Page 51 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

The next day did not solve anything. It did, however, move us closer to walls, water, a relay, and the version of trouble that wore official language instead of teeth. By the time the patched metal roofs of Vel'kari Station appeared through the trees, Taylor was breathing through stubbornness alone, and the countdown Renn had given me had become a weight in every step. Vel'kari had comms, a medic, and a Council relay. It also had a hundred strangers, and the Saurok networks paid for eyes.

21

TAYLOR

The outpost was the ugliest, most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

Vel'kari Station looked like someone had built a frontier town out of scrap metal and bad decisions. Low buildings, most of them patched and repaired multiple times, arranged around a central square of packed dirt. Shuttle pads of varying quality. A market stall area where aliens of at least a dozen different species were bartering and arguing and doing business that I suspected was not entirely legal.

And noise. Real noise. Voices, engines, the clang of metal, music from somewhere deep in the station that sounded like jazz played on instruments Earth hadn't invented yet. Civilization. Rough and grimy civilization, but civilization.

I stood at the entrance and stared. My legs shook. My eyes stung. It had been ten days since the crash. Ten days of jungle predators, rations, and sleeping on the ground. Ten days of fear and wonder and the most intense and terrifying romantic relationship of my life.

Kel stood beside me. His markings were barely showing — he'd rebuilt his damaged armor from the best components he could salvage and run the new plating high on the throat and long down the forearms, which was, I assumed, the entire point. He looked like someone you didn't want to mess with. Zhara was on my other side, already scanning the market with the appraising eye of a professional trader.

"I know people here," Zhara said. "I can get us lodging and access to the communications relay." She gave Kel a pointed look. "You two need a room."

"We need to contact the Authority—" Kel started.

"You need a room," Zhara repeated firmly. "With a door. And a shower. And you—" she pointed at me, "—need eight hours of sleep in an actual bed before you fall over."

I was too tired to argue. And she was right. I was running on fumes and willpower and whatever steadiness I was stealing off him through the bond.

Zhara delivered. Within an hour, she'd negotiated lodging from a station keeper who owed her a favor ("From a previous life. Don't ask.") and we had a room. Singular. Because of "limited availability" and also because Zhara was the least subtle matchmaker in the galaxy.

The room was small and sparse: a bed, a table, something that functioned as a chair, and, I could have wept, a washroom with an actual shower in it. An actual shower with actual warm water that came out of something resembling a showerhead.

"I'm going to be in there for approximately three hours," I announced, already pulling off the Colombian boots for what turned out to be the last time.

"We should discuss⁠—"

"Three. Hours. Kel."

He subsided.

I stripped, stepped into the shower, and nearly had a religious experience. Hot water. Clean water. Water pressure. I stood under the spray with my eyes closed and let ten days of alien jungle rinse off my skin. The water ran brown, then clear. I used something Zhara had provided that might have been soap or might have been alien conditioner. It smelled faintly floral and it lathered and I did not care what it was.

I stood there until my fingers wrinkled and my muscles unknotted and the last of the tension I'd been carrying since Colombia melted out of my shoulders.

When I stepped out, wrapping myself in what passed for a towel, I caught my reflection in the metal wall panel and stopped.

I looked terrible. Not "rough couple of days" terrible — gaunt terrible. My collarbones stood out like shelves. My arms, which had been toned from weeks of hauling equipment through a Colombian jungle, were thinner than I'd ever seen them. The spore rash had spread from my shoulders down across my ribs in angry red patches that the hot water had turned livid. And my hands — I held them out in front of me — were still trembling. Less than in the jungle, but still there. A fine, persistent vibration that I couldn't will away.

One thing was better, though. The pressure in my chest — the constant warm hand slowly pressing down that had been with me since day three — had eased. Not gone, but lighter. The outpost's air filtration system was doing something the open jungle couldn't: cycling out the particulates that had been slowly compressing my lungs. I took a deep, experimental breath and didn't feel the familiar burn behind my sternum. The relief was so sharp it made my eyes sting.

Zhara had left something on a narrow shelf beside the shower — a small canister whose label my guild disc rendered as broad-spectrum dermal soother: contact-species safe; patch-test before use. The thick, greenish salve smelled like eucalyptus and mint. I dabbed a dot inside my wrist, waited through a cautious count of sixty, then spread it over the rash. Within seconds the burning itch that had been my constant companion for most of a week just... stopped. I stood there with my hand on my ribs, eyes closed, processing the absence of pain I'd stopped noticing as pain because it had become baseline.

There was food too — Zhara again, a plate of flattened grain cakes and warm broth under a trade-guild seal the disc rendered as neutral nutrition for contact biologies. I tried one spoonful, waited for any warning from my stomach, then ate slowly. The grain cakes sat without the heavy, wrong feeling of the jungle rations. The broth was salty and rich and my body responded with an almost desperate gratitude, as if every cell was saying finally, something I know how to process.

I ate all of it. Then I sat on the floor of the tiny bathroom and cried for approximately ninety seconds, because my body was so relieved to not be fighting the food that the emotion had to go somewhere.

Then I washed my face, pulled on the clean borrowed clothes Zhara had left folded by the door, and buckled my recovered tool belt over them. I squared my shoulders and walked out.

Zhara pushed off the corridor wall where she had been waiting. "The guild disc is holding?"

"Apparently stress-rambling in captivity built an excellent language index."

"Useful at last," she said, and the ambient noise of the outpost kept resolving into words around me.