23. Taylor
TAYLOR
The cantina at Vel'kari Station smelled like engine grease and regret, which made it the perfect location for my current mood.
I knew walking out wasn't smart. I was an unregistered alien on a frontier outpost with slavers hunting me specifically, the only person who could protect me was the person I'd just walked away from, and I didn't even know which direction the bathroom was.
Smart had stopped being my primary operating mode approximately ten days ago, somewhere between "crashed on alien planet" and "developed feelings for the alien who crashed with me.
" But I needed a room where I wasn't watching his face while I thought.
Distance couldn't shut the bond off, but it could turn down the feedback enough for me to hear myself, and that meant risk, and I'd chosen risk.
Zhara steered me toward a table in the corner only long enough to get my back away from the front doors.
She shoved a warm, bitter cup into my hands, checked the small scanner strapped to her wrist for the third time in under a minute, then shifted her chair so she could watch both the front doors and the service hall.
One pair of eyes stayed on me. The other pair kept sweeping the room.
"Why are you doing that?" I asked.
"The Saurok transport was denied clearance, but it dropped five hunters in a breaching pod below the west ridge," she said, low and fast. "They're coming up the service ravine.
The front exit is exposed and the back route is locked for a fuel transfer.
We stay behind hard cover until the service lock cycles, then move the instant my scanner turns green.
Drink this, do not look at the front doors, and talk. "
"I need a minute."
"Then talk fast."
That was the thing about Zhara. She did not push like Kel pushed. She pushed sideways. She watched exits, angled her body between me and the doors, and made tactical relocation sound like emotional support.
"He didn't hide this time," I said finally.
Zhara's secondary eyes blinked while the primary pair flicked to the service door. "The Authority orders?"
"He told me about the memory wipe himself, days ago, on the walk down from the plateau — volunteered it before I even had to ask.
And this morning, when the confirmation came through?
The timeline, the denied exemption, all the concrete details?
He sat down and told me. Everything. No editing, no tactical framing.
Just the ugly truth laid out." I wrapped both hands around the cup.
"And that's somehow making this harder."
"Why harder?"
"Because when he hid things, I could be angry at him.
I could redirect the panic into 'you should have told me' and that gave me something to do with it.
Now he's not hiding, and I can't be angry at him, so I'm just...
sitting with the actual problem. Which is that the government of an alien civilization wants to erase my brain. "
Zhara did not drink. She lifted her cup, pretended to sip, and used the motion to check the cantina entrance behind the rim. "That is a more difficult problem than a boyfriend who withholds."
"Dramatically more difficult. I'd like to go back to the withholding problem. That one I knew how to handle."
"He's growing, Taylor."
"I know. That's the other thing that's making this harder." I pressed my forehead against the warm cup. "He's growing and the situation is still impossible and I can't separate the real thing from the impossible situation."
"Explain."
"The only legal way to keep my memories is to declare the bond publicly and claim Valorian citizenship through it.
The permanent part is already done — I chose the third tier in private, freely, eyes open.
All that's actually left is the public declaration.
But now their threat has welded that declaration to survival — and it's also the thing he wants most. I can't tell if declaring now is choosing the life we want or choosing not losing my mind.
And he can't tell either. Through the bond, I can feel that he can't tell, and that's eating him alive. "
Zhara's scanner gave a soft vibration against her wrist. She killed the sound with one finger and slid her chair an inch closer to me.
"But he's bonded to you for life. That doesn't go away, Taylor.
Not for him. If they wipe your memory and send you home, he will spend every remaining day of his existence feeling the echo of a bond you don't remember.
The resonance doesn't fade for the Valorian. Only for the mate who forgets."
My chest tightened. I hadn't thought about it from that angle.
If they wiped me, I'd wake up in Colombia with a lost few weeks and a vague sense of something missing.
But Kel would carry the full bond — the open channel, the resonance, the markings that would glow for someone who didn't know he existed.
"That's horrible."
"It is. Which is why he told you the truth even though the truth is ugly. He'd rather you make a clear-eyed choice — even if it's a choice against him — than trick you into something permanent."
"I'm not choosing against him." It came out fast. Too fast. Zhara's eyebrow did something impressive given her very different eyebrow situation.
"I'm not. I'm choosing him because I want to.
Because he counted my freckles and didn't tell me because he thought it was tactically irrelevant.
Because he moved close to me at night so I wouldn't be cold and pretended it was the elevation.
Because when I found the ruins and forgot to be scared, he looked at me like I was the most important discovery in the galaxy.
" My voice cracked. "Because he said 'getting to know you is what made me want to be yours' and he meant it so completely that his entire body lit up. "
Zhara smiled, but it was a thin, distracted thing. "Then tell HIM that instead of sitting here with me."
"I'm not ready yet. I need to be sure that what I'm feeling is the choice and not the corner.
" Zhara's scanner flashed green and she was already on her feet, pulling me up with the cup still in my hand.
"He told me the truth. The least I can do is tell him the truth back.
And the truth is I need five more minutes to stop being terrified before I can be brave. "
"Then tell him." She caught my elbow, gentle but firm, and guided me toward the service hall.
I opened my mouth to respond.
That was when the front wall of the cantina exploded.
Not an explosion like a grenade. An explosion like something very large and very fast hit the building from outside and the wall just... ceased to exist. I was thrown off my feet, hit the floor, and for a stunned second lay there in a rain of debris and dust trying to process what had happened.
Then the screaming started. Not mine for once. The cantina's other patrons, a dozen aliens of various species scrambling behind tables, running for exits that may or may not still exist. Through the dust, I saw figures. Dark figures. Moving in through the destroyed wall.
Saurok.
Not one. Not two. Five of them. In full combat gear, not the orange leather of the slave ship crew but harder and darker-grade. Weapons drawn. Scanning the room.
Looking for me.
Zhara was already moving. She grabbed my arm, hauled me behind the bar, and pressed me flat against the floor. "Stay down."
"What—"
"The breaching team. They reached us before we reached the service door."
One of the Saurok made an announcement in a language my guild disc rendered as: "The human female. Produce her or this station burns."
His weapon swept across the patrons trapped between the ruined wall and the blocked side exit. A charge built at the muzzle with a rising mechanical whine. He was not bluffing. If no one produced me, he was going to fire into the room until someone did.
My blood went ice cold. Not the cold of surprise.
The cold of clarity. Of understanding, with absolute precision, that I was the reason these people were in danger.
Every patron in this cantina. Every person in this outpost. Because of me.
Because I was a "trophy" from an uncontacted world and a slaver captain wanted his merchandise back.
I could not hide behind a bar while he fired into innocent people because of me. If he saw me, his weapon would turn away from them. The choice had nothing heroic about it; it was ugly arithmetic, and I was the only variable I could move.
I grabbed a broken bottle from the debris. Heavy glass, alien-manufactured, sharp edge. It wasn't a weapon but it was what I had. I still had my multitool on my belt — the most useful piece of Earth equipment I'd managed to recover from the slavers' prisoner-property bin.
"Taylor, what are you doing?" Zhara hissed.
"Pulling their aim off the crowd. Don't follow me."
"That is extremely dangerous advice."
I stood up from behind the bar.
The Saurok saw me immediately. The lead one — bigger than the others, scarred, with one eye that was milky and dead — swung his weapon toward me. I unclipped the multitool, thumbed the blade out until it locked, and raised my hands — bottle in one, blade in the other.
"I'm the human," I said. My voice didn't shake. I was deeply proud of that. "You want me? Come get me."
The lead Saurok made a sound that my guild disc rendered as laughter. He stepped toward me.
And then Kel came through what was left of the cantina's back entrance like the wrath of God.
He moved so fast I barely tracked it. One moment, empty doorway. Next moment, the nearest Saurok was on the ground and Kel was already engaging the second. His pulse weapon fired three times — precise, efficient, lethal. Two Saurok dropped.
The remaining three reacted. Weapons fire. I ducked behind an overturned table as energy bolts scorched the air above my head. Zhara drew the compact sidearm from her patched hip holster and provided cover fire from behind the bar.
The lead Saurok's weapon snapped toward me, then its muzzle charge shifted from lethal white to a pulsing blue lattice.
Capture setting. He fired. I dove, and the field locked an overturned chair to the floor where my legs had been.
He slung the rifle, ripped a restraint loop from his belt, and charged me.
Not Kel, not Zhara. Me. His orders were clear: retrieve the human alive.
I did something stupid and brave and probably both.
I didn't run. I waited until he was close — too close, close enough that I could smell the reptilian musk and see the membrane flicking over his dead eye — and drove the locked multitool blade into the exposed, soft-skinned seam under his arm where the armor plates parted.
He screamed. A sound like tearing metal. His arm swung at me and I ducked — barely — and the bottle in my other hand smashed across the side of his face. Glass burst across his good eye and he reeled, blinded for one crucial second.
I was not thinking about the morality of stabbing an alien. I was thinking about survival. About the people in this cantina. About the fact that this creature had come here to drag me back into a cell and sell me, and I was NOT going back.
The Saurok staggered. I scrambled backward, slipping on debris, and Kel was there. Between me and the wounded Saurok in a heartbeat, finishing the fight with a precision that was simultaneously terrifying and comforting.
The last two hunters went down. One to Kel. One to Zhara, who shot with the casual accuracy of someone who'd done this before and would probably do it again.
Silence. Settling dust. The acrid smell of weapons discharge and the metallic tang of alien blood.
I was standing in the wreckage of a cantina, holding a broken bottle and a bloody multitool, breathing so hard my vision pulsed. My hands were shaking now — the adrenaline crash coming hard and fast.
Kel turned to me. His markings were blazing, not the warm glow or the arousal glow.
The warrior glow, bright and fierce. His eyes swept over me, checking for injury, cataloging damage.
His terror poured into me — not for himself, never for himself, but for me.
The raw, screaming fear that he'd been too late.
"You came," I said. My voice broke on the second word.
What was left of the bottle slipped from my hand and rang against the floor. I looked down at the bloody multitool and could not make my fingers release it. The room tilted. A second ago I'd been all cold arithmetic; now every possible version of what could have happened arrived at once.
Kel closed the distance carefully, as if I were something injured that might bolt. He covered my clenched hand with his until my fingers opened, took the multitool out of them, folded the blade closed, and clipped it back onto my belt himself. Only then did he pull me against him.
The warrior mask went, all at once, and underneath was just Kel: scared, relieved, in love. His markings shifted from hard to warm.
I let him. I buried my face in his neck and shook and his arms were around me and his markings were warm against my skin and the bond between us was a roaring, open thing full of fear and relief and love — his and mine, tangled together, indistinguishable.
"I'm sorry," he said into my hair. "For all of it. Every piece of information I held. Every time I chose silence over trust. I'm sorry."
"I know." I pressed closer. "I'm still angry about the old silences. I'm the one who paused that conversation — I needed to know what I felt was mine before we finished it. It is. We'll finish it when I'm ready."
"You have every right to be."
"I needed space. If those hunters had come five minutes earlier—"
"Then Zhara would still have been beside you.
You asked for room and you were right to ask; giving it was the one thing I did correctly today.
" His arms tightened. "What I am sorry for is older than this morning — every time I decided for you what you could know and when you could carry it.
That fault is mine. Do not try to carry it for me. "
Zhara approached, stepping over debris. She looked at us, looked at the wreckage, looked at the downed Saurok, and said: "We should leave before more arrive. This team was only the first through the door — Draxis doesn't stop at one."
She was right. We moved. But I held Kel's hand the entire way, and he held mine, and his markings glowed steady and warm, and neither of us let go.