12. Taylor
TAYLOR
Something had changed and he wouldn't tell me what.
Since the ridge that morning, since whoever he'd talked to on his busted communicator, Kel had been different.
Faster. More alert. He barely slept, and I knew this because I barely slept either, and every time I cracked an eye open in the dark he was sitting upright, scanning the tree line with those violet cat eyes.
He wouldn't tell me why. Beyond the bare minimum, "the slavers might be tracking us", he'd locked down like a vault. Military mode. Perimeter checks doubled. A longer march than any day before it. Shorter breaks.
Anger buzzed under my skin, but exhaustion sat in my bones, and every time his gaze snapped to the tree line my stomach tightened. Kel didn't get scared. He got efficient. And the more efficient he got, the more I understood we were in real trouble.
I pressed. He deflected. I pressed harder until he said something in Valorian that cut through my questions like a blade. His translator flattened the emotional register on its way to me, but the tone was clear: drop it.
"You've given me the alien equivalent of 'don't worry your pretty little head about it' and I'm done."
I did stop pressing him. But the hurt lingered — being treated as cargo instead of a person when my own life was at stake.
By day seven, my body was falling apart in ways I couldn't joke through anymore.
Blistered feet. Disintegrating clothes. Sunburned on sunburn.
The rash had spread from my forearms to my shoulders, and when I scratched it — which was constantly — the skin underneath came away raw and weeping.
My hands shook when I tried to grip things, a fine persistent tremor that I hid by keeping my fists closed.
I'd stopped being able to eat the full rations Kel portioned out because the alien protein sat in my stomach like wet cement, and twice that morning I'd had to stop walking to dry-heave behind a tree while pretending I was just catching my breath.
The caloric math was getting real. I was burning more than I could absorb.
My body was metabolizing itself — I could feel it in the way my clothes hung looser, the way my legs trembled on inclines that hadn't challenged me three days ago.
Breathing the jungle's pollen and spores had started as a mild burn behind my sternum and settled into permanent pressure, as if someone had placed a warm hand on my chest and was slowly pressing down.
My vision grayed at the edges every time I stood up too fast.
I would have killed for coffee. I would have killed for anything my body actually knew how to process.
The storm hit without warning.
One moment: hot, humid, the usual Zha'kari jungle misery. The next: the canopy above us turned black and the air pressure dropped so fast my ears popped. Kel's head snapped up. He said one word in Valorian — his translator rendered it as "atmospheric discharge event" — and grabbed my arm.
"Move. Now."
We ran — actual running instead of the steady trek pace — with Kel half-dragging me through the undergrowth as the sky opened.
The rain was thicker and warmer than anything on Earth, each drop landing with enough weight to sting.
Within seconds I was drenched and blind, stumbling over roots I couldn't see.
Lightning struck. Not normal lightning — it was purple, and it didn't flash and vanish.
It crawled across the canopy in branching filaments that hung in the air for two or three seconds before fading, turning the jungle into a strobe of violet light.
The thunder came simultaneously, so deep it vibrated in my chest cavity and made my teeth ache.
A tree exploded twenty meters to our left.
Not split — exploded. The trunk detonated outward in a spray of wood and bioluminescent sap that splattered the surrounding vegetation in glowing blue streaks.
The concussion knocked me sideways and Kel caught me before I hit the ground, pulling me against his chest with one arm while the other held his weapon up.
"In here." He steered me toward a gap between two massive root systems — a natural hollow where the roots of a tree the size of a building curved up out of the ground and formed something like a cave. Not deep, maybe six feet. But dry. Mostly.
We pressed in. The space was tight enough that my back was against the root wall and Kel was against me, his body between me and the opening, shielding.
His armor was soaked and cold against my bare arms. The rain hammered the root canopy above us and the purple lightning crawled overhead in slow, branching arcs.
"What the hell was that?" I gasped.
"Ion storm. Unique to equatorial jungle regions on high-humidity worlds.
" He scanned the jungle through the opening, weapon raised.
His markings had gone hard and bright, and each breath lifted his armored shoulders too quickly before he forced them still.
"The atmospheric density on Zha'kari produces electrical discharges significantly more powerful than standard.
Considerably more dangerous than a typical storm on most worlds.
The rain carries a mild electrical charge. Extended exposure will produce burns."
"So the rain is literally electrified."
"Mildly."
"That's not reassuring, Kel."
Another tree exploded. Closer this time. The roots above us shuddered and a fine rain of dirt and bark fragments fell on my head. I pressed closer to him involuntarily, and his arm tightened around me before either of us could think, pulling me into the hollow of his chest.
We were breathing hard. Both of us. The storm raged outside and in the close, dark space I could see his markings glowing against his wet skin, casting blue-white light across the root walls. His face was inches from mine. Rain dripped from his jaw.
"How long do these last?" I asked. My voice came out quieter than I intended.
"The duration is variable. Twenty minutes to several hours."
"Several hours. In here."
"Yes."
I was pressed against every line of his body: cold armor over hard muscle, heat gathering wherever the plates ended, the rough catch of his breath above my ear.
His arm was still around me, and the pulse of his markings traveled through my soaked shirt like a second heartbeat.
In their glow, I could see the line of his jaw, the set of his mouth, the way his pupils had dilated in the dark until his eyes were almost black.
He was looking at my mouth. He was absolutely, definitely looking at my mouth.
My heart was hammering and it had nothing to do with the storm.
"Kel," I said.
His expression cracked. Just barely — a fracture in the discipline.
His hand came up, and his thumb brushed a streak of mud off my cheekbone — gentle, careful, his markings flaring white-hot at the contact.
I leaned into his touch without deciding to.
His thumb stilled. His breath caught. His face tilted toward mine, and for one suspended second the space between us was an inch and closing.
A purple lightning bolt struck the root canopy directly above us. The entire structure shuddered and a chunk of bark the size of a dinner plate crashed between us. We jerked apart — or as far apart as you can jerk in a space that's six feet deep — and the moment shattered.
He pulled back. Pressed himself against the opposite wall. His markings were blazing so bright that the root cave was lit like midday.
"The storm is weakening," he said. His voice was not steady.
It wasn't. But I appreciated the lie.
We sat in silence for another fifteen minutes while the rain slowed and the lightning retreated to distant purple flickers on the horizon.
My clothes were soaked. My hair was plastered to my face.
My skin tingled where the charged rain had hit it — not painful, but buzzing, like a low-grade static shock that wouldn't quite stop.
When we finally crawled out, the jungle had changed.
The bioluminescent organisms had gone berserk — every surface glowed in the storm's aftermath, the sap from the exploded trees painting the vegetation in streaks of vivid blue, the fungi on the forest floor pulsing in waves.
It was stunning. Alien and dangerous and beautiful.
I looked at Kel. He was not looking at the jungle. He was looking at me.
Neither of us mentioned what had almost happened in the root cave. But for the rest of the day, his markings didn't dim once, and he walked close enough that our arms brushed on every third step.
After another hour of trekking through the steam-rising undergrowth, the pool appeared like a mirage. A natural basin fed by a waterfall, water cascading over dark red stone into turquoise depths. Steam rose. Warm water.
Kel scanned it before I could get within three feet. He tested the water, the mineral film along the rocks, and the air above the steam. Only after the scanner cleared it for my already-overworked biology did his shoulders loosen by half an inch.
"We do not have time—" Kel started.
"Non-negotiable," I said, already moving toward the pool.
I sat on a flat rock, unbuckled my precious tool belt, and set it carefully beside me before peeling off my boots and socks. My feet were a medical textbook of blisters and rawness.
I stood, grabbed the hem of my shredded t-shirt, pulled it over my head, and tossed it on the rock. Then the remains of my shorts. I was down to my bra and underwear, both of which had seen dramatically better days but were still intact enough to qualify as coverage.
Behind me, Kel made a sound.
It wasn't a word. It wasn't a cough. It was something between a choke and a growl, low and strained, and it came from deep in his chest. I turned to look at him.
His markings were blazing. Not the gentle glow I'd been cataloging for the last week.
BLAZING. Every line on his forearms, his neck, his jaw, lit up like neon, bright enough to cast actual light on the surrounding vegetation.
His violet eyes were wide and his pupils, those slit pupils — were fully dilated.
His entire body had gone rigid, hands fisted at his sides, and as I watched, he spun around so fast I thought he'd heard a threat.
But there was no threat. He was just standing there with his back to me, shoulders locked, breathing through what sounded like gritted teeth.
Oh. OH.
The glow. The "various stimuli." The flickering when I was close, the brightening when I touched him, the way he'd turned away the morning I woke up warm. It wasn't general. It wasn't a medical condition. It wasn't about proximity in the abstract.
It was about me. Specifically. Like this. Without clothes on.
"Problem?" I called sweetly. Because I was petty and exhausted and he'd been freezing me out since that ridge and I had just been handed the most powerful piece of leverage in the known galaxy.
He said something in Valorian. He let his translator carry it, and it arrived in fragments: "You are... without adequate covering."
"It's called swimming. Very common on my planet." I stepped into the pool.
Sweet mother of God.
The water was warm. Not hot — warm in a way that was so perfect it felt intentional, like the planet had calibrated this pool specifically for a destroyed human woman who needed one good thing to happen.
The warmth soaked into my muscles, my joints, my brutalized feet.
I sank in up to my shoulders and made a sound that was borderline indecent.
His markings flared brighter, even with his back turned.
"How's the perimeter looking?" I asked innocently.
His response was clipped. One word in Valorian, and he did not permit the translation.
I floated. I soaked. I scrubbed my skin with handfuls of fine sand from the pool's bottom and watched a week of alien jungle grime dissolve into the water. I washed my hair, which had become a single matted entity, and worked the tangles out with my fingers until it felt like actual hair again.
I took my time. Partly because it was the first moment of physical comfort I'd experienced since Earth. Partly because Kel was standing guard with his back to me, rigid as a tree, markings pulsing in a rhythm I could time from thirty feet away, and I was enjoying that more than I should have been.
Finally, I climbed out and pulled my ruined clothes back on. The fabric was still disgusting but at least the body underneath was clean. I felt human again. Mostly.
"All clear," I said.
He turned. Looked at me. His markings were still elevated but beginning to dim. His jaw was tight. His eyes swept over me once, fast, as if checking for injury, and then locked onto a point somewhere above my left shoulder.
"We should continue," he said.
"We should."
I walked past him, close enough to touch. Light raced through his markings and he made that sound—low and strained, the sound of control fracturing.
"The marking pattern," I said over my shoulder. "We're going to talk about it. Soon. And 'various stimuli' is not going to cut it."
I kept walking. Southwest. Correct direction this time.
I was smiling for the first time in days.
Behind me, Kel made a sound that might have been a Valorian prayer, or might have been a Valorian curse, and followed.
His markings didn't dim for the next hour. I know because I checked. Repeatedly.