Page 29 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

I was smiling for the first time in days.

Behind me, Kel made a sound that might have been a Valorian prayer, or might have been a Valorian curse, and followed.

His markings didn't dim for the next hour. I know because I checked. Repeatedly.

13

KEL

Iwas going to die. Not from the slavers. Not from the jungle predators. Not from the dwindling supply margin or the damaged equipment or the eleven days of hostile terrain still ahead of us.

I was going to die because this woman had walked into a body of water wearing almost nothing and I had felt every second of it through the resonance bond.

Not her thoughts. Not even her feelings, properly named — an unconsummated bond does not grant that much. What it granted was a flood: warm, loosening, saturated, the pressure of a body being given its first good thing in days. I did not feel the water on her skin. I felt the weight of what the water meant to her, arriving as heat behind my sternum. And the flood was so complete, so overwhelming, that the pressure alone was enough to send my nervous system into a state that I can only describe as sympathetic overload.

I did not look. I want that stated for any record that may eventually exist of this disaster. I turned my back. I maintained perimeter watch. I did not look.

But I felt the tide of it, wave after warm wave, each one looser than the last. And the sound she made — soft and involuntary, obscenely content — required no bond at all. I heard it. The resonance merely amplified it and delivered it straight into the center of my chest.

I gripped a tree trunk hard enough to crack the bark. My markings were so bright that small iridescent insects began gathering around my forearms, attracted to the light. I shook them off. They came back. I was a navigational beacon for alien wildlife because this human had decided to bathe.

She had done it deliberately. Not the bathing — she genuinely needed that. The resonance kept handing me her distress, and I built the rest from watching her, and what I was receiving had begun to alarm me. Persistent nausea after eating, which she tried to conceal by turning away. The tremor in her hands, which she tried to hide by closing her fists. The rash spreading across her skin, an immune response to atmospheric particulates that her biology had no framework for processing. Her caloric intake was insufficient to sustain her activity level — I could feel the fatigue deepening in her like a tide coming in, each day worse than the last. The same spores inflaming her skin were irritating her airways and compressing each breath in small increments. She was deteriorating. Slowly but measurably. And she was hiding it from me with a discipline that would have earned commendations at the Academy.

I had tested every compound in the medical kit against the scanner's improvised model of her biology. None cleared the safety threshold. The bond could close a scrape; it could not correct starvation or the respiratory and dermal inflammation caused by alien spores. I had considered the helmet a dozen times and discarded it a dozen times; its filter had died with its seal, and a cracked visor moves more spore than it stops. The only treatment I could give her was clean water, every edible calorie we found, a slower pace we could not afford, and the promise of filtered air and proper medicine at the outpost. It was not enough. Knowing it was not enough sat under my ribs like a blade.

But the sweetness in her voice when she'd called "Problem?" — that was strategic. She knew something. She hadn't assembled the full picture yet, but she knew the markings were about her, and she was testing the theory with the empirical rigor of the scientist she was.

I was being studied. By a being half my size, from a planet that hadn't achieved interstellar travel, who was using my own biology against me with a sophistication that my training had not prepared me to counter.

She was magnificent. This observation was not helpful.

A Valorian woman would not have done this. A Valorian woman who suspected resonance would have confronted me directly, demanded the formal declaration, and then we would have stood before witnesses and resolved the matter in the time it took to speak the words. There was no Valorian concept of "testing a theory" about a bond — the bond was or it was not. You did not experiment with it. You did not approach it sideways. You certainly did not weaponize a bathing pool to force a confession.

But Taylor was not Valorian, and every assumption my culture had built about how resonance worked was proving inadequate for the reality of her.

The hours after the pool were their own unique torture. She walked ahead of me — incorrect formation; I needed to lead to identify threats, but each time I lengthened my stride to retake point, she cut across my path and matched my pace until I yielded the lead. She was punishing me for the information lockdown. Punishing me by making me walk behind her and look at her.

Her clothes were wet, clinging to her frame. Her hair was damp, pushed back from her face, revealing the line of her neck. She moved differently when she wasn't hurting: lighter and easier, a natural athleticism that I'd noted before but was now finding impossible to ignore.

My markings maintained a steady, humiliating glow for fifty-seven minutes.

That evening, she won the fire argument. I had been starting fires with my sidearm — a quick, efficient, low-powered shot to the fuel base. She insisted on doing it herself, using her multitool to create sparks. It took her twenty-two minutes. But she did it. The flames caught, burned purple, and she pumped her fist in the air and said, "Take THAT, alien kindling."

Among Valorians, competence is not admired the way humans seem to admire it — as a trait, a quality, something you possess. Competence is mapped. You observe what a being can do, you log it, and you adjust your tactical model accordingly. It is not emotional. It is operational.

My markings did not agree with this assessment. They brightened when she pumped her fist, which was not a tactical response. I turned away.

We ate in near-silence. She was tired. The fatigue was heavy and deep, pulling at her. Underneath it, something sharpened, and her gaze kept returning to my injured shoulder.

"Let me see your shoulder," she said.

"My shoulder is fine."

"Your shoulder has been bleeding through your undershirt since this afternoon. I can see the stain."

I looked down. She was correct. The wound from the crash landing, a deep scrape from the pod's torn hatch frame that I had treated with the basic medical kit's antiseptic and dismissed, had reopened during the day's exertion. The fabric over my left shoulder was dark with blood.

"It is minor."