Page 18 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

Curiosity. Trust. The beginnings of something I absolutely was not going to name.

I rolled onto my side, putting my back to him and his infuriating glow.

"Goodnight, Glow Stick," I said.

There was a long silence. Then, very quietly: "Goodnight, Taylor."

His voice was soft. No translation artifact, no clipped military tone. Just my name in his real voice, low and warm, and I felt it in the center of my chest like a match striking.

I stared at the dark and didn't sleep for a very long time.

9

KEL

Three days into the trek, and the human was adapting faster than should have been possible for a species that had never left their own atmosphere.

One adaptation was mine: the translator did the arithmetic between her units and mine, her miles arriving as vekt, my rotations leaving as her days. Because she was the one who needed the numbers, I had surrendered timekeeping to her system entirely — her minutes, her hours. Distance I kept in vekt.

She learned which berries were safe after a single demonstration. I showed her the miral — small blue-black fruit, growing in clusters along low branches, and told her it was edible. She studied it. Smelled it. Turned it over. Then she found three more plants with similar visual and textural characteristics and asked if those were safe as well. Two were. At the third, she stopped before touching it.

"Different spiral pattern. Thicker stem base," she said. "That might mean nothing, or it might mean different chemistry. Scan it?"

My scanner identified a mild toxin.

"Pattern recognition," she said. "Not a taste test."

She fashioned a carrying pouch from broad leaves, using the multitool on her belt to cut strips of vine for binding. The design was efficient. Not elegant, but functional. When I commented that it was well-constructed, she looked at me with an expression I was learning to recognize as pleased surprise, quickly covered.

"I spent a week in the Colombian jungle carrying equipment. You pick things up."

She identified a water source before I did. A root system breaking through the soil in a particular pattern that I had not cataloged as significant, but which she recognized immediately.

"See how the lateral roots curve upward here and the main root goes deeper? On Earth, that means there's a subsurface water table within a few meters. The tree is growing its roots toward it." She crouched and dug with her hands, hitting damp soil within minutes. She looked up at me, dirt under her fingernails, grinning. "Plant morphology. It transcends planets."

She was slowing me down. Her legs were shorter, her endurance lower, her night vision nonexistent. We covered eighteen vekt on the first partial day. Twenty-eight on the second. Twenty-two on the third, because she needed more rest stops and I was not willing to push her to the point of injury.

I should have been frustrated by the reduced pace. Valorian field doctrine was explicit: mission timelines exist because supply windows close. Sentiment does not extend rations.

Frustration would have been easier. What I felt was fascination. Among my people, fascination with a non-bonded individual was a temporary state — you observed, you assessed, you categorized, you moved on. The Valorian mind was built for efficient processing of novelty. You encountered something new, you mapped it, and then it was mapped and therefore no longer novel. That was how cognition worked. That was how it had always worked.

She was not becoming less novel. Every hour produced new data that failed to resolve into a stable model. My cognitive architecture had no protocol for a subject that became more complex the longer you studied it.

The resonance was getting harder to control. Each day, the bond strengthened. Each hour spent in her proximity, the connection deepened. It did not give me her feelings — an unconsummated bond carries only pressure, texture, temperature — but the textures were growing distinct. Something bright and sharp when she examined a ruin. Something cold and metallic, buried so fast I almost missed it each time. Something slow and golden, lying by the fire at night, that my biology responded to with aggressive approval. I had begun assigning her words to the textures — curiosity, fear, contentment — and could verify none of the assignments.

My markings glowed when she laughed, when she was close, when she bent to examine something and her damaged shirt rode up to expose skin. Involuntary. Uncontrollable. A cascade of biological responses to her presence that grew stronger each moment we spent together.

On the third evening, she took a fall.

We were descending a slope of loose, reddish soil between rock formations when her boot slipped on a wet stone. She went down hard, catching herself on her hands, but not before scraping her forearm across a rough rock edge. She hissed and sat up, examining the wound.

"I'm fine," she said immediately. Before I could respond. Before I had even fully turned around. "It's just a scrape."

It was more than a scrape. The wound was a finger's length of torn skin, oozing red blood — red, a striking color, nothing like Valorian circulatory fluid — and embedded with small particles of stone and dirt. On this planet, in this environment, infection was a genuine concern.

"Let me⁠—"

"I said I'm fine." She was already pouring water from our supply over the wound, cleaning it with practiced efficiency. She tore a strip from the hem of her shirt — there was very little shirt remaining at this point — and wrapped the wound tightly. Her jaw was set. Her emotions were controlled. She did not want my help.