7. Rhaek #2
“Not flat,” I said, keeping my eyes focused ahead. “Squared.”
"What are you looking at?"
"East. Forty meters. Don't turn your head."
She didn't turn her head. Her voice, when it came, was very even. "I would have, if I knew where east was. Is it one of them?"
I watched the canopy variation. The light hadn't changed. The ground underfoot registered no new vibrations. Whatever was there — if something was there — it was still waiting.
Which meant it knew we were here.
Which meant the sound of our approach had already done what I'd feared.
"Keep walking," I said, quietly. "Same pace. Don't change anything."
"Okay." A beat. "I want you to know that my heart is going very fast."
"So is mine."
“Really?”
“No.”
"I can feel it in my teeth."
"That's normal."
"Is it?"
I focused on the canopy. Then the ground. Then the moons — one quick check, the Fast Moon's arc putting the water at one hour out. Maybe less if the Wild Card closed its approach.
I reached down without breaking stride and closed my hand around the handle of the flint blade I’d fashioned earlier at my thigh.
The undergrowth to the east went still.
"Helsa," I said.
"Yes?"
"When I tell you to run — run west. Don't stop. Don't look back. Follow the tideline on the trees and keep going. Get to the ruins, find a safe place, and stay there."
She didn't answer immediately, which was unlike her. When she did, her voice was different from any version of it I'd heard yet — very small and controlled.
"And you?"
"I'll find you."
Then the undergrowth exploded.
And he was suddenly there.
One instant the forest was empty and the next he occupied it, all at once. He was large, with skin the dark green-grey of the flatlands canopy. He had been hiding in this forest since before we arrived, wearing it.
In his right hand he held something cobbled together from the detritus he’d found. Not quite a blade, nor a staff, a meter of dark material, dense, with a weighted end. Designed for narrow spaces — for environments where the ground was soft and the footing unreliable.
He had chosen his terrain well. I gave him that.
"Run!" I bellowed.
Helsa did — west, the right direction, the tideline on the trees exactly where I'd told her. I stepped forward to meet him before he could decide she was the more interesting target .
He was fast. The first swing came in low and I got my forearm up and took it on the bone rather than the skull. My makeshift blade fell from my grip and landed wetly in the damp soil.
Pain, immediate and bright, flashed. The impact told me what I needed to know about his strength — substantial, more than his frame suggested, the kind that came from a world with different gravity than the one I'd grown up on.
I adjusted my assessment and stepped inside the next swing before it could build momentum, getting close enough that the weapon's length became a liability rather than an asset.
He adapted too, faster than I expected.
The elbow caught me across the jaw and my vision went white at the edges for a half-second — long enough for him to create distance again, long enough for the weapon to come back around in a flat arc that I ducked under with not as much margin as I would have liked.
I felt the displaced air across the back of my neck.
"HIT HIM!" Helsa shouted from somewhere in the trees to my left.
Helsa?
She had not run far. Approximately fifteen meters before stopping and turning around. Anger flared in my ches. That was not what I had told her to do.
"Rhaek, WATCH OUT?—"
I was already moving. The thrust came in straight, the weighted end driving for my solar plexus. I twisted and took it on the hip instead — another correct trade, hip bones considerably more durable than the cluster of nerves behind the sternum.
The force of it shoved me sideways. I used the momentum, letting it carry me into a rotation, getting my right hand on his weapon arm at the wrist.
He pulled but I held on.
The contest lasted three seconds. He had slightly more strength in the upper body than I did, but I had the grip and the leverage. I used both to wrench his weapon arm down and across his body in a direction elbows were not designed to travel.
He released the weapon and drove his forehead into my face.
Stars. Actual stars.
It was a nasal impact. Warm blood rushed over my upper lip and the flat copper taste of it reached the back of my throat.
I staggered back two steps. The waterlogged ground took my right foot and gave it back at a bad angle. I went down on one knee in the wet soil, the cold of it soaking through immediately.
"GET UP!" Helsa shrieked.
He was on me before I could find my feet again.
The weight of him drove me fully down, my back hitting the ground, the impact forcing the air out of me in one hard expulsion.
His hands found my collar and the leverage from there was his.
He used my own weight against me. The flatlands soil gave way under my shoulders so I couldn't generate the counter-force I needed.
I got a hand between us and drove it upward under his chin. His head snapped back. He didn't release his grip.
I drove my knee up into his midsection. He folded enough that his grip loosened and I rolled, getting a shoulder under me, then one foot, rising in increments that were anything but elegant .
He was up at the same time and we were level once again.
He’d surprised me with his sudden appearance and he’d made the most of it. But I’d held on and he hadn’t defeated me.
Not yet.
"That's it!" Helsa's voice, fierce and tight and very close. "GET HIM!"
I breathed hard through my ruined nose. I reached up and snapped it back into place. I’d have to take care of it properly later.
He circled left. I tracked him. The weapon was somewhere in the soil behind me and I wasn't going to take my eyes off him to find it.
He feinted right and went left. I caught the feint early enough to pivot and get my weight correctly distributed. His rush met a planted foot and my elbow came down across the back of his neck with everything I had.
He made a dull D’uh! noise and went down.
"YES!" Helsa's voice cracked on the word. "YES, YES! KICK HIM! KICK HIM!"
He didn’t stay down. He rolled, caught himself on both hands, and was back to his knees in under two seconds.
I moved for him while he was still on his knees.
The mistake was the ground. My left foot went through the surface — soft soil, submerged recently, the crust deceptive, the depth beneath it wrong — and my stride broke in the worst possible way at the worst possible moment.
Gah! By the Creator, give me just one piece of luck today!
I lurched, the angle destroyed. His shoulder hit me in the midsection from below and I went backward over his back with a full-rotation. I turned it into a fall I could survive but still hit the ground on my back hard enough to feel it in every bone.
The air left my lungs again.
I lay on the wet soil and looked up through the alien canopy at the pale sky beyond it and felt, for two full seconds, absolutely nothing useful.
"RHAEK!" Helsa's voice. Different now. Not the fierce shrieking of the last few minutes. It was genuine, unguarded fear. "RHAEK, GET UP!"
I heard him moving. Not toward me.
He had made the same assessment I would have from his position: I was down, I was winded, I was not immediately dangerous. She was fifteen meters away, alone, smaller than anything else on this platform, with nothing between her and him.
And so he closed on her.
She backed up. Her heel found a tree root and she stumbled, caught herself against the trunk, pushed off it.
She was looking at him with enormous eyes and her back was very straight.
Her chin was up and her hands were in front of her in the completely instinctive and totally ineffective posture of someone ready to fight.
"Stay away from me!" she cried.
He didn't slow.
"I mean it! I’m warning you!" Her voice was shaking but it was loud. "Stay away from me!"
I was already rolling. The hip screamed. I ignored it. I got to my feet and my legs were not fully reliable yet. The fall had done something to my left knee that I would understand better in a few minutes. I moved anyway because there was no version of this where I didn't.
He was faster. The distance between them was shorter than the distance between us. He closed it while I was still finding my feet, and she had nowhere left to back up to because the tree was behind her and he was in front of her and the options had run out.
He grabbed her.
She made a sound that I felt in my back teeth. The cry of someone who has reached the absolute boundary of what they can manage and found nothing beyond it.
Then she started fighting. Both hands, immediately, with the focused desperation of someone who knew it wasn't going to work but did it anyway. She struck at his arms, his chest, anything reachable, her whole small body twisting against the powerful grip.
He ignored it all. He turned her, got her against his body with her back to his front, and locked his arms around her in a hold that immobilized her completely. He lifted her off the ground as though she weighed nothing.
She kicked. Her heels connected with his shins twice, hard enough that any human would have released her. He only adjusted his grip and started walking.
Away from me. East, back through the forest, back toward his territory, with her tucked against him like something he had collected and intended to keep.
"RHAEK!" Her voice came back through the trees, steady, controlled, the fear compressed into something almost calm. Or resigned.
She was looking at me over his shoulder. Her eyes found mine across the twenty meters of alien forest between us.
She didn't say anything else.
She didn't have to.
I lowered my head and ran at him.
I caught him at the tree line.
Not clean — nothing about the next ten seconds was clean.