Page 62 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

"And you're still doing it."

"Taylor." I searched for the words. My language had a concept for having been incomplete without knowing it, then discovering what had been missing. My interface would mangle it. So I let it render the nearest words in hers instead, and accepted that her language would be insufficient.

"The commission was purpose. For eight years, it was the structure I built myself around. Losing it is not—" I stopped. Tried again. My people do not process sacrifice the way hers does. We do not frame loss as noble. We frame it as reallocation. Resources moving from a lesser function to a greater one. "The commission was what I did when I did not yet know what I was for. You are what I am for. The reallocation is not a cost. It is a correction."

My markings burned bright. I could feel them — every line on my body carrying a certainty that went deeper than language, deeper than either of our cultures could express.

Her eyes glistened. What came through the bond nearly knocked me back — love and terror and joy and grief, braided so tight I could not have separated them, all unmistakably hers.

"Okay," she said. Her voice was rough. "That's — okay. We're doing this." She glanced around us, then down the corridor toward the cantina, where several outpost residents were picking through the debris. "We've got Zhara, a communications tech, and a bar full of people who just watched me stab a lizard. I think they'll stay for a wedding."

I looked at her. She looked at me. And something in my chest that had been wound tight since the escape pod, since the first touch, since the first flare of resonance in a slave ship corridor — uncoiled. Released. Settled.

"Let's go," I said.

We walked into the damaged cantina. Taylor's hand in mine. My markings blazing for the whole station to see. And I did not hide them.

I would never hide them again.

25

TAYLOR

Igot married in a wrecked cantina on a frontier trading outpost on an alien planet while still wearing someone else's boots and dried alien blood on my multitool.

It was perfect.

The formal Valorian bond declaration, as it turned out, was simple. Elegant. Nothing like the elaborate ceremony I'd imagined when he'd described his people's culture. Maybe the full version involved robes and councils and whatever the Valorian equivalent of a processional was. But the binding part, the legally irrevocable and recognized-across-the-galaxy binding part, was just words.

Kel stood in the center of the cantina, which was still missing a wall. The outpost residents who'd gathered to assess the damage stayed for the show. About twenty beings of various species, standing in the rubble, watching a glowing alien warrior take the hand of a scraggly human woman.

He spoke in Valorian first. My guild disc rendered it in fragments: ancient formal cadence of words that had been spoken by his people for thousands of years. Something about light recognizing light. Something about choosing to walk the same path. Something about "from this resonance, a bond. From this bond, a life."

Then he switched to English. For me. Not a machine's flat rendering of him. He had made the interface hold its silence and shaped the sounds himself, badly and slowly, the vowels bent wrong by a mouth that was never built for them.

"I, Kel'vran Sorath, declare resonance bond with Taylor Jennings of Earth. By the light of my markings, the pulse of the bond between us, and her freely given choice, I recognize her as my bonded mate. She is Valorian by bond right. She walks under my protection. Any who threaten her, threaten me. Any who harm her answer to my people."

His markings were steady and blazing. His voice didn't waver — and the harmonic was there, stronger than I'd ever heard it, a vibration that filled the cantina like a second heartbeat. I could feel it in the floor. In my chest. In the bond itself, as if his voice and the resonance were the same instrument playing at full volume for the first time. His hand around mine was warm and sure.

I was supposed to say something. He'd told me the traditional response was acceptance — a simple affirmation from the bonded partner. There was a Valorian phrase he'd taught me. I'd practiced it once and mangled it so badly he'd flinched.

I said it anyway. In butchered Valorian, with an accent that probably made his ancestors roll in their graves. The cantina was silent except for my voice, stumbling through alien syllables, saying yes in a language I'd known for thirty seconds.

Then in English: "I accept. All of it. The bond, the glow, the whole impossible thing."

His markings turned white-bright. The bond between us opened as a sound I felt rather than heard, every emotion we'd ever shared compressed into a single chord and released at once. His feelings and mine answered each other until the distinction blurred. The bond had become something new, something that was neither of us alone but both of us together.

Zhara stepped forward. Kel had tried to brief her beforehand and she had cut him off two sentences in — I'd heard that much through the doorway. Tell me nothing else. I'll say what I saw. She looked at us both, then at the crowd, and when she spoke her voice held the steady gravity of someone who understood exactly what was at stake.

"I, Zhara of the Talori trade guild, witness this declaration. I further testify that I have observed the resonance bond between these two individuals firsthand — in the jungle of Zha'kari, where his markings responded to her presence with an intensity I have never seen in any species. This bond is real, neither performance nor convenience, and I have watched what it has already cost them both." She turned to the gathered crowd. "Any other witnesses? For the record?"

The Chelani communications tech raised a tentacle. "Witnessed."

A Korvathi trader in the back, who appeared to have been drinking through the entire attack and subsequent wedding: "Witnessed. And congratulations, which I am told is the appropriate human noise."

One by one, the outpost's residents, aliens I'd never met, species I couldn't name, raised hands, claws, tentacles, and appendages I had no words for.

"Witnessed," they said, one after another, the word rolling out through the hole where the wall used to be, into the open air of a planet that had tried to kill me and was now throwing me a wedding.