Just because Artemis seemed to understand the reason he had for killing humans didn’t mean she was sympathetic to his motives. Azdrei’in watched her carefully as she began to quake beneath his loose grip. There was no better way to tell how prone a creature was to violence than by backing it into a corner. By threatening to kill her, he was experimenting to find out how quickly she might resort to fighting back. It wouldn’t have surprised him if she tried to defend herself. Plenty of other species were faster to fight than they were to flee, including his own. He merely wanted to see how she would react to a blatant threat, curious if she was as savage as the reports on her kind had stated or if she would give him a reason to actually finish her off right then and there.

Instead of fighting back, though, she continued to stand still without even attempting to backpedal or push him away. He studied her pale face while she spoke to him again, intrigued that her first impulse was to continue trying to negotiate with him. This wasn’t the kind of behavior he had expected to witness when he’d encountered a human. He didn’t understand most of what she was saying this time, but the tone of her voice wasn’t hostile. If anything, she almost sounded sad.

As he stood over her, the tension began to ebb from his body. Artemis was different than the image of humans that he’d conjured in his head. She seemed genuinely harmless. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that she had given him no reason to believe she would suddenly turn on him. She had hit him over the head because she had been protecting herself, but she had also tended to his wound and offered him food and drink. As they interacted with each other, he got the impression that she was curious too—just like he was about her kind. She’d had plenty of opportunities to kill him, and yet she had taken care of him and started teaching him her language instead. Those were not the actions of a violent creature.

Just as he had begun to let down his guard, he startled at a sound behind him and tightened his grip on the human’s throat, the tips of his claws digging into her thin skin. He whipped his head around to defend himself if someone else had snuck up behind him, but there was no one there. It appeared that the noise had come from another video on the large screen.

Relieved, Azdrei’in loosened his hold on Artemis again and watched the moving images. At first, he wasn’t sure what Artemis’s purpose had been in showing him this. She wasn’t trying to wriggle out of his grip, so it wasn’t a distraction. However, as the video progressed and delved into something that looked like an artificial method of reproducing, his eyes widened. He wasn’t sure how she had known that his species was dying out, but somehow, she must have figured it out.

[i]If we are able to use this strategy too, it could save us,[/i] he realized, his hearts beating faster with excitement. Now more so than ever, he was glad that he hadn’t killed the human. If he had, he never would have stumbled across the information she was sharing with him through the video.

He turned back to her when she spoke again and placed her smaller hand against his. It seemed like she had accepted the thought of dying, but he had made up his mind. Despite his orders, he couldn’t bring himself to bury his claws into the throat of a creature that not only wasn’t fighting back but had also just showed him that she wanted to help his people overcome the problem that was preventing them from repopulating. If she had any information that they could use, she was valuable to him.

He let his hand fall from around her throat. “I won’t kill you,” he decided, echoing the words she had just said to him. A brief pause followed before he punctuated the statement with a curt: “Friend.” His leaders had ordered him to eliminate anything that might be a threat to the Lunvalgan people, and he had determined that she wasn’t a threat. That along with the invaluable knowledge she had about artificial fertility treatments was enough cause for him to let her live. For now, at least. His leaders would ultimately make the final call about what to do with her, but he had a solid case now for abandoning his duties.

Stepping back from her, he walked over to the large screen and gestured at it. He lacked the words to express his questions, so he reached out to her telepathically again, projecting a feeling of curiosity alongside a conceptual vision of a mated pair of Lunvalgans going through with the same procedure. He wanted to know if she thought the method was viable for another species to use. Given that the video had showed humans and another animal, he hoped that meant it was plausible that his kind would be able to replicate it as well. He didn’t know much about fertility, since he’d only been educated about information that warriors needed to know, but he had to think that if the process in the video worked for Lunvalgans too, they might finally be able to escape the threat of extinction.