Page 7 of Alien on the Moon (Thryal Mates #3)

Elena

If overthinking were an Olympic sport, Elena would be the reigning champion. Her mind was a constant loop of Murphy’s law as she tried to anticipate everything that could and would go wrong at any given moment in her life. Spontaneity was Sofia’s expertise, not hers.

So when she woke up beside Rylan after a night of sex performed entirely on impulse, she naturally panicked a bit. She had slept with her coworker, one she would have to see every day if this didn’t work out.

And even without even taking into account the HR nightmare of the crown prince’s sister-in-law dating a coworker, their job was to prevent mass starvation. Would they become too distracted by each other to actually solve the crisis?

Rylan shifted, lazily opening his eyes to study her face. “Good morning.”

All the blood rushed to her cheeks. “‘Morning.”

Stretching luxuriously, he pressed a kiss to her lips and got to his feet. “So, should we get breakfast before processing the soil samples?”

“Together?” she squeaked, cursing herself for how high her voice rose in pitch. This was new territory for her. Usually, she would sleep with a guy, and they would go their separate ways in the morning.

And she liked it that way. Being around people was exhausting most of the time, and the Thyrals could be especially frustrating. Because she was the prince’s sister-in-law, they were always cordial, but she could tell they thought she was just some yokel from a backwoods planet who had no idea what she was talking about. Rylan was one of the few people who she thought could never be exhausting to be around.

He paused, his pants hiked halfway up his thighs. “If you want,” he said carefully, as though he was defusing a bomb. “We don’t have to—”

She cut him off. “I do.” Laughing, she sat up. “I really do. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.”

The muscles around his shoulders visibly relaxed as he flashed her a relieved smile and pulled his pants the rest of the way up. “Understood. I know I’m not someone befitting of your rank, so if you—”

She blinked. “What?”

“You’re the prince’s sister-in-law. You may not be noble Thryal blood, but you are one of them. I’m a commoner, though, which means I am beneath you.” He looked confused as he explained, as though he was answering a question that should have been self-evidential.

Elena got to her feet and took his hand. “Rylan, you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. If anything, I thought you’d be embarrassed to be seen with a weak and lowly human.”

“So, neither one of us is embarrassed by the other,” he said, handing her the bra they’d discarded during their night of passion. “I’m glad we cleared that up.”

Breakfast was far less awkward than she feared. Several of the other scientists gave them knowing looks, but out of respect for them, or more likely, for the prince, they didn’t say anything.

After eating, she began running the samples, searching for any microbes that may be responsible for depleting the soil and cross-referencing them with the diseases that the Thryal staple crop, bral, was susceptible to.

After a few minutes, the results came back. No microbes were causing a blight in the soil. In fact, there were barely any microbes at all.

A hunch was beginning to form in her mind. The soil had all the correct nutrients, but with the low variety of organic matter, she had a sneaking suspicion that the problem may lie in the overspecialization of the terraformed land. After all, where were the insects and other animals? There was no real food chain.

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, it may have seemed counterintuitive at first, but all species from the lichens and willows to the beavers and even their primary food source, elk, benefited.

Terraforming may be starting from scratch on a new planet, but the plants themselves didn’t know that. Like fruit trees on Earth that still produce massive seeds for long-extinct megafauna, the bral was failing to thrive because they expected a different environment.

“Do we have any samples of soil from Thryal up here?” she asked one of the experts in soil enrichment, Kyn.

She blinked. “Why would you need that?”

“I want to get a baseline for what makes bral thrive on Thryal along with whatever plants or animals are important for its survival.” She gestured to some of the research on her computer. “Getting a bigger picture of the environment might be the key to figuring this out.”

“I’ll send it to you,” Kyn said and disappeared to another part of the lab.

While she waited, Elena began looking at other terraforming projects. Most of them were outright failures, and those that weren’t were too expensive to be maintained enough to be useful. The costs outweighed the benefits.

When she received the soil analysis, all her theories were confirmed.

“What are you looking at?” Rylan asked.

Elena jumped. She had been so focused on her theory that she hadn’t heard him approach. “I’ve just been thinking. Maybe we’re approaching terraforming the wrong way.”

“How so?” He pulled up a chair to sit beside her.

She gestured to the open tabs on her computer, all pertaining to the environment and the need to balance various elements in the ecosystem. “Everything is so specialized and laser-focused on this one specific crop. Remember how I mentioned those Milpas yesterday?”

“Yeah, you wanted to look into polyculture practices as a solution.” He furrowed his brows. “But I don’t see why that means we’re terraforming the wrong way.”

“Do you know how many of the Thryal terraforming projects succeed?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know the exact percentage.”

“Half. Only half of all Thryal terraforming projects lead to a successful crop yield, and those that do are far too expensive to maintain. Growing a crop is not like keeping a potted plant. It needs a complete environment for it to thrive and provide any real yield, not just more nitrogen in the soil and carbon dioxide in the air.”

“But a complete overhaul? Do you know how expensive that is?”

“Probably less expensive than a famine,” she snapped. And then her stomach lurched. If she kept on this trajectory, their conversation would end with Rylan storming out of the room and out of her life, muttering “know-it-all bitch” as he did so.

It happened with her first real boyfriend, Mike, before a robotics team match. She’d noticed a flaw in his code for their entry and tried to fix it. Mike told her to leave it alone, and it turned into a fight. Eventually, she gave in and left it alone.

They lost the match, and the ensuing I-told-you-so argument had been even worse. He broke up with her and turned the entire robotics team against her, telling them that she’d intentionally sabotaged the code for their robot.

It wasn’t true, of course. He wrote bad code, and he didn’t appreciate that his girlfriend called him out on it.

But that and a decade of other miserable experiences had taught her one thing. People didn’t like it when she told them they were wrong. She only ever wanted to help, but no matter what, she would somehow insult them.

Before yesterday, with Rylan, she felt safe being a bit snappish, but things were different now. Weren’t they? They were together, and guys didn’t like it when their girlfriends snapped at them. Even when those girlfriends knew they were right.

“I-I mean,” she stammered, her heart racing. If she didn’t watch her tone, he would leave her just like everyone else. Everyone but her sisters, and sometimes she worried they were obligated by familial ties to stay with her.

“You’re not wrong,” he said, his eyes narrowing in thought. He glanced around the room. Following his gaze, she clocked that people were listening.

He nodded to a nearby conference room. “Let’s talk in private, okay?”

She nodded mutely, feeling a bit like a prisoner on death row. Yesterday, their disagreements had been so easy, but now, the threat of rejection loomed large over her head.

The logical part of her knew that one rude statement wouldn’t be enough to get him to break up with her, and if it was, he wasn’t worth it anyway. She could tell herself that all she wanted, but the animal part of her brain that was wounded by rejection still flinched at the threat of being kicked away.

Closing her eyes, she practiced her box breathing, something Carmen taught her whenever her mind would get away from her, wild as a runaway horse. In for four, hold for four, out for four, repeat…

Rylan was just a guy—a hot, brilliant, and kind guy, but still a guy. She was there to help prevent a famine, not date Thryal’s most eligible genius. If being honest about what they needed to do caused him to reject her, she could live with that if it meant millions more would also survive.

“Are you okay?” He looked at her with such concern that it made her heart beat like a jackhammer.

She crossed her arms, suddenly feeling childish. “I’m fine.”

Raising a skeptical brow, he pulled up a chair and sat down. “Is that why you look like you’re on the verge of a panic attack?”

Despite herself, she chuckled. He was blunt, and she appreciated that. It took a lot of guesswork out of their interactions. And if he was being brutally honest, she guessed that she could be the same.

Grabbing a chair for herself, she sat down with a sigh. “Just another weird, neurotic hangup. I like you. A lot. And most of the time, when I like someone, they eventually decide that I’m too much and leave. I guess when I snapped at you, it made me panic about potentially driving you away by being a know-it-all.”

He smiled and took her hand. “You could never be too much.”

“That’s easy for you to say now. Give it some time.” She sighed. “As much as I enjoyed last night, it really made things weird.”

“Well, do you want to go back to being friends?”

“No,” she said much too quickly. When he shot her a smug look, she laughed sheepishly. “I like you a lot, and that’s the problem. It makes me afraid to disagree with you because people seem to take disagreement as insults.”

“I’ve been told that I have the same problem. It’s the body language. I’m not very good at reading it.” He hummed thoughtfully. “Here’s a proposal. When we disagree, I’ll tell you when I need to take a break or you’ve crossed a line. And you’ll do the same for me.”

“Please do,” she said, the tension leaving her body. “Thank you.” He understood. Hell, he understood her better than her own sisters sometimes.

“So, back to what you were saying about how our entire system needs an overhaul.”

He tapped a few buttons on the conference table and the holographic plans for the terraforming project appeared. “Why do you think this?”

Getting to her feet, she pulled up the soil composition of bral fields on Thryal and pointed to the percentage of organic matter. “Do you see all this?”

He nodded. “Our soil here is missing that.”

“Exactly! You’re treating terraforming like a greenhouse. A sustainable environment, though, requires an ecosystem. You need squigs, and fungi to break down plant matter.” She pulled up a picture of the Thryal equivalent to an earthworm. “And you need pollinators like zegs.” She called up the image of an insect similar to an Earth bee.

“Like the Milpas you mentioned yesterday,” he said. “Things feeding one another while also helping to strengthen each other.”

She snapped her fingers and, in the same motion, formed them into finger guns. “Bingo.”

Getting to his feet, he brought the schematics forward again. “I don’t think we need an entire overhaul. We still need the machines we use to oxygenate the air and feed the soil initially, especially if we bring in plants and insects from Thryal. Something has to sustain them until we’ve stabilized everything.”

“So, instead of having the moon under constant life support, it will eventually begin to sustain itself,” she said.

He winked. “Bingo.”

Bouncing on the balls of her feet, she clapped her hands in excitement. “In the meantime, we can begin filling the soil with organic matter from our base by composting our food and waste. Give the squigs plenty to eat before they arrive.”

He openly beamed at her as her mind raced, already trying to figure out what plants and small life forms would best work together to make the soil healthy and sustainable.

Feeling his eyes on her, she blushed. “What?”

“You’re so beautiful like this.”

“Like what?”

He moved in closer, taking both her hands in his. “Excited. Your mind moving so fast that your body cannot seem to contain the energy.”

“It’s not annoying?”

He shook her head. “I never understood people who act annoyed by the happiness of others, especially when they’re taking joy in something they love.”

Why was she so afraid earlier that he’d push her away for speaking her mind? Everything Rylan had ever said or done indicated he valued her point of view. He respected her as an intellectual equal.

Standing on her tiptoes, she surged upward to kiss him. His hands found their way to her waist and pulled her closer, and she hooked her leg around his. Leaning lower, he deepened the kiss, his hands working their way inside her shirt and cupping her breasts, and—

There was a knock at the door. Elena and Rylan hopped apart like two kids caught necking under the high school bleachers. Rylan cleared his throat. “Who is it?”

“The team morale committee,” one of the residential staff, a Thryal named Ged, said. “We reserved this conference room for our meeting.”

“Right.” Rylan straightened his clothes. “We’ll clean up and be right out.”

Elena stifled a giggle attack as she helped Rylan shut off the holographic plans and followed him out of the room. Ged and the other members of the committee watched them pass with knowing stares. She couldn’t even find it in herself to be embarrassed.

Rylan took her hand and gave it a squeeze. When she looked up at him, he winked, and she had to cover her mouth to stifle her guffaw.

As soon as they were safely out of earshot of the committee, both broke down in laughter so powerful that they had to lean on each other. Elena’s fit lasted long after her sides and cheeks ached.

When was the last time she’d laughed like that with someone? It was probably at her sisters’ antics, but she couldn’t exactly remember. It definitely wasn’t with any of her boyfriends, though.

Rylan was special, more special than Elena was ready to admit to herself.