Page 35 of Alien Healer’s Mate

The Vorrtan didn’t do small talk. He was really starting to like that about them.

Amaelii led him to a low table at the edge of her delegation’s area, close enough to the main hall that the hum of the reception still reached them, far enough away that no one would wander through. Two of her males peeled off from the semicircle without being asked. One brought a data screen while the other planted himself between the table and the crowd, a wall of red muscle with his back to them both.

Efficient. He nodded in approval; he could work with efficient.

“Warrior Vihaan.” Lady Amaelii lit the screen with a flick of one clawed finger, and a spinal column resolved in the air between them, rotating slowly. “Third vertebral cluster, crush trauma. A landslide came down on his pack three years ago. He dug two of his brothers out before his legs stopped answering him.”

Kellat leaned in with a frown. The damage was old and ugly, the kind of injury that ended careers and, for most species, lives. Scar tissue webbed the injury site, thick and dense, choking off everything below it.

“He has no function below the injury?”

“None. We have kept him alive.” Her jaw tightened. “My healers tell me that is the extent of what they can offer him.”

“And you disagree.” He slid her a sideways glance.

“I did not become warlady by accepting the extent of what I am offered.” She flicked to the next file, and the display changed into a series of regeneration sequences, all time-stamped.

His pulse picked up as he watched a severed neural fiber knit itself back together in accelerated playback.

“Run it again,” he said, just to be sure he wasn’t imagining it.

Draanth. His eyed widened. He wasn’t imagining it. The Imperial healer corps had been chasing that exact result for longer than he’d been alive, and she had it sitting on a data screen like it was nothing.

“We do not graft new tissue,” she said. “We wake the body’s own repair mechanisms and aim them.”

“What’s the success rate?”

“In Vorrtan tissue, ninety-six percent.” She paused, watching him with those amber and turquoise eyes. “In Latharian tissue, we have never had a survivable result.”

Never? He blinked. Not poor results, not inconsistent… never. He looked at the imaging again, at that elegant cascade of repair, and the answer was sitting right there in front of him. Had been in front of him since he was a boy sneaking stories he wasn’t supposed to read.

“It’s the Tanel material,” he said.

The warlady went very still. Behind her, the male guarding the table turned his head a fraction, just enough to put Kellat in the corner of his eye.

“You know your history,” she said.

He inclined his head. “I do. Kayan Vorr built your people from the best of both Latharian and Tanel bloodlines. I’d always assumed the Tanel contribution was structural… your fighting form and the ability to switch to it.” He nodded at the screen. “But I’m guessing it runs deeper than that.”

“It runs through everything.” Her voice was flat. “The regeneration is Tanel. The sequences that drive it, the repair architecture, all of it comes from that side of our inheritance. Inside a Vorrtan body, the combined genetic framework holds it in check.” The large scar on her cheek pulled tight as she looked directly at him. “But inside a Latharian body, there is nothing to hold the leash. It does not recognize the tissue as part of itself. It regenerates nothing, but consumes instead.”

Draanth.

He kept his expression neutral while his mind raced. He didn’t ask where they had gotten latharians to test this on, and he wasn’t about to risk a very shaky treaty by asking. Regardless, the therapy and the threat were the same sequences. Strip the Tanel material out, and the regeneration died with it. Leave it in, and it ate any patient who wasn’t Vorrtan.

Now the documents he’d read before he arrived made a whole lot more sense. Every redacted block, every schematic cut off at a crucial juncture… the gaps sat exactly where the Tanel dependencies would be. They hadn’t been hiding their advances out of arrogance. They’d been hiding a weakness. Vorrtan medicine stopped dead at the borders of their own species, and she’d just handed him, someone who could parse and use it, that fact at a public reception.

Which told him exactly how badly she wanted what he had. And what she wanted.

“My paper.”

“Your paper.” She leaned forward. “A human brain that cleared dead tissue and rebuilt around it. Humanity has no Tanel material from what I can tell. And I checked all the records for the lost expedition that created them.”

Kellat blinked. “I’m not even going to ask how you got those.”

“Probably best you don’t.” She grinned at him, a sudden flash of sharp teeth. He knew she had a smaller, more latharian-looking form, so why did she use this one? Was it for intimidation… or to make a point?

“So they have no Vorrtan genetic framework,” she continued. “Do you see it? A solely Latharian-descended species, Healer, doing what my therapy does… on the inheritance we share with you.”