6. Helsa
HELSA
I stood there and breathed until my legs stopped shaking. Then I moved away from him.
He didn't follow.
Good.
I walked to the far edge and looked out. Below, on all sides, the water rushed. The basin was gone — the pale rock floor we'd run across had disappeared under dark water, and the ridge we'd climbed was barely above the surface. Everything else had drowned.
Drowned.
I needed a way down. By myself.
The eastern edge dropped sheer. No ledge, no grade, just a straight fall into deep water.
I moved south. It was even worse here. The rock face was slick and undercut at the base.
I pressed my fingers against it and felt the stone shift under even the lightest pressure, a fracture running through it.
No way down here.
I looked out across the water.
Other spires rose from the flooded platform in the distance. Small dark columns, each one cut off by the channels between them. And on two of them, I spied figures. Too far to make out details. Just shapes, moving. Roving.
The other aliens.
My stomach tightened. I looked away and kept moving.
The northern edge had a rough slope — broken tiers of rock but less sheer than the rest. I crouched and reached down to test the first tier.
My left palm split open.
I pulled back and hissed through my teeth. The cuts from the climb had crusted and the testing had broken them back open. The worst bled slow and dark across my palm. I pressed it to my thigh and looked down at the water below.
Shapes moved under the surface in slow, wide arcs. Patient.
I sighed at my bleeding hand and knew there was no way off this rock. Not yet, at least.
"There's a cave?—"
“Yaargghh!” I screamed in surprise.
I spun around and found him standing behind me. He appeared even and unhurried — as if he hadn’t just scared me half to death. "We should go inside."
Go inside? So what? So you can take advantage of me? I don’t think so, Bub!
I crossed to the western edge and checked it. Same as the others.
No way down. No raft, no rope, and definitely no swimming — not with those things circling below.
The thought arrived with a bitterness I recognized and ignored. I'd been alone my whole life and it had been fine. Better than fine. Nobody to factor in, nobody who expected things I hadn't agreed to give .
I looked around again, the way you look at a door a second time even when you know it's locked.
Still no way down.
Fuck!
Then, of course, things only got worse.
The first drops of rain patted the top of my head.
I ignored them.
He — the alien! — was still standing there, watching me. He'd stayed outside too — hadn't pushed, hadn't repeated himself. Just mentioned the cave once and left the option open.
Then the sky opened and the rain fell.
Cold, heavy, and immediate — not building, just arriving. My shirt plastered to my skin inside a minute. The cold drove straight through the fabric and settled in.
I wiped my face. An instant later, the rain replaced itself.
I wiped it again.
This is fine. This is totally fine.
My boots, my hair, water running down the back of my neck. I'd been cold before, frightened before, dropped onto a rock above a flooded alien platform with creatures circling below. I'd managed all of that.
This was what my body decided was the worst of it.
Being wet.
I stood in it for another minute, on principle. Then I muttered expletives to myself and walked to the cave entrance and went inside.
I could still hear it — heavy pats on the rock outside — but it was out there now. I stopped just inside and let my eyes adjust to the darkness.
It was a small cave with an uneven floor. The ceiling lowered toward the back. A dry smell, mineral and old. I moved to the far wall and turned so I could see him and the whole space at once.
He came inside and crouched near the center of the floor.
I watched him without turning my head. His hands moved across the cave floor, gathering twigs and dry leaves, arranging them with a focus that had no performance in it. He'd done this before. Not recently. Always. The kind of knowledge that lives in the hands and without thought.
I blinked and the fire caught. Man, he’s good! I hadn’t even seen the flint he must have used.
Small, then steady. The cave walls turned amber. Warmth moved outward from the flame and even reached me against the far wall. I pretended not to notice it.
He looked up.
"Come closer to the fire, if you wish." He didn't make it a question. "You'll warm faster."
I didn't move a muscle.
Again, he didn't press it. He simply sat back on his heels and looked into the flame.
A minute passed. The warmth was good against the far wall but I could still feel a chill from the wind outside. I hesitantly stood and crossed the cave floor, keeping a close eye on him the whole time.
It was pointless, I knew. If he wanted to do something to me, there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop him. Still, the illusion of control was comforting.
I sat within easier reach of the heat and kept the distance between us where I needed it.
He said nothing about it. No wise cracks. No smirk.
The fire crackled. Outside, the rain kept coming.
"The wet will be gone soon. I do not wish for you to become sick. Not in this place." His voice was low. Not filling the silence, just occupying a small part of it. "The fire draws it out faster than you'd think."
I coiled my legs underneath myself and looked toward the cave entrance. It wasn’t too far. I could sprint there within three seconds if I needed to.
If he made it necessary.
"Are you warm enough?" he asked.
I didn't answer.
He didn't seem to need me to. He watched the fire for a moment, then his eyes flicked up at me — but not at my face. At my hands, where I had them pressed together in my lap.
"Let me see your palms."
I pulled my hands back.
"I'm not going to—" He stopped. Tried a different tack. "I just want to look at them."
I looked at the fire instead.
He shifted — slowly, so I could track every movement — and reached toward my hands. Not grabbing. Just reaching.
I moved them back further and turned my head away.
He was an alien. And a stranger. And I was too terrified to even begin processing what had happened to me.
He withdrew. No frustration in it, no tightening of the jaw. He simply pulled his hand back and let the attempt go, and turned toward the eastern wall.
I watched him cross to where something pale and silver-green grew in clusters along the rock. He pressed his fingers against it, checking the moisture at the base. Then he scraped some away — a careful amount, not reckless — and brought it between his palms.
He worked it slowly, pressing his hands together in a steady motion, breaking its structure down. The smell that came off it reached me across the cave. Cold, clean. Like rock after rain.
"Velith." He held it so I could see — a pale paste, dense, holding its shape. "It grows where there's moisture in the rock. When you press it into a cut, it draws the heat out of the wound. Stops the bleeding. The pain goes down fast." He paused. "I've seen it work on worse than this."
He moved toward me. Slowly. One step, then he stopped and waited. Then another. As if approaching a frightened animal.
I looked at the paste. Looked at my hands. Looked at him.
"No." Then I belatedly added: “Thank you.”
He held still for a moment.
"As you wish," he said.
Again, no heat in it. No edge. He crouched down and set the velith on a flat piece of rock between us, within my reach. Then he stood and walked back to the cave entrance.
That surprised me. Not the placing of it — the no edge. Men didn't usually do that. They pushed, or they went cold, or they found another way to make sure you felt the refusal. He just said as you wish and moved away, like it genuinely was up to me, as if my answer was the end of it.
I glanced at the velith where it sat on the rock. My hands did hurt, stinging from the salt in the water. But I didn’t reach for it.
He stood at the entrance and watched the water below. I sat apart and focused on the fire and the cave and the pale paste on the rock.
Practical. I turned it over the way I turned everything over. He needed me functional — the fire, the velith, the calm, all of it served that logic. He needed me for something. That was the only reason he would want to help me .
He wants something. They always want something from me.
I thought of Greta. The way she went still and quiet when she was frightened, turning inward instead of exploding outward. I wondered where she was. If she was in the same predicament I was. I hoped not.
I pressed my back into the wall and sat with all the things I could not know and could not fix and could not reach.
And the rain kept coming.
The fire settled lower and burned steadier. I could feel it now not just on my face and hands but deeper — in my shoulders, down my back, the cold retreating from muscle that had been braced since the pod. My shirt was still damp at the seams but the rest had started to give.
And he still hadn't moved.
The scale-plates on his shoulders caught the firelight in fragments. The dark geometry of the tattoos on his arms. The gold eyes facing away from me, watching whatever moved in the water below.
My hands were still stinging. I flexed my fingers, felt the pull of the cuts, and looked at the velith on its rock.
I began to reach for it, then pulled back, thinking better of it.
I looked at the fire instead.
The warmth had moved into my lap now, into my thighs, settling into the places where the cold had been sitting longest. The pain in my hands was still there but farther away than it had been, like something heard from another room.
My chin dropped.
I pulled it back up.
Outside, the rain on the rock blurred into something steady and low, not a sound I was listening to anymore but a presence. The fire at the edges of my vision had gone soft. His shape at the entrance held and then softened too.
My chin dropped again.