Page 20 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

She looked at me with those brown-green eyes my own senses kept recording in unnecessary detail, and I saw the flash of suspicion. She knew something had changed. She just didn't know what.

"Must be," she said.

She did not push.

I did not deserve that restraint.

10

TAYLOR

Iwoke up warm for the first time since the crash and immediately suspicious about why.

The thermal blanket was the same useless alien foil rectangle it had been every night. The fire was dead. The elevation was higher and, if anything, it should have been colder up here. And yet I'd slept like I was in my own bed back in Minneapolis, wrapped in my weighted blanket with the heater running.

Kel was across the fire pit, already up, already doing his perimeter thing. Alert and composed, not a hair out of place. I watched him in the pre-dawn light — the bioluminescence was fading but not gone, and the soft blue-green glow made his silver skin look like something out of a fever dream. His markings were low, barely visible. He moved through the trees like water, checking the sensors, scanning.

"The elevation agrees with your biology," he'd said when I mentioned it. Sure. The elevation. Not the six-and-a-half-foot alien furnace who had definitely been back on his own side of the fire pit by the time I opened my eyes. Not a romance novel. Classic shared-crisis attachment, that's all. Mammals seek heat sources in cold. Science, not something more. I repeated all of it to myself firmly while packing up camp.

We trekked for four hours before we hit the river. And when I say "river," I mean a wide, fast-moving body of turquoise water cutting through the jungle like someone had drawn a line with a giant blue-green marker. At least fifty feet across, current strong enough that debris raced across the surface.

Too wide to jump. Too fast to swim. No visible crossing point.

Kel stood on the bank and scanned with his device. I stood next to him and looked across.

That's when I saw them. Through the tree line on the far bank, partially obscured by massive ferns: structures. Stone structures. Not natural formations — I'd staked my entire career on being able to tell the difference. These were built. Walls. Archways. What looked like the remains of a tower, crumbling but unmistakable.

My entire body went electric.

"Ruins," I breathed. "Kel, there are ruins on the other side."

He glanced across. "Kethari, most likely. This continent has extensive remnants."

"We need to go there."

"The crossing is not feasible at this point. We continue along the bank until⁠—"

"We NEED to go there, Kel."

He looked at me. Looked at the ruins. Looked back at me. "It is off our route. Every deviation adds time and risk."

"I know, but⁠—"

"We have four days of rations remaining and approximately fifteen days of travel. The margin is already gone."

"I understand the math, but⁠—"

"Then you understand why we will continue along the river."

He started walking downstream. I stood on the bank, staring at the ruins, physically aching. This was what I'd spent my entire adult life studying. Dead civilizations. The things they left behind. And these weren't human ruins — these were ALIEN ruins from a species that had vanished across multiple star systems twelve thousand years ago and they were RIGHT THERE and I was going to walk past them because of a math problem.

I followed him. Of course I followed him. I was on an alien planet and he was my only chance of survival and picking a fight over archaeology when we were rationing food was objectively stupid.

Also, I was starting to worry about the food situation more than I was admitting. The caloric deficit that had been a dull background ache on day three was a genuine problem by day four. My hands shook when I retied my boot laces. My vision went gray at the edges when I stood too fast, and the water nausea had settled into a permanent low-grade queasiness.

Then there was the rash: small raised bumps along my forearms and hands, itching deep enough to feel like it belonged to a layer of skin I didn't know I had. Alien pollen or spores had apparently chosen me as their first human colony. Kel had noticed. Every time I scratched, his gaze cut to my arms with the expression I'd learned meant he was calculating variables he couldn't control.

But I grumbled. I grumbled at a professional level. I grumbled with the sustained intensity of someone whose entire academic career had just been dangled in front of her and snatched away.