Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

THREXIN

T he first time Threxin drifted into consciousness, it was to the sound of words that had no meaning to his ear.

The reply, at least, he did understand. "Shoq."

"He needs a doctor," the first voice formed into something recognizable. "And blood. You want him to live, don't you?"

The second time Threxin woke, it was to banging and swearing in a foreign tongue. Something shook underneath him.

"Holy shit…" Another human, male this time.

"I know. Just hurry."

"The donor?"

"Here," Renza said, and he was close, so it was safe. Threxin let blackness take him once more.

There was commotion, some pain, and the feeling of something burrowing under his skin with a sharp bite.

"Wait, what are you—" A human female, high-pitched, alarmed.

Then something exploded. Clattered to the floor. Heat splattered across his face.

"Shit," the female swore. "Shit! "

"What was this?" an invisible Renza had asked from behind Threxin's closed eyelids.

"Air… He tried to inject him with air. Fuck."

Air was good… All living things required air. It seemed such an unimportant thing to panic over.

"Clean him."

"Y-yes."

Was he dirty? Warm, wet pressure on his neck lulled him back to sleep.

Alina

After all the blood, the stitches, and watching Renza break the neck of the doctor performing Threxin's blood transfusion and then tried to take a stab at killing the invader again , Alina was spent. Somehow seeing another death didn't hit her quite the same way as everything she'd already witnessed, though the way Renza killed the man right before her eyes with quick efficiency was arguably the most intimately disturbing of the bunch. Or it should've been.

When after all that Renza told her to "dampen" the uhyre's "apertures," Alina didn't think much of it and was even glad for another task. But when she actually got a bucket of warm water from her shower ration and kneeled at the bed with a hand towel under Renza's watchful gaze, the situation suddenly felt much more awkward than she had expected.

He looked slightly ridiculous, sitting in her comparatively tiny plastic desk chair, feet splayed and talons kneading into the rainbow throw pillow in his lap. She hoped he wasn't gonna shred it. Her dad had given her that pillow before his Upload.

Alina had dampened the corner of the towel and then, with some trepidation, dabbed the fabric to the grayish-blue slit nearest to her—a gash as wide as her pointer finger located along Threxin's mid-rib. She'd caught the excess stream of water as it ran down his skin, sliding it back up the dimly glowing opening. The edges of the aperture had softened before her eyes even though the crevice itself tightened in response, and she could've sworn it glowed more brightly.

A wave of nausea passed over her as Alina realized anew that these were literal holes in the alien's body. How deep did they go? How far inside was that blue radiance? If she went too deep with the towel, would she hit bone? Or was the light just beneath the surface, another layer of luminescent skin? She could probably just stick her finger in there and…

"Continue." Renza's voice brought her out of her morbid curiosity.

Alina forced herself through the awkward intimacy of the act. She focused on the more innocuous parts of him first. The splayed ribs, the striated shoulders, the dips and valleys of carved arms. That was when she noticed the comms patch attached to his inner wrist. It was biometrically locked, of course, but Renza saw her hesitate there. Without a word, he leaned over to peel the patch from his brother's wrist and tuck it into his pocket.

Then she moved to the neck and face, tracing the aperture running up one side of his throat. Before she even registered the bone-conducting earpiece behind his ear, Renza was there, snatching that away as well.

"You know they're genelocked," Alina muttered. Renza grunted.

She'd left the expanse of the alien's chest for last. At that point she worked her way through the apertures around the wound. By the time Alina reached the jagged ladder of his abdomen, she had shaped the process into a routine in her head. There was nothing awkward here. Not a big deal. She was just taking care of a wounded patient. The fact that she had to gently trail her hands down the lines of his obliques until they disappeared beneath the blanket low on his hips was nothing special. Alina was mentally steeling herself to peel back the fabric when Renza rose in her peripheral vision.

"Good," he grunted. "Do this five times each day."

"That's it? Just the… torso?"

Please say it's just the torso.

"Apertures are only on our upper bodies," Renza said.

Alina exhaled a sigh of relief, wiping excess moisture from the opening she'd been working on, just below his hip.

Having gone through it once, Alina realized it wasn't going to be so bad. She could do this. And the treatment had a marked effect on the alien. He just looked… better . More vibrant.

She just wasn't sure if that was a good thing yet.

Renza had dismissed the uhyre guard patrolling her hallway and allotted himself in their place. It was a strange kind of relief to be watched at gunpoint by one uhyre over another. But it did allow Alina more breathing room, Renza being gone a lot of the time. With Threxin "missing," it was up to his brother to keep things under control as best he could and not rouse suspicion among both the humans and the uhyre.

But apparently, two days after Threxin landed on her floor, someone hadn't gotten the memo.

Renza was there when it happened, monitoring her work on redressing his brother's wound. When the chime sounded, his spikes went up and he turned toward her slowly, crimson eyes narrowed. Accusatory crimson slits glared in her direction, as if Alina had anything to do with it. "Explain."

"It… it's my doctor," she muttered when the feed projected who was outside. Dr. Pertin waited at her door with th e same female uhyre who'd escorted him before looking bored behind him.

Renza hissed through his teeth when the female shoved the doctor out of the way to bang a fist on the cabin door.

"Ignore it," Renza instructed in a quiet monotone, flexing his talons on the grip of the pistol he had extracted.

Alina slumped with a sigh when, after a few minutes, they walked away. She'd never forgive herself if this whole mess got Dr. Pertin killed too. Luckily Threxin hadn't distributed access devices to all the uhyre yet. If he had, they could barge into human cabins unannounced any time they wanted. So far, only Renza had that privilege.

The missed calibration visit was for the best. Talking to Dr. Pertin now would be useless with everything going on. And frankly, she was way too exhausted to think about her feelings.

Only later that day, Renza came and told her to go to the medbay for her "head correction."

"That's not what it is, and it's really not a good time," Alina tried to protest. But debate was not on the table as Renza herded her toward the door. For creatures who had no trouble fucking with their heads back on Old Earth, the uhyre seemed surprisingly concerned with her people's mental state.

At Dr. Pertin's office, Alina's foot worried at a little divot between two tiles in the floor.

"Alina?"

"Huh?" She looked up. "Sorry, what was the question?"

"How are you?"

"Oh. I'm fine." She drummed her fingers on his desk. The peach paint on her knuckles had long since chipped and repainting them had been the furthest thing from her mind.

Dr. Pertin twined his hands together on his tabletop and sighed. "Fine, huh?"

"Yeah. "

"Alina." He leaned forward. "You know just because we're rationing medication doesn't mean you have to pretend to be okay."

"I'm okay!" Alina snapped, bringing a hand up to run through her bangs. "I'm sorry. It's just been… a lot. But it's a lot for everybody. How does this work now anyway?"

Calibration relied on a precise Neurosync link in which a medical specialist carefully tweaked her hormone levels for optimized internal flows. Everything else—coping strategies and meds like Harmonapam—was just a bonus. The real treatment was enabled entirely by the NS and the practitioner's familiarity with relevant physiological structures. Now that their Neurosyncs were disabled, what the hell were they even going to do here?

"We do what we can with the tools we have left," Dr. Pertin said.

"Like what? Talk about all my problems?" Alina chuckled, but the joke fell flat, which was… worrying.

"Have you kept count this week?"

"Yes…" Alina picked the toe of her sneaker into the floor divot. "Three."

Three times that her brain wouldn't stop ruminating on something stupid she had done to the point of near-incapacitation.

"But I'm better now," she offered and it was true. Since Threxin showed up on her at her door, she had no time to panic about much of anything except keeping him alive. She had even kept her mind off that tarp, most of the time. Focusing on something— someone —else helped her stop from fixating.

"I'm glad to hear it." Dr. Pertin reclined in his seat. "Because I'm afraid I don't have anything more to give you aside from… well," he smiled. "The talking. We're in a bit of a bind here with medical supplies."

"It's fine. I'm fine, and the tea's helping like always. "

"It isn't your job to make me feel better, Alina." Dr. Pertin smiled.

"I'm not. Look, I gotta go." It was almost time for her dinner triage run for Kaia, and then Threxin's next wound redress. "Don't worry about me, all right?"

It was the first time Alina ended a session on her own before their time was up, and she saw that it threw him, but what else were they supposed to do here? Without the NS, a calibration doctor may as well be a surgeon without a scalpel!

Dr. Pertin nodded, but stopped her when she stood to go. "Alina? How was this appointment arranged?"

Alina swallowed, keeping her hands decidedly limp at her sides against the urge to fidget. "I don't know… I think Kaia may have pulled some strings?"

"Perhaps," Dr. Pertin nodded.

Aside from the impromptu medbay visit, Renza had permitted Alina to leave her watch at her cabin for her regular duties to avoid rousing suspicion. There was always a risk that Kaia would pull her away, but her charge—the human one—seemed even less inclined to need her than usual, if that were possible. Kaia was more distracted and looked more tired than usual. She hadn't asked Alina to join her in the command center since the morning after Threxin's "disappearance."

Authority seemed to naturally fall to Renza amongst the uhyre, and luckily Colossal was largely self-operating when no critical decisions had to be made. Threxin had already authorized a preset course for the location of a jump Alina wasn't even sure would happen anymore. She was pretty sure now that Threxin would live, but how long would it take for him to wake up and be recovered enough to command Colossal again ?

So all in all, things were running as well as could be expected when your ship's been invaded by aliens. Alina just wished she weren't so tired.

"I thought we were on nutrigel, or the wraps or whatever now," Kaia wrinkled her nose at the salad Alina held out to her the next evening outside the command center.

"I pulled a couple strings at the canteen," Alina's smile faded at the disappointment on Kaia's face. Sure, she'd preferred nutrigel to real food when she first arrived on Colossal , but Alina had seen her tastes evolve over time. She was regressing.

"Just get the nutriwrap next time," Kaia muttered as Orion took the salad on her behalf.

"Kaia…" Orion sighed.

"What? Nutrigel settles my stomach."

Alina blinked. Settle her stomach? Always tired and gaunt-looking? Cravings for otherwise subpar food? Realization hit her all at once.

She's pregnant!

How could Alina not have seen it before? Kaia Halena was pregnant. She had to be. Even Kaia's petulance and suicidal aggression toward Threxin and his kind suddenly made sense. It was the pregnancy hormones, of course. She was on edge and couldn't help herself.

Alina's stomach sank. What would Threxin do when he woke up and found out the former commander of Colossal was about to get an heir? Would he consider the child a threat? Would he do something?

If ever there was a time to tell Kaia and Orion what was going on, it was then. Let them make a decision of what to do with Threxin—there was still time, after all. He was surely the weakest he'd ever be as he lay unconscious in her bed.

But Alina already knew what they'd do. There would be only one thing for them to do, and that would be to kill the invader. And what if it made her do it, considering she was the one with the access? Alina's stomach turned at the thought. And even if it happened—if Threxin was dead—the rest of the uhyre would still be there to enact their revenge.

Alina's face fell when she got back to her cabin that night to find the covers thrown off of Threxin's chest. She kneeled next to the bed and pressed a palm to his huge forearm, testing the body temperature: cold. She pulled the covers as high as his ribs, leaving the area of the wound bare. Then she peeled away the synthskin plaster. The wound was pink at the edges, but the plaster wasn't crusted with blood on the inside anymore.

Alina recoiled when the alien groaned. His heavy brow was knotted, face tilted in her direction with his upper lip curled, revealing the flash of a black fang. It would take him nothing to reach out and snap her neck, maybe even in his sleep. How much awareness did the alien have of what was happening? Did he know she was there to help him, or would he wake up confused, in a rage?

Maybe he could hear her…

"So," Alina whispered, clearing her throat. "Threxin."

She yawned as she picked through the medkit at the bedside and extracted an antiseptic salve applicator. Pinching her tongue between her teeth, Alina dipped forward to position the tip of the applicator to the sutures in the alien's chest.

"You're in a cabin. My cabin. Me being Alina." She applied the salve to the wound. "You were hurt by a person. But not by me," she hastened to add. "And you're okay. Your brother from another mother helped with a blood transfusion, and I'm watching over you."

She smoothed the salve with her fingertip gingerly, gaze sliding up to the alien's face for any reaction. Did she imagine the little twitch between his brows ?

"You must be hurting, but that's just the wound. Not me. So… please don't kill me, okay?" She continued, extracting a new tube of synthskin from the kit and puncturing the seal. "I'm just redressing it now. You know, the stab wound."

Damn it, Alina. Did she have to keep reminding him about the stabbing? She squeezed the synthskin to the injury and smoothed it over with her fingertips as neatly as she could. She was no medic, but Alina thought it looked pretty good. "After this I'll moisten your skin cracks. Your apertures . They look dry again."

The openings contracted a little, for just a moment, and Alina felt a pang of motivation. That had to be a response. He must be hearing her somehow.

Since Renza had shown her how to do this, she'd had to go through the process multiple times a day, including in the middle of the night. She really needed a shower. After filling the bowl for the job of hydrating Threxin like this, all Alina had left of her meager graywater rations was just enough to brush her teeth.

"You're looking much better," she continued as she dabbed the towel along the line of the alien's jaw, above which an aperture ran from his chin to the spot behind his ear. It swooped nearly seamlessly into another that cut the plane just beneath his broad cheekbone, casting an ethereal glow to already sharp angles. "You're more glowy than before at least, which has to be a good sign, right?"

She moved through the task methodically. It was always difficult to reach the side of him near the wall.Alina propped a knee on the edge of the bed and a hand on the other side of the mattress, curling herself over her charge to work one-handed at the apertures there. She could see some of the openings dipping below the sheet, along his back, but reaching those was not an option and she doubted it was a good idea to move him at this point anyway .

"Don't worry," she grunted as she worked bent over him. "I'm almost done. Oww! Fuck!"

Alina's arm buckled as a cramp shot through the joint of her elbow. She scrambled to get her other hand underneath her for purchase, the damp towel still clenched in her fist, but it was no use. Her head had landed in the sheets, chin jutting against the alien's side.

"Crap. Sorry, I—ouch!"

At least she hadn't fallen onto his wound. Alina scrambled backward across his abdomen as she gripped her seizing arm with the other. "Sorry! Just a second."

But Threxin gave her no seconds. Two massive arms linked themselves atop her, crushing her to the rock-hard plane beneath.

"Wait!" Alina squeaked, cramp subsiding because apparently her body decided it had bigger things to worry about. Like getting pinned and drawn backward into an uhyre's chest— his injured chest .

The stitches!

"Threxin?" Alina tried to crane her neck to catch a glimpse of his face, but it was impossible. His jaw was at her neck, his breath hot on her ear. Those fangs were right there . But his breathing was slow and even, which meant he was still unconscious.

Her ribs ached under the pressure of his pythonic grasp already, and all he had to do was apply a little more to crush her like a bug.

"Threxin? It's okay. This is fine. You're… not in danger," she wheezed, taking shallow breaths because the vise of his forearms crossed against her chest would not let her have anything more. "Just… stay calm."

Was she talking to him, or to herself? She forced herself to count.

One… Two …

"You can hear me, right? Threxin? Just… let me go. It's okay," she tried, to no avail.

Her throat was constricting, her hands heavy and numb even as they dug divots into the alien's forearms. She couldn't feel her body, but she felt his. It was a solid slab beneath her, sharp peaks and troughs of alien muscle jutting through her shirt and trousers. She swallowed as she became acutely aware of the plane at which their skin connected.

Three… Four… Five…

She loosened her grip on his arms, realizing trying to peel him off her was futile. His breath was a steady pendulum beneath her, swinging up and down in an uncompromising rhythm. The pounding in her head stuttered, then slowed to meet it. Her own lungs tried instinctively to match it, but she didn't have room to take the deep inhales he did, not with her ribcage getting crushed like that.

Six…

Alina took stock of her body. Her legs were splayed atop his own, one foot propped on his shin, the other on his thigh. Her butt was at his stomach, and his stomach burned . All of him did. He was cold before, and now this. Was he running a fever? She tried to lift her back a little to take pressure off his wound, but only got herself jerked tighter against him in response, eliciting an airless squeak.

Seven… Eight…

The counting was helping her reconnect with her body, but maybe that wasn't such a good thing this time. The heat of his breath in her ear, slithering along her earlobe and down the back of her neck, made her feel a little sick. A shiver clenched her gut as she struggled to twist her head from the contact with little success.

She reminded herself to keep the count and focus on the even metronome of motion beneath her. Where was she again?

One… Two… Three… She started again. Bit by bit, the surge inside her subsided as she managed to focus on the breath… not her breath, considering she barely had any, but that of her captor.

Four… Five…

Her head grew heavy with the even rhythm of the heat at her neck. He wasn't letting go, and she stopped hoping for that eventuality, letting her mind wander.

Six… Seven…

She was so damn tired. She couldn't wait for all this to be over, and to be back to her normal routine. One perk of being no one important and being rejected by your super important boss was getting plenty of sleep. Alina wasn't used to waking up multiple times a night to check on a possibly dying alien, care for his wound, water his apertures…

Eight… Nine…

But he wasn't dying anymore, that much was clear. So maybe she could just close her eyes for a little bit, considering she had nothing better to do.

Five minutes, and then she'd try getting herself out of this again.

Ten.