Page 4 of Stolen By Her Alien Mate

The promise of pudding doesn’t erase the day, but it helps.

I move to head back into the shuttle to get another kid, but Jopin grabs my arm.

“Leave this for the Beta Guard,” she says.

“Don’t bother telling me to go to Med Bay. It’s just a scratch.”

“Not Med Bay. C&C. Radford wants to see you.” She looks at Draeden who just handed his cargo over to one of the guys in Beta Guard. “He wants to see both of you. We got some kind of message.”

Draeden and I head for the tram door that leads from the landing pad down to Command and Control. Jopin falls into step beside us.

“What kind of message?” Draeden asks. “Another ally on the ground? Tides know we could use more.”

“No, this is something else. He wouldn’t give me any details. I think Cass is still translating it.”

When we reach the tram doors, Draeden and I enter the tram alone, and Jopin goes back to helping with the shuttle.

“You really should go to Med Bay,” Draeden says dryly.

“No.” I barely hide my wince. “It’s barely a scratch.”

“So you keep saying. Personally, I’m less worried about the scratch than I am about all the blood you’ve lost. If you faint, I don’t want to have to haul your dead weight around.”

“When have I ever fainted?”

“Training simulation four-eighty-two.”

“That doesn’t count. I was twelve.”

“Sure. That was it.”

We both know I’m not going to ignore a command from Radford and go to Med Bay and that Draeden is just giving me shit to distract me. Which, frankly, I appreciate. Tides know I don’t want to fracking faint in C&C.

Right before the tram arrives at our destination, Draeden slants me a look. “Joking aside, if you need to go to Med Bay, I’ll handle Radford.”

“It’s fine.” I hope.

“No matter how much you might wish otherwise, you don’t have your mother’s gift for healing.”

I bite down my automatic gag reflex at the mention of my mother and force myself to flash him a grin. “Too bad, right?”

My mother could heal anyone, including herself. It’s a power that’s been in my family for so many generations we stopped keeping track. And today, I sure as hell could’ve used it.

Not just today either. Every time we go on a mission to the surface of Perse. We rescue kids, we gather supplies, we gather Intel – all things the rebellion can’t survive without.

But none of it is without a price. The Sovereign Police are brutal and growing in number seemingly every day. Every time we strike, they strike back, harder. Too many people in the rebellion have died. It about kills me that I should be able to heal them and can’t.

Draeden doesn’t say anything else, probably because he knows he brought up a sore topic. When the doors slide open to reveal C&C, we step out of the tram, only to stop in our tracks.

Normally, the C&C room bustles with energy and movement, not today.

Today, it’s silent.

I look around, taking in the cluster of men standing around the lone figure of Cass standing beside a wall, one hand stretched out to press against the control panel of the palace’s main computer.

Cass looks like–almost–like a Persæn male, but there are subtle differences. Not imperfections—just differences in posture, skin tone, and movement. Visual cues to let even the most casual observer know that he’s not an organic life form. He’s one of the few remaining Historians—relics from the height of the Persæn Empire, inorganic creatures designed to interface with the Empire’s vast web of computers.

If I’ve ever seen another working Historian, I don’t remember it. Historians were designed to work in pairs. Their physical bodies were designed as a safeguard to limit their reach. The computer network within any given palace is vast and complicated. And accessible only via a Historian. Without Cass, all of our systems simply stop working. Unfortunately, right now, it looks like he’s offline.