Page 32 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

"Thanks. I feel terrible. How are you even alive? Where did you go?"

"When the ship broke apart, I managed to hijack one of the Saurok shuttles. I kept it in orbit for several days, hiding our signature in the planet's upper radiation belts to shake their automated trackers, before the thruster started misfiring. I made a hard, forced landing here about four days ago and have been patching it up ever since." She held up a small device — the source of the mechanical sound. "This is my nav unit. The only working guidance system I have left — everything that flies this thing routes through it now."

Kel emerged from the undergrowth behind her. His weapon was holstered but his posture said he wasn't fully at ease. He and Zhara exchanged words in a language I didn't recognize — not Valorian, something else. A common trade language, maybe. Zhara responded at length. Kel's expression, already carved from stone, somehow hardened further.

"What?" I looked between them. "What's she saying?"

Kel turned to me. "She has intelligence about the Saurok."

Zhara switched to English — or whatever my language registered as through her translation.

"How do you speak my language?" I asked, because the question had been nagging me since the cell.

She tapped a small disc behind her left ear — I'd missed it earlier against the blue of her skin. "Trade translator. Standard Talori guild equipment. Mine had a partial archive of your language, but it was corrupted and ugly. It indexes any language with sufficient sample data." She tilted her head. "You talked enough in that cell. Short bursts, high stress, wide phonetic spread — and when I asked your planet, you answered in a full paragraph. Cleaner sample in ten minutes than most captives give me in a day. The index finished before the hull gave out."

She dug through her kit and held up a spare disc in its sterile cover. "This anchors behind your ear with one skin-deep needle. It will sting, it can be removed, and it will not open a closed channel. Do you want it?"

Being unable to understand the next warning could get me killed. "Yes."

Only then did she peel the cover and press the disc behind my left ear. A needle-fine sting, a wash of static, then the device settled against my skin. "Now you have the same index. It will render any language in the archive, but closed channels stay closed."

So that was how. Not magic, not coincidence — just me stress-rambling in captivity while alien tech built a language file from my panic.

"Draxis, the Saurok captain, he survived the attack on his ship. He's furious." She said this with the matter-of-fact tone of someone delivering weather updates. "He's sent hunters to recover escaped merchandise. All of us. But especially you."

The "especially you" hit different when she was looking directly at me.

"Why especially me?"

"Because you're from an uncontacted world. Do you understand what that means in the slave market?"

"Kel mentioned I was 'valuable.'"

Zhara laughed, short and humorless. "Valuable. A Zarithian crystal is valuable. You are priceless. A sentient being from a species that has never been documented in the galactic registry? Collectors, researchers, private owners — the bidding would not start anywhere near what you are worth and go up from there. You're not just merchandise. You're a trophy."

My stomach hollowed out. The jungle suddenly felt less like an adventure and more like a hunting ground. Because it was. I was the prey.

I looked at Kel. His expression hadn't changed. His hand was on his weapon. And his markings — his markings were glowing with a ferocity I'd never seen, not the warm, reactive pulse I'd been cataloging. This was hard. Cold. The markings of a warrior lit up not by attraction but by something more primal.

He'd known. Since the ridge. Since his handler told him. He'd known I was being specifically hunted and he'd increased the pace and tightened security and refused to explain why because⁠—

Because he was protecting me. The way he always protected me. By carrying the burden himself and cutting me out of the information loop.

I was going to have several words with him about that. Later. Right now, I needed more from Zhara.

"How far behind us are they?"

All four of Zhara's eyes widened when I asked. Good. I was learning that I liked being underestimated and then blowing straight past it.

"I don't know precisely. The hunters Draxis uses are Vektor-class trackers. Small, fast, very good at finding people. They could be days behind us or hours."

"Hours." I swallowed.

"Which is why," Zhara said, and for the first time her expression shifted from pragmatic to something approaching warmth, "I came to find you. I have a shuttle."

"You just said you made a forced landing."

"With style. The shuttle is damaged — one thruster is cracked, the nav computer is dead, and the fuel cell is at maybe eighteen percent. It won't get us off-planet and it won't get us all the way to the outpost. But it can cover ground faster than walking. I've been nursing it since then, replacing coolant lines with tubing cannibalized from the shuttle's own dead systems, running the engine only in short bursts so the cracked thruster doesn't overheat." She shrugged, all four eyes blinking in sequence. "Talori are traders. We fix what we have."