Page 16 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

I pressed my hands to the sides of my head because my brain was making sounds that I'm pretty sure brains aren't supposed to make. Galactic archaeology. An entire discipline studying exactly what I studied, but on a scale I'd never imagined possible. Ancient civilizations across STAR SYSTEMS. I had spent six years getting a master's degree and four more fighting for grant money to study ruins on one planet and there was an entire galaxy of ruins out there.

"I need a minute," I said, and sat down on the carved pillar.

"We do not have time for⁠—"

"I'm having an existential crisis, Kel. Give me sixty seconds."

He gave me sixty seconds. Exactly. I know because he started walking at the sixty-first second and I had to scramble to catch up.

But even through the crisis, even through the vertigo of realizing that everything I knew was a fraction of a fraction of what existed, there was something underneath it. Something that felt dangerously like excitement. Like maybe, in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to me, there was a door opening to something I'd wanted my whole life without knowing it existed.

I shoved that thought down. Survival first. Existential career pivots later.

We made camp that evening in a natural hollow between the roots of one of those massive trees. Kel did his perimeter thing, walking a wide circle, checking for threats, setting up some kind of sensor from the pod's supplies. I gathered what he'd identified as safe fuel and tried to build a fire.

Emphasis on tried. The alien wood did not want to burn. I crouched over my sad little pile of sticks and bark equivalents, using the multitool from my belt to shave thin strips for kindling, and tried every technique I'd learned in the Colombian jungle.

Nothing.

Kel returned, looked at my arrangement, and did something with his weapon — a quick, low-powered shot at the base of the pile. It ignited immediately. Purple flames. Slightly purple, anyway. More lavender. Like the sky.

"Show-off," I said.

He sat across the fire from me. First time sitting down across from each other with nothing to do but talk, and I didn't know where to start. Two days of pent-up questions and now I had too many to pick one.

"So," I said. "You're an alien."

"From your perspective. From my perspective, you are the alien."

"Fair point. What are you? Species-wise."

"Valorian."

"Valorian." I turned it over. It sounded like something from a fantasy novel. "And what do Valorians do? Besides glow mysteriously and refuse to answer questions about it?"

His jaw tightened slightly. A micro-expression. I was getting better at reading him. "Valorians are a spacefaring species. We maintain the largest military fleet in the Galactic Core. I serve as a retrieval specialist for the Valorian Interstellar Authority."

"Retrieval specialist. You retrieve things."

"People, primarily. Hostages. Kidnapping victims. Those taken by slavers."

"So you're like... space search and rescue?"

"The comparison is not inaccurate."

"That's what you were doing on the slave ship. Retrieving someone."

His pause was barely perceptible. "Yes."

"Who?"

"A Valorian diplomat's daughter. She was taken by the Saurok eleven days before I boarded the ship."

"The Saurok — that's the lizard guys? In the orange outfits?"

"Saurok. Yes. They operate one of the largest slave trading networks in the outer systems."

A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. "And they took me because..."