Chapter 19
nineteen
. . .
Kex
It took us another three days to reach the crash site. The pod lay on its side, split open, with lmmp escape fluid splattered across the forest floor like a cracked, rotten egg. “This will be atrocious to clean up,” I said.
“They won’t need to remove the goo, will they? It’s not tech,” my mate said.
“Technically, it is,” Rainair said. “The lmmp communicate through electrical inputs. Their whole bodies are receptors. That fluid is engineered to support their forms and transmit their signals.” He grinned evilly.
“If the ormonai are serious about purging the forest, they’ll have to remove every speck by hand. ”
I winced. He was right, and I was endlessly grateful that job would not fall to me.
“Well, that sucks for them,” my mate said, a hint of a smile in her voice. “But my friends aren’t here. How are we going to find them? They could be anywhere at this point.”
Rainair and I both pointed to a path in the trees, a clear trail of slime and broken, bent, and trampled foliage making it very clear about a dozen creatures as uncoordinated as my mate trampled in that direction. “I do not think they will be hard to follow.”
“Oh good, lead the way,” my mate said, perhaps not noticing my sarcasm. Our translation tech was not perfect.
I led the way. It took us only a few minutes to reach a small river.
The trail of slime led upstream a short distance, where we came out of the trees onto a small stony bank with humans scattered about completing various tasks.
A protector was the first to notice us, tall and pale purple, he stepped out of the tree line and observed us.
I raised a hand in greeting, and that was when the humans noticed us. My mate stepped around me.
“I’m back, bitches,” she called. And the humans broke out into yells and shrieks.
While the humans swarmed my mate, I stepped to the side and greeted the protector.
“Lord Kexanoplus, how can I serve?” the man asked, offering a bow of respect.
“Please, it’s Kex. This is Rainair.” I gestured to my friend who had followed me, casting weary eyes at the excited women. “And we are here to help. We have brought additional supplies, and my mate has a translation device so we can properly communicate.”
A second protector stepped up to us. “Your mate is the woman who was taken by a ranook?” the green man asked.
“Yes, it brought me my mate, a good distance east. We made it to the city and saw your report, and my mate wished to return and help her friends. Have you been able to communicate with the humans?” I asked.
“Sort of,” the green man said, pinching his temple, as if in pain. “I returned to the city for a check-in and downloaded the entire database.”
“Fucking stupid, that was,” Rainair said.
“Yes, well, it seemed necessary in the moment, and it helped to understand the women, even if they can’t understand us. I am Immun, by the way, and this is Zelphinus, First Protector.”
I gestured acknowledgment to both men. “The cleanup file says backup should be here in about two days. Do you wish to wait for them before escorting the humans out?”
“Yes,” Zelphinus sighed. “Only one has injuries preventing her from walking, but they are all weary. A larger group to support them would make travel easier.”
I nodded in the human way, but caught myself.
“I follow your leadership in this,” I said, and returned to where my mate was holding court among her people.
As First Protector, Zelphinus’s head would be on the line based on how well this cleanup went.
It would be a political nightmare once it was widely known, and while I easily outranked the man, he knew the protector’s procedures better than I did, and I wasn’t about to clip the man’s claws.
Emily
“Oh my God, you’re alive!”
“But how are you still alive?”
“Emily!”
“She’s clean, how is she clean?”
“She’s not dead!”
“Is that a cat-man?”
A pink-clad woman darted out and wrapped me in a crusty hug. “Oh my fucking God. You are such a bitch for abandoning me,” Jen said, her voice choked up.
“I’m so glad you aren’t dead,” Cindy said, hugging me as soon as Jen let go. The other women crowded in, hugging me and asking more questions than I could answer with any rational thought.
“How did you get away from that monster?” Cindy asked.
I smiled. The poor woman had to have been traumatized watching me get carried off. “Turns out alien dinosaur monster birds don’t like the taste of escape pod goop.”
Jen pulled at her crusty pink jumpsuit. “Well, that’s a silver lining if I’ve ever heard one.” Kex stepped up to my group, keeping a small distance, but still a few women stepped back. “So who are the new guys?”
I stepped through the crowd and put my arm around Kex, he immediately pulled me to his side. “Guys, this is my husband, Kex.”
“You got married?!?” Questions tore out of the group once again, and I gestured for them to bring it down.
“Yeah, kind of alien married. It’s a long story, which I will absolutely tell everybody eventually, but you should all know he understands English, as does the tabby.
” I gestured over my shoulder at Rainier.
“They can’t speak English, but I got a translation chip and can understand their language, and as soon as we get out of the forest everybody gets translation chips so you can understand everybody else. Sound good?”
“You didn’t bring any with you?”
“So they do have technology!”
“And then we go home?”
I winced. “There isn’t really any going home.”
There was a long, drawn-out silence, where I wasn’t sure what to say. Glancing around, there were looks of bewilderment, anger, and sadness.
“And why the fuck not?” Jen asked at last, breaking the pause.
“Because Earth is a pre-spaceflight planet, and that puts it in some kind of classification that makes it illegal for anyone to go to it,” I said.
“Well, someone sure as fuck went to it once or else we wouldn’t be here,” Jen said.
“Yes, but they did it illegally.”
“So can’t they just drop us off and be done with us?” Jen asked.
“No,” I sighed. “That would make us the lawbreakers as people who have knowledge of the wider galaxy and essentially invading a preflight planet ourselves”
“That sounds like some bureaucratic bullshit,” Jen said.
“Yes, exactly,” I agreed.
“But we have space flight,” someone called. Isabel, I think.
“Yeah, it doesn’t really matter. It’s more about, like, knowledge of the wider universe and alien races,” I tried to explain, even though I didn’t agree with it.
“Okay, but can’t we do it anyways?” Olive said, crossing her arms.
I glanced back at Kex, and he was smiling. See? I wanted to say. I’m not the only rule breaker.
“Unfortunately, my alien husband is very passionate about rule following, more on that later. And if we tried to get someone to break the rules for us, the likelihood of them betraying us and actually selling us into sex slavery or eating us or something is high.”
“So we can’t leave?” someone whose name I couldn’t remember asked.
“No one is keeping us here, but we’re safe here. Kex will keep us safe,” I said.
“Let them know they will need to stay at least until the species paperwork is complete. They would be at too great a risk leaving the planet before then,” Kex said.
I sighed and explained the documentation.
“Well, what does that mean for us now? More living off the grid? Because I gotta tell you, girl, this planet kinda sucks,” Jen said, gesturing around us, and others nodded or spoke their agreement.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The whole planet isn’t like this.
They have plumbing in the city. It’s all a long story, but for now this means we are under Kex’s protection, and he is going to keep us safe from any slave-trader-type people while the protectors work on integrating us into their society.
We’ll have a home there, in real buildings. ”
“Who are the protectors?” Harper asked.
“The two guys who have been here.” I gestured to the lavender and green aliens Kex had been speaking to.
“They are Monai’s Protectors. Monai is the name of their goddess and also the name of this forest. We’re kind of in the middle of a nature preserve, and they are tasked with keeping this forest sacred and tech-free, and our very presence here makes their jobs harder.
As much as we all want to leave, they want to get us out of here just as much. ”
Jen snorted. “That explains a lot.”
“What does being integrated into their society mean?” Isabel asked. “Are we all getting alien husbands whether we want them or not?”
“Absolutely not! Or at least, kind of not? It’s a long story.” I shrugged.
“Well, you can’t stop there,” Cindy said, indignant.
“Yeah, start with the long story and maybe make it short,” Jen said.
“Okay . . . So aliens know a little bit more about the universe than the rest of us. Can we all agree that’s true?”
The women nodded or shrugged, and I took that as agreement. I was a little nervous about how this would go.
“So soulmates are real,” I said with a shrug.
“Cool, right? Every sentient species has a soulmate, but we don’t always find them.
I found mine. That’s that guy right there, the big gorgeous teal guy.
” Kex grinned and lifted a hand. “So he’s my soulmate, which is why we are basically alien married.
So if you find your alien soulmate, you might also want to be alien married to them, but no one is going to be forced into any kind of relationship. Make sense?”
A few people looked concerned, others horrified, and some intrigued.
“How do we know if we have an alien soulmate?” Cindy asked, her eyes alight with interest.