Page 9 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

Investigating.

The resonance informed me that she was experiencing simultaneous fear, nausea, grief, and curiosity. The curiosity was winning. I did not know what to do with that information.

My helmet's diagnostic display had been flashing warnings since the crash. The internal HUD was partially functional, I could access basic scans and atmospheric readings, but the primary comms array was damaged, the translation module was operating at thirty percent, and the structural integrity of the helmet itself was compromised. A crack ran from the left temple piece down across the jaw guard. When I turned my head, I could feel the halves shift against each other.

I removed the helmet.

The jungle hit me unfiltered. Scent, sound, humidity. Zha'kari air was thicker than standard Valorian air—warm and dense with biological signatures my enhanced senses immediately began cataloging. Seven distinct predator scent trails within two hundred paces. Three water sources. A fungal colony beneath the soil that explained the slight sponginess underfoot.

And her.

Her scent reached me without the helmet's filtration and something in my chest constricted. She smelled like sweat, soil, vegetation from her own planet, and underneath all of it something warm and organic that my biology responded to with a possessive certainty that made my vision blur. Mate. The word surfaced from instinct, not the bond — the resonance does not label. It was my own brain, making declarations my training had not authorized.

I heard her go quiet. First time since the pod opened. I looked up.

She was staring at me. Her mouth was open. Those unusual eyes — the color was unfamiliar, something between brown and green that shifted in the jungle light — were wide and moving across my face with an intensity that I could feel through the bond as a complicated surge of surprise and confusion and something warmer underneath that I could not classify.

She made a sound. A single word repeated in a tone I interpreted as disbelief. She pointed at her own face, then at mine, then made a gesture I didn't understand. She said several more words in rapid succession.

The translator — still cycling in the set-down helmet, feeding the interface behind my ear — offered nothing useful. Static. Raw phonetic markers. A string of sounds without meaning while the module tried and failed to build a framework from insufficient data.

She seemed annoyed. About my face. I was not certain how to interpret this.

I turned back to the supplies. Gave the pack a final check. My markings were active. The faint glow along my forearms was visible — the left bare since the gauntlet was lost, the right where I had unsealed the remaining gauntlet and pushed the under-sleeve back. I pressed my arms against my sides, hiding the glow against my body. It made no difference to the light itself. They hadn't dimmed since I'd touched her on the ship. This was becoming a problem.

The markings themselves were not unusual. Every Valorian had them — bioluminescent pathways threaded through our skin, a remnant of our deep evolutionary past. Our ancestors had navigated the lightless cave systems of Valoria Prime for millennia before reaching the surface. The markings had been survival tools: wayfinding in absolute darkness, silent signaling between hunting parties, threat displays to predators who hunted by sight. In modern Valorian life, they served social and military functions — unit identification, rank signaling, emotional legibility that our culture considered a form of honesty. You could not lie with your markings. They betrayed you.

Mine were betraying me now. Blazing a steady, unwavering signal that any Valorian within visual range would read instantly: bonded.

A standard resonance event between Valorians was managed through cultural ritual. Both parties recognized the bond. Formal courtship protocols were initiated. Physical proximity was carefully controlled until the bond was accepted or, in extraordinarily rare cases, declined. There were customs for this. Structure. Rules.

None of those customs, structures, or rules accounted for the possibility of resonance with a species that had never been contacted. A species that had no knowledge of Valorians, resonance bonds, or interstellar civilization at all. A species that was currently walking toward me with her hands on her hips, saying words I couldn't understand in a tone that suggested she expected answers.

She stood close enough that the resonance surged and my markings brightened visibly. Mud streaked one cheek beneath a scatter of freckles, and damp brown hair had escaped whatever arrangement had once held it away from her face. One eyebrow lifted higher than the other when she questioned me, a minute asymmetry that made every expression impossible to mistake. Her eyes dropped to my forearms, tracked the glow, snapped back to my face. She said something in a tone that was clearly a question, pointing at the markings.

I moved my arms behind my back.

She raised both eyebrows.

I turned, shouldered the pack, and began assessing the optimal route through the tree line. Direction: southwest, based on the stellar positioning. If we maintained a reasonable pace, we could cover twenty-five vekt per day. At that rate, the outpost was eighteen to nineteen days of travel.

Nineteen days. Alone in a jungle with this creature. This small and curious creature that my biology had decided was the most important being in the known universe, and who was currently following me, still talking, still pointing at my markings, still smelling like everything I had never known I wanted.

I walked faster.

She made an indignant sound and walked faster too. Her legs were perhaps two-thirds the length of mine and she was nearly jogging to match my stride. Her irritation reached me like a static shock. Sharp. Pointed. Directed at me specifically.

Good. Irritation was preferable to the other things I'd felt from her — the curiosity, the warmth, the flash of something when she'd first seen my face. Irritation gave her something of her own to push against; I clung to it because the alternative was admitting how closely I already watched her.

We reached the tree line. The jungle closed around us, dense and dark and humming with life. She was still talking. I did not understand the words but I understood the tone: complaint. Sustained and passionate complaint.

I checked my scanner. Noted a water source four hundred paces ahead. Adjusted our heading.

Behind me, she tripped on a root, caught herself, and said a single word with such force and clarity that even without translation I knew it was profanity.

I kept walking.

My markings kept glowing.