19. Rhaek
RHAEK
S he got smaller.
I let her.
Every instinct I had was running the same sequence on a loop — Go after her! Cover her! Don't let your mate out of your sight! — but I stood there and let her get smaller and smaller.
I did not move.
The wind was strong. Coming in off the south face, carrying salt and nothing useful.
I scented it anyway. Ran the calculation anyway.
Last patrol position of the closest male: northeast quadrant, moving west. Estimated speed.
Estimated trajectory. The gap between where he was and where she was going.
Acceptable. Barely.
I watched her run.
The uneven rock did not slow her down the way it should have. She had learned this platform in the same sequence I had, and I had not accounted for that. I had not accounted for a lot of things .
That was becoming a pattern.
I never had a choice. Not one. You took that from me.
I had stood there and taken that sentence and not answered it because there was no answer that would have helped and I knew it. I had watched her face while she said it. The tears she wasn't wiping. The steadiness in her voice that was worse, somehow, than if she had shouted.
I had kept her safe her entire life. But that wasn’t the same as giving her life. Or freedom.
I had not once considered what it cost her.
She disappeared behind the first pale formation and I stood there in the wind with that understanding settling into me like something very heavy finding its level.
The tide was already moving.
I could see it from the platform edge. The water advanced from the south, slow and certain, the way it always was. It didn't hurry. It didn't need to.
I turned and ran.
Alone, I took the ridge fast. The way I'd mapped it the first time. My stride, my pace, nobody to adjust for. I was at the top in under two minutes.
I didn't go to the cave.
I looked at it from above. The entrance set into the rock face, the angle of it catching the last of the light. I could see the shelf at the back from here if I looked at the right angle. I didn't look at the right angle.
The cave was where I had answered her questions. There had been a distance between us then. But not so great as now. The cave was the first time she had stayed in the same space as me.
I couldn't go near it.
I sat down on the ridge above it instead .
The wind up here was colder. It had nothing to break it.
That was fine.
I found her on the bone reef hill.
Small from this distance. Moving through the pale formations, picking her way between them. I tracked her without meaning to. Old habit. Switching on automatically.
She reached the far side of the hill.
Stopped.
Turned, just slightly, in my direction. Not looking at me, not quite, but aware of the sightline. Aware I was up here.
Then she moved around to the other side of the formations and was gone from view.
I stayed where I was.
The tide came in beneath me, slow and methodical, the sound of it changing as it rose. It reached the base of the ridge. Then the first shelf of rock. Then my feet, cold through my boots, and I still didn't move.
Cutting me off from her.
My instincts had one thing to say on an endless loop. They had been saying it since she turned and ran and they had not stopped.
Go to her. Cover her. Don't leave her out there alone.
But doing that had also led to this. Led to her leaving me. I could not allow myself to follow them blindly any longer.
I stayed.
She had asked for time where nobody kept her alive on purpose.
I could give her that.
What I could not give her — what was not mine to decide, not something I could remove or redirect or arrive twelve minutes early to prevent — was this :
Whether she forgave me or not, I would be always be there for her.
That was not a choice I was making.
It was simply what I was.
The water lapped at my feet.
I watched the far side of the hill and I waited.