4. Helsa
HELSA
“ T en.”
I woke up screaming and there was no sound.
My mouth was open. My throat was working. But whatever came out of me got swallowed by the walls of the thing I was in, absorbed, gone, like screaming into water.
I sucked in a breath and tried again and heard nothing and that was somehow the most terrifying part of all of it — that even my fear wasn't allowed to be loud in here.
I made myself stop. Or my body did, running out of air, deciding breathing was more important than panic, which was probably the correct call even if I resented it.
Greta.
Greta, who had gone first, who I had watched go through the hole in the roof before me, pulled up and away with her arms pinned to her sides and her voice cutting off so suddenly it was like a switch.
When it was my turn, I had grabbed what little I could in the ceiling, grabbed it and held on until the wood snapped in my hands and then there was nothing but the beam of light pulling me up through the dark and into?—
Here. Whatever here was.
She had to be here. She'd been taken first. She was somewhere in — in whatever this was. She had to be.
I took a deep breath and let it out.
The pod was oval, maybe two yards wide. A curved ceiling arched close to my head.
Everything was the same dark seamless material — walls, floor, the seat that held me — smooth where structural, soft where it met my body.
The light came from nowhere. A dim luminescence lived in the walls themselves, the color of something between gray and white, like the underside of a cloud.
There was a seam in front of me. A panel. Five amber glyphs.
But no door.
I was out of the seat before I'd decided to be, both hands flat against the glass, pressing, pulling, running my fingers along it, looking for anything that moved. But nothing moved. The material was seamless and warm and completely indifferent to how badly I needed it to open.
"Nine."
The voice. I'd heard it before without registering it. Low, toneless, resonant in the walls. A countdown. It wasn't reacting to me. It had been running before I woke up, would keep running after I gave up. No one had paused it.
I sat back down.
All right. There was no door. I had gotten in here somehow. So if there was a way in, there had to be a way out.
I pressed my palm to the wall on my left.
The material went translucent under my hand, cloudy and milky, and I saw? —
I yanked my hand back so fast I hit my elbow on the seat.
The wall went dark.
I sat perfectly still. My breathing had turned — shallow and fast, the kind that doesn't actually move enough air no matter how much you do it. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and stared at the opposite wall.
What I had seen was not Greta. But something else.
It was enormous. Thrashing. Dark through the milky material, all mass and movement and fury.
It had hit the wall of its pod and the sound had come through — deep, resonant, a roar that I had felt in my back teeth — and then hit it again.
I understood with the animal part of my brain that it knew I was there, that it wanted to reach me, that the only reason it couldn't were the wall between us.
"Eight."
I sat very still.
There was one on my left. I didn't look at the right wall to find out what was there. I didn't want to know. I sat in the gray light of my pod and kept my hands in my lap and thought about Greta.
She was somewhere in this. She had to be.
The aliens — the word arrived in my head with a kind of hysterical flatness, aliens, right, aliens, the word is aliens — had taken her first. There was a reason for that.
Maybe they'd wanted her, or they'd wanted both of us, and we'd both ended up here.
She was probably in a pod like this too.
But not here. She was probably doing exactly what I was doing — awake, scared, trying to breathe through it.
I pressed my palm to the front wall.
The space outside was vast. A ceiling that curved away thirty yards above, lit in dim sourceless gray. Pods arranged in rings across a dark composite floor. Five of them, like mine. All sealed.
Not all still.
Several of them shook, rocking, straining. And from them, through the wall of my own pod — sounds . Low and huge, the same resonance I'd felt from the left, a roar that communicated something without language: I am here. I am large. I am aware of you.
One pod rocked so hard it seemed to strain against its moorings.
Another had something pressed against its front wall, a hand — no, not a hand, a paw, a claw, a thing that had too many joints and too many fingers and moved with the bright terrible energy of something that very much wanted to be somewhere else.
My throat closed.
I kept my hand flat on the front wall and I made myself look, because the alternative was sitting here not looking and imagining something worse.
They can't get out. Neither can I. We're all in the same boat… or pod.
That thought helped, a little. We were all locked in. Whatever they wanted from me, it wasn't available yet. The countdown was running and the doors were sealed and no one was getting anywhere until whatever was going to happen happened.
I looked for Greta's face in the other pods.
Milky walls, opaque, dark shapes inside them.
I couldn't see faces. I couldn't see clearly at all.
I moved my eyes from pod to pod — over there, something massive and scaled; over there, something that barely moved but had what looked like wings folded tight against itself; over there, a pod that rocked so hard I was relieved I couldn't see what was inside it .
No Greta. Not that I could see.
She's here. You just can't see her yet. She's here and you're both going to be fine.
"Seven."
My heart was still too fast, too loud, sitting too high in my chest, keeping me alive but not doing it gracefully. I knew distantly that I was in shock, or close to it. I knew that there was nothing I could do about that except wait for it to pass and try not to make it worse.
I pressed the amber symbols on the panel. One by one. No sequence, no logic, just pressing them because I needed to do something with my hands.
Nothing happened.
"Six."
Still, nothing.
"Five."
Nothing.
I stopped pressing symbols.
I thought about the tractor beam. The quality of the light — pure-white, absolutely steady, a column of it that had come through my roof not like a searchlight but like a pillar. Intentional. Not random. Not an accident. Not something that had happened to me because I was unlucky.
Something had chosen us.
Something had known where I was, known Greta was there, had taken her first and then come back for me. This hadn't been a net thrown wide. This had been specific.
I didn't know if that was more terrifying or less.
At least you're not insignificant, said the small dry part of my brain. Being insignificant would be so much worse.
"Four."
I looked right.
I'd been avoiding it. But I pressed my palm to the right wall and held it there and made myself look at what was on the other side.
The pod to my right was rocking. Whatever was in it had its back to me — vast, dark, so wide the pod barely contained it — and then it turned, and I saw the face, and I understood why it had been roaring.
It saw me through the translucence.
The sound that came through the wall wasn't like the others.
The others had been rage — furious, impersonal, the sound of something that wanted out.
This one was directed. I watched it charge the wall between us and felt the vibration through my seat and my hands, felt it in my teeth.
I yanked my hand back and scrabbled to the other side of my pod as far as I could get.
The wall went dark. The vibration stopped.
This… can’t be happening.
This can’t be happening.
"Three."
The pods to the right kept rocking. I didn't look.
I pressed my hand to the front wall instead, and this time I looked further. And I saw one that was different.
Not milky. Not opaque. Clear — completely clear, as if the wall had been made from different material, or simply left off. A display case.
The figure inside was still.
He wasn't fighting. He wasn't rocking. He was sitting the way I was sitting — upright, hands loose, watching the room around him with the composed attention of someone who had decided that this was a situation he could manage.
He was enormous too. Broad in a way that was different from the creatures in the other pods — not the raw mass of something that hunted, but something else. Something toned, sharpened like a blade .
He faced forward. Toward me.
His jaw was too wide, the brow heavy, the nose long and thin, a shape decided by different evolutionary pressure than mine. But the eyes stole the show. They were open and looking at me. Directly at me. And they were?—
They were?—
Gold.
Not warm gold. A saturated amber-into-copper, the color of old coins caught in firelight.
But it wasn’t just their color that so seized me.
It was the realization I had seen them before.
Once. In a warehouse that had been falling apart around me in the chaos of that night.
I had looked across and seen those eyes through a face that had been wearing something over it — something that made the face look different, human-ish, a thing I hadn't been able to name at the time.
He wasn't wearing it now. The disguise, or whatever it had been. He was just himself.
But it was him. I was sure of it. The eyes were exactly the same.
His eyes flicked over to the other pods, and then he turned — slowly, deliberately — and looked directly at me once more.
His eyes met mine and I felt it, somewhere in my chest — not warmth, not comfort, just the shock of recognition. Of being seen by something that had already seen me before and had apparently not forgotten.
He had been in the warehouse. Greta and I had been in the warehouse. And now he was here, and I was here, and there was no version of this that was coincidence.
I didn't know if that made him a threat or not. I genuinely didn't know .
I just kept looking at him. It was better than looking at the other pods, at least.
"One."
There was a whirring sound as the floor dropped away.
No warning, no creak. The bottom of the pod just shifted aside. A deep humming shook the pod like an engine powering up.
I’d been right. There was an exit. And now it had found me.
And then it hit me.
The countdown.
It was for a reason. It was a countdown for a?—
"Launch."
My pod fell and I was screaming again.
And this time, it was loud.