10. Taylor
TAYLOR
Iwoke up warm for the first time since the crash and immediately suspicious about why.
The thermal blanket was the same useless alien foil rectangle it had been every night.
The fire was dead. The elevation was higher and, if anything, it should have been colder up here.
And yet I'd slept like I was in my own bed back in Minneapolis, wrapped in my weighted blanket with the heater running.
Kel was across the fire pit, already up, already doing his perimeter thing.
Alert and composed, not a hair out of place.
I watched him in the pre-dawn light — the bioluminescence was fading but not gone, and the soft blue-green glow made his silver skin look like something out of a fever dream.
His markings were low, barely visible. He moved through the trees like water, checking the sensors, scanning.
"The elevation agrees with your biology," he'd said when I mentioned it.
Sure. The elevation. Not the six-and-a-half-foot alien furnace who had definitely been back on his own side of the fire pit by the time I opened my eyes.
Not a romance novel. Classic shared-crisis attachment, that's all.
Mammals seek heat sources in cold. Science, not something more.
I repeated all of it to myself firmly while packing up camp.
We trekked for four hours before we hit the river.
And when I say "river," I mean a wide, fast-moving body of turquoise water cutting through the jungle like someone had drawn a line with a giant blue-green marker.
At least fifty feet across, current strong enough that debris raced across the surface.
Too wide to jump. Too fast to swim. No visible crossing point.
Kel stood on the bank and scanned with his device. I stood next to him and looked across.
That's when I saw them. Through the tree line on the far bank, partially obscured by massive ferns: structures.
Stone structures. Not natural formations — I'd staked my entire career on being able to tell the difference.
These were built. Walls. Archways. What looked like the remains of a tower, crumbling but unmistakable.
My entire body went electric.
"Ruins," I breathed. "Kel, there are ruins on the other side."
He glanced across. "Kethari, most likely. This continent has extensive remnants."
"We need to go there."
"The crossing is not feasible at this point. We continue along the bank until—"
"We NEED to go there, Kel."
He looked at me. Looked at the ruins. Looked back at me. "It is off our route. Every deviation adds time and risk."
"I know, but—"
"We have four days of rations remaining and approximately fifteen days of travel. The margin is already gone."
"I understand the math, but—"
"Then you understand why we will continue along the river."
He started walking downstream. I stood on the bank, staring at the ruins, physically aching.
This was what I'd spent my entire adult life studying.
Dead civilizations. The things they left behind.
And these weren't human ruins — these were ALIEN ruins from a species that had vanished across multiple star systems twelve thousand years ago and they were RIGHT THERE and I was going to walk past them because of a math problem.
I followed him. Of course I followed him. I was on an alien planet and he was my only chance of survival and picking a fight over archaeology when we were rationing food was objectively stupid.
Also, I was starting to worry about the food situation more than I was admitting.
The caloric deficit that had been a dull background ache on day three was a genuine problem by day four.
My hands shook when I retied my boot laces.
My vision went gray at the edges when I stood too fast, and the water nausea had settled into a permanent low-grade queasiness.
Then there was the rash: small raised bumps along my forearms and hands, itching deep enough to feel like it belonged to a layer of skin I didn't know I had.
Alien pollen or spores had apparently chosen me as their first human colony.
Kel had noticed. Every time I scratched, his gaze cut to my arms with the expression I'd learned meant he was calculating variables he couldn't control.
But I grumbled. I grumbled at a professional level. I grumbled with the sustained intensity of someone whose entire academic career had just been dangled in front of her and snatched away.
"This is like finding the Library of Alexandria intact and walking past because you're late for a meeting."
He didn't respond.
"Do you know what archaeologists on Earth would give to see an alien ruin? Literally anything. Their careers. Their savings. Their firstborn children. I know a professor who would sell a kidney."
Nothing.
"I'm just saying, when we get to civilization and someone asks 'did you document the Kethari ruins on Zha'kari,' I'm going to have to say 'yes, from memory, at a dead run, because Kel wanted to stay on schedule.'"
He walked faster. I walked faster to keep up.
"And you'll be known as the guy who—"
I stopped talking. Because I'd looked down.
The stone along the riverbank wasn't random.
It was laid — flat and fitted, parallel to the water in a band about three feet wide.
Worn smooth by millennia of weather, but the joints between the stones were still visible.
And carved into the surface at regular intervals — small symbols. Directional markers.
I crouched. Traced a symbol with my finger. My heart was hammering and for once it had nothing to do with fear.
"This is a road," I said. "Or a path. Intentional construction, laid stone, directional carvings every..." I measured with my hand. "Every two meters or so. Kel, this is a maintained route. It was GOING somewhere."
He stopped. Turned. Came back.
I followed the markers. They led upstream, away from the direction Kel had been heading, but only for about thirty meters before they turned sharply toward the river. And there, beneath a layer of silt and accumulated debris, hidden under the water's surface, stepping stones.
Large, flat stones formed a submerged path across the river. The water ran over them, obscuring them unless you knew to look. Unless you'd followed the markers.
I turned to Kel with the smuggest look I have ever worn in my entire life. And I have been smug before. This was a personal best.
"I'm sorry, what were you saying about the crossing not being feasible?"
He looked at the stepping stones. He looked at me. His markings flickered bright and I was pretty sure that was the Valorian equivalent of "okay, you got me." He nodded once. Single, sharp.
We crossed. The stones were slippery with algae but solid — whoever had placed them had used dense stone that hadn't eroded significantly in twelve thousand years.
The water came up to my knees at the deepest point.
Kel kept a firm grip on my hand, his massive frame anchoring us both against the rushing current as I carefully tested each stone before committing my weight.
The far bank. The ruins.
"Five minutes," he said.
"Fifteen."
"Seven."
"Ten and I'll stop complaining about the food for one whole day."
He considered this. "Ten minutes."
I was already running.
The ruins were stunning. Even crumbling, even swallowed by jungle, they were clearly the work of a sophisticated civilization.
The stone was a deep red-black, different from the surrounding rock, which meant they'd quarried it from elsewhere.
The joints were precise — no mortar visible, just perfectly cut stone fitted so tightly that even after twelve millennia, most joints were still flush.
And the carvings.
I pressed my hands against a wall and felt my throat tighten.
Carvings covered every surface. Not decorative — narrative.
Sequential panels showing figures, structures, bodies.
A story. Told in stone. Just like humans had done on Earth for tens of thousands of years.
Different species, different planet, same impulse: we were here. This is what we knew. Remember us.
And then my brain did the thing it does — the pattern-matching thing that had gotten me through grad school and into trouble in equal measure.
The symbols. Some of them were unfamiliar, completely alien.
But the visual grammar — the way the panels were structured, the spiral motifs, the repeating geometric language — nagged at me.
I'd seen something like this before. Not identical.
Not even close. But the underlying logic, the way the symbols interlocked...
The Colombian temple. The chamber I'd fallen into while running from the jaguar.
The strange carvings I hadn't been able to place — the ones that didn't match any known South American archaeological tradition.
I'd touched the stone column in the center of that room like an idiot, half expecting something to happen.
Nothing had happened. Except for the hum. That low vibration in the stone that I'd felt for half a second and then talked myself out of. The hum that I now realized sounded exactly like the harmonic that lived under Kel's voice.
Then, after the missing hours my watch could not explain, I woke on a slave ship.
My hands went cold against the alien stone.
Coincidence. It had to be coincidence. An ancient civilization from another part of the galaxy couldn't have left carvings in a Colombian jungle.
That was insane. That was the kind of theory that got you laughed out of academic conferences and relegated to the ancient-aliens-conspiracy table at career fairs.
But I was standing on an alien planet reading twelve-thousand-year-old carvings that my archaeologist's brain kept insisting looked like cousins of the ones I'd found on Earth.
And I filed that thought away in the part of my mind labeled things I will absolutely investigate later when I'm not being marched through a jungle by a glowing alien, and kept reading.
My hands were shaking. Not from cold, not from fear. From the sheer overwhelming privilege of being the first person from my planet to touch this.
"They're telling a story," I said, mostly to myself.
"The panels read left to right, top to bottom — the touch-wear on the stone runs that way, panel to panel.
These figures here, see the repeated motif?
Leader, deity, ancestor — I can't know which.
And these —" I pointed at a series of circles in descending sizes.
"Could be star charts. Could be a solar-system diagram.
The sequence may be cosmological — creation, migration, something else.
I can't translate the symbols, but the structure is narrative. They carved a story into the walls."
I was tracing the visual grammar of twelve-thousand-year-old alien stone carvings, and I didn't care that I couldn't actually translate the symbols.
The layout established sequence, repetition, and emphasis even when the content remained unknown.
Civilizations across the universe apparently shared the same fundamental urge: to leave a story before they disappeared.
I turned around. Kel was standing at the entrance to the ruin, weapon ready, watching the tree line. Guarding me while I geeked out over dead alien civilization.
But he wasn't just watching for threats.
He was watching me. I caught him turning back to the trees a half second after I turned, but I saw it.
He'd been watching my face. And his markings were doing that steady, warm glow that I was beginning to associate with...
something specific. Something that wasn't "various stimuli. "
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing." He checked his scanner. "Your ten minutes have elapsed."
"Already?" I looked at the walls. There was so much more. SO much more. I could spend weeks here. Months. A lifetime.
"Taylor." Just my name, in that voice with the harmonic underneath — the vibration that hummed below the word like the ruins themselves were speaking through him.
"I know." I stepped back from the wall. Ran my fingers over one last carved symbol — a spiral, possibly representing a galaxy, possibly something else entirely. "I know."
We left the ruins. I kept looking back until the jungle swallowed them. My chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with physical exertion.
We walked in silence for a while. Then Kel said, without looking at me: "When we reach the outpost, I can arrange to send a report to the Galactic Archaeological Council about the site. With your observations as primary documentation."
I stopped walking.
"Your analysis of the directional markers, the stone construction, and the narrative carvings was detailed and accurate. The Council would find value in a firsthand report."
I stared at the back of his head. He kept walking.
"Are you..." I jogged to catch up. "Are you offering to publish my alien archaeological findings?"
"I am offering to ensure your observations reach the appropriate academic body. Under my name, until yours can carry it."
"Kel." I grabbed his arm without thinking. He went rigid. Light raced across his skin under my touch, bright enough to cast shadows. I let go quickly. "Sorry. But — seriously?"
"Your expertise has value. It should be recognized."
He said it simply. Like it was obvious. Like of course my knowledge mattered, of course my work should be documented, of course the things I noticed were important.
No one had ever said that to me so plainly before.
My professors had qualified it. My advisors had told me my niche was too narrow.
The grant committees had told me my work was "interesting but not fundable.
" And this alien, this stoic, secretive-in-the-dark alien, had looked at my excitement over twelve-thousand-year-old stone carvings and decided it had value.
My eyes stung. I turned away before he could see.
"Thanks," I said. Casual. Light. Like my entire worldview wasn't rearranging itself.
"You are welcome."
We kept walking. And for the first time, I didn't grumble about the pace.