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The needle plunged into the stranger's skin and his eyes snapped open. Expanses the color of honey with streaks of blue met hers and Alexis's breath caught in her throat. He was most certainly not human.
Placing a hand on his shoulder, Alexis gently pushed him to counteract his attempts to sit up, pressing him back down into the mattress.
"I need you to lie still."
"What's happening?" he asked, his voice powdery and strained.
"You were injured in a crash. I'm a medic, and I need you to calm down while I fix you up. Just relax. It will be over in just a minute."
The man nodded and Alexis went back to work stitching together the long, jagged cut. She was nearly finished when she heard him draw in a sharp breath and felt his hand reach over the edge of the bed and grab onto her thigh. His fingers dug into her, but she kept stitching, drawing his skin together and closing it. When she finished, she snipped off the thread, knotted it, and tossed the needle into the basin.
He had his enticing eyes squeezed closed and kept them that way as she wrapped a strip of gauze around his head to protect the new stitches.
"I'm finished," she said softly to him when she secured the end of the gauze and tossed her scissors onto the bedside table.
"Who are you?" he asked through gritted teeth as if trying to distract himself with the words rather than focusing on the pain.
"My name is Alexis. I'm the colony medic."
He opened his eyes and looked at her questioningly.
"Colony?"
"We traveled here from Earth almost two years ago to colonize this planet. My father is the commander of the mission." She paused, trying to choose her words carefully, and finally deciding to go with the ones he had used with her, "Who are you?"
"I'm Tyrok."
He stopped without elaborating any further and she looked at him.
"Are you…." she trailed off, not wanting to offend him.
"Human?" he asked with a hint of laughter in his voice and she nodded, "No, just a stunning facsimile."
He laughed but Alexis found her heart beating a little faster. Stunning was absolutely right.
"Where did you come from, Tyrok?" she asked, fighting the urge to look at his bare chest again.
"A planet not too far from here. You've likely never heard of it."
"Where were you going when you crashed?"
Tyrok didn't respond and Alexis turned her attention from the medical kit she was organizing in her lap to his face. His eyes were wide, his mouth partially open. The color had drained from his skin and his body was shaking.
"Tyrok?" she said, reaching out to touch his arm, "Tyrok? Are you alright?"
His convulsions became more intense and Alexis dropped the kit to the floor. She took Tyrok by his shoulders and looked down into his eyes. They stared blankly back at her and she heard faint gurgling sounds coming from his throat. This was something she had never seen before, but had studied in her intensive training program before leaving on the mission.
Leaving Tyrok on the bed, Alexis scrambled out of the house and ran as fast as she could toward the partially completed clinic on the other side of the village. It was a small building she had insisted they build in the first few weeks of being on the planet, but one they had used only a couple of times to handle the illnesses and minor injuries they had encountered. It was not equipped to handle the severity of what Tyrok was facing, but she knew that somewhere in the containers that filled the back room were the supplies she needed to hopefully get him through.
"Alexis!" James's voice called to her from outside the clinic.
Alexis dug through the dust-covered containers, desperately searching for the small black box she knew was on the inventory list. She heard her father call out her name again and she screamed back at him without removing her attention from her task.
"What are you doing?" James asked, coming into the room.
"He's crashing."
"What?"
"Tyrok, the man I found on the ship. He's crashing. I stitched him up and he was absolutely fine, and then he started convulsing and is unresponsive."
"What does that mean?"
Alexis finally wrapped her hand around the black box and brought it out of the storage container with a sigh of relief.
"It means that I need to get this to him as quickly as possible if he is going to have any chance of survival. Then I need you to come back to the ship with me."
"I didn't find anyone else."
"Exactly."
Alexis pushed past her father toward the clinic door.
"What do you mean?"
"The ship wasn't burning anymore, was it?"
"No."
She nodded.
"Just wait for me."
James nodded in agreement and she ran out of the clinic and back toward her house. She could hear Tyrok gurgling in the bedroom as she ran through the kitchen.
"Hold on, Tyrok," she said when she got into the bedroom.
His eyes were still fixed on the ceiling above him and his body arched and thrashed with such violence it sent her pillows skittering across the floor. Alexis spread the contents of the black box on her bedside table and scanned them, trying to draw the instructions from her training back to the front of her memory. Tyrok made another strangled sound and she grabbed a large syringe from the pile. Lifting it above her head, she brought the needle down into Tyrok's heart.