21. Taylor
TAYLOR
The outpost was the ugliest, most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
Vel'kari Station looked like someone had built a frontier town out of scrap metal and bad decisions.
Low buildings, most of them patched and repaired multiple times, arranged around a central square of packed dirt.
Shuttle pads of varying quality. A market stall area where aliens of at least a dozen different species were bartering and arguing and doing business that I suspected was not entirely legal.
And noise. Real noise. Voices, engines, the clang of metal, music from somewhere deep in the station that sounded like jazz played on instruments Earth hadn't invented yet. Civilization. Rough and grimy civilization, but civilization.
I stood at the entrance and stared. My legs shook. My eyes stung. It had been ten days since the crash. Ten days of jungle predators, rations, and sleeping on the ground. Ten days of fear and wonder and the most intense and terrifying romantic relationship of my life.
Kel stood beside me. His markings were barely showing — he'd rebuilt his damaged armor from the best components he could salvage and run the new plating high on the throat and long down the forearms, which was, I assumed, the entire point.
He looked like someone you didn't want to mess with.
Zhara was on my other side, already scanning the market with the appraising eye of a professional trader.
"I know people here," Zhara said. "I can get us lodging and access to the communications relay." She gave Kel a pointed look. "You two need a room."
"We need to contact the Authority—" Kel started.
"You need a room," Zhara repeated firmly. "With a door. And a shower. And you—" she pointed at me, "—need eight hours of sleep in an actual bed before you fall over."
I was too tired to argue. And she was right. I was running on fumes and willpower and whatever steadiness I was stealing off him through the bond.
Zhara delivered. Within an hour, she'd negotiated lodging from a station keeper who owed her a favor ("From a previous life. Don't ask.") and we had a room. Singular. Because of "limited availability" and also because Zhara was the least subtle matchmaker in the galaxy.
The room was small and sparse: a bed, a table, something that functioned as a chair, and, I could have wept, a washroom with an actual shower in it. An actual shower with actual warm water that came out of something resembling a showerhead.
"I'm going to be in there for approximately three hours," I announced, already pulling off the Colombian boots for what turned out to be the last time.
"We should discuss—"
"Three. Hours. Kel."
He subsided.
I stripped, stepped into the shower, and nearly had a religious experience.
Hot water. Clean water. Water pressure. I stood under the spray with my eyes closed and let ten days of alien jungle rinse off my skin.
The water ran brown, then clear. I used something Zhara had provided that might have been soap or might have been alien conditioner.
It smelled faintly floral and it lathered and I did not care what it was.
I stood there until my fingers wrinkled and my muscles unknotted and the last of the tension I'd been carrying since Colombia melted out of my shoulders.
When I stepped out, wrapping myself in what passed for a towel, I caught my reflection in the metal wall panel and stopped.
I looked terrible. Not "rough couple of days" terrible — gaunt terrible.
My collarbones stood out like shelves. My arms, which had been toned from weeks of hauling equipment through a Colombian jungle, were thinner than I'd ever seen them.
The spore rash had spread from my shoulders down across my ribs in angry red patches that the hot water had turned livid.
And my hands — I held them out in front of me — were still trembling.
Less than in the jungle, but still there.
A fine, persistent vibration that I couldn't will away.
One thing was better, though. The pressure in my chest — the constant warm hand slowly pressing down that had been with me since day three — had eased.
Not gone, but lighter. The outpost's air filtration system was doing something the open jungle couldn't: cycling out the particulates that had been slowly compressing my lungs.
I took a deep, experimental breath and didn't feel the familiar burn behind my sternum.
The relief was so sharp it made my eyes sting.
Zhara had left something on a narrow shelf beside the shower — a small canister whose label my guild disc rendered as broad-spectrum dermal soother: contact-species safe; patch-test before use.
The thick, greenish salve smelled like eucalyptus and mint.
I dabbed a dot inside my wrist, waited through a cautious count of sixty, then spread it over the rash.
Within seconds the burning itch that had been my constant companion for most of a week just...
stopped. I stood there with my hand on my ribs, eyes closed, processing the absence of pain I'd stopped noticing as pain because it had become baseline.
There was food too — Zhara again, a plate of flattened grain cakes and warm broth under a trade-guild seal the disc rendered as neutral nutrition for contact biologies.
I tried one spoonful, waited for any warning from my stomach, then ate slowly.
The grain cakes sat without the heavy, wrong feeling of the jungle rations.
The broth was salty and rich and my body responded with an almost desperate gratitude, as if every cell was saying finally, something I know how to process.
I ate all of it. Then I sat on the floor of the tiny bathroom and cried for approximately ninety seconds, because my body was so relieved to not be fighting the food that the emotion had to go somewhere.
Then I washed my face, pulled on the clean borrowed clothes Zhara had left folded by the door, and buckled my recovered tool belt over them. I squared my shoulders and walked out.
Zhara pushed off the corridor wall where she had been waiting. "The guild disc is holding?"
"Apparently stress-rambling in captivity built an excellent language index."
"Useful at last," she said, and the ambient noise of the outpost kept resolving into words around me.
Kel had come out of the room behind me. I made it three steps. My knees folded and he caught me before I hit the floor.
There was no argument about what happened next.
He put me in bed, found the outpost medic, and stayed beside me through a scanner check that ruled out organ damage, produced several stern warnings about dehydration, malnutrition, and respiratory inflammation, and confirmed the long-acting barrier remained active after the shower.
Then I slept for nine hours so deeply that even the bond went quiet.
When I woke, there was another tray of grain cakes and broth waiting.
Kel did not touch me until I had eaten every bite, kept it down, and let the medic clear me for something more strenuous than walking across the room.
My hands had steadied. A second dose of salve had taken the heat out of the rash.
I still looked gaunt, but my body no longer felt like it was losing an argument with the atmosphere.
After a quick second rinse, I walked back into the room wrapped in a fresh towel.
Kel was sitting on the edge of the bed. He'd removed his armor and was wearing borrowed civilian clothes — dark, simple, and fitted.
I saw him fully for the first time in normal lighting.
Not firelight, not bioluminescence, not the lavender haze of Zha'kari.
Just him, in a plain room, in clothes that showed the breadth of his shoulders and the lean power of his frame.
The markings extended further than I'd realized.
In the soft room light, I could see them at his collar, along the backs of his hands, tracing the line of his jaw.
They were a low, warm glow. Not dim. Not blazing.
Just... present. Steady. He looked up at me and the glow brightened, and I felt the resonance do the thing, the warm, pulling thing, and my clean, clear head went fuzzy.
"You look—" he started.
"Like a person who's had a shower for the first time in ten days?"
"Beautiful."
He said it simply. Without emphasis or qualification. Just a statement of fact delivered in his low, resonant voice, and it hit me harder than any line from any movie or book or poem I'd ever encountered.
"Kel."
"Yes."
I dropped the towel.
His pupils blew wide. Blue-white light swept over his markings in a full-body cascade, and through the bond I felt his response like a shockwave. Want. Raw, unfiltered, long-suppressed want.
"Bed," I said. "Now."
He was off the bed and across the room in a stride that I barely tracked. His hands were on my waist, lifting me, and my legs wrapped around him and my mouth found his and the bond between us opened like a floodgate.
The bed. A proper bed. With something approximating a mattress and sheets that weren't thermal blankets.
The luxury of it, horizontal surface and privacy, a door that locked, made everything more intense.
The first time had been desperate and new.
This time was urgent and knowing. I knew what his hands could do.
I knew the sounds he made when I touched the markings on his ribs.
I knew the way his breathing changed when I whispered his name.
He pressed me into the mattress and kissed down my neck and I arched into him and his markings were so bright the whole room glowed and through the bond I could feel exactly what I did to him — every touch amplified, every gasp translated, the feedback loop building and building until I couldn't tell whose pleasure was whose.
"Kel—"
"I'm here." He braced over me, one arm holding his weight, the other hand tracing down my body with a deliberateness that was going to kill me. "I'm right here."