Page 5 of Fated to the Dragon Alien

“We’re not equipped to—”

“Then get equipped.” Stavian turned his back and stalked toward the secondary control pad. “Or I’ll file it myself. Direct to High Emissary Bendahn at Central Axis.”

Telren didn’t follow. She just muttered something Stavian didn’t catch and turned toward the med station.

He cursed under his breath.

He was supposed to manage a system, not wage a war over every damn health protocol. He glanced up at a nearby security cam blinking above the tunnel door. The feed was live. Recording everything.

And if anyone back at Central bothered to watch it, including Bendahn, the female high emissary who took him as an orphan infant in and trained him, they’d see what really went on in this place. Not that they would care.

Stavian scrolled down the live suit logs on the terminal. Five miners from tunnel set E had biofeedback inconsistencies. Three more had flagged radiation spikes. The system had auto-cleared them all. Just green boxes on a screen. Green didn’t mean safe. It meant overlooked.

He inputted one miner he wanted to check in on—Inmate 630-I, commonly called Cerani.

Yes, he knew their names. But he especially knew hers.

Her file expanded across the screen as it had countless times before. Stavian didn’t want to think about how many times he’d looked at her file. No known planetary origin listed outside of “Settled Territory – Axis Registered. TP-112-1.” But that wasn’t a settlement—it was a prison disguised as a colony. Probably the most disturbing part of it—the inmates didn’t know they were prisoners. Desperation and survival were what kept them in line.

He pulled up Cerani’s biometric logs. Instead of the same string of slow decline he saw in everyone else, her records told a different story.

Respiration rate: stable. Heart function: above average. Blood oxygen: optimal. Cellular turnover spiked well above standard miner range. No strain markers. No signs of long-term damage from radiation exposure. In fact, unbelievably, her biological systems had improved since she’d arrived.

Stavian leaned closer. “How?” he murmured to himself.

He tapped the interactive feed to match her data with mine exposure levels. Her first ten cycles showed moderate contamination. The same as everyone else. But then something shifted. Her body adapted at a rate that didn’t match other species’ baselines. Not even his. Thepsiakradiation was nourishing her body, not destroying it.

He pulled up the visual profile next—not for the specs, just to see her. The most recent image of her was captured in the barracks, the previous wake cycle, as she stood in line to receive her rations.

She was beautiful. Unsettlingly so. Not in the delicate, artificial way he was used to seeing in Axis circles, polished and measured. There was nothing cautious about her beauty. It was raw. Defiant. Like her body didn’t know it stood in a prison.

Nothing at the DeLink 22K Mine looked like her. In the still, her body was caught mid-motion, lean and strong, shaped by labor but not weighed down by it. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled back, but strands had come loose, catching the overhead lighting and turning it molten at the edges—gold, copper, crimson, fire. The file said her hair was brown. It was wrong.

He zoomed in.

She wasn’t directly facing the lens, but even in profile, the lines were striking. High cheekbones, a straight nose, full mouth, her face drawn into a look of focus that made it hard to look away. Her skin held a soft olive tone under the grime layered from long shifts below surface, but it was her eyes that rooted him. Even blurred in the capture, they gleamed—light gold, like polished amber under glass. He remembered them clearer in person. Sharp, unwavering, and bright in a way nothing on this moon should’ve been. Bright in a way that felt…dangerous.

Her face was smooth, although there was a maturity to her features, indicating she was far from childhood. Large, goldfreckles on her forehead reflected the light, undimmed by the dust. His gaze moved over the curve of her neck. The way her chin was lifted, confident and sure. She looked tired, yes, but not cracked or pale like the others. Not breaking. There was something whole about her. Unshaken. She should’ve looked like everyone else—drained, empty, nearly broken. But this picture betrayed none of that. Cerani looked like someone you could not crush. And that truth scraped at something under his skin.

He hadn’t meant to study her image like this, hadn’t planned to stare too long or wonder what her voice would sound like if she weren’t always half-filtered through a respirator. But something about her unsettled all that control he’d spent a lifetime perfecting.

Stavian pinched the bridge of his nose, not sure whether it was fascination or warning rattling in his chest. But the truth was what it was—he couldn’t stop watching her. And he didn’t want to believe that was dangerous.

Even though it was.

“Why you?” he muttered.

He pulled up health data from his own log on a separate screen. His readings were similar—resilient, no decay markers, stable under prolonged exposure to the psiak radiation. He had been sent here to run the mine because he was unaffected by the radiation. It was, he was told, a trait of Zaruxians, his species.

But Cerani wasn’t Zaruxian. She wasn’t anything defined, if her file was to be believed. No species tag. No medical flags. No genetic match found in the Axis database, and that was anomalous. Everything had a match. Everything had a place.

He scanned through her work records. Over quota for the last eleven shifts. Zero med alerts. No behavioral incidents. Only internal observation flags—those came from him.

Stavian sat back, his eyes still locked on the screen. He’d extended her shift. It hadn’t been reported. He had slid the override through quietly, given five failing miners temporary hold tags for recovery, then shifted her onto Rotation T-7L, solo, for the extra time. She could take it. The others could not.

He locked the file and keyed in a blackout tag for her medical logs. It wouldn’t erase the data, just shuffle it under his name and list it as inactive within default reports. This was a trick he’d learned after too many dealings with auditing teams. They looked for flags. They didn’t dig deeper if something looked like laziness. And despite the Axis’ reputation of being this huge, powerful entity, there was plenty of laziness among the ranks.

He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his hands over his face.

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