3. Rhaek
RHAEK
I stood beneath the hole in the ceiling and looked up through it. It was too small, that hole, for the importance of the thing it had taken.
The night sky over Edinburgh glowed amber — light pollution from four hundred thousand lives being lived below, completely unaware that something had just gone catastrophically wrong.
She was gone.
Three words. The most devastating words in any language.
I didn't move. Movement implied a next step, and I had no next step. I had spent years building a wall of contingencies around this female, and in the space of four minutes, every single one of them had failed.
I turned.
The figures I had fought — the Malquaran acquisition team, operatives licensed under Compact Charter 7 to retrieve biological assets for the sector's most lucrative institution — were gone. Every last one of them .
Of course they were. They had achieved their objective. There was nothing left to stay for.
There was nothing left to question, either. Not that I needed to question them. I already knew exactly where they were taking her.
I just hadn't allowed myself to say it yet.
The Mating Games were the oldest institution in the known sector.
They were also, by any metric that mattered, the most inescapable.
Once a candidate's registration was filed under the Interstellar Compact — ratified by two hundred and seventeen signatories, with no mechanism for appeal or withdrawal — the binding was absolute.
No jurisdiction in the known sector had the authority to intervene.
No treaty, no ambassador, no force of arms.
Helsa had approximately seventy-two hours before her registration became permanent and her Game began.
And I was standing in an empty warehouse in Edinburgh.
I turned away from the hole in the ceiling. I needed to stop looking at it. She wasn't coming back through it.
I was going to have to go and get her.
The Malquaran recovery team had filed their acquisition report while I was still fighting them.
I knew this because that was standard protocol — the report transmitted automatically from the wrist device the moment the target was secured.
It was elegant, in the merciless way that efficient cruelty was always elegant.
By the time I had hit the floor of the warehouse, she was already in the system.
I walked to the back of the building and pushed through the personnel door into the service lane outside. The boxes she had dropped were still there. All three, sitting in the middle of the tarmac exactly where she had left them when she grabbed her colleague and ran.
I looked at them for a long moment.
I knew what was inside. Three umbrellas. Two spare pairs of Wellington boots. Waterproof socks. Waterproof gloves. An entire category of preparation aimed at keeping her dry.
She had been afraid of water for almost as long as I had been watching her. She had never told anyone. Not a single person in all these years of observed life.
I was the only being in the universe who knew the full geography of that fear.
I set the boxes against the wall, out of the weather. It wasn't rational. She wasn't coming back for them tonight, or possibly ever.
I did it anyway.
I stood in the lane for one more moment. Just one.
Down at the far end, where the service road opened onto the main street, a fox stood looking directly at me. It looked on indifferently, I knew, but I couldn’t help but see accusation in its eyes. Why weren’t you there for her when she needed you most?
She would have said something about that fox. Something dry and faintly absurd. She had words for everything — every situation, every object, every inexplicable moment. Couldn’t imagine what she would say now, not I heard the rhythm of them.
I had told myself correct distance was how I protected her. How I kept her safe.
I was wrong.
"Helsa." My voice was quiet in the empty lane. "I could even hear the accusation in my own voice now. "
The amber sky. The indifferent fox. The city going about its business below.
"I failed you once. I will not fail you again."
I walked north toward the city lights, already building the plan from the available components, the timeline brutal and the odds not worth quantifying.
Seventy-two hours to do what had never been done before.
It would have to be enough.