Chapter 30
G reta awoke in a tangled mess of torn cabling and floating debris. The flooded bridge tilted at a sharp angle. Water poured steadily through a dozen hull breaches, cold and relentless.
Her pink scales still shimmered faintly, but the glow was fading fast. The timer inside her chest had gone strangely quiet — not because the danger had passed, but because something far worse had taken its place.
She pushed herself upright, tail flicking weakly to clear a path through the swirling silt and blood. “Klari?”
No answer.
The emergency lights were dying one by one, plunging the cabin into deepening shadow. She swam forward, claws scraping along the buckled deck plating.
“Klari?”
Her voice cracked on the second call. She pulled herself through the tilted doorway into the main corridor, heart hammering against her ribs.
The ship was broken beyond repair — bulkheads crumpled, consoles shattered, the crystalline power core cracked and leaking faint blue fluid that mixed with the flooding seawater like dying starlight.
It could have been worse. At least it didn’t blow. Though it looked like it could any moment.
She searched frantically.
Through the engineering bay where she had woken the ship only hours ago. Past the command deck where they had shared that single, perfect look of hope. Down the narrow passage where they had first entered together.
No sign of him.
Terror clawed up her throat.
Then she saw the blood trail.
Dark, thick ribbons of indigo-tinged blood drifting lazily in the current, leading toward the aft cargo section. She followed it with growing dread, tail propelling her faster than she thought possible.
She found him slumped against a collapsed support strut near the rear loading hatch. The rival’s upper body still lay nearby, crushed and forgotten.
Klari’s massive frame was half-curled on the tilted deck, one arm draped across his abdomen. Blood — too much blood — pooled beneath him and rose in slow, dark clouds around his body.
Greta’s stomach dropped.
“Klari!”
She was at his side in an instant, hands pressing over the worst of the wounds. But she knew immediately.
This wasn’t surface damage from claws or tentacles. The fight on the bridge had torn something deep inside him — an internal rupture the crash had worsened.
Dark arterial blood pulsed steadily from a gash low on his side, the color wrong, too rich, too final. His breathing was shallow and wet, each gill-flutter accompanied by a faint, bubbling sound.
She couldn’t fix this.
She was a physics teacher. An engineer. She could rebuild drones and rewire alien power cores, but she wasn’t a surgeon. Even if she had been, there was nothing here — no tools, no sterile field, no way to stop internal bleeding in the middle of a flooding wreck on an alien seabed.
Klari’s golden eyes opened slowly. They found hers with that same direct, unflinching amber gaze he had always given her.
He knew too.
He didn’t pretend.
“Greta,” he rasped. His voice was rough, wet, already fading at the edges. One clawed hand lifted weakly, reaching for her.
She caught it immediately, gripping tight, her smaller fingers lacing with his larger ones.
“Don’t,” she whispered, voice trembling with fury and terror. “Don’t you dare say goodbye. We were supposed to win. We were supposed to leave together.”
A faint, pained smile touched his mouth. Blood flecked his lips.
“I got you out,” he said simply. “That was always the only win that mattered to me. Seven games… and you were the only one who ever chose me back.”
Tears burned behind her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. Not in front of him. She would not cry while he was still breathing.
She squeezed his hand harder, as if she could hold him here by sheer force of will.
“You stupid, stubborn male,” she choked out. “I was supposed to fix the ship and get us both free. Not this. Not you bleeding out in a broken wreck because you protected me again.”
His thumb brushed weakly over her knuckles. His markings were dimming — the beautiful silver threads across his chest and shoulders flickering slower and slower, like stars going out one by one.
“I love you,” he said, quiet and honest, no grand speech, just truth.
“Not because the game made me. Not because you were the prize. But because you’re you.
The one who talked about circuitry when she was terrified.
The one who fixed a dead ship with her bare hands.
The one who looked at a monster like me and still said yes. ”
Greta’s breath hitched. She pressed her forehead to his, tails still tightly entwined even as the water level continued to rise.
“I love you too,” she whispered fiercely. “So you don’t get to leave me here alone. You hear me? You fight. You stay.”
His markings dimmed further. The silver threads faded to dull gray, then to nothing. His golden eyes stayed on hers until the very end, soft and full of that same protective warmth.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed, so quietly she almost missed it. “I have to… have to sleep.”
Then his markings went out completely.
His body went still.
For one terrible, endless second, Greta clutched him close, tails wrapped so tightly around his that it hurt.
“Klari? No… No!”
She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, breathing in the last fading traces of his scent — salt, blood, and that warm, briny male smell that had become home.
Then his body began to disappear.
It wasn’t violent. It wasn’t dramatic. It was gentle, almost merciful. His form shimmered, scales losing substance, turning translucent, then simply… gone. Reclaimed.
The platform pulling him back to whatever pod waited for failed or dead contestants. Reset.
Her arms closed around nothing.
Her hand, still outstretched where she had been holding his, grasped only water.
Greta stared at her empty palm for a long moment, the wreck creaking and flooding around her, the last emergency light flickering overhead.
She understood now.
That was how it worked. When they died here, the platform took them back. Not truly dead — just gone. Reset. Waiting in their pods for the next game, the next cycle.
The only way to return to him was to join him.
The same way he had left her.
Death.
Greta closed her fingers slowly, then pressed her fist to her chest, right over her heart.
The water continued to rise.
The ship settled deeper into the seabed with a final, mournful groan.
And in the darkness of the broken wreck, Greta sat alone, tails curled around herself, staring at the empty space where Klari had been.
She didn’t cry.
Not yet.
But the fury and terror and love inside her burned brighter than any artificial sun the Malquarans had ever built.
She would find a way back to him.
Even if it meant dying to do it.