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weirdly, so she pulled her hand back and rubbed her palm against her thigh to stop all the tingling going on in her fingers.
    “Did you nearly get any of your other assistants killed?”
    He shrugged. “Maybe one other. But he didn’t cope anywhere near as well as you. We may have some more challenges before we’re clear. But if we keep our heads, we’ll come out fine.”
    And in order to keep her head, she needed to stay detached from the man in front of her. They were in a potentially life-threatening situation. Near-death experiences tended to create bonds between people who otherwise might never have connected. It should have been easy to keep in mind that there was a huge gulf of deceit between them—her being here under totally fabricated orders that would see her thrown in military prison or sent to Erebus if the truth came out.
    And only if she were lucky. If Zander Graydon really was an alien and he found out she was suspicious of him, she could only imagine the kind of torture and certain death that might result. But as her obviously imbecilic hormones had proven a moment ago, his gorgeous eyes and a charming smile were nearly enough to distract her.
    If Rian’s suspicions turned out to be correct, then anything the admiral did or said wasn’t real, anyway. An alien playing a role, trying to fool them all. That possibility alone should keep her well and truly detached and analyzing everything the man said.
    “Yes, sir. We should check on the others.” She stood and gathered the two medical packs.
    Graydon took one from her, and they went over to Nazari and the AS officer. While she turned her attention to Jaren, the admiral checked Nazari’s ankle.
    The admiral had Nazari’s foot and lower calf bandaged up in no time, saying he believed it was badly sprained but not broken. As for Jaren, while his shoulder seemed superficially injured, she couldn’t find any other obvious wounds. Yet his slowness to respond worried her. She suspected he had some kind of internal injury, but what or where, she couldn’t tell.
    Graydon stood by with his arms crossed and expression drawn while she finished checking on the younger man. After she’d finished, he crouched down to have a quiet conversation with the officer. She couldn’t hear much, but whatever words Graydon spoke seemed to help.
    While it was expected that a commander should care about the people serving under him, Graydon’s worry seemed to stem from a more personal level in the way he gripped Jaren on the shoulder and murmured a few encouraging words.
    While she packed away the medical supplies, the admiral collected some wood and dug a shallow pit. After he’d stacked the sticks, he pulled a piece of string from somewhere and sat down, setting up some kind of odd-looking contraption with bark and the twine wrapped around a twig.
    “What in the fiery pits of Erebus are you doing?” She moved to stand next to him as he bent his head and twirled the stick.
    “The spark matches are also missing. It’s going to be dark soon. If we want a fire, this is how it’s going to happen.”
    As she dropped to sit on a short, fat log he’d dragged over, the ruined sleeve of her jacket flapped, so she shrugged out of it and balled it up. The evening breeze chased over her bare arms, leaving a trail of goose pimples. Damn, why had she decided to put a short-sleeved shirt on this morning? No doubt it would get cold as evening turned into night, and her torn, bloodied flight jacket wouldn’t do her much good.
    “But how is that going to make a fire?” Even as she asked the question, a small spiral of smoke curled up from where the stick rubbed against the bark.
    “Friction. When I served on Minnea during the Assimilation Wars, we got cut off from the supply runners for eight months. One of the guys in the unit was this ancient history buff, and once we ran out of spark matches, he showed us how to do it the old-fashioned way. You think it’s tough going with