6. Helsa #2
I didn't catch it this time.
The warmth was already everywhere, and my hands were far away and the rain was just sound, and I was still watching the fire. I was certain I was still watching the fire, and then suddenly I wasn't watching anything at all.
I jolted up, body tense and braced for something I couldn't name. My heart was going hard.
Momentarily disorientated, I looked around.
The cave. I was in the cave. So it wasn’t just a nightmare…
The light was grey and dim and the fire was still burning. The alien was still at the entrance while I had been asleep.
I sat there and ran it back.
I had fallen asleep. In a cave. On a rock floor, on an alien platform, with no information and no plan, injured, and an unknown creature perched eight feet away!
And I’d thought it a good idea to simply close my eyes and go under like it was a regular Tuesday afternoon. He could have done anything! Could have rifled through my pockets. Could have moved me. Could have undressed me. Could have?—
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. Stupid.
Then I lowered them and looked at the fire.
It was the same height it had been when I'd last seen it. Steady, low, fed. Someone had tended it through the night and it hadn't been me.
I looked at him .
He hadn't moved a muscle, so far as I could tell.
The grey light of early morning coated him, producing a silhouette and caught the scale-plates along his jaw and shoulders, making them darker than they'd been by firelight — almost black at the edges, the deep bronze visible only where the angles shifted.
The tattoos on his arms were illegible in this light.
Just marks. He was facing out and I could not see his face.
He had kept the fire going while I slept.
I sat with that and didn't know what to do with it, so I picked up the velith from its rock and started working it into my left palm. The cold hit immediately — the pain from the cuts pulling back like something stepping into shadow.
Then I worked it into the right hand, the smaller cuts, the rough skin at the knuckles. By the time I flexed both hands the pain was nearly gone. I flexed again just to confirm it.
Gone.
Ho-ly shit.
I looked at it, marveled at it. This was the greatest medicine I’d ever had in my entire life! What a fool I was for not using it earlier!
Outside, somewhere below, the water moved. The sound of it was lower than it had been — quieter, a different register, the way a voice drops when the urgency goes out of it.
The sleep at cleared some of my exhaustion, had calmed my confused and addled brain. I was thinking better now.
I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing here. Why I should be here at all. The only way through this was to understand it. So, I took a deep breath, swallowed my pride, and said:
"I need to know what's happening here."
Out loud. Not to him exactly — to myself, because saying it made it real, made it the thing I was doing now instead of the thing I was still deciding about.
He turned.
He crossed the cave and crouched by the fire. The gold hit me before the rest of him — that impossible full-iris color, lit differently in the morning grey than it had been by firelight. Steadier, less warm, but firm. He added something to the flame without looking down and it lifted and held.
"Very well."
Okay… so was that confirmation or…?
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Rhaek."
"Rhaek. That’s a nice name. My name’s Helsa. Nice to meet you."
I extended a hand toward him. He peered at it and cocked his head to one side.
Then he extended his hand outward to me, stopping short of touching me.
“Helsa,” he said, quietly.
“Yes. That’s my name. And yours is Rhaek.”
The fire crackled. Outside, the water shifted again — a low sound, constant, the rhythm of it not quite like anything I'd heard before. Like a tide working in reverse.
"Where are we?"
"We’re on a platform." He kept his eyes on the flame. "The Malquarans built it. Then they drop competitors in." He paused. "For entertainment."
I waited.
He looked up. The gold eyes met mine and stayed.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. Start from the beginning.”
"These are the Mating Games," he said. "Multiple males. One female. The goal is to mate with her three times. The first male to achieve that wins. And the Games end. "
“Hang on. Mate?”
He nodded. “Mate with her.”
“But… why?”
“For entertainment.”
I frowned. “How is that entertaining?”
“To many species, mating is the ultimate game.”
I could understand that, at least.
"So what happens to the female?"
"She becomes his."
"And if she doesn't consent?"
Something moved across his face. Small, controlled. "Consent isn't part of the design."
I looked at the fire and my mouth turned dry. The shape of what he'd just described was sitting in my chest — not panic, not yet, but something close to it that I was keeping very still. "Property," I said. "She becomes his property."
"Yes."
I breathed out through my nose. "Why me?"
"You'll be entertaining to them." He said it flatly, no apology in it. "Humans are relatively new to the Mating Games. The unpredictability of a human response to the platform conditions?—"
"Makes for better viewing."
"Yes."
I stared at the wall of the cave. The silver-green patches of velith there, faintly luminescent, doing their slow quiet thing.
Better viewing. Somewhere right now, across whatever distance separated this platform from wherever the watchers were, millions of — I didn't even have a word for them.
Millions of things watching to see what the human did.
"But why me?" I said, feeling dense for asking the same question again.
He didn't answer this time .
I looked at him. He was looking at the fire again, the line of his jaw lit from below, the scale-plates catching the orange and throwing it back differently from how they caught the grey.
He wasn't going to answer that one. I didn't know if that was because he didn't have a way to answer it that I could understand or because he'd decided I didn't need it yet. Either way the door was closed.
"How about Greta?" I said.
His eyes came back to me. “Greta? What is a Greta?”
"She’s my friend. She was taken first — before me. Is she here somewhere?"
"I do not know. Predicting the Malquaran mind is a… dangerous business." He said it directly. No softening. "This Greta was taken by mistake. You were the target. She was with you at the wrong moment. The extraction pulled her in."
My hands tightened in my lap. "Then where is she?"
"I do not know." The words were plain and level and offered without cushion, which I found I preferred to the alternative.
"When a non-target is extracted by accident, the standard is release.
She would have been returned to the extraction point or near it.
" He met my eyes. "She's most likely back on Earth.
Unless she was entertaining enough to capture their interest."
Most likely. Two words doing a lot of work. I took them and put them somewhere I could carry them without having to look at them directly.
And there was that word again. Entertaining.
I imagined Greta back in the car park, confused and frightened and completely fine. That was the version I was choosing to believe happened. I would look at the other version later… if I had to.
I swallowed. "The… males. The four others. "
"Different species. Different methods." Something shifted in his expression — brief and unreadable. "Some here voluntarily. Others involuntarily. Their mission is all the same."
Mate with me. Gulp.
"And… you? Are you going to try to… mate me?"
Out the corner of my eye, I appraised the distance to the doorway. Three seconds.
The gold eyes held mine. "I'm not going to do that."
"Why not?"
"My species requires consent. We do not take. It's not a choice I'm making. It's not how we're built."
I looked at his face. The hard angles of it, the scale-plates along the jaw, the geometric darkness of the tattoos. The eyes.
I ran what he'd said against every action he'd taken since the basin. The distance kept. The stopping when I pulled back. The as you wish. The fire, still burning, tended all night while I was unconscious and unable to stop him doing anything he wanted.
The pattern held.
That wasn't trust. That was data. But it was more data than I'd had an hour ago and I was going to use it.
"Okay. Then what's in the water outside?" I said.
"Predators. Blood-tracking." His gaze dropped briefly to my hands, then back up. "They navigate by scent. Open wounds in the water draw them in." He looked toward the entrance. "They can't access the upper channels when the tide pulls out."
“The tide?”
“This type of Matings Games is called the Tidal Games. The water level rises and falls, depending on the orbit of the platform’s three moons?— ”
“Three moons?” My jaw dropped open. I don’t know why that struck me so hard considering everything else he was telling me, but it did.
He nodded. “When they converge, the gravitational pull brings the tide in. Fast. Other times, if they don’t align, slowly. It depends on how they move. When the tide is out, the flatlands become usable.”
"So where do these monsters in the water go when the tide is out?"
"The deeper levels. We don’t have to concern ourselves with them then. Only when the tide is in." The gold eyes came back to me. “There are other rules. Most of them universal, though the Malquarans have been known to change the rules on a whim.”
“Rules?”
“When a male dies, he respawns back in his pod. There he will wait until the round is reset.”
“The… round? This is one round?”
He nodded. “Yes. A round ends only with two conditions: one, the female dies. Or two, she is mated by a male. Or, sometimes, any rule specific to a particular platform. For ours, there are none. It’s just the first two.”
I just gaped at him, mouth open.
"So… let me get this straight. I was abducted by aliens.
They put me in these Games for entertainment.
Along with five alien males who all want to mate with me.
The first one to do that three times, wins.
If they die, they respawn. If I die, it resets the whole platform.
And on this platform, the tide comes in and out fast, depending on how the moons move. "
He nodded.
I fell back and leaned on the palms of my now-healed hands. “That’s… a lot for a girl to take in. ”
“I am sorry this happened to you.”
And he looked like he genuinely did, too. Huh. He really was different from all the others. But that still didn’t help me get away from this place.
He stood. "Come."
I followed him to the entrance and stopped beside him.
Below, the water lay grey-gold in the early light, reflecting the starry sky. I could see the tideline on the rock — the dark mineral mark of where it had been, and the gap between that mark and the surface now. The gap was wider than it had been been I slept. The tide is going out.
He pointed west.
I followed the line of his arm past the channels — dark water between sections of elevated rock, the shapes of things moving slowly below the surface — past a stretch of open platform, to a dense section of vegetation in the middle distance.
Alien canopy, catching the light differently from the rock, the green of it wrong in a way I couldn't name.
And beyond it, far beyond, at the platform's western edge where the rock met the waterline: shapes.
Angles. Things that had been built and were now low and dark and barely holding themselves above the flood.
"Ruins," he said. "Far western edge. The Malquarans expand their empire and dominate other species and civilisations. Then use the remnants of their society to build these platforms." He paused. "That is where my ship will come to rescue us."
Hope filled my chest. “Your ship?”
“Get there and we will escape this place.”
I looked at the distance. "How long do we have?"
His eyes locked on mine. "Four hours. Maybe five. "
I didn't need to ask what four hours meant for us. He'd already told me.
I looked at the route. Channel crossings first — the open flooded ground between here and the tree cover.
Then the flatlands, that dense section in the middle distance.
The ground there would be different — recently submerged, soft, the kind of surface that would compress and release underfoot, carry sound and vibration in every direction.
Nothing silent through there. Nothing invisible.
"The forest and flatlands?" I said. "That's the only route?"
"The channels on either side run too deep. The flatlands are passable during the drop window." He looked down at the water level. "The ground there is waterlogged. Every step carries."
"Both directions. Meaning, the other males will come hunting for me."
His eyes moved to me. Something in them — quick, there and gone, like light off the scale-plates when he shifted his weight. "Yes."
I looked at the ruins again. Too far to make out detail. Just the shapes of something that had once been a building, sitting in the grey morning light at the edge of the platform, waiting.
"How long until the crossing is passable."
He read the water the way I read a room. Without rushing, without uncertainty, his eyes moving across the surface and the channels and the tideline on the rock with the attention of someone working from information, not guesswork.
"Less than an hour," he said.
I nodded. Three hours, then. We had three hours to cross the forest and the flatlands and reach the ruins. It was hard to judge distance from here, but he wouldn’t have told me if it wasn’t possible. Right?
I turned back into the cave. Looked at the fire. The velith on its rock, the flat mark where the paste had been before I'd used it. The entrance he'd stood at all night.
My hands didn't hurt.
I flexed them one more time just to confirm it — the full range of motion, the grip, the test of the skin across the cuts. Nothing. Just hands.
I tried to make that mean only what it should mean. I tried to put it in the same category as the fire, as the distance kept, as all the other things that fit the explanation neatly. He needs me functional. That covered it. That had always covered it.
It covered it now.
Mostly.
"Alright," I said. "We move when the tide is low."
He was already looking back at the water. I couldn't see the gold eyes, just the dark line of his profile, the scale-plates along the jaw.
"Get warm while you can," he said quietly. “The next few hours will be… a challenge.”
My stomach dropped. By the look in his eye, I took that to mean he was trying to allay my fears.
Trying… and failing.