16. Helsa
HELSA
“ T en.”
I was back in the pod.
The glass in front of me. The familiar weight of the casing at my back, the hiss of pressurized air, the low hum of whatever mechanism was counting down to what came next. My hands against the glass, braced, like some part of my body had known before the rest of me caught up.
“Nine.”
The reset had been real then. Not a dream. Not the mist doing something hallucinatory to my brain chemistry — although I was reserving judgment on that — but an actual event. The platform, rebooted. The game, restarted.
“Eight.”
I looked out through the glass.
The other pods were visible in the configuration I remembered — arrayed in the pattern the Malquarans had decided was optimal for whatever entertainment value we were providing them.
The males were back. All of them, as far as I could see — back in their pods, back at full strength, back with the focused hostility of something that had been interrupted mid-hunt.
“Seven.”
The one we'd killed was there.
He was looking directly at me.
The injuries were still on him — some logic to the reset that I didn't fully understand, the damage preserved even as the life came back. He was looking at me through the glass with an expression that made the keth'var seem friendly by comparison. His hands were flat against the pod wall. Pressing.
“Six.”
The other males were variations on that theme. Rage. Focus. I was the most interesting thing in their tiny little lives at that moment.
I looked past them all.
“Five.”
I found him.
Third pod from the left. He was already watching me.
I lifted my hand against the glass.
He did the same.
“Four.”
I leaned in close and my breath misted up the glass. The fog spread from my mouth outward in a slow circle and his face blurred behind it. The sharp lines of him going soft. The angles of his jaw, the dark of his hair — all of it blurring, softening, becoming a blur.
And that was when it hit me.
“Three.”
Not a memory exactly. More like the edge of one — the sensation of something trying to surface that you haven't thought about in a long time, something you'd filed under other things. A shape. A feeling .
A very large, very dark figure moving through water.
My stomach dropped.
I knew that feeling. I had felt it before. Long ago. Not here, not on this platform, not in any alien arena with any alien male — but somewhere in my actual life, in the part of my life that predated all of this by decades.
I was eight years old and the tide had caught me and something had pulled me to the beach…
“Two.”
I shook my head. Hard. To dislodge a thought my brain was trying to finish without my permission.
It didn't dislodge.
It sat there, patient and terrible, in the pit of my stomach where the other feeling had been.
I looked at him through the glass as the fog began to clear. His face blurred, his outline large and dark against the white of the pod behind him. And I thought about what he had said on the rock, before the crash, before everything.
There's something I need to tell you.
I only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.
I tried to meet his eyes.
I couldn't.
Because if what I thought was true — if the shape I was feeling had the name I thought it had — then everything changed.
Everything.
“ One.”
He was still watching me.
I could feel it even with my eyes down, even with my hands pressed flat against the glass and my forehead following them, the cold of it against my skin.
I could feel his attention across the distance between our pods the way you feel weather coming — something in the air changing, some pressure differential that your body registers before your mind does.
I didn't look up.
I couldn’t.
I looked at my hands instead. At the fog my breath had made and was still making, the small cloud of it spreading and thinning and spreading again with every exhale.
At the way the glass held the cold. At nothing in particular and everything all at once, the way you look at things when you're trying very hard not to look at the one thing your eyes keep wanting to find.
His concern was worse than the other males' rage.
The rage I could categorize. Understand.
Move past. His face, doing that careful, patient, something-is-wrong-and-I-will-wait-until-you-tell-me thing — that I could not process.
Not yet. That landed somewhere I didn't have a drawer for and sat there, looking exactly like something I had seen before.
Looking exactly like something I had always known.
The thought was right there.
The shape of it. The name of it.
I pressed my forehead harder against the glass.
The voice came.
One word. Flat. Absolute.
“Launch.”
The pod released. And for once, I was grateful to this place.