Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Jaz’s neck screamed in protest as she jerked awake, her hand already reaching for the knife she kept strapped to her thigh.
Threat. Stranger.
The memories caught up with her in pieces. The storm. The explosion. The impossible creature she’d dragged through a kilometer of ice and wind because apparently her survival instincts had gone on permanent vacation. Her gaze flew to the bunk.
He’s still here.
She blinked hard, scrubbing a hand across her face, half-expecting the image to dissolve into something rational. A trick of exhaustion. A stress-induced hallucination. Anything other than what her eyes were actually showing her.
But no. The male on her bunk remained stubbornly, impossibly real.
He was unconscious again, his massive chest rising and falling with breaths that rattled slightly but no longer gurgled the way they had hours ago.
The drain she’d inserted was still doing its job, the collection container now half-full of dark fluid that made her stomach turn every time she looked at it.
She stood slowly, her joints popping in protest after too many hours crammed into a chair designed for functionality rather than comfort.
The habitat unit groaned around her, a sound she’d grown disturbingly accustomed to over the past twelve hours.
The storm was still raging outside, but her shelter was holding.
She moved towards the bunk without really deciding to, her feet carrying her forward while her brain tried to catch up.
Wings.
That was the thing she kept coming back to.
He had wings. Massive ones, folded now against his back, their membranes an almost translucent white that darkened to pale blue at the edges.
And one of them was damaged. She’d done what she could to immobilize it, splinting the broken bone with supplies meant for human limbs, but she had no idea if her treatment would actually help. For all she knew, she’d made it worse.
For all she knew, she was looking at a corpse that hadn’t realized it was dead yet.
No. His breathing is better. The drain is working. I’m keeping him alive.
The thought should have been reassuring. Instead, it just raised the question she’d been avoiding since the moment she’d found him.
What the hell is he?
The readings from her initial scan had made no sense.
The bone structure that was simultaneously denser and lighter than human norm.
The musculature that explained how something his size could actually fly.
A cardiovascular system that seemed to include additional components she couldn’t identify.
And beneath all of that, woven through every system she examined, was something that appeared to be human DNA.
She’d run the scan three times. The results hadn’t changed.
Approximately sixty-two percent of his genetic markers matched human baselines. The rest was something her scanner couldn’t classify. Something it flagged as “unknown origin” with a margin of error that suggested her equipment was just as confused as she was.
She crouched beside the bunk, studying his face.
The scales that covered most of his body gave way to something smoother around his features—still textured, still clearly not human skin, but softer.
More expressive. His jaw was strong and angular, and his closed eyes were set deep beneath a pronounced brow.
His nose was thin and straight, above a mouth that looked capable of expressions she probably didn’t want to see.
He’s beautiful.
The thought emerged before she could stop it, and she immediately shoved it aside with something approaching horror.
He’s a mystery. A dangerous, unknown variable that I’ve invited into my home. Beautiful doesn’t factor into the equation.
But her eyes kept returning to those strong features, tracing the strange symmetry of his face, and noticing details she had no business noticing.
The wound on his side drew her attention away from her more troubling observations.
She’d cleaned it as best she could, applied the heavy-duty antibiotics from her medical kit, and sealed the worst of it with synthetic skin.
But even in the dim light, she could see the angry red spreading from the edges of the wound despite the injection she’d given him.
She needed to check and see whether her treatment was working or whether she was watching him slowly poison himself from the inside out.
She reached for her medical scanner, pulling it from the kit she’d left beside the bunk.
The device hummed to life in her hand, its display casting a blue glow across the unconscious male’s features.
Focus on the practical. That’s what I do. That’s who I am.
She held the scanner over the wound, watching data populate the screen.
His temperature appeared to be significantly elevated, even accounting for the fact that she didn’t know what his baseline should be.
His white cell count was through the roof.
The synthetic skin was holding, but beneath it, his body was fighting a battle it might be losing.
I need stronger antibiotics. I need proper medical facilities. I need—
She needed a lot of things she didn’t have.
The storm wasn’t letting up. Her comms were down. Her rig was destroyed. And she was stuck in a damaged habitat with a creature that shouldn’t exist, watching him slowly succumb to an infection she couldn’t treat.
Great. This is exactly how I imagined my week going.
She moved the scanner higher, running a full-body assessment while she had the chance.
His vitals were… confusing. His heart rate seemed low, but given his size and unknown metabolism, she had no idea if that was normal or concerning.
His respiration had definitely improved since she’d applied the drain but there was still fluid building in his lungs so she couldn’t remove it.
His brain activity was particularly interesting. Even unconscious, the readings showed complex patterns that suggested a neural architecture that made human brains look like simple circuits by comparison. Whatever he was, he wasn’t stupid. That much she could say with confidence.
Which means when he wakes up, I’m going to be dealing with an intelligent, dangerous creature who may or may not want to kill me.
The thought should have scared her more than it did. But fear required energy, and she’d burned through most of hers hours ago. What remained was a sort of tired acceptance, a resignation to circumstances she couldn’t control.
She’d made her choice when she’d dragged him through the storm. Now she had to live with it.
The scanner beeped, completing its assessment, and she frowned at the results. The sixty-two percent human DNA readings were still there, impossible to ignore.
Where did you come from?
The question had been circling in her mind since she’d first seen the seismic anomaly on her deep-core scans.
The reading had been wrong—too deep and too intentional to be natural geology.
She’d planned to investigate after the storm passed, to drill down and see what was hiding beneath the ancient ice.
Now she didn’t need to drill. The anomaly had come to her. He’d been down there, beneath the glacier. But for how long?
The ice in this region was old—millions of years of accumulated sediment and frozen water, layered like the rings of a tree. Whatever chamber he’d emerged from had been deep enough that it predated human colonization by an incomprehensible margin.
Could he actually be… a Martian?
The word felt absurd even in the privacy of her own thoughts.
Mars had never supported complex life—that was basic xenobiology, drilled into every colonist from their first day of orientation.
The planet had been dead long before humans arrived, its atmosphere stripped away by solar winds and its water locked beneath the surface in frozen reservoirs.
But the readings didn’t lie. The scanner showed organic material that was at least partially compatible with human genetics, which meant it had to have evolved from the same basic building blocks.
Either this creature shared a common ancestor with humanity, which seemed impossible, given the distances involved, or…
Or someone had made him.
The thought hit her like a punch to the gut.
GenCon.
The corporation had been the primary contractor for Mars colonization, and they’d spent years pushing the boundaries of what was legally and ethically permissible.
There were rumors of projects that went far beyond anything officially sanctioned.
Most of it was speculation, conspiracy theories traded in the darker corners of the colony networks.
But some of it had turned out to be true.
The whistleblowers had revealed enough to trigger a full governmental investigation, and while GenCon had officially been “restructured” in response, everyone knew they were still out there and still pursuing whatever twisted goals had driven them from the beginning.
Could he be an experiment? Something they created and then… what? Abandoned beneath the glacier?
It didn’t quite fit. The depth of the chamber suggested real age—not centuries but millennia or even more.
And the genetic readings, while partially human, included markers her scanner couldn’t identify.
If GenCon had created him, they’d used source material that didn’t exist in any database she could access.
Unless they found something. Something ancient. Something they could modify.
The possibility made her skin crawl.
Is that what you are? Someone’s failed experiment, locked away to be forgotten?
The thought brought an unexpected surge of anger. Not at him, but at whoever might have created him. At the arrogance of playing god with another being’s existence. At the casual cruelty of treating sentient life as a commodity. As an asset to be exploited and discarded when no longer useful.
If GenCon did this to you, I hope they burn.
The intensity of the emotion surprised her. She barely knew this male. She had every reason to fear him. But something about the idea of him being made rather than born, designed rather than evolved, touched a nerve she hadn’t known she had.
The possibility led her to make another scan, but this time she searched for nanotechnology, the same type of technology that had been used to create the cyborg rangers who were used in the original part of the terraforming process.
The results came back almost immediately. He had nanites in his bloodstream.
What the hell?
The results suggested some type of manipulation, but still didn’t answer her questions about how he could have been placed so far beneath the surface or where the other DNA could have come from.
She shook her head, forcing herself to focus on the practical. Whatever he was, whatever his origins, the immediate problem remained the same. He was injured, infected and possibly dying, if she couldn’t figure out how to treat wounds she didn’t understand in a body that shouldn’t exist.
She reached out to check the drainage tube, her fingers brushing against the scaled skin of his chest as she worked.
The texture was strange—smooth in some places, rougher in others, and warm beneath her touch despite the conditions.
She found herself filing the sensation away alongside all the other impossible details of the past twelve hours.
The tube looked secure. The drain was still functioning. She’d done what she could.
She started to stand, already planning her next tasks—checking the habitat’s structural integrity, assessing their food and water supplies, and trying again to raise someone on comms—when something closed around her wrist.
Her heart stopped.
Strong fingers were wrapped around the narrow bones of her wrist with a grip that could shatter them if it chose to. His scales were cool against her skin, a contrast to the warmth she’d felt when she touched him, and the pressure was just this side of painful.
She looked up.
Ice-blue eyes stared back at her, alert and aware and fixed on her face with an intensity that made her breath catch. His pupils were vertical slits, contracted in the low light, and they tracked every microexpression that crossed her features with predatory precision.
He was awake.
He was watching her.
And he wasn’t letting go.