frightened people that the wall-shudder was old stone settling.
Ila looks even less convinced by that lie than the people she told it to.
“The dead drop sent before it died,” Rhazek says. “The answer in the sky is beyond our reach. Something closer is not.”
“And if we wait?” Rosalind asks.
“Something on Tajss is listening.” His gaze moves to me, then away. Too late. Everyone sees it. “The blood relay is answering a return path east of the City. Whatever is there has the dead drop’s partial pattern. It can use me to pull for more.”
A sour feeling rolls through my stomach.
Name. That is what this all comes down to.
The galaxy doesn’t need to love Tajss. It only needs to name us correctly: surviving Zmaj, human women, hybrid children, living epis, active source, bond resonance.
Once the wrong mouths have the right names, hunger gets organized.
Adran’s voice is low. “Then we must act before it gets another clean answer.”
“No one is arguing that.” Rosalind’s eyes stay on Rhazek. “The question is how.”
“We lure it,” Syin says.
I close my eyes for half a second.
There it is. The thought all of them have been circling.
The simple answer. The ugly line. Put Rhazek where the local listener can taste him.
Let the blood relay in his body shine. Let the enemy reach through the return path.
Follow the pull. Break whatever is waiting before it can gather enough to finish naming Tajss.
On a slate, it would look efficient. On flesh, it looks evil.
“No,” I say.
Syin’s patience snaps enough to show fang. “You do not yet know what I am proposing.”
“I know exactly what you’re proposing because everyone in this room is using the same silence to avoid saying it. You want to take the most dangerous thing about him and dangle it until the enemy bites.”
Rhazek says, “That is the correct thing to do.”
“Don’t help,” I snap.
He closes his mouth.
He’s truly impossible. He can take a wound through the ribs without making a sound, but one sharp sentence from me and he obeys like I put a blade under his chin.
Rosalind rubs a hand over her mouth. “Kessa.”
I look at her, and shift my argument. Rosalind isn’t Adran.
She’s not looking for a cage and calling it stability.
She’s been watching, listening, and inventorying.
She knows exactly what words cost when someone else owns the list. That is why this is worse, because even if she is considering it, the danger is not theoretical.
It’s already inside our walls, eating the beams.
“We just survived a system that wanted to use bonded people as keys,” I say. “We are not building a smaller version because ours has better intentions.”
Visidion flexes his wings. Only once. Adran’s gaze flicks to him, then back to me.
“Intentions do matter when the alternative is destruction,” Adran says.
“Not to the person being opened.”
I feel my words hit Rhazek, like a tremor under my own skin. His throat pulses again, dim and poisonous.
Once.
Pause.
Again.
The copper sphere gives a tiny answering click from its salt cloth. Every guard in the doorway shifts.
“Stop,” I say, because panic has a scent and the room is starting to sweat it. “No one moves.”
Rhazek’s shoulders settle. His bound hand turns palm-down on his knee. Deliberate. Visible. A message to all the nervous weapons around him.
Merra limps closer to the table and glares at the sphere as if it personally insulted her lineage.
“Argue quieter. It likes sharp things.”
“Voices?” Ila asks.
“Fear,” Rhazek says. “Command. The moment before a room chooses violence.”
“Lovely,” Renn mutters. “So it feeds on council meetings.”
Despite myself, I laugh. It comes out thin and reedy. Not better, exactly, but less likely to get me exiled from my own crisis.
Rosalind looks at the bowl, then at Rhazek. “Can you make the local listener reach for you without giving it more proof?”
“Yes.”
“No,” I say at the same time.
Rhazek’s gaze finds mine again. “Kessa.”
“No.”
“You asked for a choice.”
“I asked for a real choice.”
“This is one.”
“This is you picking the version where everyone else survives because your body is already ruined enough to be expendable.”
He shuts me out. Not empty. Controlled. Armored. He looks less like an enemy and more like a man standing very far away on the other side of a bridge he burned because he thought no one should cross it.
“My body is not ruined,” he says.