Kessa
I pace the room he shouldn’t have been able to get out of and refuse to think about why I’m scared.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Rhazek, you stupid man.
The chamber smells of hot stone, bitter-root paste, old blood, and fear dressed up as discipline. Everyone else is running around the City, doing whatever they think might help or prepare us for the inevitable.
The other survivors who showed up, and if I’m being honest kicked off this sandstorm, have told us about the Invaders.
They’ve said how it got so bad that they had to retreat to some ancient bunker then set off a bomb.
It was big enough that we felt it. We thought it was a meteor striking the planet though.
For us it was a bright flash on the horizon followed by a minor quake.
We had no idea how bad it’d been for them. Or how bad it’s going to be for us now.
He’s gone.
My thoughts keep coming back to that. And I hate it.
I’m sure he thinks he’s being all noble and sacrificing himself.
Because he’s an idiot. My plan would have worked and now it’s in shambles.
I don’t know where the dead drop’s last path leads.
I don’t know what answered it. How strong their forces will be.
I don’t know.
“Damn it!”
I kick the stool he was sitting on. It screeches across the floor and slams against the wall, then falls on its side.
“Kessa?” Lio says softly from behind me.
I whirl, hands balled into fists, face burning both from anger and because he saw what just happened. Syin stands behind him, silent and judging.
“What?” I snap. He looks startled and hurt, and I’m instantly a full pot of regret. I close my eyes, just for a second, and take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. What is it, Lio?”
He holds up a chipped clay route token clenched in one fist. His arm trembles as he holds it out to me.
“Second junction,” he says. “Old drain. Kessa, it’s one of yours.”
He left a message.
Of course he did. The stupid man runs into the desert with alien murder-metal in his hand and still stops long enough to talk to me in route marks.
I want to hit him. I want to shake him until his teeth rattle.
I want him back in this room where I can call him every kind of fool to his face and make sure he is still breathing while I do it.
That last part is the problem. He’s running into danger and I don’t know if he’ll survive it. I don’t know if we will.
I take the token from Lio. It’s warm from his fist, rough along the chipped edge, and far too familiar.
“Show me.”
Syin starts to say my name.
“Do not.”
He shuts his mouth. Bless him and his survival instincts.
Lio leads me to the second junction at a half-run. Syin follows because Syin would rather swallow a hot coal than let me sprint toward danger without a witness.
The old drain sits where three service throats meet, half hidden behind a cracked storage wall and a smell like wet ash trapped under stone. No one uses this route unless they have a reason or a death wish. Rhazek had both.
The blood comes first.
A palm smear beside the drain. Three fingers dragged across the obvious path, not with panic, not with collapse, but with intention. My mark. My denial mark. Do not take the obvious route.
The chipped clay token rests on its edge beside the blood. Not dropped. Placed. The broken point angles down into the old service throat.
He learned that from me.
The thought should make me angry. It does. Unfortunately, the anger is tangled with something else, something hot and scared and embarrassingly tender that has no business surviving inside my chest when the City is in so much danger.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Only this time I do not know if I mean him or me.
“He left me a route,” I say.
Syin’s eyes narrow. “A route to what?”
I look at the blood, the token, the black salt dust caught in the cracks, the old throat waiting under our feet.
I want the answer to be simple. I want it to be betrayal because then I know what to do with it.
You can hate betrayal. You can organize against it.
You can put it on a slate, underline it twice, and assign guards.
This is anything but simple. This is Rhazek trusting me to understand him while refusing to trust me enough to stay.
That intangible thing I can’t fully ignore in my chest pulls before I can stop it. Something deeper and stranger, that keeps turning toward the empty space he left as if my body knows a direction my good sense refuses to read.
I think of Sera and Kavor. The way people lowered their voices when they talked about mates, as if the word itself might hear them and come looking. I thought it was comfort language. Story language. One more beautiful thing people said after surviving too much ugly.
I’m beginning to doubt my understanding of all of it.
I’m not going to name whatever this is between Rhazek and me. Naming things gives them weight and weight becomes need. Then, before you know it, need becomes a hand on the wrong side of a ration slate.
But I know I’m not this angry because he betrayed us. I’m angry because he left.
“Away from the heart,” I say, and my voice comes out rough. “Down first. Then east. Away from the City.”
Syin makes a hard sound. “Convenient.”
I stand slowly. “No, convenient would have been taking the upper gate, where he could move fast and leave no one able to follow before sunrise. Convenient would have been killing the guards who got in his way. Convenient would have been vanishing without leaving me a route only I would read.”
“The guards live,” Lio says, stepping into the passage. His gaze goes to me, then to the blood by the drain.
“One has a broken wrist,” Syin adds. “The other is unconscious.”
“But alive,” I repeat, because if I don’t keep my voice practical, it will become something else. “He disabled them. He didn’t butcher his way out.”
Syin’s face has the pinched look of a man whose good argument has stepped in something damp.
“That does not make him loyal.”
“No. It makes him controlled.”
“And control is what Krix built into him.”
That strikes right where fear is already softening me up.
I see Rhazek’s throat pulsing green. Rhazek saying yes when I accused him of deciding for us. Rhazek offering his body like a blade because he still thinks use is the closest thing to worth.
I hate him for leaving.
I hate him more for making sense.
“He did what we would not let him do,” I say.
“Betray us?” Syin asks.
“Leave before the dead drop’s last path could map the City.
” My voice sharpens. Good. Sharp is usable.
“The thing we broke already sent something. Maybe only a piece. Maybe only direction. If the hook in him is still carrying that path, then every safe corridor near him became a marked road. If we tried to move him as a guarded group, whatever answered could have followed back through the safest routes we had left.”
Lio looks at the floor scratches. His brow creases, slow and worried. “So he took it out.”
“He took himself out,” I say. “There is a difference.”
“Gather them, Lio,” I say. “I need to brief the leaders.”
Lio nods sharply and runs off, leaving me alone with Syin. His mouth parts but I hold up a hand.
“No,” I say.
“I haven’t spoken yet,” he says.
“I don’t care.”
Syin watches me silently for several heartbeats. I stare at the message, the tunnels, and then run the most likely route in my head.
I could catch him if I go alone, but going alone is stupid. Almost as stupid as running off on your own on some noble quest to save everyone. That’s a pretty high bar to beat.
“I understand,” Syin says at last, and that jerks my attention to him.
“What?” I ask.
He blinks slowly. Which is a Zmaj thing. They must have extreme control of their eyelids. It’s weird and freaky to watch the lids close, then open so slowly.
“I understand his thinking,” he says.
“What does that mean?” I ask, but all I get is another creepy slow blink. “Syin?”
“Maybe I was wrong about him,” he says. Then he turns and strides away before I can ask any more questions.