“Only I know English,” Azdrei’in responded idly to the male human’s question as he soothed the wounded child. He noticed that the adolescent had used a different inflection when he spoke than their kind usually did when asking about something, but he didn’t understand what it meant, so he dismissed it. At the moment, his focus was better applied to helping Artemis’s patient relax while she treated her leg. He curled his fingers around her small ankle while the physician set the bones in place and used tubes as a splint to hold them still, waiting until after she was done before he finally let go again.

Rising to his full height, he watched as Artemis gave the male her food and a container of what he could only guess was a medicine of some sort. The way they interacted reminded him of his own people, and he marveled again at how similar their species were. The sight also made him wonder, though, why the Earthlings were supposed to be a violent race. Everything he’d seen so far had told him the opposite. Artemis had only attacked him when she’d feared for her life, and the young humans had behaved the same way. They only seemed to resort to fighting if they believed their lives depended on it, just like the Lunvalgans did. How could his leaders say, then, that they were savages who needed to die before his kind could inhabit the planet?

Perplexed by the thought, he glanced at the youngest one in her bed one more time before he followed Artemis back out into the open. “How many humans are good?” he asked with a frown when she told him she wanted to help the good ones. The more of them he encountered, the more unsettled he felt about the Eilix’s decision to wipe them all out with a virus. If they had all been brutes like he’d initially been led to believe, it would have been easy to brush off their extinction as a necessary evil. However, if most humans were like Artemis and the two children, he wasn’t certain that he could ignore the genocide so carelessly.

He didn’t have time to ponder over it before she suddenly told him to trust her and wrapped her arms around his midriff in an embrace. The unexpected touch made him stiffen in surprise, and he looked down at her bemusedly. He didn’t know why she’d decided to hug him, but it wasn’t the act itself that caught him off guard. He was even more startled by his own reaction to it. His hearts beat quicker, and his breath hitched the same way it would have if he’d been touched by a female of his own species. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. Objectively, he’d thought that Artemis was aesthetically appealing, with her exotic light skin, red hair and brightly colored eyes, but they belonged to two different races. He couldn’t look at her the same way he would a Lunvalgan female. It was illogical.

Distracted by his own inner turmoil, it took a moment before her question registered in his head. As he snapped out of his brief trance, Azdrei’in tore his gaze away from her to look at the woods around them. He needed to fix his attention on something besides the feeling of her warm body pressed against his. “Not there,” he replied with a gesture toward the tall buildings of the ruins he’d passed through the day before. Knowing there were infected humans in that area, he wanted to stay far away from it to keep her out of danger. “Other places are fine. I don’t care where we go.”