For all she knew, she was looking at a corpse that hadn’t realized it was dead yet.
No. His breathing is better. The drain is working. I’m keeping him alive.
The thought should have been reassuring. Instead, it just raised the question she’d been avoiding since the moment she’d found him.
What the hell is he?
The readings from her initial scan had made no sense. The bone structure that was simultaneously denser and lighter than human norm. The musculature that explained how something his size could actually fly. A cardiovascular system that seemed to include additional components she couldn’t identify. And beneath all of that, woven through every system she examined, was something that appeared to be human DNA.
She’d run the scan three times. The results hadn’t changed.
Approximately sixty-two percent of his genetic markers matched human baselines. The rest was something her scanner couldn’t classify. Something it flagged as “unknown origin” with a margin of error that suggested her equipment was just as confused as she was.
She crouched beside the bunk, studying his face. The scales that covered most of his body gave way to something smoother around his features—still textured, still clearly not human skin, but softer. More expressive. His jaw was strong and angular, and his closed eyes were set deep beneath a pronounced brow. His nose was thin and straight, above a mouth that looked capable of expressions she probably didn’t want to see.
He’s beautiful.
The thought emerged before she could stop it, and she immediately shoved it aside with something approaching horror.
He’s a mystery. A dangerous, unknown variable that I’ve invited into my home. Beautiful doesn’t factor into the equation.
But her eyes kept returning to those strong features, tracing the strange symmetry of his face, and noticing details she had no business noticing.
The wound on his side drew her attention away from her more troubling observations. She’d cleaned it as best she could, applied the heavy-duty antibiotics from her medical kit, and sealed the worst of it with synthetic skin. But even in the dim light, she could see the angry red spreading from the edges of the wound despite the injection she’d given him.
She needed to check and see whether her treatment was working or whether she was watching him slowly poison himself from the inside out. She reached for her medical scanner, pulling it from the kit she’d left beside the bunk. The device hummed to life in her hand, its display casting a blue glow across the unconscious male’s features.
Focus on the practical. That’s what I do. That’s who I am.
She held the scanner over the wound, watching data populate the screen. His temperature appeared to be significantly elevated, even accounting for the fact that she didn’t know what his baseline should be. His white cell count was through the roof. The synthetic skin was holding, but beneath it, his body was fighting a battle it might be losing.
I need stronger antibiotics. I need proper medical facilities. I need?—
She needed a lot of things she didn’t have.
The storm wasn’t letting up. Her comms were down. Her rig was destroyed. And she was stuck in a damaged habitat with a creature that shouldn’t exist, watching him slowly succumb to an infection she couldn’t treat.
Great. This is exactly how I imagined my week going.
She moved the scanner higher, running a full-body assessment while she had the chance. His vitals were… confusing. His heart rate seemed low, but given his size and unknown metabolism, she had no idea if that was normal or concerning. His respiration had definitely improved since she’d applied the drain but there was still fluid building in his lungs so she couldn’t remove it.
His brain activity was particularly interesting. Even unconscious, the readings showed complex patterns that suggested a neural architecture that made human brains look like simple circuits by comparison. Whatever he was, he wasn’t stupid. That much she could say with confidence.
Which means when he wakes up, I’m going to be dealing with an intelligent, dangerous creature who may or may not want to kill me.
The thought should have scared her more than it did. But fear required energy, and she’d burned through most of hers hours ago. What remained was a sort of tired acceptance, a resignation to circumstances she couldn’t control.
She’d made her choice when she’d dragged him through the storm. Now she had to live with it.
The scanner beeped, completing its assessment, and she frowned at the results. The sixty-two percent human DNA readings were still there, impossible to ignore.
Where did you come from?
The question had been circling in her mind since she’d first seen the seismic anomaly on her deep-core scans. The reading had been wrong—too deep and too intentional to be natural geology. She’d planned to investigate after the storm passed, to drill down and see what was hiding beneath the ancient ice.
Now she didn’t need to drill. The anomaly had come to her. He’d been down there, beneath the glacier. But for how long?
The ice in this region was old—millions of years of accumulated sediment and frozen water, layered like the rings of a tree. Whatever chamber he’d emerged from had been deep enough that it predated human colonization by an incomprehensible margin.
