Page 53 of Alien Healer’s Mate

His struggles were growing weaker, his boots scraping at the deck.

Nobody was going to get here in time, and she screamed again, tears streaming down her cheeks. Then something broke inside her.

No.

The thought wasn’t from her head, from her brain. It wasn’t even a thought so much as a feeling, from the place behind her breastbone where she’d felt a warmth back in the cell. That small impossible warmth she’d told herself was nothing. Just her brain trying to give her hope in the way people with hypothermia believed they were warm and safe. She hadn’t let herself believe in it then, but it wasn’t small anymore, and she was desperate enough to grab for it.

As soon as she did, it rose and swelled. It was pressure. Light. A door she’d been leaning against her whole life to keep shut, and she hadn’t even known it was there.

NO!

Light cracked through the back of her skull, white and total. She gasped as her spine arched and her head went back. Every muscle in her body pulled tight at once, her knuckles white on the bars, and she heard herself make a sound that wasn’t a scream anymore.

For a second she was in two places at once. One version of her was on her knees in the cage watching Kellat dying under the weight of the combat machines crushing him. The other version of her was somewhere else, moving fast. She was huge. Heavy and furious, with more legs than she should have. And her eyes saw everything… heat, currents running through metal, and the small bright shape of her own body kneeling behind bars.

The wall came down.

The scream of metal plating tearing like paper was the first thing she ever heard with her second set of ears, echoed by the sound in her first set. Dust and debris blasted across the bay, pinging off the bars of her cage, and somewhere overhead an alarm started shrieking. She opened her eyes in the cage as a drakeen tore through the wreckage of the bulkhead and landed hard enough to buckle the deck, and she felt the impact in both her bodies.

She knew it.

Under all that size, under the rage and the armor and the legs like support columns, the warmth hummed. She smiled. It was the same hum from her little robot, the one that had curled against her in the dark and vibrated under her palm like a purr. The little lost thing that had played ball in a corridor and grieved beside a folded giant. But the folded giant had been this all along. Its real body. It had come back to it, and then it had come for her.

Okay, let’s get them off him.

She took a step, and the deck dented under her. Under it. Whatever. The weight should have terrified her, but it didn’t. It felt like putting on a coat that finally fit.

The prototype came away from Kellat like a scab. She felt her hand close on it, except her hand was a forelimb the size of a girder. The thing’s chassis crumpled inside her grip as she crushed it mercilessly. Hot fluid sprayed the deck, and she tasted the chemical stink of it in her human throat behind the bars. The second one turned toward her, but it was like it moved in slow motion. It was no match for her. She slammed another limb down and drove it through the deck plating. The crunch rattled through her teeth, but she didn’t stop.

The third one still had Kellat by the throat.

Her vision narrowed to that one point, where the other machine had him around the throat. His lips moved, but no sound came out. Surging forward, she sank her front claws into the thing’s shoulder, tearing it backward and apart. Cables and pieces of it flew away, spinning away across the deck in a shower of sparks. The thing staggered away, bleeding fluids onto the deck before it collapsed, shuddering and jerking.

She ignored it. None of it mattered, because Kellat sucked in a breath.

The sound of it nearly took her legs out from under her. She skittered toward him, forelimbs raised as she looked around for any other machines coming for him.

He coughed, dragging in another breath. He rolled onto his side, one hand braced against the deck, his whole chest heaving like the air was fighting him on the way in. His eyes opened, and she watched his face change as he looked up at her in the machine standing over him.

He was a healer, and he was Latharian. He’d read her scans a hundred times, mapped everything her brain had done, so she saw the exact moment all of it fell into place, the shock as he twisted his head and his gaze found hers through the bars.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t have to.

She nodded.

Then more of the wall the machine-her had torn through came down, and the rest of them arrived.

The Voors’tial’s drakeen poured through the breach with their pilots right behind them, blades drawn and already bloody. Her little robot chirped brightly somewhere in the back of her mind, feeding her information. It had torn through the shuttle to get back into its combat-body. The second it powered up, every drakeen in the Voor’stial’s hold had woken with it. They’d followed it and the pilots had scrambled after them.

Now they hit what was left of Z’Saai’s prototype army like a wave hitting a sandcastle. The prototypes were fast and brutal, but it didn’t help them. What Z’Saai had built were mindless machines on a leash, but what they faced were true chimeras… biology and machinery in perfect harmony.

And she fought with them.

She didn’t think about it. She didn’t need to. There was nothing to think about. The drakeen’s body was her body, its limbs her limbs, and the little robot was part of her mind now. She moved in a way she’d never once moved in her own skin, sure and heavy and… perfect.

She tore a prototype in half and dropped it to crush another under a hind leg. The double vision should have made her sick, but it didn’t. Instead, it made everything sharper. Layered, like the world had been flat her whole life and someone had finally handed her the other lens. In the cage, her human body swayed on its knees, breath sawing in and out, hands still welded to the bars. She let it. That body could wait.

She whirled around as another machine tried to creep up behind her and tore it apart, flinging the bits to hit opposite walls.