2. Helsa #4
I pulled. Nothing happened. I turned and hit at the arm with my free hand.
I might as well hit structural steel for all the good it did me.
The figure — the pink one, I could see the pale tulle of the skirt in the thin light from under the roller door — didn't react in any way that suggested it had noticed.
It raised its other arm and spoke into a device on its wrist in a language I didn't know but even without the language I understood the register: I have her.
"Let go," I said. "Let go —"
I got my heel against the roller door and pulled with everything I had. Nothing moved, and I heard myself making sounds I didn't recognize as mine, and I thought: This is how Greta ended. This is how you end. You're going to go through the ceiling and ? —
"I don't think she wants to go with you, friend."
The voice came from directly behind the figure holding me. He turned, and I saw another man.
He was even bigger. Not just than the one holding me — bigger in a way that recalibrated the room.
Normal clothes, dark jacket, nothing that didn't belong.
And some part of me that wasn't running the fear calculations noticed him in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with something older and less reasonable.
He hit the figure holding me once. No windup. No telegraphing. Just a decision executed at a speed that my eyes barely tracked. The grip on my arm was gone and the figure in the pink dress went down and stayed there.
I stood back against the door.
He looked at me. His eyes were a gold that was too bright and too even, no variation in the dim light. Like a wolf hunting. I filed that under later . The later folder was getting full.
"Are you hurt?"
"Uh… no." Not quite true, but close enough to say.
His head turned away. A moment later, somewhere deeper in the building, a door slammed.
Then his hand was on my arm, and I felt the difference before I understood it.
Where the mercenary's grip had been hard and painful, this was something else.
Deliberate. His fingers curved around my arm with a certainty that suggested he already knew the shape of it, and I drew in a breath I hadn't planned on taking.
I noticed. And I noticed that I'd noticed. I told myself firmly that this was not the time.
"Come on. "
We moved through the building fast. I said, "What is happening, why are these people?—"
"Not now. First, I must take you somewhere safe."
We pushed through a door into a narrow connecting passage. He stopped, looked both ways with that absolute economy of attention, and went right. The passage was narrow enough that his arm nearly brushed mine as he moved past.
"Why are they after me?" My voice was steadier than I deserved. "Is this — did I do something? I filed late one year but I paid the penalty, I have the documentation —"
"They want to take you." He was scanning the passage ahead as he said it.
He moved like someone who had never wasted a motion in his life, all that focus and economy contained in a body that was — I stopped that thought before it completed itself, which took more effort than it should have.
"Take me where?"
He glanced back. The gold eyes gleamed, reflecting light that wasn’t there. "Off-planet."
I missed a step. “Excuse me?”
“Off-planet.”
“As in… off… this planet?”
He looked at me.
"You're saying… they’re aliens?"
"Yes."
"Aliens are trying to abduct me."
"Yes."
"Because of my taxes?"
"What? No?—"
Something shifted in his expression.
A shape came out of the dark at the end of the passage as if it were part of the dark. His hand dropped from my arm .
I pressed my back against the wall and watched him fight.
Now, I'd seen men fight. The school playground version, all noise and adrenaline.
The closing-time version, ugly and purposeless.
This was nothing like either. This was silent and precise and relentlessly fast, every movement the shortest distance between two points, and somewhere between one breath and the next I understood that what I was watching only looked human the way a very good painting looks like a window — all the right shapes, none of the depth.
His hands moved and I tracked them without meaning to, the line of his shoulders, the economy of how he used his weight.
My pulse quickened. I gave it approximately one second to sort itself out, then gave up and accepted that this was simply happening.
The second shape came through the door to my left.
Two of them, one of him. I watched him hold the line for thirty seconds that felt far longer.
Why are you still standing here? No answer came that I could argue with, so I turned and ran.
The light hit me the moment I cleared the pallet rows. I immediately ducked to turn back but it was too late.
My feet left the floor.
Slow at first. Then gathering speed. I wailed an undignified cry but there was no part of my mind available for dignity at that moment. I floated through a hole in the ceiling—the same one Greta had disappeared through!
“No! Please! No!”
Without even thinking, my hands reached out and found a ceiling joist, old and dry and already protesting.
My legs floated up toward the sky but I held on.
I looked down.
He was there. He finished off the second kidnapper, hitting the ground hard. He looked up at me with those gold eyes and that calculating expression.
"Stay there!" he called up.
"Hilarious!" I called back.
The pull intensified — a hard step change, something ramping up — and the wood shifted and I gripped tighter. The joist began to crack.
He was moving. Leaping from stack to stack to stack — using the arrangement of pallets like a staircase with agility that had nothing to do with the laws I'd been raised on. If I hadn't been holding on for my life with failing arms I would have found it extraordinary.
“Hurry!” I cried.
He reached the top of the tallest stack. The gap between us was massive. No way he could make it… could he?
He ran two steps and launched himself.
He was rising toward me. I took one hand off the joist and reached down toward him.
He was reaching up, and I saw his face clearly — more clearly than I'd seen anything all night — his face tilted up and the gold eyes finding mine and something in them that was fierce and intent and entirely focused on the distance between his hand and mine, which was closing, closing, closing…
He’s going to make it! He’s going to make it!
Then the wood snapped clean through.
I had both halves in my hands for one weightless, lurching second, and then I was going up fast, much faster than before. I twisted to reach back down toward him but it was no use.
His jaw set hard, eyes wide, something raw and unguarded in them that he hadn't chosen to put there and couldn't take back. It was the most honest thing I'd seen all night .
The beam took me.
Cold air smothered me. His face shrinking small. The warehouse shrinking along with it. The pallet stacks, the district, the orange-lit grid of Edinburgh shrinking below me to a map, to a pattern, to a suggestion, and then the dark came over everything at once and there was nothing.