5. Rhaek #2
I had seen both of them in the bay. One was built for tidal zones — dense, low-slung, camouflage coloring in gray-green that would read as near-invisible against the platform's wet rock.
The other was the strangest of them all, almost translucent, and would move on land with the careful deliberateness of something that was out of its element and knew it. Until it got to the water.
They were going to land near the tidal margin, the northeast edge of the platform where the water moved fastest through the channel.
They would fight over territory when they landed, I estimated.
The question of which one came west from there and which one retreated would determine a great deal about the second phase of the crossing.
I noted it as a variable still resolving.
As for my pod…
Her pod was falling below mine now. I had a clear line of sight on it. I would land second closest. And would race to reach her first.
She had recognized me. I had seen it happen — the slight widening, the stillness.
And she had not looked afraid of me.
After years of watching her manage the things that frightened her from a careful distance, I had some understanding of what her fear looked like. It was controlled. It was competent. It did not touch her face if she could prevent it.
She had looked at me the way she looked at difficult problems. Trying to place me .
I had knowledge about her and she had — what? — about me? A warehouse. A pair of eyes seen once across an empty room while everything was going wrong. She did not know my name. She did not know what I had engineered to be here.
She was in a pod screaming toward the most exposed position on the worst tidal configuration in the active rotation and she was afraid of water and she had looked at me across the bay like I was a problem she intended to solve.
Something in my chest pirouetted in a way I did not examine.
The landing zone was coming up fast now, pale and wide, the tideline on the perimeter walls legible even at this distance.
She was going to hit the soft ground near the centre of it, approximately forty yards from the nearest perimeter — a reasonable distance in good conditions, a dangerous one when the tide turned.
I ran the numbers.
It was enough time to reach her. Barely.
The pod hit the final approach angle and the vibration went from unpleasant to structural. The walls sang at a pitch that had no business being audible. I braced. The soft ground of the landing zone would slow the impact. I would land hard and intact.
I already knew which direction I was running the moment the door opened.
Below, through the last of the fire and the blur of approach, I could see her pod ahead of mine.
Smaller. Falling. About to hit the pale flat ground in a scatter of impact and displaced rock, and inside it was a woman who had survived the last seventy-two hours and was now about to land on a water platform with five alien males in the drop behind her .
She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing there. Or what the males would do if they got their claws on her.
Hold on, Helsa. I’m coming.
The ground hit.
Total impact — a single massive jolt that compressed my spine and threw my vision white for half a second. The pod rocked. Settled. The rock beneath made no sound at all, solid and unyielding, dry.
The door mechanism ran its cycle. Two seconds. One.
It opened.
And I was already moving.
The landing zone was already changing.
The water came from the south. It didn't crash or rush. It just moved. Slow and flat and certain, spreading across the low ground, filling every dip and hollow it could find.
I ran.
The pale rock was soft. The dark rock was firm. I read the difference through my feet. I adjusted with every stride. Lighter on the pale. Full weight on the dark. I didn't slow down. I couldn't slow down.
Three minutes to her pod. Maybe less.
The first crack cut across my path. Deep and narrow. I jumped it. Both feet hit the far side hard. The sound cracked out across the flat — sharp, loud, a noise that said something heavy, moving fast, right here.
I didn't know what lived on this platform.
Not exactly. I hadn't recognized the configuration until I was falling through the atmosphere.
I hadn't had time to pull a full species list. But I knew how Malquaran tidal platforms worked.
Apex predators in the water. Scavengers on the exposed rock.
Ambush species in the wet zones between — the places that were neither fully land nor fully water.
The places I was running through right now.
Something had heard that sound.
Maybe nothing would come from it. Maybe something would.
I couldn't fix it. I kept running.
The second crack was worse. A whole section of the surface had dropped — last tide cycle, probably. Too wide to jump. I cut right and ran the edge of it for six strides until it narrowed. Then I crossed. Four seconds gone. The water didn't care.
Twenty yards.
The pod's crater was clear ahead. A shallow dent in the pale ground.
The edges pushed outward where the impact had shoved the surface aside.
The pod sat slightly tilted — the soft ground had taken it unevenly.
Ten degrees off. That meant the hatch had opened at a bad angle.
Whoever was inside would have had to step down before they were ready.
I skidded to a stop at the crater's edge.
The hatch was open.
The pod was empty.
Something seized my heart. Fast and cold, like a hand closing tight.
I had been running for four minutes. Maybe five.
The large one — the blue-gray male with the wide shoulders — his pod had come down closer to hers than mine had.
Not much closer. But enough. He had less ground to cover.
He was fast. He could have been here already.
He could have read these marks before I did.
He could have already followed wherever she went. He could have?—
Stop. Stay calm.
I dropped to one knee and looked at the ground .
Two shallow dents at the base of the hatch. She had gripped the edge when she came out. Her fingers, not her palms. The marks were close together. Someone holding on. Someone whose legs weren't sure yet. Then the first footprints — small, shallow, too close together.
She had stumbled out. But she had walked away.
“Helsa…”
No drag marks. No large prints beside the pod. Nothing to say something big had stood here next to her.
She had left on her own.
The cold grip in my chest loosened. Just slightly.
I breathed. One full breath. Then I read the tracks.
North-east. Short steps, uneven, wandering slightly left and then right. She wasn't running. She wasn't sure where she was going. She was moving because standing still had felt worse than moving — and she had looked for high ground.
Clever girl.
The low ridge to the north-east was the only elevation visible from here. Eight yards above the flat. Not much. But it was up, and up was the right instinct when the ground was flooding.
She had done the smart thing. She just didn't know enough about this platform to know where smart led.
The water reached the crater's edge. It began to fill from the south side.
I stood. I ran.
The ground between the flat and the ridge was the worst stretch yet.
This section held water the longest. The surface looked solid but it wasn't. Third stride — my right foot punched through to the ankle. Cold water. I pulled it free and shifted left .
I growled.
The left line held for twelve yards.
Then it went soft too. Each footfall sent a pulse through the ground.
A vibration. On some tidal platforms that meant nothing.
On others it called things up from below — species that hunted by pressure and movement, that felt the difference between a heavy animal moving slowly and a heavy animal moving fast.
I moved faster.
Fast reduced the contact time. Reduced contact time reduced the pulse. Not to nothing. But enough, maybe. Hopefully. I held the thought lightly and I kept moving.
Her tracks came back on the firmer ground near the ridge. Cleaner prints here. The surface had been dry long enough to take a shape. Her stride had changed. Longer. More even. The spacing wider. She had been steadying as she walked. Getting herself back.
Good.
That thought came with something attached to it. Something I didn't have time to examine. I kept moving.
The ridge rose. The ground hardened. The water hadn't reached this height. I pushed harder. Her boot prints were clear — small, deliberate, climbing.
Ten yards from the top I slowed.
Not because I was tired. I slowed because I needed to think about what came next.
Anything that came over a ridge fast was a threat.
Everything on this platform had threat responses built in.
She did too. If I crested that ridge at a run and she saw me before she heard me, she would run.
And running meant direction, and direction meant deeper into a platform she didn't know, and deeper into this platform meant water.
I came up the last stretch low. I kept my shape below the ridge line. I slowed my breathing deliberately — four counts in, four counts out — until it was quiet.
I came up over the top.
The basin fell away below. Dry pale rock. Open in every direction. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to shelter. The platform's light lay flat across all of it.
She was standing in the middle of it.
Her arms were pulled tight around herself. Her hands gripped her own elbows. Her shoulders were up, curled inward, making herself smaller. She faced away from me, looking east across the water — a wide flat sheet of it, already well over the low ground, the platform's far edge barely visible.
She was shaking.
She was alone.