Blix pulled herself up onto a flimsy branch and turned just a wolf leaped into the air. Alf swung his feet up and over a lower branch as the wolf hit him in the back with a snapping thunk. For a second Blix thought it had broken his spine, but he grabbed another branch and kept on climbing.

The wolf leaped again, followed immediately by another one. The tree shook as a third wolf slammed into the trunk, but Alf had managed to squirm just out of reach of the growling pack.

“You okay?” She helped him to the limb across from hers. His hands, arms, shoulders, chest… everything was a torn, shredded bloody mess. A tiny rivulet of blood ran down his arm, dripping from his elbow at an alarming pace. She had to do something before he bled out. But even if she managed to stop the bleeding, how was she supposed to keep his wounds from getting infected? Rats were about as sanitary as raw sewage. Without antiseptics or antibiotics, he was as good as dead.

“Alf? Are you still with me?”

“Just a minute,” he said between panting breaths.

She tore a ring of fabric from the bottom of her already-too-short tunic. “Let me see your arms.”

He gasped in pain as she pried his left arm away from his body. His sleeve was a tangle of blood-soaked tatters. Hundreds of oozing cuts crosshatched his skin, but no single cut stood out as particularly worse than the others. The strip of fabric clasped in her hand couldn’t even begin to do justice to his wounds. There wasn’t enough fabric in her entire tunic.

“Alf, I need you to check your health bar, okay? How are your hit points?”

Alf closed his eyes and answered in a drowsy voice. “Twenty out of a hundred.”

Oh my God. One more bite and he could have died. “Keep watching it.” She held her hand to his cheek to get his attention. “I want to know the second it changes.” If the aliens had based their so-called RPG on traditional earth games, there were four major healing systems to choose from: one, characters recover their full health over a fixed period of time (e.g., thirty minutes or an hour or a day), two, supernatural healing is only possible by healing spells or potions, three, characters only heal when they level up, or four, supernatural healing isn’t even possible. Options one or three would be amazing, but if the aliens had opted to go with two or four, she and Alf probably wouldn’t survive.

“It just changed to twenty-one,” Alf said without opening his eyes. “Doesn’t feel any better though.”

“Tell me when it gets to twenty-two.” Blix counted out the seconds in her head. She made it all the way to 410 before Alf finally stopped her. “It took forever, but I’m at twenty-two now.”

She breathed out a sigh of relief and ran the calculations in her head. Multiply by a health of one hundred, divide by sixty to convert to minutes, another sixty to convert to hours, and it came out roughly to twelve hours. Alf would heal a hundred point in twelve hours. Or one point every seven minutes and change. It wasn’t very fast by video game standards, but a heck of a lot better than real life.

“That’s great!” She put every bit of enthusiasm she could manage into her voice. “The nanites are healing you. According to my calculations you should be fully healed in about ten hours. Sooner if we figure out how to raise your constitution.”

The skin around his eyes tightened.

“I know you’re hurting, but we’ll get through this.” She brushed her fingers through his hair.

“It’s not the pain; it’s Jane.” He leaned into her hand like a contented cat. “She says she’s bored. She’s threatening to take back control.”

“Twenty-four hours, that was our deal,” Blix spoke to the space above Alf’s head. “We just figured out an important part of the system. And Alf did an amazing job with the rats.” She turned her attention back to Alf. “You really did. You were swinging that staff like a pro.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “A dialog popped up while I was spinning the rat around. It said I’d learned the grappling skill and that from now on I’d get a 3% advantage. Then, when I killed its friend, I got a dialog saying I’d earned 75 EXP.”

“Yes!” Blix pumped a fist in the air, more for Jane’s benefit than anything else. “A 3% bonus is huge. That means they’re employing assistive technology in combat as well. And 75 EXP sounds about right. It probably means the rat was at level 2—which means there should be safer and easier prey out there to go after. Five to ten more rats, and you should be close to leveling up.”

“I also learned a Faire du Canne skill.”

“A what?”

“Faire du Canne. It’s a French martial art that uses weighted walking sticks for self defense. There was a period in history when the French nobles weren’t allowed to carry swords so they learned to fight with their canes. It sounds lame, but it’s actually kinda cool. I took lessons while my dad was doing his sabbatical in France.”

“Is that what you were practicing before? I thought you were just making stuff up.”

“It looks really Otaku, right?”

“Not at all. It’s just that…” She trailed off, distracted by his widening eyes and waggling eyebrows. Oh, yeah… Bored alien. “Thanks for rescuing me from that rat. You were brilliant.” She grinned like a maniac and tried desperately to come up with something to make sitting in a tree more interesting. Alf and Blix sitting in a tree… An old kid’s chant popped into her head. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. “Ummm… Tell Jane to keep her alien undies on. It’s not my problem she doesn’t have a life.”

“She can hear you.”

“Fine.” She raised the stump of her left arm to her eyes and rotated her hand like she was turning a crank—the charades sign for movie. “Jane, close you eyes or antennae or whatever your using to invade our privacy.”

“Um…” Alf’s brow gathered into knots.

“Do it!” She leaned over slowly and trailed a kiss up Alf’s neck. His damp skin was tangy with salt. Which reminded her of another healing mechanism. They’d need to find something to eat soon or infection would be the least of their worries.

“Um… Blix?”

“Shut up. I’m trying to heal you,” she said the first thing that came to her mind and kissed the line of his jaw until his breath caught in his chest.

Okay, let’s see the alien bitch grok this. Combing her fingers into his hair, she pulled him towards her and went for the kill.