Azdrei’in watched as Artemis gave him what seemed to be an entrance key to the door of her living quarters, taking in one last piece of important information before he veritably shut down for the day. It was interesting to him that humans used codes to open locks. His people preferred bio scanners that worked on hands, faces or eyes. He didn’t feel like explaining that to her though, so instead of sharing a mental image, he leaned into the cushioned back of the furniture he was sitting on and closed his eyes to relax.

When she left, he realized idly that she could escape from him while she was gone. If there was any part of her that was determined to survive, it was the perfect opportunity for her to run away. Just because he had deemed that she wasn’t a threat didn’t mean he trusted her wholeheartedly, so, while she was gone, he passively tracked her heat signature to make sure she didn’t disappear beyond the radius that he could sense. If she did, he wouldn’t hesitate to get up and go after her. Because of her knowledge about fertility treatments, he wouldn’t kill her, but he wouldn’t allow her to leave now that she’d made herself valuable to him either.

Fortunately, there was no need for drastic measures. Artemis didn’t wander too far, and before long she had returned with his communication device inside of a cage. The sight was amusing to him, a creative solution, and he looked up at her with a hint of interest before removing the piece of Lunvalgan technology from its holding.

The following gestures she made were ones he understood as beckoning, so even though he was tired, he reluctantly indulged her by standing up to see what it was that she wanted to show him this time. Ambling along to a different room, he was mildly surprised to find that she had taken him to a space designated for sleeping. He’d thought she would have left him on the other furniture, since that was where he’d woken up the first time. He stepped over to the bed, which was quite a bit larger than the one in his quarters on the mothership. It looked softer too, and he was suddenly eager to find out how comfortable it would be to lay down on.

First, though, he let Artemis show him the attached room, where he watched as she demonstrated the use of a system he’d never seen before. He studied the “shower” curiously. It looked like it was designed for the purpose of bathing, but he’d never seen an upright bath before. His kind used pools of water to cleanse themselves of dirt and grime as needed, often in a shared space separated by sex, so they could conserve the precious resource. He supposed humans wouldn’t have the same need, since their planet was covered by so much of it, but he was still intrigued by the design of the system.

Once he was alone, he strolled back over to the bed and collapsed onto it tiredly, his first order of business being to get some sleep after the incredibly long day. The human hadn’t killed him earlier, so he felt fairly confident that he was safe enough to rest without fear of being murdered in his sleep. Between the plush surface underneath him and the mental fatigue of learning so much in the span of a few hours, it took no time at all before he’d drifted off into a light slumber.

Like the rest of his kind, he didn’t remain unconscious through the entire night though. After some time, while it was still dark beyond the human’s hideout, he stirred, drawn back to wakefulness by his empty stomach. He stretched languidly on the bed and sat up, gathering his bearings before he eased himself to his feet. His vision during the night was equally as clear as it was during the day, so he located the door in spite of the lack of light in the room and strode back out to the common space. With the artificial lights turned off, the bioluminescent patterns on his dark skin glowed a soft silvery white, matching the same dim glow of his crystalline irises. On Ashad’te, the genetic feature helped the Lunvalgans blend in with their environments, but on the Earth, it would cause him to stand out inconveniently at night.

Regardless, he was hungry and restless and determined to find something to eat. Artemis had shown him her frozen slabs of cow meat, but he bypassed the freezer and went straight to the door, entering the code she had shown him to get out. He wanted to hunt his own meal, so he went outside to search the area for wild prey, thrilled by the prospect of catching something for the first time.

There were a few animals on the farm, some large like the antelopes the human had showed to him earlier and some small like her bunny. Since he was only out to feed himself, he tracked down the latter, only needing enough meat to fill his stomach for one meal. He found a few tiny creatures in the structure that housed the cows. They had round ears and long tails, with short brown hair that covered their bodies. He easily snatched up two of them after frightening them out of their nest in a wall and then caught a slightly larger beast with a bushy tail and ringed patterns in its hair that he discovered snuffling around the outside of the building.

The fresh meat was immensely more satisfying than the supplements he’d been fed on the Lunvalgan ship, both in taste and texture. By the time he’d finished his hunt, he sauntered back to the human’s hideout with a pleasantly full stomach and the lingering metallic taste of blood on his tongue.

On his way to the door, he decided to take a moment to report back to his commanders now that he had his communication device back. He hitched the piece to his ear and pressed down on the transmitter, relieved to find that he had a clear signal. “This is Azdrei’in, reporting,” he spoke into the receiver, stopping just outside the structure to lean against the wall while he checked in with the mothership. He didn’t even have to wait before one of the commanders, Zalla, responded.

“Azdrei’in, where have you been?” she asked curtly. “We could not reach you for hours. We considered sending a rescue team to find out if you had been killed.”

“I am fine. I just lost track of time,” he replied, choosing not to admit that a human had knocked him out for a while and stolen his communication device. No harm had been done, so Zalla didn’t need to know about that. “I have made some discoveries that may be of interest to our people though.”

“What do you mean?” Zalla asked.

“I found an Earthling that is still alive,” Azdrei’in explained, idly brushing at a spatter of blood on his clothes from his prey. “It is a female that seems to have been unaffected by Strizin. She has been living in some kind of safehold on a farm by herself, so I am unsure if there are others who have survived as well.”

“There have been multiple reports from the other Yihai of Earthlings who are not dead yet,” Zalla said somewhat jadedly. “You did kill this one, did you not?”

“No. This one is completely unaffected, commander,” he pressed. “It exhibits no signs of mania, uncontrolled impulses or illness. It is not violent either.”

“That does not matter,” Zalla snapped impatiently. “Need I remind you that your orders are to kill all Earthlings you come across? They are a danger to our people and must be eliminated.”

“I understand that,” Azdrei’in exhaled. “However, I have a good reason for keeping this one alive…” And he explained everything Artemis had taught him, reciting the information to the best of his ability. The news that the human was educated about medicine and fertility shocked Zalla, and she reluctantly agreed that he had made the right decision by not killing her right away.

“I will have to look into this,” she mused. “I will pass what you have told me along to the Om’phaers and find out their thoughts on the matter. For now, continue doing what you have been doing, and do not let this Earthling out of your sight. If it is valuable to us, they may want you to bring it back to the ship.”

“I will keep an eye on her, commander,” Azdrei’in said obediently.

The transmission ended, and he entered the code to return to Artemis’s hideout. With nothing left to do, he supposed he could go back to sleep, but as he passed through the common room, he noticed that she had left the small screen out that he had been using to communicate with him earlier. He stopped and studied it. The device seemed to have quite a few different functions, and he wondered if he could learn how it worked if he tried to use it.

Foregoing sleep for now, he picked it up and sat down at the table, fiddling with the screen for a while and pulling up different pages of information written in a language he couldn’t read. It would be difficult for him to effectively learn anything when he didn’t know what all the symbols meant. So, he decided that was his next challenge.

He browsed the device until he came across a feature that read the words on the screen out loud in a feminine voice. From there, he searched for one of the words he had been taught by Artemis by speaking it out loud to the machine. The device picked up his voice and ran a search for “food” (it was the easiest word for him to conceptualize) and he managed to figure out via the disembodied feminine voice that the name of the language he had vocalized was English.

It took some trial and error and awkward fumbling for a while, but eventually, he succeeded in learning the language’s alphabet phonetically and found a source to use to begin studying more words and grammar. He spent the rest of the night refining his knowledge of English until he grew too tired to keep his eyes open anymore and went back to his bed to get some more sleep.