Page 68 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Repeat after me,” the officiant says, eyes gentle, voice a scaffold. I repeat. Sounds tumble out of my mouth like beads from a cut string. Words about posterity and peace, about land and legacy. They taste like paper. I say them anyway, because the script is a machine and my voice is one of its gears.
Kaspian’s hand is steady in mine. It’s not cold. It’s not warm. It’s disciplined. When we turn to face each other fully, he finally finds my eyes and stays there, and in the deep blue of his gaze Isee a man who is doing arithmetic with his life and not liking the answer. There’s no malice. There’s no hunger. There’s… relief? Maybe. It’s faint, like a note heard through a wall.
“Do you, Star Chambers, of House Chambers, of Akura and Earth, take?—”
“I do,” I say, because we have reached the part of a theater piece where an audience expects sound.
“—to honor and to hold, to temper and to cherish, in season and out, under law and above it, before the eyes of ancestors and the favor of?—”
“I do,” I echo, and the phrase tastes like something I stole and am returning for lack of courage.
A breeze slides through the courtyard and the veil whispers; jasmine lifts its voice and sings through the lemon and the river-salt and the human warmth of a hundred bodies in their clean clothes. CynJyn tilts her chin a millimeter: you alive? I blink back once, slow: complicated.
Sneed stands to the right of the dais, slate at his ribs, shoulders straight as a blade. He is the picture of neutral usefulness; only the set of his mouth betrays the truth that he is watching me like a hawk watches a rabbit who has learned tools.
“—and if any have cause to speak—” the officiant says, the ritual turning the corner into that old, theatrical sentence.
The air tightens. The orchestra’s bows hover. The gulls shut up. A camera blinks red and thinks about history.
From the rear arch, a man steps into the light.
He isn’t dramatic about it. He doesn’t storm. He doesn’t run. He simply arrives, as if the courtyard was always waiting for him to complete the geometry of the morning. Cloak dark. Scars like silver script. Gold eyes that catch the sun and make it remember it is fire. Rayek moves through the aisle like a thought everyone has tried not to think and failed.
People turn—but not everyone at once. A ripple, not a crash. A cousin sucks in breath; the Feldspar matriarch stiffens so hard you can hear her spine have an opinion; a journalist fumbles her drone controls and the little camera lists like a drunk moth before steadying. I can smell metal under the jasmine, as if his presence reminds the courtyard it’s built on stubborn stone.
He doesn’t push to the front. He stops when he can see me and I can see him. No command voice. No roar. Just a sentence, clean and unadorned, delivered the way a person offers you water: “We’re in love,” he says, and the quiet is so complete the syllables hardly need a throat. “We’ve been in love. And I won’t let her lie anymore.”
The officiant drops his scroll. Paper slaps marble, a cheap sound in a rich room.
Somewhere, someone laughs—one bright, shocked bark smothered immediately by a hand. Then the world loses its balance. Gasps flower like white explosions up and down the rows. The orchestra stumbles to their feet without meaning to—bows scraping strings in a discord that sounds like the beginning of a storm. The minister’s mouth makes shapes and fails to invent a word for this in any language he respects.
Kaspian doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even look surprised. His shoulders ease as if somebody just lifted a cathedral off his back. The corner of his mouth remembers how to be human. He exhales—one honest breath, naked as a newborn, and I know that sound will live in my head for the rest of my life as the moment the play stopped pretending to be a life.
His mother shrieks. It’s small, high, and expensive. “Impurity! Betrayal! Scandal!” She stabs the air with a finger like she’s pinning butterflies. “She’s not pure! You cannot—this is—” She gasps in a way that suggests she owns the concept of air. “Call it off at once!”
Daddy mutters without meaning to, “About damn time,” and Mama flicks him sharply with a handkerchief, but her eyes—oh God, her eyes—shine wet and fierce. She doesn’t look away. She doesn’t look away from me.
The bouquet is no longer a bouquet. It is a lifeline, knuckles white, stems digging, perfume punching my sinuses like a blessing that forgot to be gentle. I turn. My mouth is dry. My heart is a drum with bad timing. “You weren’t supposed to—” I say, because we made a rule in a room with stars and now we’re in daylight.
“I had to,” Rayek answers, steady, hands at his sides, eyes only for me. “I won’t let you lie anymore.”
Sneed is already moving in that smooth, frictionless way he has when he plans to put a whole house back on its hinges without anyone noticing. He steps once, twice; then stops. If you don’t know him, you’d say he paused because the aisle is blocked. I know him. He paused because the mathematics of dignity told him to. He sets his slate against his ribs as if to protect the part of him that likes order. He does not interrupt. He waits.
The officiant finds his voice and loses his authority in the same breath. “This is… highly irregular.”
“Oh, darling,” CynJyn says from the front row, not to him, to the universe, delighted. “You have no idea.”
I look at Kaspian, because I have to. He meets my eyes and does not look away. There’s a man in there, not a statue. He lifts a hand—small motion, palm out, peace—and the chaos condenses around us like dew on a blade.
“She’s not for me,” he says, quiet, to his mother, to the officiant, to the entire assembled history, to himself. “She never was.”
His mother teeters. “Kaspian!”
He doesn’t take his eyes off me. His expression softens into something that isn’t pity and isn’t desire; it’s recognition of a person he respects doing the hardest thing. Then—God help me—he glances sideways, just for a heartbeat, at CynJyn. It isn’t lewd. It isn’t foolish. It’s longing the way a thirsty man longs for water he hasn’t let himself name. He looks back at me and that flicker stays, a small, bright truth.
Mama’s hand goes to her mouth; it’s not horror. It’s a dam cracking. Daddy straightens, pride and terror wrestling in his shoulders. The whispering in the rows has grown teeth and rhythm, a hundred mouths trying to make sense out loud.
“Silence,” Sneed says pleasantly, and the word behaves. He has that effect on rooms. He folds his hands. “Let us remember breathing.”
