Page 36 of Alien Healer’s Mate

Her voice dropped, and there was hunger under it now. “Half of what we are is you. If that pathway exists on the Latharian side, then it has to exist somewhere in my people. Buried somewhere. And I want to find it and wake it. And then I want to rebuild this therapy without the tanel poison in it.”

He folded his arms over his chest. The science was sound, and Charlotte Mason was lying in his medical bay half a galaxy away with Scorperio scarring carved through her nervous system, and he had no Imperial treatments left to try.

“If I share the scans,” he said slowly, “Then I want your protocols. All of them. Targeting methodology, stimulation parameters, and all the failure data from the Latharian trials. My patient’s case is far too sensitive for half measures.”

“Done,” she said without hesitation, extending her hand across the table, human-style, and he wondered which briefing document she’d pulled that from. “My people will prepare the files. We review them together after the evening session.”

He took her hand. Her grip was cool and strong.

She didn’t let go. Instead, her thumb moved across his knuckles, slow and deliberate, and her gaze drifted over his face with an interest that had nothing to do with cellular imaging.

“Your human,” she murmured. “The little one with you. She is your mate?”

“She’s my guest.”

The lie was smooth and immediate, and as soon as the words left his lips, he kicked himself. It was the same lie he’d been excusing himself for before they’d arrived, and here he was doing it again.

Lady, he was such a draanthic.

“Interesting,” the warlady said, and released him. “I will see you at the evening session.”

“Of course,” he said, inclining his head. “I look forward to it.” Then he turned and walked away.

The main hall had gotten louder while he’d been occupied. He cut through the crowd on autopilot, scanning. It took him all of ten seconds to find her by the buffet table on the east wall. She was alone, a pastry in one hand and that too-bright look on her face, the one that he was beginning to hate.

Oh draanth…

He’d left her standing alone in a hall full of strangers. The lie he’d told Lady Amaelii was still sour on his tongue, and the look on Delilah’s face said he needed to do something. Put this situation right. He started toward Delilah⁠—

“Healer V’Raav.” A male stepped into his path. Latharian, he was wearing formal robes and a researcher’s sash, dark hair in the style scholars had adopted to show it had never held a braid and they didn’t care who knew it. His smile was polished to a shine. “I was hoping to find you here. I’ve followed your work for years.”

“Researcher Z’Saai.” Recognizing the clan sigil on the researcher’s sash, Kellat returned the nod and kept his feet angled toward the buffet. “You’ll forgive me, I was on my way to⁠—“

“Rivaan, please. Your paper on the human neural remapping.” Rivaan carried on like Kellat hadn’t spoken. “I’ve read it three times. Remarkable doesn’t cover it. A human brain reorganizing around dead tissue at that speed… tell me, is she enjoying the conference?”

Kellat froze and looked down at the researcher.

The published paper was scrubbed of any identifying information. Age, origin, name, all of it had been stripped out. It was standard practice for anything touching the Mate Program, or even humanity. Nothing in his paper indicated that the subject was female, let alone that she was at the conference.

A guess. It had to be a guess. A healer arrives at a medical conference with a human on his arm… he kicked himself. Okay, it wasn’t a difficult deduction.

But the warning prickle crawling up the back of his neck didn’t ease.

“My companion is enjoying the buffet,” he said, his voice formal. “Your interest should be in my work rather than her.”

“Oh, absolutely, my apologies. I wanted to show you this.” Rivaan produced a dataflex from within his robes. “I’m working on link-band regeneration. You’re familiar with the interface scarring in drakeen pilots?”

Despite himself, Kellat looked at the screen. Neural scans cascaded across it, and the pattern snagged him the same way Lady Amaelii’s imaging had. Scar tissue targeted, broken down and cleared. He frowned. This was a different mechanism entirely. Where Lady Amaelii’s therapy woke the body’s own repair and couldn’t leash it, this one stripped the scarring first and asked questions later.

“You’ve found a way to clear it. How? Is it replicable?”

“Seventy-three percent in laboratory conditions.” Rivaan’s smile widened. “The clearance works. The problem is what comes after. The regrowth doesn’t hold… the body rejects the new tissue before it integrates. We can tear down the wall, but we can’t get anything to grow where it stood.”

And there it was. The other half.

Kellat kept his expression pleasant and neutral while his mind slotted the pieces against Charlotte’s file. The warlady could regenerate but not clear, and not in Latharian tissue. Rivaan could clear but not regenerate. And sitting in his own encrypted queue was proof that a Lathar-descended brain could do both on its own because one small human female had rewritten her own brain while he watched her sleep.

His human female.