Page 33 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

I looked at Kel. "Why are we still standing here?"

Zhara's shuttle was a piece of garbage. I say this with love and gratitude because it was a piece of garbage that could fly, which made it the most beautiful piece of garbage I'd ever seen. It was wedged into a ravine about two hours' walk from where she'd found us, camouflaged with cut branches and broad leaves.

It was small — barely big enough for three, with a cockpit and what I generously interpreted as a cargo area. The hull had a dent in it the size of a refrigerator. One of the engine things was visibly cracked. Half the control panel was dark.

"It flies?" I asked.

"It flies," Zhara confirmed. "It just doesn't fly well, or far, or reliably. But it flies."

I looked at Kel. He was examining the shuttle with the expression of a man being asked to trust his life to a vehicle he would not consider acceptable for transporting livestock.

"Navigation runs through my handheld unit," Zhara said to him in English, which I appreciated. "And the weapons system has partial charge. Better than walking."

"Significantly better than walking," I agreed.

Kel looked at the shuttle. Looked at me. I could practically see the tactical calculation behind his eyes — risk of shuttle failure versus risk of being on foot with hunters closing in.

He nodded once.

We had a ride.

I climbed into the back, folded myself into the cargo area, and tried not to think about the fact that the last two times I'd been in an alien vehicle, things had ended catastrophically. Third time's the charm. Or third time's when you die. Either way, we'd find out.

Before Zhara started the engines, she dug a sealed pouch from the shuttle's emergency compartment. "Saurok prisoner medical stock. Broad-spectrum hydration formula. Designed for species they haven't cataloged yet." She tossed a strap of foil bricks after it. "And Authority emergency ration bars. A full crate. Your food problem is over."

"What do they taste like?"

"The concept of duty."

Kel ran his scanner over the pouch, checked the reading against whatever he'd built in there about how I worked, and handed it to me. It tasted like salty wallpaper paste. My body accepted it anyway. By the time the engines caught, the tremor in my hands had eased. The pressure behind my sternum had not, but at least dehydration was no longer tightening everything around it.

Zhara was already in the pilot's seat, hands moving over the panel. Kel stood outside for another moment, scanning the tree line one final time. His markings were still running hot: bright and hard.

Then he climbed in, and Zhara lifted us off the jungle floor, and the trees fell away beneath us, and the sky stretched before me—the whole sky, unbroken. Lavender and vast, stretching to horizons I couldn't name, with both moons visible in the daylight — gold and pink, familiar now, almost comforting.

I pressed my forehead against the viewport and breathed.

Still hunted. Still stranded. Still so far from home that the distance was meaningless.

But moving. And not alone.

That counted for something.

15

TAYLOR

Zhara flew. Kel co-piloted, which mostly meant sitting in the front seat providing commentary that Zhara ignored with practiced ease. I was crammed into the back with my knees against my chest, vibrating with every shudder of the shuttle's damaged engine, watching alien jungle scroll past beneath us through a viewport that had a crack running through it.

It should have been terrifying. It was, a little. But mostly it was the fastest I'd moved in over a week without my own feet doing the work, and that alone was enough to make me borderline euphoric.

Zhara banked the shuttle around a mountain ridge and Kel's hands twitched toward the controls. She swatted them away without looking. This happened three more times over the next hour. I got the distinct impression Zhara was a better pilot than Kel and that this was a source of significant personal distress for him.

"How do you know each other's language?" I asked Zhara during a relatively smooth stretch of flying.

"Talori, my people, are traders. We learn languages the way you might learn to cook: practically, broadly, and starting young." She glanced back at me. "I understand pieces of forty-seven languages. Yours was one of the more obscure ones in my collection. I acquired a partial language archive from a black-market data haven. Some rogue surveyor illegally recorded fragments from your system decades ago."

"You understood English from illegal space eavesdropping?"