Alien’s Retrieved Mate (The Resonance Frontier #1)

1. Taylor

TAYLOR

"Iam not getting paid enough for this shit."

Which was ironic, because I wasn't getting paid at all. I was paying them — that's how archaeology works when nobody will hire you. The employed get salaries. The rest of us write a check and get called volunteers.

I spat out sweat that had dripped onto my mouth and reminded myself not to speak unless I absolutely had to.

My messy bun had surrendered before breakfast, and damp brown strands kept welding themselves to my cheeks and neck.

What I'd thought would be the smart way to stay in my field between jobs that never materialized — pay my own way onto a volunteer dig, keep my trowel hand in, maybe find something cool — was in fact a horrible idea.

The mosquitoes in Minnesota were bad. These ones were throwbacks from the Jurassic era, and they had zero respect for DEET.

Not to mention the snakes, which I'd learned were venomous, not poisonous, thanks to a twenty-minute lecture from Mansplaining Mike on the first day.

And the cute but very deadly jaguars. I craned my neck and scanned the canopy, trying to pick out the ring-shaped spots of a jaguar's coat before one of them jumped down and crunched my skull.

"Watch where you're going, Taylor!"

A fern frond the size of a dinner table smacked me in the face. The guy in front of me had walked right past it without a backward glance. Awesome. Assaulted by vegetation and it wasn't even nine.

Then Bitchy Bob brushed past me, intent on getting through the jungle as fast as humanly possible. He'd been complaining about my speed since we'd set out from camp that morning.

Wait. If Bob had passed me, that meant I was last in line.

I looked back. Nothing but bent vegetation springing upright to seal the path behind us.

I swallowed and hurried as fast as my tired legs could carry me and a forty-pound pack of mapping equipment.

Last in line meant prime jaguar snacking opportunity.

Tasty Taylor Treats did not have the kind of ring I wanted to hear.

I picked up my pace — let's be honest, probably a five-seconds-a-mile improvement — and trudged through the muck, boots squelching, mud sucking at my soles. Still morning, but the heat was already unbearable. Sweat pooled in the collar of my shirt. My back ached. My shoulders burned.

We were heading to a previously unexplored sector where drone footage had flagged strange stones jutting from the ground.

I was carrying the radar mapping equipment because it was very expensive and very heavy, which meant the salaried scientists were happy to let the paying volunteer haul it.

If I could have fobbed it off on someone else, I absolutely would have.

I stopped for a swig of water and wiped my face.

When I looked up, something moved in the shadows.

My body went still before my brain caught up. Not breathing. Not blinking. Just staring into the darkness of the canopy above, eyes adjusting, pulse climbing so fast the edges of my vision flickered.

More movement. I stopped hearing the mosquitoes.

It shifted, and a shaft of light came down through the canopy and found it. Sleek black rosettes on tawny fur. Green eyes, sharp and intelligent, fixed on mine. A jaguar. Muscular, motionless, watching me with the patience of something that knew exactly how fast it could move.

I ran.

Feet slipping in the mud, arms flailing, part of my brain screaming that once I left the hacked path I'd be lost forever. A future exhibit of bones for some luckier archaeologist to find. Hopefully not in a pile of jaguar poop.

The lizard part of my brain didn't care about navigation. It cared about the claws tearing through the brush behind me and the plants snapping as two hundred pounds of apex predator closed the distance. How long? Five seconds? One?

I kept running. I wasn't going to die lying down.

I tripped. Stumbled down a small incline.

Looked up — a broken opening in a stone-carved wall, a few feet off the ground.

I scrambled toward it, ducked under an overhanging slab, heard a growl and a heavy thump behind me.

My arms slid out of the backpack straps and I dove through the opening, hit the stone floor in a graceless roll of elbows and knees — diving onto stone: not recommended — and scrambled around to block the entrance.

Too late. But I didn't need to.

The jaguar couldn't fit. He shoved his head through, growling, then pulled back and swiped a paw in my direction. I scooted across the stone floor, staring, as he rammed his muscled bulk against the wall again and again. It didn't budge.

Thank you, ancient architects. I'd have kissed the floor if I weren't actively questioning what had been living on it. I checked. Surprisingly clean. Odd.

I caught my breath while the jaguar — really, it was stunningly beautiful — kept trying to force its way in.

Thank god I'd lost weight from a week of jungle trekking or I wouldn't have fit through the opening myself.

That cat would have had me for breakfast, then dragged the leftovers up a tree like something out of a National Geographic special.

I scooted back until I hit the wall behind me. The chamber was small — a hallway before a collapse, from the look of it, lit only by the faint light filtering in around the jaguar's growling head.

I stood slowly, keeping my eyes on my new friend. Then turned to see what I'd bumped into, praying it wasn't something straight out of Indiana Jones. Bodies on spikes. A wall of tarantulas. I shivered at the thought.

Nothing with more legs than me. But the stone wall was covered in symbols and carvings, and when I focused on them, my archaeologist brain elbowed my panic brain aside.

I didn't recognize most of the writing. It looked nothing like the carvings at Tierradentro or any other Colombian site I'd studied.

Either my adrenaline-scrambled brain was misfiring, or I'd stumbled onto something remarkable.

One good thing about Mansplaining Mike: he was big on redundancy. He'd issued us all tool belts — flashlight, multitool, flare, the works. I unclipped the flashlight and swept the beam across the chamber.

A rustle behind me. I spun, heart slamming into my throat.

Just the jaguar. Still watching from the entrance. Still furious.

I turned back. I didn't know what to make of this place, or how I was getting out, but I was certain of one thing: I was moving in the opposite direction of the cat.

In the farthest corner, I found an opening at floor level that wasn't fully blocked. The flashlight showed nothing waiting on the other side. I got on my belly and slithered through.

The second chamber was different. My flashlight was reflecting brighter than it should have — something in the stone, phosphorescent or obsidian-like — and there was a hum filling the air. Low. Steady. I could feel it in the floor through my boots.

I pushed my sweat-soaked bangs off my forehead and looked around. I still needed to find a way out that didn't involve a hungry jaguar, then navigate back to the path, then get to camp. My shoulders slumped. Still up a creek.

But these walls — I squinted. The symbols here were different from the first chamber.

Some of them I recognized: San Agustín motifs, well-known to anyone who'd studied Colombian archaeology.

But they were mixed with the same unfamiliar writing from the hallway, interlocking with it, as if two systems had been laid over each other.

I'd seen enough cheesy sci-fi to know this was where the ancient alien tech was supposed to be hidden.

A stone column stood in the center of the room, and the carving wound up it in a single unbroken spiral — two parallel channels cut side by side the whole way, close enough to touch and never quite touching.

I filed it under things to photograph when I came back with a working camera and a colleague who would not laugh at me.

I reached out, paused, considered.

Nah. I touched it. What was the worst that could happen?

For a second — just a second — I thought I felt something. A hum. Low and steady, vibrating up through the stone and into my palm, as if the walls themselves were resonating at a frequency just below hearing. The hairs on my arms stood up.

Then it stopped. Or I decided it had never started. No beam of light. No hidden chamber opening. No alien tech activating. I laughed until the sound echoed back at me, wiped my eyes — laughter, not despair — and let go of the column.

Nothing had happened. Of course it hadn't. Aliens weren't real.

Would've been nice, though. A beam of light transporting me back to camp. I sighed. Time to keep moving.

Except the way I'd come in still had a jaguar attached to it.

When I crawled back toward the first chamber and listened, I could hear him — the rasp of claws on stone, a huff, the unhurried pacing of a predator with nowhere better to be.

Great. I retreated to the humming chamber, sat with my back against the column, and waited him out, checking my watch by flashlight every time I was sure an hour had passed.

Usually it had been six minutes. It took two real hours for the jungle outside to settle back into ordinary bird-and-bug noise, and I gave it another paranoid half hour on top of that before I trusted it.

Even then, I was not crawling out the front door on the off chance he was lying in ambush like the world's most patient bouncer.

I went looking for another way out instead, and the temple did not make it easy: every passage I tried was collapsed, or narrowed to nothing, or ended in rubble I wasn't brave enough to climb over in the dark.

Most of another hour went to dead ends and backtracking.

Then I crawled through one more partially collapsed room and found stairs — proper stone steps spiraling up around a central column.

Bats, maybe. But up was better than staying down here with no exit.

The top of the stairs did not lead to a chamber of emeralds, gold carvings, or even a crown I could put on. Disappointing. But the staircase opened onto the roof of the building, with a stone overhang to keep rain off. These ancients knew what they were doing.

And from this height — the jungle stretched to the horizon. There. A small clearing. Our camp.

"Hello! Hey! I'm up here!"

Then I remembered: yelling my location with a killer jaguar wandering below was maybe not the play. I sat down, leaned back, and took a breath. Now that I wasn't about to die imminently, the exhaustion hit like a wall.

The gadgets on my tool belt dug into my back. I groaned and reached for the buckle — and remembered the flare.

Mike, I take back every mean thing I ever thought about you. Absolute genius.

Yes, a flare was basically yelling, with fireworks — if the jaguar was still in the zip code, I'd be advertising.

But he couldn't reach me up here, the team could not possibly find me without it, and dying unfound in a jungle lost to every version of getting spotted.

Calculated risk. I did the math in about four seconds.

I unclipped the flare, stripped the packaging, flipped the safety, stepped out from under the overhang, aimed up, and pressed the button.

Bang. Woosh.

I jumped and screamed. So much for not alerting the local wildlife that Taylor's Tasty Treats was available on the roof, ready for easy pickings.

Nothing came. No jaguars, no snakes. Just birds shrieking in the canopy. I did a slow circle, then sat, then lay down. Exhausted. I just needed to stay awake until the team found me...

I woke with a jerk.

Couldn't tell what had woken me. No unusual sounds. Nothing moving. But according to my watch — if the dive through the temple opening hadn't killed it — five hours had passed since I'd fired the flare.

Five hours. I hadn't lain down long enough to lose five. I could've sworn it had been one at most. But the second hand was ticking. Weird.

I pushed myself up with a groan. The team should have come by now. Then a low hum rose behind me. My shoulders dropped. Finally—the team.

"Hey! Over here! I'm up here!"

I waved my arms, licking dry lips. They had to be close. I couldn't wait to see someone with water. My canteen was down at the base of the building, still on my abandoned backpack, and there was no way I was climbing back through that temple until I was sure the jaguar had moved on.

The humming grew louder. I turned in a circle, trying to spot the team. I couldn't place the sound — no equipment I knew of hummed like that. A GPS locator was silent. And I was the one carrying the mapping tech.

Louder still. Hands on my hips, I frowned. It was vibrating in my back teeth now.

The one thing I didn't do was look up.

I should have. I really should have. But it wouldn't have mattered.

When I finally sensed someone behind me and spun around, the ship was already there — hovering above the temple, massive and silent except for that hum.

And on the roof with me: a huge, upright lizard with a tail, wearing something that looked like an orange leather snowsuit, pointing a short stick at my chest.

A lizard person. Of course it was a lizard person. Somewhere down there, every podcast guy in a tinfoil hat was owed an apology, and I was clearly not going to live long enough to deliver it.

I opened my mouth to scream.

Then nothing.