She glanced up from her food, catching him watching her, and tilted her head curiously.
“You’re staring.”
He didn’t look away. After a moment, she shook her head slightly, but he caught the hint of color that rose to her cheeks before she turned back to her food.
Interesting.
He filed this observation away with all the others, adding it to his growing catalogue of information about this female who had saved his life. He would learn her language. He would understand this world and his place in it.
But first, he would heal. He would rest and let her tend to his wounds, and he would watch her carefully, looking for any sign that she was depleting herself too far.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Adjar was sleeping. Jaz knew she should probably be grateful. It gave her time to try and figure out what the hell she was going to do with an injured winged male in her habitat. But she’d rather he was awake and talking—or at least attempting to communicate. Watching him in his unconscious state made her worry too much.
She’d checked his vitals six times in the past hour, the medical scanner humming quietly in her hand. His temperature had stabilized but remained elevated. The infection in his wounds seemed to be responding to the antibiotics, but she’d been feeding him enough of them to take down a small elephant. His wing was still a mystery—she had no idea if her splinting was helping or if there were specialized treatments he needed that she couldn’t provide.
Now she watched the slow rise and fall of his massive chest, counting the seconds between each breath. The rattling wheeze from earlier had faded, replaced by something closer to normal respiration, though she suspected “normal” was a relative termwhen applied to a seven-foot-tall winged alien who’d literally erupted from beneath the Martian ice.
He’s not an alien.The thought circled back around, as it had been doing for hours.He’s Martian. Or at least part of him is. Native to this planet in a way I’ll never be.
While his origins were still a mystery, she was increasingly certain that the unidentified DNA was actually Martian DNA. The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d spent ten years on Mars, fighting tooth and nail to carve out a place for herself in its unforgiving landscape, and she was still an interloper. A visitor overstaying her welcome in a house whose original owners had long since vanished.
Except they hadn’t vanished entirely. One of them was lying on her bunk, taking up approximately ninety percent of the available space and radiating heat like a dying star.
Speaking of which…
She pushed herself up from the storage crate where she’d been sitting, her muscles protesting every movement. When had she last slept properly? Two days? Three? The storm had blurred everything together into one long, exhausting marathon of crisis management.
She moved towards the bunk, her steps quiet and careful. The memory of his hand closing around her wrist was still fresh—not painful, exactly, but potent. A reminder that despite his injuries and his confusion, he was far from helpless.
But he made me split our food.
She smiled again at the memory of him insisting she eat first. The absurdity of it still hadn’t worn off. Even though he wasthe injured one, he’d refused to eat unless she ate too. Like they were negotiating a business deal instead of managing a survival situation.
Stubborn male.The words came with a flicker of amusement.Of all the ancient Martians I could have dug up, I got the stubborn one.
She reached the side of the bunk and stood there for a moment, studying him in the soft glow of the emergency lighting. Asleep, the harsh edges of his features seemed softer. Not gentle—nothing about him would ever be gentle—but less actively threatening. The silver-white scales along his temples caught the light, glinting like frost patterns on a window, and his white hair fell across his face in disarray.
Beautiful,she thought again, but she shoved it away with the ruthless efficiency of long practice. Now was not the time for aesthetic appreciation. Now was the time for medical assessment.
She reached for the medical scanner on the nearby surface, careful not to make any sudden movements, and activated it with a quiet click. The device hummed to life as she ran it over his body. His temperature was still significantly elevated, high enough that she would have been seriously worried if he were human. But the scanner’s admittedly confused readings suggested his baseline temperature was naturally higher than a human’s, which meant the current reading might be closer to normal than she’d initially feared.
Or it might mean he’s about to spontaneously combust. Hard to tell without a species-specific reference guide.
She bit back a slightly hysterical laugh and moved on to the wound assessment.
The gash in his side was her primary concern. The metal fragment from her destroyed rig—don’t think about that right now—had embedded itself in the muscle tissue, and she’d spent a considerable amount of time extracting it with steady hands and a racing heart. The infection she’d feared had developed anyway, the flesh hot and angry around the wound edges.
But now…
She frowned at the scanner readout, then looked at the wound itself, then back at the readout. The numbers didn’t make sense. According to the device, the temperature of the flesh around the wound was even higher than his core temperature, but the tissue inflammation had decreased by nearly forty percent since her last scan. The edges of the wound were already beginning to knit together, new cells forming at a rate that should have been impossible.
She reached out, her fingers hovering just above the bandage, and felt the heat radiating from beneath. Not the dangerous heat of infection, but something else, something… purposeful.
He’s healing himself. Or the nanites in his bloodstream are healing him,she realized. The cyborg rangers possessed a similar ability.
The realization sent a chill down her spine that had nothing to do with the habitat’s temperature. The nanites in his body were actively repairing the damage, burning through resources at an incredible rate to close wounds that should have taken weeks to heal. It explained his hunger, his exhaustion, the furnace-like warmth of his skin.
