7. Kel
KEL
The translator reached usable accuracy late on our second morning, and I immediately wished it hadn't.
Over the next three hours, she talked. Constantly. Without pause, without apparent need for breath, and with a fluency of complaint that I had never encountered in any species across twelve star systems.
She talked to herself. Extended monologues about her physical discomfort, the temperature, the humidity, the inadequacy of her footwear, and something called "coffee" that she appeared to need with the desperation of an addict in withdrawal.
She described this substance in such vivid and longing detail that I briefly considered it might be a controlled stimulant.
She talked to the jungle. She addressed trees that blocked her path as if they had personally offended her. She narrated her own progress through the underbrush in what I gathered was meant to be humorous. She greeted insects.
She named things.
A six-legged ground predator broke from the ferns on our second morning, low to the ground and fast, its jaw opening in three hinged sections as it charged.
I drew my sidearm and fired into the path a handspan before its front feet.
Soil erupted. The creature skidded sideways, all six legs scrabbling for purchase, and she stopped behind my shoulder instead of running.
"Hey, Kevin," she said, breathless.
The predator looked at her. Looked at the smoking crater. And left.
"See? Kevin gets it," she said. "Kevin knows when he's not wanted."
I did not understand the significance of the name Kevin.
I did not understand how she had decided this creature was a Kevin.
I did not understand why the creature had responded to being addressed as though it were a social acquaintance.
I added these to the rapidly growing list of things I did not understand about this species.
Among my people, you did not name a thing unless you intended to claim responsibility for it.
A weapon was named. A ship was named. A bonded mate was named.
A scavenger on a jungle path was assessed, categorized, and forgotten.
She named everything. She was either claiming the entire planet or her species had a fundamentally different relationship with naming than mine did.
I suspected the latter, but with this alien, I could not be certain.
She also talked to the food. Each emergency ration bar was greeted with a new variation of disgust. "Hello, sadness rectangle.
" "Back again, flavor void." "Oh good, compressed misery for breakfast." She ate them all.
Completely. She never wasted food despite her vocal contempt for it.
But the rations were designed for Valorian biology, not hers, and the gap was widening.
She was burning fuel faster than she could absorb it, and it was starting to show in her face.
Her body ran hot and constant, like an engine with no idle setting, and the bars were not giving her enough.
Already, the slight tremor in her hands when she unwrapped each bar told me what she would not: she was starving by degrees.
And she was hiding it from me with the same stubborn competence she applied to everything.
And she talked to me.
"So, Glow Stick. That's what I'm calling you until you tell me your name.
Because of the —" She waved her hand at my forearms. "The light-up situation.
Which, by the way, we are going to discuss at some point, because that's not normal.
Well, I guess I don't know what's normal for you.
Maybe all of your species do the glow thing.
Maybe you're the weird one who doesn't glow enough.
Maybe I'm glow-shaming you and I should apologize. "
She did not apologize.
"You know what, let's start with the basics." She stopped walking, which forced me to stop as well since she was behind me and had proven she would simply stand still and yell if I got too far ahead. She pointed at herself. "Taylor." She enunciated clearly. "Tay-lor."
I looked at her. By then, the translator had been feeding me her words for the full three-hour stretch with increasing accuracy. I understood her perfectly. She did not know this.
I should tell her. Communication was tactically essential. We needed to coordinate on navigation, threat response, rationing, pace. Every hour without verbal communication was a liability.
What I could not reconcile was the crying.
She had cried the previous night — briefly, silently, turned away from me, her shoulders shaking while she thought I was asleep.
The resonance had delivered her grief as pressure — sharp-edged, heavy, with a texture I had no name for.
Who or what it was for, the bond did not say; it gave me the weight of the thing, not its contents.
She had stopped within minutes, wiped her face, and gone to sleep.
Among Valorians, grief was communal. You brought it before your clan and they held it with you until it diminished.
The idea of processing loss alone, in silence, hiding it from the only other being present, was incomprehensible to me.
I did not mistake it for weakness; I simply could not understand a culture that treated grief as private and needing comfort as a concession rather than a biological necessity.
It explained the self-sufficiency. It also explained why the self-sufficiency looked, through the resonance, like it cost her so much.
I should tell her.
"Taylor," she repeated, jabbing her thumb at her chest. Then she pointed at me with an expectant look.
The problem was that the moment I revealed I could understand her, she would ask questions.
Specifically, she would ask about the markings.
She had been observing them with an analytical intensity that suggested a trained mind.
She had already conducted proximity experiments, moving closer and farther to gauge my markings' response.
She was building a hypothesis. Once she could ask direct questions, she would test it.
And I was not prepared to explain resonance to a being who did not know my species existed until two days ago.
She was still pointing at me. Waiting.
I was a coward. A decorated retrieval specialist with eight years of exemplary service and seventeen successful extractions, and I was afraid of a conversation with a creature half my size.
"Kel'vran," I said.
She attempted to repeat it. What came out was not recognizable as my name in any dialect. She tried three more times, each worse than the last, her face contorting with effort.
"Kel," she finally said, truncating it with the decisiveness of someone who had tried and was done trying. "You're Kel now. Deal with it."
Kel. No Valorian had ever addressed me without the full formal designation.
My commanding officers used my rank prefix.
My handler Renn used the full designation, and clipped it to Kel only when he had stopped being my handler for a moment and was just Renn.
No one else called me Kel at all. It was not a name. It was barely a syllable.
I did not correct her.
"Okay, Kel." She said it like she was testing the weight of it. "I'm Taylor. Taylor Jennings, if aliens do last names. Human. From Earth. That's my planet. It's..." She looked up at the canopy. "Really far from here, I'm guessing."
I said nothing.
"Right, you don't understand me. That's fine.
I'm going to keep talking anyway because if I stop talking I'm going to think about the fact that I am on an alien planet with no way home and I will have a complete mental breakdown, and neither of us wants that.
" She started walking again. "So you get the Taylor commentary track. Free of charge. You're welcome."
During those three hours, she continued almost without pause.
I learned that she was an archaeologist — someone who studied the remnants of dead civilizations on her planet.
That her specialty was pre-Columbian South American cultures, which I gathered were from a specific region of her world.
That she had been in the jungle on her planet as a volunteer, paying her own way onto the expedition because no one in her field would pay her to be there.
That she lived in a place called Minneapolis that she described as "frozen hell for five months of the year and mosquito hell for three and tolerable for four.
" That she had a degree she'd spent six years earning and still couldn't find stable employment in her field, because — as she explained with some heat — her planet produced far more archaeologists than it was willing to pay.
She told me all of this freely and openly, as if I were a wall she was bouncing words off of. And perhaps that's what she thought — that I was a receptive surface that couldn't understand or judge.
She told me that she missed her mother, who she called every Sunday. She said this quietly, between other things, and then immediately covered it with a joke about how her mother would react to her being abducted by aliens. "She'd find a way to blame it on me not wearing a jacket."
Her grief hit sharp and fresh. Quickly buried under determination.
She was remarkable. I had not intended to form that assessment.
It was not tactically relevant. But she had been ripped from everything she knew, thrown into circumstances that would shatter most beings, and she was walking through an alien jungle naming predators and making jokes about the food.
Her fear was constant, I could feel it, a low hum underneath everything else, but it never stopped her.
I had trained for years to operate under fear. She appeared to do it naturally.
"Hey, question," she said from behind me.
"And I know you can't answer, but I'm asking anyway.
Where are we going? Because we've been walking southwest for —" She checked a device on her wrist. "— four hours today, and I'm assuming you have a destination because you don't seem like the wandering-aimlessly type. "
I stopped. Turned. She nearly walked into my chest, caught herself, stepped back. My markings flared at the proximity and I watched her eyes drop to my forearms, register the glow, and snap back to my face with that knowing look I was beginning to dread.
I should tell her I understood her. She deserved to know. Keeping it from her was dishonest and served no purpose except my own discomfort.
"We are traveling to a trading outpost," I said.
She stared at me.
"It is called Vel'kari Station. It is located on the southwestern coast of this continent. The planet is called Zha'kari. At our current pace, we will reach it in approximately eighteen days."
She continued to stare.
"The outpost will have communications equipment, transport options, and—"
"You speak English."
"Your language has been translating through my neural interface since approximately three hours ago.
I moved the module into my interface the first night, once it was clear the helmet was not going back on.
" I tapped the bone behind my ear. "It runs both directions.
Mine into yours, aloud, when I permit it. "
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Her face cycled through an impressive range of expressions: surprise and confusion, and then a slow, dawning fury that I felt through the resonance like approaching fire.
"Three hours."
"The calibration required—"
"You have understood every single word I've said for the last THREE HOURS?"
"Yes."
"And you could have answered me. Out loud. This entire time." She said it slowly, like she was checking her own arithmetic and hoping to find the error. "You let me talk at you for three hours knowing I thought I was alone."
"The translation is not perfect. Some idioms do not—"
"I told you about my student loans, Kel. I told you about the time I accidentally set my microwave on fire making ramen. I told you — oh my god." She pressed her hands to her face. "I told you about my MOM."
"I—"
"I called you Glow Stick to your FACE."
Her emotions through the bond were a chaotic storm: embarrassment and anger, and underneath it something I identified as hurt. She had been vulnerable. She had thought she was speaking to someone who couldn't understand, and she had been honest in a way she might not have been otherwise.
I had taken that honesty without her consent.
"I apologize," I said. "I should have informed you immediately."
"Yeah. You should have." She crossed her arms. Her jaw was tight. Then she exhaled, the tension draining from her shoulders. "Okay. Okay, we're going to table the betrayal of trust for now because I have about nine hundred questions and they've been piling up for two days."
"I will answer what I can."
"Great. First question." She pointed at my forearms. "What's with the glowing?"
"It is a biological response. Common to my species."
"A biological response to WHAT?"
I held her gaze. She held mine. The jungle hummed around us. My markings pulsed.
"Various stimuli," I said.
She narrowed her eyes. Her disbelief hit me like a physical pressure.
"Uh huh," she said, in a tone that made it clear she was not remotely satisfied with that answer. "Various stimuli. Right."
She turned and started walking again. Then stopped. Turned back.
"Eighteen days?"
"Approximately."
"Eighteen days of walking through an alien jungle."
"Yes."
"With no coffee."
"I do not know what coffee is."
"It's the only thing standing between me and complete civilizational collapse, and the fact that this entire planet doesn't have any might actually be the worst part of being abducted by aliens."
She turned again and resumed walking. Ahead of me this time, which was incorrect. I needed to lead to identify threats. I caught up in three strides and moved in front of her.
"I lead."
"Oh, now you want to talk. Three hours of golden silence and NOW you're chatty."
She was not going to let this go. I could feel it.
Seventeen days, twenty-one hours remaining.