Page 15 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

Iwas never going to forgive him for the three hours thing. Never. I was going to bring it up on my deathbed. "Remember when you understood English for three hours and didn't tell me and I told you about the ramen fire? I'm still mad about that. Avenge me."

Okay, I was probably going to forgive him eventually. But not today. And honestly? The only reason I was shelving it at all was because the alien jungle was actively trying to eat me and holding a grudge required bandwidth I couldn't spare. The second I wasn't in mortal danger, we were revisiting this. With a PowerPoint. And footnotes.

Today we walked. And walked. And walked some more. Through alien jungle that was simultaneously the most beautiful and most terrifying environment I'd ever been in. By midday my calves shook on every incline, my damp clothes rasped against sunburned skin, and three days of sweat and mud had dried into a gritty second layer I could smell every time I moved.

My body was starting to notice it wasn't on Earth anymore. Not in a dramatic, collapse-in-a-heap way — in the slow, accumulating way that a wrong environment wears you down. The warm air was dense with pollen and spores from plants and fungi my immune system had never met. My first few breaths on Zha'kari had felt amazing, like breathing pure oxygen at a spa. By day two, the back of my throat was raw and my sinuses burned if I inhaled too sharply. Every breath carried another dose of something my lungs had not evolved to filter.

The water was worse. Kel dropped a purification tab into every container before I drank, but whatever alien microbes the tabs didn't catch had introduced themselves to my digestive system with enthusiasm. Nothing catastrophic — no dramatic jungle-floor vomiting, thank god — but a persistent low-grade nausea that I was pretending wasn't happening. My stomach had been staging a quiet protest since day one and showed no signs of negotiating.

And the ration bars. The ration bars were keeping me alive and not much else. I was hungry all the time now. Not "I skipped lunch" hungry — "my body is burning more fuel than I'm putting in" hungry. The deep, gnawing kind that sits behind your sternum and doesn't go away when you eat, just dims for an hour before coming back. I caught Kel watching me unwrap my half-bar at breakfast with an expression I couldn't read. He'd been giving me slightly more than half. I'd noticed. I hadn't said anything because I needed it and pretending I didn't would have been stupid.

Every twenty minutes something tried to kill us. Not quite that often, but it felt like it. Giant flying things with wingspans wider than my arm span. Plants that snapped shut when you walked past them. Something that looked like a vine but moved.

I jumped approximately three feet when the vine-thing brushed my ankle and made a noise that I would describe as a "dignified yelp" and Kel would probably describe as "the female screamed."

"It is a sensory tendril," he said without turning around. "It is cataloging your biological signature. Not dangerous."

"CATALOGING ME?"

"A passive scan. Many plant species here use them for⁠—"

"It's touching me. It's an alien plant and it's touching me."

"It will stop once it has completed its⁠—"

"KEL."

He turned, looked at the tendril wrapped loosely around my ankle, and said something in his own language that sounded vaguely exasperated. He crouched, touched the tendril with two fingers, and it immediately retracted. His markings were doing their usual glow-up in my proximity and I was building a very solid case for what "various stimuli" actually meant, but I saved that cross-examination for later.

"Thanks," I muttered, stepping over where the tendril had been. "Add 'plants that grope you' to the list of reasons I want to go home."

The list was long. But I was keeping a second list too, reasons this wasn't the absolute worst, and it was growing faster than I wanted to admit. The bioluminescence at night. The way the dual moons turned the canopy into something out of a dream. The double shadows cast by the binary suns — two overlapping outlines of every leaf and vine, slightly offset, so the whole jungle floor looked like a watercolor painting of itself. The archaeology.

Oh god, the archaeology.

Even trekking at breakneck pace through dense jungle, I kept spotting things. Carved stones half-buried in the underbrush. Geometric patterns on rock faces that were too regular to be natural. What looked like a fragment of a road surface, worn smooth, cutting through the forest floor before disappearing under roots.

Whoever had been here before was advanced. And long gone. And my fingers itched to stop and document everything, but Kel set a pace that made it clear stopping was not in the itinerary. So I documented the only way I could with no paper and no camera: pacing out every bearing, fixing each carving in memory panel by panel, and reciting the whole sequence back to myself at every water stop until it stuck. Bad field conditions are not an excuse for bad field notes. They just make you the notebook.

I asked him about it once, pointing at a carved pillar we passed. "Who built that?"

"The Kethari. A civilization that collapsed approximately twelve thousand standard years ago."

"What happened to them?"

"Unknown. They vanished across multiple systems within a single generation. It remains one of the unsolved questions of galactic archaeology."

I stopped walking. "Galactic. Archaeology."

He looked back at me. "Yes."

"There's a field called galactic archaeology."

"The study of extinct civilizations across star systems, yes."

"That's a real job? That people and aliens — do?"

"It is a well-funded academic discipline in most developed systems."