Page 10 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

This was going to be a very long nineteen days.

6

TAYLOR

The alien was hot and I was furious about it.

Not like Brad Pitt hot. Not conventionally attractive in any human sense that I could point to and say "yes, that's a normal thing to find appealing." More like — imagine someone took a fantasy book illustration and dialed it up to eleven and then made it real and silver and glowing.

His skin was gray. Not human-gray, not sick-gray, more like burnished silver with a slight shimmer to it that was probably not helped by the GLOWING LINES that ran along his jaw and down his neck and across his forearms. I'd seen those lines in the pod, blazing in the dark while I screamed and tried not to die, but now, in daylight, they looked less like an emergency light and more like part of him. Sharp features — high cheekbones, strong jaw, angular in a way that shouldn't have worked but absolutely did. His nose was narrow and straight, almost blade-like, with a slight flare at the bridge that was definitely not human but close enough to read as aristocratic rather than alien. Heavy brow ridges that cast his eyes in shadow — and the eyes themselves were violet. Actually violet. With vertical slit pupils like a cat's that widened and narrowed with shifts in light or, I was beginning to suspect, emotion. His ears came to subtle points, set slightly higher on his skull than a human's would be. His hair was dark, almost black, cropped close on the sides but longer on top, and it fell across his forehead in a way that was so unfairly attractive I wanted to scream.

Which I had been doing a lot of today so at least I was warmed up.

The point was, after the nightmare of the last however many hours and jaguars, lizard aliens, slave ship, escape pod, crash landing, discovering that my alien rescuer slash kidnapper looked like an elf warrior that had stepped out of a video game was just insulting. The universe was mocking me. I was filthy, sunburned, and covered in bruises, my clothes were held together by stubbornness, and this guy had taken his helmet off and revealed a face that should be on the cover of Alien GQ.

"Seriously?" I had said, pointing at his face. "You look like THAT under there? That's just ridiculous."

He'd looked confused. I'd felt better.

The second hand on my battered watch said that had been an hour ago. Now we were trekking through an alien jungle, because apparently my life was just jungles all the way down, and he was twenty feet ahead of me moving through the dense vegetation like he'd been born doing it while I stumbled over roots and got smacked in the face by alien ferns that were suspiciously similar to Earth ferns except purple.

He was too fast. I was too slow. My legs hurt, my back hurt, everything hurt, and he wasn't even breaking a sweat. Could he sweat? Did aliens sweat? His silver skin looked perfect and dry and I hated him a little bit for it.

"Hey! Darth! Slow down!"

He didn't turn around. Right. Language barrier. I tried again.

"Hey!" I clapped my hands. He turned. I made an exaggerated slowing-down motion with my hands, then pointed at my legs, then at his legs, and held my hand at his shoulder height and then at my significantly lower height. Short legs. Small person. Slow down.

He looked at me. Then at my legs. Then back at my face. Then he turned around and kept walking.

At the same speed.

"Real nice. Love the communication skills. A-plus teamwork there, Shiny."

I was cycling through nicknames since I couldn't exactly ask his name. Darth was good for the armor, but without the helmet he didn't have that vibe anymore. Shiny was accurate but felt too friendly for a guy who'd shoved me into a tin can and shot me at a planet. Glow Stick was my current frontrunner, because of those lines.

The lines. They were fascinating. They were part of his skin — bioluminescent patterns embedded in his epidermis. Epidermis? I was too tired for science words. They ran along his jaw, down his neck, continuing below his armor collar. Down his forearms in intricate, almost geometric patterns. They were beautiful, objectively speaking.

And they did something. At the crash site, when I'd walked toward him, they'd brightened. When I'd stepped back, they'd dimmed. When I'd pointed at them and asked about it, he'd shoved his arms behind his back like a kid caught with cookies.

That was interesting. That was very interesting. I tucked it into the part of my brain that was still functioning and kept walking.

He stopped at a small clearing near a stream — alien stream, alien water, slightly more turquoise than Earth water. He set down the pack from the pod and started doing efficient military things with the supplies. I watched him lay everything out with the precision of someone who inventoried gear for a living.

My stomach growled. Loudly. He looked up.

"Yeah, that's hunger. Common human experience. Happens when you crash-land on an alien planet and puke up your last meal."

He reached into the supply pack and held something out to me. A bar of something. Compact, dense-looking, wrapped in material that might have been foil if foil was invented by aliens.

I took it. Turned it over. Sniffed it. It smelled like nothing, which was somehow worse than smelling bad. I peeled the wrapping back and took a bite.

I have eaten gas station sushi at 2am. I have eaten cafeteria mystery meat in grad school. I have eaten a protein bar that expired six months ago because I was in the field and didn't check. None of that prepared me for the experience of alien emergency rations.

It tasted like if you took cardboard, mixed it with despair, compressed it into a rectangle, and then removed any remaining trace of joy. It had the texture of wet sand crossed with a pencil eraser. It was aggressively, almost impressively flavorless, while simultaneously being the most unpleasant thing I'd ever put in my mouth.

I ate the whole thing. Because I'd had nothing since yesterday and I wasn't about to be picky on an alien planet.