Page 13 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

"Kel," she finally said, truncating it with the decisiveness of someone who had tried and was done trying. "You're Kel now. Deal with it."

Kel. No Valorian had ever addressed me without the full formal designation. My commanding officers used my rank prefix. My handler Renn used the full designation, and clipped it to Kel only when he had stopped being my handler for a moment and was just Renn. No one else called me Kel at all. It was not a name. It was barely a syllable.

I did not correct her.

"Okay, Kel." She said it like she was testing the weight of it. "I'm Taylor. Taylor Jennings, if aliens do last names. Human. From Earth. That's my planet. It's..." She looked up at the canopy. "Really far from here, I'm guessing."

I said nothing.

"Right, you don't understand me. That's fine. I'm going to keep talking anyway because if I stop talking I'm going to think about the fact that I am on an alien planet with no way home and I will have a complete mental breakdown, and neither of us wants that." She started walking again. "So you get the Taylor commentary track. Free of charge. You're welcome."

During those three hours, she continued almost without pause.

I learned that she was an archaeologist — someone who studied the remnants of dead civilizations on her planet. That her specialty was pre-Columbian South American cultures, which I gathered were from a specific region of her world. That she had been in the jungle on her planet as a volunteer, paying her own way onto the expedition because no one in her field would pay her to be there. That she lived in a place called Minneapolis that she described as "frozen hell for five months of the year and mosquito hell for three and tolerable for four." That she had a degree she'd spent six years earning and still couldn't find stable employment in her field, because — as she explained with some heat — her planet produced far more archaeologists than it was willing to pay.

She told me all of this freely and openly, as if I were a wall she was bouncing words off of. And perhaps that's what she thought — that I was a receptive surface that couldn't understand or judge.

She told me that she missed her mother, who she called every Sunday. She said this quietly, between other things, and then immediately covered it with a joke about how her mother would react to her being abducted by aliens. "She'd find a way to blame it on me not wearing a jacket."

Her grief hit sharp and fresh. Quickly buried under determination.

She was remarkable. I had not intended to form that assessment. It was not tactically relevant. But she had been ripped from everything she knew, thrown into circumstances that would shatter most beings, and she was walking through an alien jungle naming predators and making jokes about the food. Her fear was constant, I could feel it, a low hum underneath everything else, but it never stopped her.

I had trained for years to operate under fear. She appeared to do it naturally.

"Hey, question," she said from behind me. "And I know you can't answer, but I'm asking anyway. Where are we going? Because we've been walking southwest for —" She checked a device on her wrist. "— four hours today, and I'm assuming you have a destination because you don't seem like the wandering-aimlessly type."

I stopped. Turned. She nearly walked into my chest, caught herself, stepped back. My markings flared at the proximity and I watched her eyes drop to my forearms, register the glow, and snap back to my face with that knowing look I was beginning to dread.

I should tell her I understood her. She deserved to know. Keeping it from her was dishonest and served no purpose except my own discomfort.

"We are traveling to a trading outpost," I said.

She stared at me.

"It is called Vel'kari Station. It is located on the southwestern coast of this continent. The planet is called Zha'kari. At our current pace, we will reach it in approximately eighteen days."

She continued to stare.

"The outpost will have communications equipment, transport options, and⁠—"

"You speak English."

"Your language has been translating through my neural interface since approximately three hours ago. I moved the module into my interface the first night, once it was clear the helmet was not going back on." I tapped the bone behind my ear. "It runs both directions. Mine into yours, aloud, when I permit it."

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Her face cycled through an impressive range of expressions: surprise and confusion, and then a slow, dawning fury that I felt through the resonance like approaching fire.

"Three hours."

"The calibration required⁠—"

"You have understood every single word I've said for the last THREE HOURS?"

"Yes."

"And you could have answered me. Out loud. This entire time." She said it slowly, like she was checking her own arithmetic and hoping to find the error. "You let me talk at you for three hours knowing I thought I was alone."

"The translation is not perfect. Some idioms do not⁠—"