Page 13 of Alien on the Moon (Thryal Mates #3)

Elena

“Are you kidding me?” Elena muttered in frustration, staring at the squigs that lazily squirmed along her desk. Almost all of them had stopped eating the compost, and the soil was already losing its fertility.

Worse than that, they looked engorged and sickly, like they carried some disease. But in her research, she couldn’t find any kinds of diseases they were prone to that matched their symptoms.

“What is wrong with you?” she muttered, lightly prodding at one of the squigs with a pair of tweezers. It burst open, its skin peeling back like a blanched tomato as slime oozed out of its former body cavity.

Yelping, she leaped to her feet in disgust, covering her nose as a putrid odor filled the room. She and everyone in the immediate vicinity fled.

“Oh, that’s foul,” Sofia said, approaching from down the hall. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. “What happened?”

Elena refused to meet her sister’s eye. “Squig popped.”

“Gross.” She craned her head to peek into the lab window. “Do you know what’s wrong with them yet?”

She shook her head, resisting the urge to scream in frustration. “I have no idea.”

Sofia squeezed her sister’s shoulder. “Hey, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You’re the genius. Remember?”

“Not feeling like one right now.”

Her older sister sighed, looking resigned. “Look, we’re going to head back to Thryal soon, but Arccoo wanted to talk to you in private before we left.”

Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath in and out. Best just to get it over with. “Where is he?”

Sofia furrowed her brows in concern. “Are you sure you want to go now?”

“I’m not a child. I can handle myself if it’s bad news,” she snapped, feeling a bit childish for it. Her older sister was just the messenger. None of this was her fault.

Sofia put her hands up in a placating gesture. “Yeah, I know that. I actually was going to suggest that you change first. No offense, but you reek. What are those squigs made of?”

“Spite and cruel mockery, I think.”

She sniffed her shirt. The squig must have gotten some of its juices on her when it burst because the shirt smelled awful. But she was heading in for what was inevitably going to be a frustrating conversation, so she was feeling petty. “I’ll stay in this. If I have to suffer through the bad news, Arccoo should be just as uncomfortable.”

Sofia smirked and patted Elena’s shoulder. “It looks like the squigs aren’t the only things full of spite. He’s in his room. I’ll take Carmen somewhere far away.” She sniffed again, her face twisting in disgust. “Very far away.”

Feeling like a prisoner on death row, Elena made her way to Arccoo’s room. He sat waiting on his bed, expecting her. Carmen wisely seemed to have already cleared the area.

When she entered, he wrinkled his nose. “Ugh, what’s that smell?”

“The scent of someone doing their duty , Your Highness ,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.

He gestured for her to sit down at his desk chair.

Arccoo sighed, looking incredibly tired. She knew she wasn’t being fair to her brother-in-law. He had the literal weight of his planet’s future on his shoulders, but she believed in this project and needed him to believe in her.

He scrubbed his face. “Look, Elena, I’m trying. You have no idea how hard I’ve been working to buy you all more time, but we need results.”

“So, what? You’re just pulling the plug?” She crossed her arms, digging her fingers into their soft flesh. The physical pain was enough of a distraction from her growing anger.

He shook his head. “Not yet. We’re giving you one more chance. Then, unfortunately, we’ll have to switch to Plan B before it’s too late to avert disaster.”

“Don’t you believe in me?” Try as she might, she couldn’t keep the hurt from her voice.

“Of course, I believe in you, little sister,” he said, looking almost equally pained. “You have one of the brightest minds in the galaxy. I know that, if given enough time, you’d figure it out. But we don’t have that time, and the royal council is pushing me to end this project.”

Getting to his feet, he opened his arms, offering a hug. A petty part of her considered rejecting it, but she decided against it. This wasn’t really his fault, after all. He was fighting for the project as much as she was.

She wrapped her arms around his chest. He gave her a squeeze and then made a disgusted noise. “You really should change your shirt,” he said. “Or burn it.”

Rolling her eyes, she stepped backward and gave an exaggerated bow. “As you wish, my liege.”

“We’ll be leaving in about twenty minutes. Carmen and Sofia will want to say goodbye.”

She nodded and headed for the door. “I’ll be there.” Pausing, she turned back to him and gave him a weak smile. “And there’s no hard feelings. I know you’re doing your best, and above everything else, we’re family. Nothing will ever change that.”

“Thank you,” he said softly. After his brother’s betrayal, he began to close himself off for a time. It took a while for him to open up to anyone outside of Carmen again. Even though she was upset, she knew he still needed some reassurance that she hadn’t rejected him over this.

Heading back to her room, she changed into a clean shirt and threw the dirty one into the basket for the laundry collection bots to pick up. Sitting on her bed, she let some tears escape for a few minutes before splashing cold water on her face and heading to the hangar to say goodbye to her family.

Carmen, Sofia, Arccoo, Zaraq, and Rylan were all waiting for her. Rylan hung back, his gaze pensive as she hugged the prince and Zaraq goodbye.

Stepping back from Arccoo’s hug, she flashed him a weak smile. “No hard feelings. I mean it.”

He returned her smile with an incline of his head.

Then Carmen and Sofia threw their arms around her. “We’re so sorry,” Carmen whispered. “We know how much this means to you.”

Elena straightened and gave them a smirk. Though a little hurt by their lack of faith, she didn’t want to end their visit on a bad note. “Hey, I’ve still got one more try. Don’t count me out just yet.”

Stepping back, Carmen smiled. “You? Never. We believe in you.”

Sofia patted Elena’s shoulder. “So, channel your inner mad scientist and figure this out. Thryal just isn’t the same without you.”

Elena’s world went a bit fuzzy as her eyes misted over. “I’ll miss you guys, too.”

She watched them climb the steps to the ship and take off with a pang of homesickness. They would be waiting on Thryal, but for now, she had work to do. She turned to Rylan and sighed.

“We need to talk,” she said.

He nodded. “My office.” They walked there together in silence, but it wasn’t the usual kind of quiet, comfortable companionship that filled their hours in the lab. This silence was made of that terrible anticipation that usually accompanied bad news.

Shutting the door, he sat at his desk and gestured for her to sit down across from him. “I take it that Prince Arccoo told you about ending this project,” he said, looking wan and exhausted.

She crossed her arms, her fingers again digging into her flesh and adding a new set of little crescents to complement the old. “Yeah, he said he was going to buy us some time to figure it out first.”

“Elena…” he began.

She shook her head. “No, don’t you ‘Elena’ me. We’ve come too far to give up now, especially with so many lives on the line.”

Didn’t he realize what giving up meant? She would go back to Thryal as a failure, and he would be shipped off to wherever the king and queen wanted. Long-distance relationships rarely ever worked out, especially one as new as theirs. They might never see each other again.

“I’m sure Earth also has a concept of the sunk-cost fallacy.” Sighing, he scrubbed his face. “I know you’re disappointed, but…”

“Disappointed? No, I’m confused and pissed.”

Too much energy buzzed beneath her skin. She had to move, had to get some of it out.

Standing, she paced the room. “This project is your baby. You’ve worked so hard at it and what? You’re just giving up now? We’ve had a setback, yeah, but we’ll figure it out.”

“Not just a setback,” he snapped. “This entire project has been setback after setback. Some things are just doomed to fail.”

Doomed to fail. Just like they were doomed to fail if they just rolled over and gave up. She thought he really liked her. Was this relationship just a diversion for him? Was he ready to cast her aside when she was no longer useful, just like all her peers on Earth?

Intellectually, she knew this was an illogical line of thought. His feelings for her and his feelings about the project were entirely separate entities. But he once told her that as long as he had his work, he would be content. Did that mean the work was more important? Would she always come in second to it?

It was completely illogical to feel like the fact that he wasn’t fighting for the project meant he wasn’t fighting for her, but feelings were rarely logical.

“I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I think we can’t just give up on this. We’re close to an answer. I can feel it. We just have to try.” We can’t just give up on us.

“And we’re going to. But Elena, you know that the odds of success—real success that we can show the royals—are vanishingly low. I also have to be realistic. You said yourself that half of all terraforming projects fail, and the other half only last a few years before it’s too expensive to maintain. How likely is it that we can make this one project a success when we have no real precedent for it?”

She straightened, meeting his gaze with a glare and a determined set of her jaw. “Well, sitting here with your thumb up your ass won’t make it any more likely to succeed.”

With that, she turned and slammed the door behind her. Elena had come here to prove herself as a scientist. She was here to save a terraforming project and stop a famine in its tracks.

Maybe it would be better if she and Rylan had some time apart to think and plan. He had been a distraction in the past few weeks. She didn’t want to admit it, but it was true.

Her mind would frequently drift from whatever experiment she was running to the sensation of his skin against hers and how he would touch her like she was something precious and perfect. She would fantasize about moving back to Thryal with him and working together on the cutting edge of scientific breakthroughs.

Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly lovesick, she would daydream about the kids they would have and what she would name them.

Clearly, though, he didn’t feel the same way. Rylan was eager to wash his hands of this moon, this project, and of her.

Fine.

But she wasn’t going to give up so easily. Not on him and not on Kheros.

She grabbed an oxygen mask and made her way back to the lab. The odor of the dead squig had driven most of her coworkers away, but she returned to her desk, took a sample of the slime, and began to examine it under a high-powered microscope.

Strange shapes squirmed in the membranous goo, but she couldn’t yet identify them. At first, she thought this might be some kind of larvae, but they didn’t look like any of the larvae she’d read about. Could it have been a parasite? Something already living in the soil that was affecting them? However, the preliminary soil tests showed that the ground was practically lifeless.

She spent the next several hours banging her head against the wall, both figuratively and, once or twice, literally. What was she missing? Why were the squigs dying off?

Her comms beeped and a message flashed on the screen. Remember Eureka.

It was from Rylan, of course, and though she could tell it was intended to be a peace offering, it did nothing but gall her further. He wanted her to leave the lab and abandon her work.

Between the two of them, someone had to keep at it, and from the looks of it, he had already given up. She had to pick up the slack.

But the part of her that still ran on logic rather than frustration pointed out that she hadn’t eaten in hours and did need to sleep eventually. She would be no help if she ran herself to the ground.

“Fuck you, Rylan,” she said without any heat as she got to her feet. After grabbing a quick bite from the cafeteria’s food synthesizers, she showered and went to bed.

And then she lay there staring up at the ceiling. Though she was tired, she couldn’t seem to fall asleep. Her mind raced from frustration to frustration—Rylan, the squigs, the depleting soil, Rylan, the fact that she still had the smell of the goo in her nose even after showering, Rylan, the fact that she was never going to be taken seriously as a scientist, and once again, Rylan.

With a groan, she checked the time on her comms. It had been about two hours with no sign of the sandman. She tossed and turned for another hour after that before giving up. Sleep would not come to her that night.

So, instead, she went to the cafeteria, grabbed a bottle of Jolt, and headed back to the lab. If her sisters were there, they would carry her bodily—kicking and screaming—back to her bedroom and lock her in there until she finally fell asleep.

Rylan would have an easier time coaxing her out. All he’d have to do was invite her into his bed, and she would happily join him. She always seemed to sleep better in his arms, and—

Nope! She wasn’t going to think about it. He’d been too much of a distraction to her already. She needed to focus. What was wrong with the squigs?

By this point, she’d read everything she could find on their physiology and environment as well as contacting several expert entomologists, but none had responded to her queries just yet.

Were there any parallels to Earth animals? She had been thinking of them as being akin to earthworms, but maybe she needed to expand her scope of study. Thryal creatures and Earth creatures both evolved in similar ways, but that didn’t mean they were the same.

She knew she was grasping at straws, but it was better than giving up. Stifling a yawn, she got back to work.