20. Helsa
HELSA
I paced.
Back and forth across the hilltop, between the pale formations, my one boot hitting rock harder than it needed to. The bare foot didn't get a vote.
The water was down there. I could hear it. I didn't look at it.
Never in control.
That was the thing sitting in my chest, hot and getting hotter.
My whole life. Every turn, every close call, every moment I had told myself I was handling it, I was managing, I was fine on my own…
and the whole time there had been a hand on the dial.
Adjusting. Correcting. Making sure the numbers came out right.
Every time I had felt capable, I hadn't been.
I had been managed.
Controlled.
I stopped walking. Started again. My fists were clenched so tight my knuckles had gone pale. I didn't unclench them because the clenching was the only thing I was in charge of right now and I was keeping it .
You were four days old.
Four days old and already accounted for. Already someone's responsibility. Already in someone else's plan.
I had spent twenty-eight years thinking I was building a life.
Instead, I had been living in a controlled environment. A mouse in a cage. Designed by someone else.
My jaw was so tight it ached.
I walked faster. The formations blurred at the edges of my vision, white and skeletal, the wind moving through them in a low tone that made my bones shake.
My breath was coming in short and my hands were shaking and there was something climbing my throat that wasn't words, wasn't tears and I had nowhere to put it.
So I stopped.
Opened my mouth.
And screamed.
It came out ragged and enormous and the wind took it. I didn't care. I didn't care who heard it. I didn't care about the males or the tide or any of this god-forsaken place. I screamed until my throat burned and my eyes were streaming and my legs stopped working.
I hit the ground hard. Knees first, then hands. The rock was cold and unyielding under my palms.
I stayed there.
Breathing.
Everything I thought I knew about myself was sitting around me in pieces and I didn't know which parts were still true, which parts had been true, and which parts had never been mine at all.
I sat back on my heels and looked at the sky.
The practical thing first. That was how I worked. Lead with the practical thing and the rest would follow .
The practical thing was this: I had to mate with him again.
Twice more. That was the agreement. That was the only exit from this place that existed, because the extraction point was gone and the ship was at the bottom of the sea and the other males were out there somewhere.
None of them had ever once looked at me like I was a person. Twice more and we had two more resets and two more chances to find another way out.
So that was settled.
I could feel things about it later.
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and stared at the pale formations. I let my mind go where it had been trying to go since I came here.
Jerrol.
He had left on a Tuesday. I remembered because I had been in the middle of making coffee and he had come in and said he needed to talk. I had stood there with the coffee still brewing and he had told me it was over. His face had been strange.
Not guilty — I had expected guilty, had been braced for guilty — but frightened. Genuinely frightened, the look of someone who had seen something they couldn't explain and needed distance from it.
I had thought he was frightened of me.
Of hurting me.
I understood now what he had actually happened.
It was Rhaek. Someone, he had terrified him, no doubt threatened him, to leave me alone and never return.
I pressed my fingers harder into my thighs.
And the rest of it. The near miss on the motorway that I had walked away from without a scratch.
And another: The promotion that came through the week I was certain I was going to be let go.
The landlord who had inexplicably dropped the rent increase the same month I genuinely couldn't have covered it.
I had told people I was lucky. And I had believed it. I had built a whole quiet theory of myself around it — that I moved through the world with some unofficial protection, that things just worked out for me, that I was just one of those people.
And I was one of those people.
Just not for the reason I thought.
None of it had been luck.
Every single piece of good fortune I had ever chalked up to the universe being kind — every near miss, every strange reprieve, every door that opened at exactly the right moment — had been him. Standing somewhere I couldn't see. Moving something I would never know had been moved.
My life.
He had been running my life.
The anger came back, different this time. Quieter. The kind that sits in the stomach rather than climbing the throat. I let it sit there.
I had never had a single thing that was only mine.
Not one.
Except…
The word arrived quietly. I tried to ignore it.
Except.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and sat with the anger. I let it do what it wanted and underneath it, patient and unhurried, the word just waited.
Except he had never asked for anything.
Not once. Not here, not in the cave, not on the ridge or the flatlands or anywhere on this platform. Every time he had helped me I had been braced for it — the invoice, the ask, the moment the hand came out.
It never came.
I had kept waiting and it had never come and I had filed that under things to examine later and apparently later was now.
He had pulled me out of the water when I was eight years old.
He had breathed air into my lungs and stroked my hair until I coughed and then he had run.
He hadn't waited for thank you. He hadn't waited for anything. He had just made sure I was breathing and then he had disappeared into the water and left me on the beach for my family to find.
That wasn't a puppetmaster.
I didn't want to think about what it was so I thought about Jerrol instead.
That didn't help either, because Jerrol had stayed.
Jerrol had been there every day for three years with his hands out, and I had given and given and carefully, quietly edited myself down to the size that kept him warm.
Jerrol had wanted everything from me and I had given it.
Rhaek had wanted nothing.
I opened my eyes.
The bone reef formations stood around me, white and patient, the wind moving through them. The sound they made had no name. I had stopped trying to find one.
If the tables were turned.
The thought arrived the way the important ones always do — sideways, while I was looking at something else.
If I were the alien. If I had been bonded from birth to someone I had never met, on a planet I had never seen.
If I had felt the lock of it the moment they were born and known — not chosen, just known — that this was mine to protect.
If I had watched them their whole life. If I had seen the bad things coming.
Would I have stayed away?
I knew the answer.
I had always known the answer.
I had spent my whole life taking care of people. Quietly, without being asked, without wanting anything back. It was what I was best at and the thing I never let anyone do for me in return. I had never once examined why those two things lived in the same body.
With him I didn't feel managed.
I turned that over carefully.
With him — here, on this platform, in the cave, on the ridge — I had felt capable. Sure-footed. Like myself, but louder.
Not smaller.
Never smaller.
I sat with that for a long moment.
Then I got to my feet.
The wind had dropped slightly.
It came the moment my head had finally gone quiet — all at once, everything arriving at the same time. The tonal howl of the formations. The sky, wide and unobstructed, the light source of this place doing something almost warm across the bleached white surfaces surrounding me.
I almost smiled.
Not at anything in particular. Just at the fact that I was standing here, on an alien platform, on the highest point on the surface, having just screamed myself hoarse, and I was okay.
I was going to be okay.
He was out there somewhere on the ridge. I knew that without looking. He had given me what I asked for and stayed where I put him and hadn't tried to fix it. For once. I was going to have to tell him at some point that I understood — not all of it, not yet, maybe not ever all of it — but enough.
Enough to start.
I turned to look out at the water.
It was closer than I expected. The tide had come in fast while I was sitting with myself, the way it always did on this platform. The perimeter was mostly submerged. The pale mineral tideline on the far wall almost underwater.
Something was moving down there.
I watched it without really seeing it at first — my eyes tracking the motion before my brain caught up. A thin shape. Low in the water, cutting through it without disturbing the surface.
I watched it.
It changed direction.
Toward me.
I took one step back from the edge and kept watching because it was probably nothing, probably just this platform doing strange things with water.
Then it got closer.
The shape beneath the surface was longer than I had thought. Much longer.
It reached the edge of the platform.
And then, slowly, with a kind of patient and terrible purpose, it began to come up onto the land.
My mouth went dry.
I took another step back.
And it kept coming.