Could he actually be… a Martian?
The word felt absurd even in the privacy of her own thoughts. Mars had never supported complex life—that was basic xenobiology, drilled into every colonist from their first day of orientation. The planet had been dead long before humans arrived, its atmosphere stripped away by solar winds and its water locked beneath the surface in frozen reservoirs.
But the readings didn’t lie. The scanner showed organic material that was at least partially compatible with human genetics, which meant it had to have evolved from the same basic building blocks. Either this creature shared a common ancestor with humanity, which seemed impossible, given the distances involved, or…
Or someone had made him.
The thought hit her like a punch to the gut.
GenCon.
The corporation had been the primary contractor for Mars colonization, and they’d spent years pushing the boundaries of what was legally and ethically permissible. There were rumors of projects that went far beyond anything officially sanctioned. Most of it was speculation, conspiracy theories traded in thedarker corners of the colony networks. But some of it had turned out to be true. The whistleblowers had revealed enough to trigger a full governmental investigation, and while GenCon had officially been “restructured” in response, everyone knew they were still out there and still pursuing whatever twisted goals had driven them from the beginning.
Could he be an experiment? Something they created and then… what? Abandoned beneath the glacier?
It didn’t quite fit. The depth of the chamber suggested real age—not centuries but millennia or even more. And the genetic readings, while partially human, included markers her scanner couldn’t identify. If GenCon had created him, they’d used source material that didn’t exist in any database she could access.
Unless they found something. Something ancient. Something they could modify.
The possibility made her skin crawl.
Is that what you are? Someone’s failed experiment, locked away to be forgotten?
The thought brought an unexpected surge of anger. Not at him, but at whoever might have created him. At the arrogance of playing god with another being’s existence. At the casual cruelty of treating sentient life as a commodity. As an asset to be exploited and discarded when no longer useful.
If GenCon did this to you, I hope they burn.
The intensity of the emotion surprised her. She barely knew this male. She had every reason to fear him. But something about the idea of him being made rather than born, designed rather than evolved, touched a nerve she hadn’t known she had.
The possibility led her to make another scan, but this time she searched for nanotechnology, the same type of technology that had been used to create the cyborg rangers who were used in the original part of the terraforming process.
The results came back almost immediately. He had nanites in his bloodstream.
What the hell?
The results suggested some type of manipulation, but still didn’t answer her questions about how he could have been placed so far beneath the surface or where the other DNA could have come from.
She shook her head, forcing herself to focus on the practical. Whatever he was, whatever his origins, the immediate problem remained the same. He was injured, infected and possibly dying, if she couldn’t figure out how to treat wounds she didn’t understand in a body that shouldn’t exist.
She reached out to check the drainage tube, her fingers brushing against the scaled skin of his chest as she worked. The texture was strange—smooth in some places, rougher in others, and warm beneath her touch despite the conditions. She found herself filing the sensation away alongside all the other impossible details of the past twelve hours.
The tube looked secure. The drain was still functioning. She’d done what she could.
She started to stand, already planning her next tasks—checking the habitat’s structural integrity, assessing their food and water supplies, and trying again to raise someone on comms—when something closed around her wrist.
Her heart stopped.
Strong fingers were wrapped around the narrow bones of her wrist with a grip that could shatter them if it chose to. His scales were cool against her skin, a contrast to the warmth she’d felt when she touched him, and the pressure was just this side of painful.
She looked up.
Ice-blue eyes stared back at her, alert and aware and fixed on her face with an intensity that made her breath catch. His pupils were vertical slits, contracted in the low light, and they tracked every microexpression that crossed her features with predatory precision.
He was awake.
He was watching her.
And he wasn’t letting go.
