14. Taylor
TAYLOR
Iwasn't going to ask again.
I'd made the boundary clear. The next time the glow came up, he would answer or admit he would not.
Until then, I was done asking. If he wanted to walk through an alien jungle lit up like a Times Square billboard every time I got within arm's reach and pretend that was normal, that was his business.
I was not going to think about the way his skin had felt under my fingers.
The warmth. The way the markings had responded to my touch like they were alive, like they recognized me.
The sound he'd made, barely audible and dragged out from underneath every layer of Valorian composure, when my fingertips grazed the glowing line along his shoulder.
I was not going to think about the look in his eyes when he'd caught my wrist. The way his thumb had found my pulse with unerring precision, as if he knew exactly where to press. The way his eyes had held mine with an intensity that made my chest tight and my brain blank.
Definitely not thinking about any of that.
I had theories. I'd been building theories for days, and last night's data had narrowed the field considerably. The markings responded to me specifically. Threats, weather, food, fire, and jungle did not affect them the way my proximity, my touch, and my skin did.
If he were human, I'd call it attraction.
Clear, unambiguous physical response to another person.
But he wasn't human. And alien biology could mean anything.
Maybe his species glowed around potential food sources.
Maybe I smelled like something important on his planet. Maybe it was an allergic reaction.
But the way he'd looked at me last night wasn't allergic. And the way he'd held my wrist wasn't clinical. And the sound he'd made, that low and helpless sound when I'd touched his markings, that wasn't anything except exactly what it sounded like.
I was in trouble. Capital-T Trouble. The kind of trouble where you're stranded on an alien planet with a gorgeous and glowing alien man who won't talk about his feelings but whose body broadcasts them in bioluminescent HD, and you're developing feelings right back despite every survival instinct telling you this is a spectacularly bad idea.
So. Day eight. Walking. Not talking about any of it.
We'd been moving in tense silence for about three hours when a rhythmic, mechanical whine cut through the ambient jungle noise. Not an animal. Not weather. I recognized it because I'd heard it on the slave ship — the whine of technology.
I stopped. Kel had stopped two seconds before me, already in combat posture, weapon drawn, his entire body transformed from walking companion to lethal professional in the time it took me to blink.
He held up a hand. Stay.
For once, I stayed.
He moved into the undergrowth without a sound. Literally without a sound. A man that size should not have been able to move through dense vegetation silently, and yet he dissolved into the green-purple foliage like he'd never existed.
I stood alone in the alien jungle, my heart hammering, a six-inch multitool in my hand that would be about as useful against alien technology as a strongly worded letter.
I turned in a slow circle, scanning the tree line, listening for anything that wasn't birds or insects or the distant rush of water.
Sixty seconds passed. Ninety. Two minutes. I was about to abandon the "stay" instruction and go find him when a figure emerged from the undergrowth to my left.
I spun, multitool raised, teeth bared, ready to go down fighting—
"It's me, human. Put the tiny knife away."
I nearly collapsed.
The blue-skinned alien from the cell. Standing in front of me in what looked like scavenged clothing and a pair of boots that were too big for her, with a fresh scar along one of the knobs on her forehead and an expression of exhausted amusement.
A compact sidearm rode in a patched holster at her hip.
All four of her eyes were on me — two large ones, and a smaller pair set higher and wider on her temples, angled to take in everything the front pair missed that I'd apparently been too busy panicking to notice in the cell.
"You," I said, my voice doing something embarrassing. "How — what are you doing HERE?"
"Zhara," she said, tapping her chest with two fingers. "Since we are apparently still alive enough for introductions."
I'd been calling her "her" in my head since the cell, on the strength of absolutely nothing. Nobody had corrected me yet, so it stood.
"Zhara," I repeated, because my brain needed one concrete fact to hold on to. I tapped my own chest. "Taylor."
"I've been tracking you for two days." She looked me over with the appraising directness I remembered from the cell.
"You look terrible. I was already heading toward Vel'kari — the outpost is the only place on this continent with a functioning repair dock, and my shuttle needs one badly.
I picked up the ion trail from your pod's descent where it tore through the canopy, then found residual thermal blooms from your first camps.
Messy trail at the start. After that, whoever chose your sites got disciplined — shielded fires, cold ash, water crossings, false turns.
I followed the older traces and projected your line toward the outpost."
"Thanks. I feel terrible. How are you even alive? Where did you go?"
"When the ship broke apart, I managed to hijack one of the Saurok shuttles.
I kept it in orbit for several days, hiding our signature in the planet's upper radiation belts to shake their automated trackers, before the thruster started misfiring.
I made a hard, forced landing here about four days ago and have been patching it up ever since.
" She held up a small device — the source of the mechanical sound.
"This is my nav unit. The only working guidance system I have left — everything that flies this thing routes through it now. "
Kel emerged from the undergrowth behind her.
His weapon was holstered but his posture said he wasn't fully at ease.
He and Zhara exchanged words in a language I didn't recognize — not Valorian, something else.
A common trade language, maybe. Zhara responded at length.
Kel's expression, already carved from stone, somehow hardened further.
"What?" I looked between them. "What's she saying?"
Kel turned to me. "She has intelligence about the Saurok."
Zhara switched to English — or whatever my language registered as through her translation.
"How do you speak my language?" I asked, because the question had been nagging me since the cell.
She tapped a small disc behind her left ear — I'd missed it earlier against the blue of her skin.
"Trade translator. Standard Talori guild equipment.
Mine had a partial archive of your language, but it was corrupted and ugly.
It indexes any language with sufficient sample data.
" She tilted her head. "You talked enough in that cell.
Short bursts, high stress, wide phonetic spread — and when I asked your planet, you answered in a full paragraph.
Cleaner sample in ten minutes than most captives give me in a day.
The index finished before the hull gave out. "
She dug through her kit and held up a spare disc in its sterile cover. "This anchors behind your ear with one skin-deep needle. It will sting, it can be removed, and it will not open a closed channel. Do you want it?"
Being unable to understand the next warning could get me killed. "Yes."
Only then did she peel the cover and press the disc behind my left ear. A needle-fine sting, a wash of static, then the device settled against my skin. "Now you have the same index. It will render any language in the archive, but closed channels stay closed."
So that was how. Not magic, not coincidence — just me stress-rambling in captivity while alien tech built a language file from my panic.
"Draxis, the Saurok captain, he survived the attack on his ship. He's furious." She said this with the matter-of-fact tone of someone delivering weather updates. "He's sent hunters to recover escaped merchandise. All of us. But especially you."
The "especially you" hit different when she was looking directly at me.
"Why especially me?"
"Because you're from an uncontacted world. Do you understand what that means in the slave market?"
"Kel mentioned I was 'valuable.'"
Zhara laughed, short and humorless. "Valuable.
A Zarithian crystal is valuable. You are priceless.
A sentient being from a species that has never been documented in the galactic registry?
Collectors, researchers, private owners — the bidding would not start anywhere near what you are worth and go up from there.
You're not just merchandise. You're a trophy. "
My stomach hollowed out. The jungle suddenly felt less like an adventure and more like a hunting ground. Because it was. I was the prey.
I looked at Kel. His expression hadn't changed.
His hand was on his weapon. And his markings — his markings were glowing with a ferocity I'd never seen, not the warm, reactive pulse I'd been cataloging.
This was hard. Cold. The markings of a warrior lit up not by attraction but by something more primal.
He'd known. Since the ridge. Since his handler told him. He'd known I was being specifically hunted and he'd increased the pace and tightened security and refused to explain why because—
Because he was protecting me. The way he always protected me. By carrying the burden himself and cutting me out of the information loop.
I was going to have several words with him about that. Later. Right now, I needed more from Zhara.
"How far behind us are they?"
All four of Zhara's eyes widened when I asked. Good. I was learning that I liked being underestimated and then blowing straight past it.
"I don't know precisely. The hunters Draxis uses are Vektor-class trackers. Small, fast, very good at finding people. They could be days behind us or hours."
"Hours." I swallowed.
"Which is why," Zhara said, and for the first time her expression shifted from pragmatic to something approaching warmth, "I came to find you. I have a shuttle."
"You just said you made a forced landing."
"With style. The shuttle is damaged — one thruster is cracked, the nav computer is dead, and the fuel cell is at maybe eighteen percent.
It won't get us off-planet and it won't get us all the way to the outpost. But it can cover ground faster than walking.
I've been nursing it since then, replacing coolant lines with tubing cannibalized from the shuttle's own dead systems, running the engine only in short bursts so the cracked thruster doesn't overheat.
" She shrugged, all four eyes blinking in sequence.
"Talori are traders. We fix what we have. "
I looked at Kel. "Why are we still standing here?"
Zhara's shuttle was a piece of garbage. I say this with love and gratitude because it was a piece of garbage that could fly, which made it the most beautiful piece of garbage I'd ever seen.
It was wedged into a ravine about two hours' walk from where she'd found us, camouflaged with cut branches and broad leaves.
It was small — barely big enough for three, with a cockpit and what I generously interpreted as a cargo area. The hull had a dent in it the size of a refrigerator. One of the engine things was visibly cracked. Half the control panel was dark.
"It flies?" I asked.
"It flies," Zhara confirmed. "It just doesn't fly well, or far, or reliably. But it flies."
I looked at Kel. He was examining the shuttle with the expression of a man being asked to trust his life to a vehicle he would not consider acceptable for transporting livestock.
"Navigation runs through my handheld unit," Zhara said to him in English, which I appreciated. "And the weapons system has partial charge. Better than walking."
"Significantly better than walking," I agreed.
Kel looked at the shuttle. Looked at me. I could practically see the tactical calculation behind his eyes — risk of shuttle failure versus risk of being on foot with hunters closing in.
He nodded once.
We had a ride.
I climbed into the back, folded myself into the cargo area, and tried not to think about the fact that the last two times I'd been in an alien vehicle, things had ended catastrophically. Third time's the charm. Or third time's when you die. Either way, we'd find out.
Before Zhara started the engines, she dug a sealed pouch from the shuttle's emergency compartment.
"Saurok prisoner medical stock. Broad-spectrum hydration formula.
Designed for species they haven't cataloged yet.
" She tossed a strap of foil bricks after it.
"And Authority emergency ration bars. A full crate. Your food problem is over."
"What do they taste like?"
"The concept of duty."
Kel ran his scanner over the pouch, checked the reading against whatever he'd built in there about how I worked, and handed it to me.
It tasted like salty wallpaper paste. My body accepted it anyway.
By the time the engines caught, the tremor in my hands had eased.
The pressure behind my sternum had not, but at least dehydration was no longer tightening everything around it.
Zhara was already in the pilot's seat, hands moving over the panel. Kel stood outside for another moment, scanning the tree line one final time. His markings were still running hot: bright and hard.
Then he climbed in, and Zhara lifted us off the jungle floor, and the trees fell away beneath us, and the sky stretched before me—the whole sky, unbroken.
Lavender and vast, stretching to horizons I couldn't name, with both moons visible in the daylight — gold and pink, familiar now, almost comforting.
I pressed my forehead against the viewport and breathed.
Still hunted. Still stranded. Still so far from home that the distance was meaningless.
But moving. And not alone.
That counted for something.