7. Rhaek
RHAEK
I gave up the safety of the cave reluctantly.
The rock released its hold with a kind of ambient indifference, the cool dark swapping for the flat grey light of the platform's morning in a way that was not welcoming but openly hostile.
I stood at the cave's mouth and read the air, the light, the sound before I let her follow. Then I stepped onto the wet rock of the escarpment face and turned and held up one hand: Wait.
She managed to wait approximately three seconds.
"Is it safe?"
"I'm looking."
"What are you looking at?"
"Everything."
A pause. Then: "That's not very helpful."
I was looking at the Fast Moon, which had cleared the platform's eastern horizon and was moving at its usual pace — too quickly, always too quickly, the thing had no patience — through the lower arc of its transit.
Then I looked at the Slow Moon, barely shifting from where it had been when we went into the cave, a vast pale presence at the platform's zenith that exerted its pull on the water with the serene indifference of something that had never needed to hurry.
Finally, I read the Wild Card Moon, which concerned me most: it was sitting lower on the horizon than it had been two hours ago, closer in its arc than the Slow Moon's transit would normally allow for. Closer than it had been yesterday.
I added the variables.
The tide had receded and the forest was exposed.
I could see the pale line of the tree canopy from here, a kilometer west, the alien forest sitting in its own eerie stillness on land that would be underwater again in — I ran the numbers — ninety minutes.
Two hours, if the Wild Card Moon continued its current approach.
I looked at Helsa.
She was standing on the ledge just inside the cave mouth with her arms folded and her chin slightly up. It was the expression I was learning meant she was being patient with me. Her patience had a very real structural limit.
"Ninety minutes," I said. “Two hours at the most.”
"For what?"
"For us to cross the flatlands and reach the ruins before the water comes back."
She looked at the water. A wide flat sheet of it, retreated to the platform's edges, leaving the central ground exposed in its pale, still-damp entirety.
She looked at it the way she always looked at water — not panic, not quite, but something that lived in the same neighborhood. Then she looked at the treeline.
"Through the forest," she said.
"Through the forest. "
She was quiet for a moment. "And the other males?"
"Three possibilities. Blue — the large one — landed near the central zone.
He'll be moving, probably already through part of the lower crossing by now.
" I watched the platform's surface as I spoke, reading it the way I'd read everything since landing: for information, for threat, for the stillness waiting to be movement.
"The second — the one with the iridescent coloring — I put him on the high ground.
The bone reef hill, northeast. He's patient. He won't rush the crossing."
"And the third?"
I didn't answer immediately.
She noticed. "Rhaek?"
"The third was in the flatlands when we went to ground last night. I don't know where he is now."
Helsa absorbed this. "So we should move."
"Yes. Now."
The tideland was not beautiful in any conventional sense, but it was extraordinary — I kept noticing that, in the half-second intervals between reading the surface and reading the treeline and reading the moons and her footfalls behind me.
The water's retreat had left everything wet and pale and faintly gleaming, the mineral deposits on the rock catching the morning light in flat, even planes that made the ground look like hammered silver.
Tide pools dotted the exposed rock in irregular clusters, each one a still mirror.
Anything with shells had retreated into them.
It was very quiet. Too quiet.
"Do you think they have fish?" Helsa said .
I checked the treeline. "What?"
"In the pools. Do they have anything like fish?" She stepped over a pool without looking at it. "Or is it all just sharks?"
"The large predators don't come into the tidal flats. The channel at the north edge is their territory. These—" I glanced at a pool "—these will have smaller things. Scavengers."
"Scavengers," she repeated, as though assessing the word for comfort value. "That's fine. Scavengers are fine. Scavengers mean something died somewhere nearby though… which is slightly less fine, but." She paused. "Is that a shell?"
I looked. "Yes."
She moved to pick it up.
“Don’t touch it!”
She froze in place. “But it’s just a shell?—”
“Nothing is just anything in this place. Everything you see has been designed for one purpose: to kill.”
She looked at the shell sideways. “Even pretty shells?”
“Especially pretty shells.”
She gulped, nodded, and drew closer to me.
I scanned the treeline. The flatlands forest began two hundred meters ahead — the alien canopy already legible as a distinct texture against the platform's grey sky. The leaves’ color was slightly off, the angles too deliberate, too perfect.
They caught the morning light and returned it in a way that held no warmth.
An eerie effect. I had studied this forest type in the data and hadn't liked it then and I didn't like it now.
I kept walking.
"Can I ask you something?" Helsa said.
“Can I stop you?”
“Probably not. ”
"You've been asking me things since we left the cave."
"That was different. Those were logistical. This is — different." A brief silence, which on her lasted approximately the length of three steps. "What happens if we get to the ruins and the ship doesn't come?"
"It will come."
“But if it doesn’t?”
“It will.”
Another silence. This one lasted five steps, which was the longest silence she'd managed since the cave.
"You've been on this kind of platform before?" she asked.
"No. This is my first time in the Mating Games."
“Then… why are you here?”
All her questions eventually revolved around that same topic: Why was I in the warehouse? Why am I here? It was the one question I didn’t want to answer. Not yet. Not here.
“I am here because the Malquarans wanted me here.” True enough, though not the whole story.
"Is that what you do? Study things?"
"I study things that are going to try to kill me or the people I'm responsible for. Yes."
She was quiet again. Then: "Am I a person you're responsible for?"
Her questions were sharp. Probing.
I decided to check the moons again. The Fast Moon was a quarter arc further along. The Wild Card was sitting in the same position it had been three minutes ago. "You're a person I'm going to get off this platform," I said.
"That didn't answer my question. Why not?"
I didn’t answer that one either.
She liked to prod at me the way a tongue prodded a loose tooth, with the relentless attention of someone who couldn't accept not knowing .
We were fifty meters from the edge of the treeline now, close enough that I could hear the wind whistling through the alien canopy — a sound like a haunting set of panpipes blown by a ghost.
The tideline was visible on the trunks from here.
A pale mineral mark, horizontal and absolute, at roughly shoulder height across every visible tree.
That was how high the water came when the moons combined against you.
It wasn’t the water’s height that was dangerous here. It was what was inside it.
"It's beautiful," Helsa said quietly.
She was looking at the treeline with an expression I had not seen on her before. Like she’d forgotten to manage herself. It lasted perhaps two seconds before she remembered who and where she was, and the expression of wonder was gone.
"It's eerie," I said.
"Yes," she agreed. "That's what I meant. Beautifully terrifying."
We entered the forest and the ground changed under my feet immediately. The solid damp rock of the tidal flat gave way to something softer and less certain — waterlogged soil that had been submerged in the last cycle and was only now, reluctantly, returning to the condition of land.
Each footfall produced a squelching sound.
Not much, but enough: a soft compression, a faint release, the ground registering every step in a way I did not like.
In the flatlands, sound traveled through the soil the way it traveled through water — in all directions simultaneously, readable by anything that had learned to read it.
I adjusted my stride and made them shorter, more deliberate. Weight distributed differently, the outside edge of each foot landing first and rolling inward, reducing the compression. It helped. Not enough, but it helped.
Helsa's footfalls behind me had not changed and were as loud as a marching band.
And she was still talking.
"The trees are taller than they look from outside," she said helpfully.
"Keep your voice lower."
A pause. Then, lower: "The trees are taller than they look from outside."
I could barely contain my laugh. It came out as a snort.
I noted the tideline on the nearest trunk. Shoulder height. I was not short. I looked at the ground — at the distance between where I was standing and where the water would be — and filed the number somewhere useful.
"Why are the leaves like that?" she said.
"I don't know."
"They're all facing a different direction. I thought plants faced the same way?"
"Usually. To track light."
"But there's no sun here. Only moons."
"That’s what they’re tracking, though it’s tough when there are three of them."
I focused on the undergrowth to the east. The canopy was wrong in one specific place — not a gap, not quite, but a section where the light through the leaves was slightly different from the surrounding pattern.
Could be a terrain variation. Could be a hollow. Or something could be standing in the treeline ahead.
I slowed a fraction.
"Rhaek?"
"Yes?"
"You've gone quiet. "
"I'm usually quiet."
"No, you've gone different quiet." A pause. "You've gone flat in the shoulders."