8. Taylor
TAYLOR
Iwas never going to forgive him for the three hours thing. Never. I was going to bring it up on my deathbed. "Remember when you understood English for three hours and didn't tell me and I told you about the ramen fire? I'm still mad about that. Avenge me."
Okay, I was probably going to forgive him eventually.
But not today. And honestly? The only reason I was shelving it at all was because the alien jungle was actively trying to eat me and holding a grudge required bandwidth I couldn't spare.
The second I wasn't in mortal danger, we were revisiting this. With a PowerPoint. And footnotes.
Today we walked. And walked. And walked some more.
Through alien jungle that was simultaneously the most beautiful and most terrifying environment I'd ever been in.
By midday my calves shook on every incline, my damp clothes rasped against sunburned skin, and three days of sweat and mud had dried into a gritty second layer I could smell every time I moved.
My body was starting to notice it wasn't on Earth anymore.
Not in a dramatic, collapse-in-a-heap way — in the slow, accumulating way that a wrong environment wears you down.
The warm air was dense with pollen and spores from plants and fungi my immune system had never met.
My first few breaths on Zha'kari had felt amazing, like breathing pure oxygen at a spa.
By day two, the back of my throat was raw and my sinuses burned if I inhaled too sharply.
Every breath carried another dose of something my lungs had not evolved to filter.
The water was worse. Kel dropped a purification tab into every container before I drank, but whatever alien microbes the tabs didn't catch had introduced themselves to my digestive system with enthusiasm.
Nothing catastrophic — no dramatic jungle-floor vomiting, thank god — but a persistent low-grade nausea that I was pretending wasn't happening.
My stomach had been staging a quiet protest since day one and showed no signs of negotiating.
And the ration bars. The ration bars were keeping me alive and not much else.
I was hungry all the time now. Not "I skipped lunch" hungry — "my body is burning more fuel than I'm putting in" hungry.
The deep, gnawing kind that sits behind your sternum and doesn't go away when you eat, just dims for an hour before coming back.
I caught Kel watching me unwrap my half-bar at breakfast with an expression I couldn't read.
He'd been giving me slightly more than half.
I'd noticed. I hadn't said anything because I needed it and pretending I didn't would have been stupid.
Every twenty minutes something tried to kill us. Not quite that often, but it felt like it. Giant flying things with wingspans wider than my arm span. Plants that snapped shut when you walked past them. Something that looked like a vine but moved.
I jumped approximately three feet when the vine-thing brushed my ankle and made a noise that I would describe as a "dignified yelp" and Kel would probably describe as "the female screamed."
"It is a sensory tendril," he said without turning around. "It is cataloging your biological signature. Not dangerous."
"CATALOGING ME?"
"A passive scan. Many plant species here use them for—"
"It's touching me. It's an alien plant and it's touching me."
"It will stop once it has completed its—"
"KEL."
He turned, looked at the tendril wrapped loosely around my ankle, and said something in his own language that sounded vaguely exasperated.
He crouched, touched the tendril with two fingers, and it immediately retracted.
His markings were doing their usual glow-up in my proximity and I was building a very solid case for what "various stimuli" actually meant, but I saved that cross-examination for later.
"Thanks," I muttered, stepping over where the tendril had been. "Add 'plants that grope you' to the list of reasons I want to go home."
The list was long. But I was keeping a second list too, reasons this wasn't the absolute worst, and it was growing faster than I wanted to admit.
The bioluminescence at night. The way the dual moons turned the canopy into something out of a dream.
The double shadows cast by the binary suns — two overlapping outlines of every leaf and vine, slightly offset, so the whole jungle floor looked like a watercolor painting of itself. The archaeology.
Oh god, the archaeology.
Even trekking at breakneck pace through dense jungle, I kept spotting things.
Carved stones half-buried in the underbrush.
Geometric patterns on rock faces that were too regular to be natural.
What looked like a fragment of a road surface, worn smooth, cutting through the forest floor before disappearing under roots.
Whoever had been here before was advanced.
And long gone. And my fingers itched to stop and document everything, but Kel set a pace that made it clear stopping was not in the itinerary.
So I documented the only way I could with no paper and no camera: pacing out every bearing, fixing each carving in memory panel by panel, and reciting the whole sequence back to myself at every water stop until it stuck.
Bad field conditions are not an excuse for bad field notes. They just make you the notebook.
I asked him about it once, pointing at a carved pillar we passed. "Who built that?"
"The Kethari. A civilization that collapsed approximately twelve thousand standard years ago."
"What happened to them?"
"Unknown. They vanished across multiple systems within a single generation. It remains one of the unsolved questions of galactic archaeology."
I stopped walking. "Galactic. Archaeology."
He looked back at me. "Yes."
"There's a field called galactic archaeology."
"The study of extinct civilizations across star systems, yes."
"That's a real job? That people and aliens — do?"
"It is a well-funded academic discipline in most developed systems."
I pressed my hands to the sides of my head because my brain was making sounds that I'm pretty sure brains aren't supposed to make.
Galactic archaeology. An entire discipline studying exactly what I studied, but on a scale I'd never imagined possible.
Ancient civilizations across STAR SYSTEMS. I had spent six years getting a master's degree and four more fighting for grant money to study ruins on one planet and there was an entire galaxy of ruins out there.
"I need a minute," I said, and sat down on the carved pillar.
"We do not have time for—"
"I'm having an existential crisis, Kel. Give me sixty seconds."
He gave me sixty seconds. Exactly. I know because he started walking at the sixty-first second and I had to scramble to catch up.
But even through the crisis, even through the vertigo of realizing that everything I knew was a fraction of a fraction of what existed, there was something underneath it.
Something that felt dangerously like excitement.
Like maybe, in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to me, there was a door opening to something I'd wanted my whole life without knowing it existed.
I shoved that thought down. Survival first. Existential career pivots later.
We made camp that evening in a natural hollow between the roots of one of those massive trees. Kel did his perimeter thing, walking a wide circle, checking for threats, setting up some kind of sensor from the pod's supplies. I gathered what he'd identified as safe fuel and tried to build a fire.
Emphasis on tried. The alien wood did not want to burn. I crouched over my sad little pile of sticks and bark equivalents, using the multitool from my belt to shave thin strips for kindling, and tried every technique I'd learned in the Colombian jungle.
Nothing.
Kel returned, looked at my arrangement, and did something with his weapon — a quick, low-powered shot at the base of the pile. It ignited immediately. Purple flames. Slightly purple, anyway. More lavender. Like the sky.
"Show-off," I said.
He sat across the fire from me. First time sitting down across from each other with nothing to do but talk, and I didn't know where to start. Two days of pent-up questions and now I had too many to pick one.
"So," I said. "You're an alien."
"From your perspective. From my perspective, you are the alien."
"Fair point. What are you? Species-wise."
"Valorian."
"Valorian." I turned it over. It sounded like something from a fantasy novel. "And what do Valorians do? Besides glow mysteriously and refuse to answer questions about it?"
His jaw tightened slightly. A micro-expression. I was getting better at reading him. "Valorians are a spacefaring species. We maintain the largest military fleet in the Galactic Core. I serve as a retrieval specialist for the Valorian Interstellar Authority."
"Retrieval specialist. You retrieve things."
"People, primarily. Hostages. Kidnapping victims. Those taken by slavers."
"So you're like... space search and rescue?"
"The comparison is not inaccurate."
"That's what you were doing on the slave ship. Retrieving someone."
His pause was barely perceptible. "Yes."
"Who?"
"A Valorian diplomat's daughter. She was taken by the Saurok eleven days before I boarded the ship."
"The Saurok — that's the lizard guys? In the orange outfits?"
"Saurok. Yes. They operate one of the largest slave trading networks in the outer systems."
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. "And they took me because..."
"Earth is classified as an uncontacted world. No sanctioned species is permitted to interact with your planet. The Saurok violated this classification when they abducted you. A human from an uncontacted world would be extremely rare in the galactic slave market. Extremely valuable."
My stomach dropped. "Valuable."
"I do not say this to frighten you."
"Too late."
He looked at me across the fire. The purple light caught the planes of his face and made his violet eyes catch the light like something predatory and beautiful. His markings were a steady low glow. "You are under my protection. The Saurok will not take you again."
He said it like a fact. Like gravity. The Saurok would not take me again because he would not allow it, and I believed him. The absolute certainty in his eyes caught me low in the body — one warm, startling pull that had no business existing beside fear.
"Okay," I said. "What about the diplomat's daughter? Did you get her out?"
Another pause. Longer this time. "No. The ship was attacked by a rival faction, Korvathi raiders, before I could reach her cell block. The structural damage cut off access. I was unable to complete the extraction."
"So she's still out there? Still with the slavers?"
"I have incomplete information. My communications equipment was damaged in the crash. The pod's emergency beacon fired automatically on impact, before the array failed. The Authority knows I came down, and roughly where."
"And they're not coming."
"The Authority does not scramble a retrieval for a specialist who is off-assignment and still transmitting vitals.
The beacon gives them an approximate search ellipse under canopy, not a landing point, and no craft can safely put down here.
I am expected to walk out." A pause. "A secondary team may have been deployed for the diplomat's daughter. "
"May have been."
"Communications have been intermittent."
I stared at the purple fire. A girl was out there, somewhere in space, taken by the same monsters that had taken me. And the guy who was supposed to rescue her was sitting across a campfire on a jungle planet because he'd grabbed me instead.
"Why me?" I asked quietly. "Why did you take me instead of going after her?"
The question hung in the air between us. The fire crackled. His markings pulsed once brighter, then settled.
"The ship was failing. Your cell block was the only one accessible. Leaving you to die was not an acceptable outcome."
It was the right answer. The noble answer. But something about the way he'd said it, too carefully, too controlled, made me think it wasn't the whole answer.
I let it go. For now.
"Okay. One more question for tonight. Your markings. 'Various stimuli' is not an explanation. They changed when you talked about leaving that girl behind, and again when you said leaving me to die wasn't acceptable. Your body keeps answering questions you won't."
His markings brightened. Even he could not pretend otherwise.
"I am not prepared to give you the whole answer."
"Then say that instead of pretending there isn't one."
"There is an answer."
"And you're choosing not to trust me with it."
He said nothing. I turned away from the fire before he could give me another controlled fragment. This was not over.
I lay down on my side of the fire, pulled the thermal blanket from the pod around my shoulders, and stared at the bioluminescent canopy above. Two moons were visible through a gap in the leaves — one gold, one pink. Alien moons. Alien sky. Alien planet.
Alien man who glowed when I got close to him and wouldn't tell me why.
I should be terrified. I was, partly. But there was another feeling there too, warm and stubborn and entirely unhelpful, and I identified it with the same clinical detachment I used for cataloging artifacts.
Curiosity. Trust. The beginnings of something I absolutely was not going to name.
I rolled onto my side, putting my back to him and his infuriating glow.
"Goodnight, Glow Stick," I said.
There was a long silence. Then, very quietly: "Goodnight, Taylor."
His voice was soft. No translation artifact, no clipped military tone. Just my name in his real voice, low and warm, and I felt it in the center of my chest like a match striking.
I stared at the dark and didn't sleep for a very long time.