Page 18 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid (Hybrids of Yulaira #1)

Rentir grabbed a flimsy lower tree limb.

Somehow, it managed to bear his weight, and he began to climb.

Reluctantly, Cordelia followed his path up the silvery tree.

Each reach above her head pulled at the wound in her side.

By the time she was fifteen feet from the ground, she panted with pain and exhaustion.

Rentir climbed back down, using his tail to anchor himself as he stood on a precariously thin branch.

“We are not high enough yet.” He didn’t have the decency to sound even slightly winded. “You must keep climbing, Cordelia.”

“I can’t,” she wheezed. She pressed her forehead against the branch above her, clinging to it for dear life as her muscles trembled.

He hesitated, then leapt gracefully to her branch, making the whole thing sway. She yelped as he crouched beside her, wrapped one arm around both her thighs, and abruptly rose.

“Climb,” he said, urging her onward.

She grabbed the closest branch and ignored the burn in her side, struggling to drag her weight higher.

She flinched when he palmed her ass and gave her a boost of momentum, shoving her up and over.

They repeated the sequence until she was high enough off the ground that the view spun menacingly when she looked down.

She shuffled back along the thick limb she was standing on until she could dig her fingers into the bark of the tree trunk, sliding down until she was sitting.

The sky was more visible from this high in the tree.

It had passed through every shade of orange, pink, and silver, and now the blanketing deep purple was being overtaken by the stark black of night.

Animal calls grew louder and more numerous.

And, wonder of wonders, some of the foliage was beginning to glow.

The purple leaves on the silver-barked trees were turning fluorescent blue, as vibrant as a blacklight in a bowling alley.

She laughed in amazement, distracted as Rentir swung up onto her wide branch.

“You are amused?”

“It’s beautiful.” She gestured toward the forest. “Hardly anything glows like this on Earth. It’s incredible.”

“You like things that glow?”

“Yeah, I guess I—oh.”

He crouched in front of her, his eyes glowing green. The darker spots over his nose and high cheekbones were fluorescing bright purple. She could see the movements of his hands in the dark as the smaller spots there glowed. His tail shone like a beacon as it swayed back and forth.

“You glow!”

He grinned, flashing his sharp teeth. They shone eerily under the glowing leaves, adding to that strange feeling that she’d fallen down the rabbit hole. “I do.”

She looked out over the forest, full of flickering blue lights, then back at him. “You’re the wrong color.”

His pointed ears twitched. “Ah… yes. Does it displease you?”

She did a double-take at that. “What? No, of course not. It’s just curious.”

He blew out a breath, nodding. “I see.” He sprawled out in a comfortable position across from her, leaning back on his hands. “Haerune glows like this—blue. He believes his majority donor must have come from a world like this one, whereas mine…”

“Majority donor?”

His glowing eyes turned on her. “Yes. Though we’re all an amalgamation of different species, we tend to have a dominant set of traits from a single species donor. We all share a baseline of auretian genetic code—the rest is fine-tuned by the geneticists until we present the traits they want in us.”

She chewed on that. “What happens if you grow up and you don’t have the traits they were trying to give you?”

Rentir’s body went tense, and he looked away from her. “It would not be cost-effective to keep hybrids who cannot be utilized effectively for the Aurillon’s needs.”

Her stomach turned over.

“Of the forty hybrids born to my batch, only twenty-eight made it planet-side. The rest…” His mouth thinned, and he shook his head. A lock of his dark hair fell into his eyes.

Impulsively, she leaned forward and brushed it behind his horn. He stiffened, eyes widening, and stared down at her without breathing until she sat back again.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice husky. His tail rasped over the branch to reach for her. He seized it in his hand, dragging it into his lap.

“You said ‘planet-side’. Does that mean you guys were…” She pointed up.

“Reared on the Gidalan. Yes.” He looked up, as though he’d be able to make out the ship through the boughs and the gloom. “It is a nursery for my kind. There are hybrids being raised even now, likely a hundred young aboard the mothership.”

“What will happen to them now that you guys have rebelled?”

He puffed out a breath.

“We have speculated, but truthfully… we do not know. Fendar monitors their transmissions as often as he can hack their communications. If they are retaliating against the young, they have not sent word of their actions to anyone else. Still, it’s no guarantee.”

“What’s down here that they need such a big workforce for? All I’ve seen so far is trees and more trees.”

He grinned at that, releasing his tail to flick lazily through the air. “It’s what’s beneath the trees. Beneath the mountains. A rare mineral used in powering jump drives. The Aurillon call it teserium. Dangerous to mine, to handle.”

“So they send you guys down to do it instead.” She straightened her aching legs.

Her boot brushed against Rentir’s hip, and his tail seized upon her, wrapping loosely around her calf. They both looked at it for a long moment; when she didn’t object, he let out a small sigh.

“What a bunch of dicks,” she muttered, leaning her head back against the tree.

He laughed at that. “You say the strangest things.”

“Mmm, we’ll have you cussing before long. Especially Nyx. She’s going to ruin you guys for real.”

“The towering one with the quick temper?”

She laughed hard at that. “That’s the one.”

“Are you close with the other humans?”

“Some of them. Nyx and Eunha went through a hell of a lot of flight training with me before the mission launched. It made us close. The rest… well, some I like more than others.”

She thought of Lyra looming imperiously at the edge of the room during training and simulations, soaking up all the accolades in the media for funding her own vacation to Lapillus.

“Are there… males with you?” He asked the question so strangely, as if the words were strangling him.

“No. We were an all-women crew. It was supposed to be some kind of feminist fuck-you to the rising misogyny in our culture, I guess, but who really knows what Lyra was thinking?”

“Women?”

“That’s what we are. Uh, since it’s come up, you should probably stick to ‘women’ when you’re referring to one of us. ‘Female’ and ‘male’ aren’t really polite.”

Some of the tension in his shoulders eased. He nodded. “I see. And… what is misogyny?”

She worried her bottom lip, reluctant to be the one to introduce the concept to him.

He’d been protective of her, but he hadn’t treated her like she was less than.

What if she told him what men were like on Earth and, like a butterfly flapping its wings, it became a tornado she’d have to deal with later?

“Cordelia?”

She met his glowing gaze. “Can I trust you?”

His expression turned fierce. “Always.” No hesitation, no doubt. His tail skirted higher on her leg and tightened around her thigh.

She slid her fingers over it, stroking the soft fuzz that coated his skin. His spots made her fingertips glow purple, like a flashlight pressed to her hand.

“Misogyny is the belief that men are superior to women,” she explained reluctantly, studying the pattern of spots over his tail.

“On my world, women are often treated badly. They forced themselves on us, assaulted us, killed us. Told us what to wear, what to say, what we were allowed to accomplish. The roles we traditionally took on were seen as the least valuable. When we tried to take on other roles, we were scorned for upsetting the natural order. Things got better for a while. Then the Resource Wars happened, and things got much, much worse.”

They’d been trying to make an argument for shunning women from the workforce entirely around the time they’d launched.

They were trying to claim that women were some precious resource that needed to be protected by being kept at home and out of society.

The argument was obtuse; there were no less women than men.

It didn’t matter. There were plenty of talking heads who were all too willing to go along with it.

They passed bills to ban abortion and involuntarily sterilize certain women in the same breath.

When she left, they were kicking around laws about banning IVF, tightening down on who could adopt, and requiring a man’s signature on all major financial documents—a grim prospect now that no-fault divorce was a thing of the past.

Rentir went very, very still. “They treated you thus?” His voice was too steady, some strong emotion thrumming just beneath the surface.

“I had it better than a lot of women. Better than most, honestly. For most women, the career I’ve had will never be anything more than an unachievable dream.”

She didn’t tell him about the time her drink got spiked in college, or the boyfriend who’d slapped her when she’d accused him of being insecure about her career, or the numerous men she’d dealt with during her training as an astronaut who’d mocked and belittled and stymied her as much as possible.

It was still so many leagues better than what most women got handed.

Even some of the women on her crew had been through worse.

“And all men were like this?”

Felix’s dark eyes and easy smile flashed before her eyes.

She smiled sadly. “No. Not all of them, but too many.”

He stiffened, his tail tightening around her thigh, the tip creeping perilously close to the junction of her legs. “Did you have a man? On Earth?”

“When I left? No.”

His tail went slack. “Ever?”