15. Taylor
TAYLOR
Zhara flew. Kel co-piloted, which mostly meant sitting in the front seat providing commentary that Zhara ignored with practiced ease.
I was crammed into the back with my knees against my chest, vibrating with every shudder of the shuttle's damaged engine, watching alien jungle scroll past beneath us through a viewport that had a crack running through it.
It should have been terrifying. It was, a little. But mostly it was the fastest I'd moved in over a week without my own feet doing the work, and that alone was enough to make me borderline euphoric.
Zhara banked the shuttle around a mountain ridge and Kel's hands twitched toward the controls.
She swatted them away without looking. This happened three more times over the next hour.
I got the distinct impression Zhara was a better pilot than Kel and that this was a source of significant personal distress for him.
"How do you know each other's language?" I asked Zhara during a relatively smooth stretch of flying.
"Talori, my people, are traders. We learn languages the way you might learn to cook: practically, broadly, and starting young.
" She glanced back at me. "I understand pieces of forty-seven languages.
Yours was one of the more obscure ones in my collection.
I acquired a partial language archive from a black-market data haven.
Some rogue surveyor illegally recorded fragments from your system decades ago. "
"You understood English from illegal space eavesdropping?"
"Fragments of it. Mostly listening data, not clean active speech.
Specifically from old, leaked audio broadcasts from your planet — some talk program where two brothers argued endlessly about repairing primitive ground vehicles.
The cell gave my translator enough live sample to synthesize it properly. "
I barked out a laugh so hard it hurt. "You learned English from an illegal alien archive of car-repair arguments?"
"The linguistic patterns were clear and the content was entertaining, yes."
I was still laughing when Kel turned in his seat and gave me a look that I interpreted as confusion about why I was making that sound. His markings flickered. They always flickered when I laughed. I added that to the mental folder now labeled "Evidence I Am Choosing to Ignore for My Own Sanity."
After about two hours, Zhara set the shuttle down in a small clearing to rest the engine. The landing was rough enough to rattle my teeth, but the shuttle stayed in one piece. "If I push it much further without cooling, we'll be walking again. And I prefer not walking."
Kel immediately left the grounded shuttle to do his perimeter thing. I watched him through the viewport, moving through the trees, scanning, checking. Always checking.
Zhara was doing something with the control panel but I could feel her eyes on me — the secondary pair fixed on me while the primaries watched her work.
"You have questions," she said. Not a question.
"About nine hundred."
"Then start with the one that matters."
I pulled my knees tighter to my chest. Through the cracked viewport, Kel moved between two massive trees, his markings visible even at this distance. A steady, low glow.
"Why does he glow?" I said. "The real answer this time."
Zhara's hands stilled on the panel. All four eyes found me. Her expression became very carefully neutral — the kind of neutral that takes effort. The kind of neutral that means the next words out of someone's mouth are going to change everything.
"Why do you ask about Valorians specifically?"
"Because I'm stuck with one and he glows at me and won't tell me why."
She studied me. Then, quietly: "He glows. His markings. When he's near you?"
"Yes. When I'm close. When I touch him. When I —" I gestured vaguely. "When I took my clothes off to swim. It gets brighter. It responds to me specifically."
"And he hasn't explained this to you."
"He says 'it's complicated' and shuts down the conversation."
Zhara let out a breath. A long one. Then she turned her chair to face me fully. "The word you're circling is resonance."
"Resonance."
"Valorians, his species, they have a biological mechanism for identifying a compatible mate.
It's rare. Sacred to their culture. When a Valorian encounters the being their biology recognizes as their ideal partner, their markings activate.
For the Valorian, that recognition and the first-tier emotional signal do not switch off.
They glow in the presence of the compatible person.
The bond is called resonance. It does not make that person a partner or obligate them to accept anything deeper. "
I stared at her.
"The initial recognition is not a choice. It's not something they can control or dismiss. When it triggers, it remains part of the Valorian's biology. What happens after that still requires two people."
I was still staring. My brain was doing something strange — it was replaying every single interaction with Kel since the slave ship at high speed.
The grab. The markings flaring. Every time I'd moved close and they'd brightened.
Every time I'd stepped back and they'd dimmed.
The sound he'd made when I touched the markings on his shoulder.
The way he'd held my wrist, thumb on my pulse.
"His body has recognized you," Zhara said. "As the person it would choose as a mate."
"His..." I couldn't finish the sentence.
"His markings glow because his biology is responding to you. Specifically you. I know you've probably been trying to explain it away — I would too — but there's only one thing that makes a Valorian light up like that. It's resonance. You are his resonance mate."
The shuttle was very quiet. Outside, through the viewport, Kel was walking back toward us. His markings were glowing. For me. Because his alien body had decided I was his person and it was announcing it in bioluminescent light every time I was nearby.
"How long has he known?" My voice came out strange. Flat.
Zhara didn't hesitate. "Since the moment he touched you. That first contact — whenever it was — that's when the first tier locked in for him."
Something cracked open in my chest. Not anger — not yet.
Something bigger, more complicated, a tangle of emotions so dense I couldn't separate them.
He'd known since the BEGINNING. Since that first grab in the corridor.
Since he'd dragged me screaming through the slave ship and shoved me into an escape pod.
He'd known what I was to him, what his body had decided, and he'd walked beside me for over a week without saying a word.
Every deflection. Every time he'd said "complicated" or "various stimuli" or "when the time is appropriate." Every time his markings had blazed and he'd pressed his arms against his sides or turned away or changed the subject. He'd been hiding THIS.
Heat chased the hollow out of my stomach, climbing into my throat until my jaw ached from holding it still.
"He's known since the beginning," I said. "Over a week. He's known I was his — what did you call it?"
"Resonance mate."
"His resonance mate. And he didn't tell me."
"Valorians are not known for their emotional communication skills."
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
"It's supposed to be accurate." Zhara's voice was gentle in a way I hadn't heard from her before. "The resonance with a non-Valorian has never been recorded. Never. In their entire history. He's as lost as you are, Taylor."
I didn't want to hear that. I didn't want context or nuance or sympathy for his position. I wanted to be angry because the anger was simpler than the other thing — the warm and terrifying thing underneath it that I was refusing to examine.
Because if the resonance was real, if his body had genuinely recognized me as his person, then every moment of the last eight days had to be re-read.
Every time he'd protected me. Stood guard.
Moved closer in the night to keep me warm.
Offered to send my archaeological findings to the galactic academic council.
Looked at me in the bioluminescent dark with an expression I hadn't been able to name.
The expression had a name now. And it was bigger than anything I'd prepared for.
The side hatch of the grounded shuttle opened. Kel climbed back in from his perimeter sweep, ducking through the narrow frame with one hand still near his weapon. He took one look at my face and went still.
He knew that I knew. I could see it in the way his entire body locked up, the way his markings flared and pulsed with something new — not attraction or proximity response. Something that looked, in bioluminescent light, like fear.
Good. He should be scared. I was about to have a lot of words for him.
"Zhara," I said, not breaking eye contact with Kel, "could you give us a minute?"
Zhara was already moving. "I'll check the external engine coupling." She squeezed past Kel, gave him a look that roughly translated to good luck, you'll need it, and disappeared outside.
The hatch closed.
I looked at Kel.
He looked at me.
His markings were blazing so bright the interior of the shuttle was lit in blue-white light.
"Were you going to tell me?" I asked. Quiet. Not yelling. The quiet was worse and I could tell by the way he flinched that he knew it too.
"Taylor—"
"Were you going to tell me. Yes or no."
A breath. "Yes."
"When?"
"When I had determined how—"
"How long were you going to wait? Another week? Until we reached the outpost? Until you handed me off to your Authority and disappeared back into the galaxy?"
His jaw tightened. "I was not going to hand you off."
"Then what was the plan, Kel? Because from where I'm standing, the plan looks a lot like 'keep the human in the dark while my body screams the truth every time she walks past.'"