Page 7 of Thexan

His gaze fixed on me again, and this time the silence carried something different, a faint undercurrent that might have been irritation if he had been human. I found that oddly reassuring. A patient annoyed with me was usually less likely to die in the next five minutes.

I ran the scan slowly, adjusting the angle when the diagnostic tablet protested the density of his body. The readings came back uneven, some useless, some fascinating. Elevated temperature. Irregular neural activity. Cardiovascular force far beyond human tolerance. Tissue damage along the wound site complicated by an energy residue I could not identify.

“What did this?” I asked.

His expression closed.

That was answer enough.

“Thexan.”

The name worked again. His attention returned to me, immediate and intense.

“I need to know if whatever hurt you is going to kill you while I’m standing here guessing.”

“The weapon was designed to disrupt repair response.”

I looked down at the wound. “That explains why it keeps reopening.”

“It also disrupts neural regulation.”

My gaze lifted. “That explains the instability.”

“Yes.”

“And the contact?”

He looked away.

Not far. Only enough that he was no longer meeting my eyes.

That, more than anything, made my hand still over the diagnostic tablet. I didn’t like not understanding something this fundamental—especially when it involved my own body as much as his.

“You know what this is.”

He did not answer immediately. The quiet stretched between us, filled with the low hum of the overhead light and the distant sound of someone laughing outside the infirmary, oblivious to the fact that I had an injured Mesaarkan warrior on my cot and no idea whether I had just saved my settlement or invited danger into the center of it.

“I know enough,” he said at last.

“That’s becoming a very annoying answer.”

“It is the only one I can give you safely.”

I set the tablet down with more care than I felt. “Then give me the unsafe one.”

His eyes returned to mine.

The room seemed to narrow again.

The room narrowed to details: blood beneath my nails, the ache between my shoulders, the heat of his wrist under my fingers, the shallow rise of his bandaged chest, and the impossible steadiness of his eyes on mine.

Then he said, “My body recognizes you.”

The words should have been meaningless without context. They weren’t. I didn’t understand them, but some part of me reacted before thought could intervene, a small tightening low in my body, a warmth that had nothing to do with the infirmary or exhaustion.

I made myself breathe normally.

“As what?”