16. Kel
KEL
She knew. And she hadn't run.
I processed this while simultaneously managing weapons systems on a shuttle that should have been decommissioned and repurposed as scrap metal.
The Saurok pursuit vessel was closing fast — smaller than Zhara's shuttle, faster, better armed.
A scout ship, likely one of several Draxis had deployed to cover the continent.
"Coming in on our starboard," Zhara called, banking hard. The shuttle shuddered ominously. "Their weapons are charging."
I rerouted what remained of our weapons power to the rear deflector. It wouldn't hold against sustained fire but it might buy time. "Can you outrun them?"
"In this? No." Zhara's hands moved across the panel with the fluid confidence of someone who had been outrunning things her whole life.
"But I can outfly them. There's a canyon network thirty vekt south.
My scanner picked it up on approach. Tight corridors, unpredictable thermals. Good for us. Bad for them."
"Do it."
She banked again. The shuttle groaned. Behind us, in the cargo hold, Taylor was strapped in and silent.
I could feel her through the resonance — the fear, the cold metallic spike of it — but underneath: determination.
Anger. Knowing Taylor, I suspected some of that anger was for the interruption.
The possibility that she could be furious at an armed pursuit vessel for its timing as well as its threat was so distinctly Taylor that I felt something in my chest loosen despite the circumstance.
The first shot hit our port side. The shuttle bucked violently. Alarms screamed. I read the damage: hull integrity reduced but holding. The engine coupling Zhara had just checked was strained.
"Return fire?" I asked.
"Save it. We'll need it in the canyons."
She dove. The shuttle's nose dropped at an angle that my stomach rejected and my training accepted. The jungle canopy rushed up, close enough to scrape our underside, and then fell away as the terrain shifted to exposed rock and ravines—the jagged mouth of a canyon system.
Zhara flew into it like she'd been born there.
The canyons were narrow, carved from dark red stone by millennia of water erosion and tectonic shift.
The walls rose towering on either side, close enough that the rock strata were visible from the cockpit.
Zhara threaded the shuttle through gaps that left no more than an arm's length of clearance on each side, banking on instinct, reading the canyon's curves through the viewport rather than the shuttle's damaged scanner.
She was a better pilot than me. I would never say this aloud. But it was true.
The Saurok scout followed us in: a narrow orange-black wedge with a blunt armored nose, swept-back wings, and weapon ports glowing along its belly.
Mistake. Their ship was faster in open air but less maneuverable in confined space.
Within minutes, they fell behind, unable to match Zhara's turns.
They fired twice — one shot hit the canyon wall above us, raining debris. The other went wide.
"Taylor, are you alright?" I turned.
"Define alright!" she yelled from the back. "Am I alive? Yes! Am I alright? ASK ME WHEN WE LAND!"
She was alright.
Zhara barked a laugh, then banked hard left into a side canyon so narrow that both wing tips scraped the walls with a shriek of metal on stone. The Saurok scout couldn't follow. I heard their engine whine as they overshot, trying to find an alternate route.
"Lost them," Zhara said. "For now. The canyons fork six ways ahead. They'll have to guess."
She slowed marginally, navigating the narrowing canyon with exacting precision. The walls were almost close enough to touch from the cockpit. Below us, a river churned through the canyon floor. Above, a strip of lavender sky.
"How far to the other side?" I asked.
"The canyon system exits onto a plateau. The outpost is approximately forty vekt from there. Two days' walk."
"Can the shuttle make it?"
As if answering my question, the engine made a sound that engines should not make. A grinding, rhythmic shudder that I felt through the deck plating.
"The shuttle can make it to the plateau," Zhara said carefully. "After that, probably not."
Another impact. Not weapons fire — the shuttle hitting a rock outcropping that Zhara had almost, but not quite, cleared. The starboard side crumpled. More alarms.
"Definitely not," Zhara amended.
We emerged from the canyon system onto a broad plateau of scrubby vegetation and exposed rock.
The jungle was thinner here — lower canopy, more light, drier air.
Both suns were fully visible in the open sky for the first time since the crash, and the lavender sky made the red rocks of the plateau look almost gold.
The light was warmer than it should have been, and everything below cast double shadows across the rock.
The shuttle was making increasingly concerning sounds.
"Setting down," Zhara announced, and brought us in for a landing that was controlled by Zhara's standards and terrifying by anyone else's. We hit the ground, skidded across bare rock, bounced once, and came to a stop in a cloud of dust and the smell of something electrical burning.
The engine died. Not shut down. Died.
Taylor's voice from the back: "If you make me crash-land ONE more time, the slavers will be the least of your problems."
Zhara looked at me. Her four eyes held an expression I recognized: respect mixed with concern. "She's interesting," she said in the common trade language — a guild channel the disc she'd given Taylor kept locked.
"You have no idea," I replied in the same.
We crawled from the shuttle into the doubled light, my shadow stretching out in two faint copies across the rock. Taylor's legs were shaking; I could see it from where I stood. But she stood straight, brushed herself off, and surveyed the plateau with the same assessing look she used on ruins.
I stood near her. Not touching. Not speaking. The conversation from the shuttle, the real one, before the alarms, hung between us like a living thing. She knew about the resonance. She knew I'd been hiding it. She knew what I felt.
And she was still here. Standing next to me. Close enough that my markings glowed.
She looked at me. The anger was still there.
I could feel it, a low simmer under everything else.
But it wasn't alone anymore. Alongside the anger was something I hadn't felt from her before, directed at me: possibility.
She was considering me. Not as a captor or a rescuer or a secretive alien. As a man she might let in.
My markings pulsed. I didn't hide it.
She looked at them. Looked at me. Almost smiled.
"Two days' walk?" she said.
"Approximately."
"And the slavers?"
"Lost in the canyon system. Temporarily."
"Temporarily." She nodded. Straightened her shoulders. Put her hands on her hips. "Then we walk. And while we walk, you are going to answer every single question I have about the resonance. No more 'complicated.' No more 'various stimuli.' Everything."
"Everything," I agreed.
"Starting with whether you can actually feel what I'm feeling right now."
I held her gaze. "Yes."
Her eyes widened slightly. "Right now? You can feel what I'm feeling right now?"
"Echoes. Emotions. General direction rather than specific detail."
She went slightly pink in a way I had learned was associated with human embarrassment. "That is... deeply unfair."
"The bond is not selective. I can dampen what I send. I cannot choose what I receive."
"No, I mean—" She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. "I mean you've been walking beside me for eight days feeling everything I—" She stopped. Dropped her hands. "Oh my god."
"Taylor—"
"The POOL, Kel. You felt the pool."
I did not answer. My markings answered for me, flaring bright enough to cast shadows on the rock.
She stared at me. Then she laughed. A real laugh, sudden and startled and completely involuntary, and the resonance translated it as joy and my entire body answered, warmth running out through every marking from my jaw to my feet.
"This is insane," she said, still laughing. "This is completely, absolutely insane."
"I am aware."
"You can feel my emotions. You glow when I'm near you. Your body permanently recognizes me as compatible and you've been quietly losing your mind about it for a week."
"That is an accurate summary."
She laughed again. I did not understand why the accurate summary had prompted more laughter — it was a precise restatement of the facts she had just described.
But the laughter produced that golden frequency in the bond, warm and bright and addictive, so I did not ask for clarification.
I was learning that with Taylor, my factual observations frequently triggered this response, and I had no theory as to why.
Zhara, leaning against the disabled shuttle, caught my eye and made a gesture in Talori body language that roughly translated to: she likes you, stop making it worse.
I had no intention of making it worse. I also had limited confidence in my ability to prevent it.
Taylor stopped laughing. Looked at me with those eyes — green in the daylight, my brain cataloged uselessly — and her expression settled into something serious and open and brave.
"We're going to figure this out," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"But if you keep anything from me again — anything, I don't care how complicated or impossible or scary it is — I'm going to find out anyway and I'll be twice as mad."
"Understood."
"Good." She turned to Zhara. "Which way?"
Zhara pointed southwest. Taylor started walking.
Her response through the bond thinned with distance — and something in it dragged, the way a hand does when it lets go a beat late. That was the part distance did not explain. She didn't want to walk away from me. The distance cost her something. Small, but real.
I followed her. My markings glowed steady and bright against the thin plateau air, and for the first time since the resonance had triggered on the slave ship, I did not try to hide them.