7. Rhaek #3
I hit him from behind with my shoulder at full stride and the three of us went sprawling down together, a tangle of limbs and wet soil. Helsa made a sharp cry as the ground came up to meet her.
His grip broke on impact. She rolled — actually rolled, a full sideways rotation through the mud that was entirely instinctive and entirely correct — and came up on her hands and knees two meters away with her hair across her face and her mouth full of the flatlands.
She spat. "That was—" She spat again. "There is so much dirt in my?—"
I didn't hear the rest of it because he came off the ground at me.
The next exchange was close and fast and ugly. The kind of fighting that happened when both parties were tired and hurt and had stopped performing for an invisible crowd and were just trying to end it.
He was hellish strong. I already knew he was strong but knowing it and experiencing it in the fifth minute of a fight on soft ground with a compromised knee were different things.
Every time I thought I had a position, he moved through it, his body dense and relentless. The rage that had been building in me since the moment he picked her up off the ground — clean, cold, completely controlled — sharpened everything down to its essential components.
He reached for my throat. I let him get there and used the half-second to get both my hands on his weapon arm and wrench it backward and down with my full weight behind it .
He went to one knee. I drove my elbow into the side of his head and he fell to two knees. I followed him down because letting him recover was not something I was willing to do again.
"GET HIM!" Helsa was on her feet. "THAT'S IT! YES!"
I got behind him. My arm drew across his throat.
And then I understood the problem.
His skin was wrong. The surface carried a moisture that wasn't sweat, but something secreted, a slickness that made every grip I established feel like I was trying to hold running water.
My forearm slid. I compensated. It slid again. He knew it too. I felt it in him, the calculation happening in his body before it happened in mine. Then he drove himself backward against me and twisted. The slick surface did exactly what it was designed to do.
My grip failed.
He spun free and had me before I could reset. His arm across my throat now, his body behind mine, the reversal so fast and so complete that for one full second I couldn't process it had happened. Then the pressure came and I understood it very well.
I got both hands on his arm and pulled. Nothing moved.
I drove my heel into his instep. He adjusted his weight and absorbed it. I tried to drop my chin, to get my jaw in the way of the pressure, to buy myself an inch of airway. He adjusted for that too.
The edges of my vision began to do what edges did when the airway closed.
I pulled again at his arm. My hands couldn't find purchase — the same slickness, everywhere, his entire body a surface that refused to be held.
I could feel my strength going from my hands outward, the draining that came with restricted blood to the brain, and underneath the physical fact of it was something worse: the knowledge of what this meant.
What it meant for her. For Helsa.
She was standing somewhere behind me. I couldn't see her and I couldn't get to her. The darkness at the edges was widening.
And I realized I had been here before.
Not this platform but the understanding I was about to fail someone I had failed to protect once… and was about to do so again.
The darkness closed in.
Then I heard something. A small noise as someone lifted something too heavy for them. A grunt of effort.
Crack!
Something caught him heavy across the back. I felt it reverberate through his body. The impact traveled through his grip, through his arms, and into the arm that was across my throat. It loosened by one crucial fraction of an inch.
I pulled and got my chin down. I pulled in half a blocked airway and it was enough to clear the worst of the darkness.
I got my foot behind his ankle and dropped my weight.
He went down and I went with him. Controlled, this time.
I came up on top of him face-to-face and got both hands around his throat, my knees on his arms, all my weight where it needed to be.
This time, there was no slick-skin solution because I wasn't gripping, I was pressing, and pressure didn't need friction the way grip did.
He flailed. His legs came up and his hips drove against the ground and none of it moved me. I stayed precisely where I was and maintained the pressure. All I needed now was time.
I waited with the patience of someone who had decided this was already finished and, soon, the conclusion would arrive.
His hands found my forearms and scrabbled at them. He found nothing to work with.
His legs slowed.
Then they stopped.
His hands dropped away from my arms and hit the wet ground. He lay still. I held the pressure for five more seconds and felt the last tension leave his body all at once. The limpness of unconsciousness.
I released him but remained with my knees on him. I let my hands find their way back to themselves. And breathed.
Helsa was the one who made a sound. No surprise there.
Not a word but a gasp of surprise.
He was going, becoming less.
It started at the extremities and moved inward, his outline softening and then dissolving, the slick green-grey of his skin fading first to translucence and then to nothing at all. The solid fact of him simply withdrew from the world with the calm inevitability of morning mist.
His weapon lay in the mud beside him. In ten seconds that was all that remained. The weapon, the impression of his body in the wet soil, and the two of us looking at the space where he had been.
The forest was very quiet.
Helsa stared at the empty ground for a long moment. Then she looked at me. Her face was doing something complicated and unguarded.
"He's not dead," I said. "I told you before. The platform doesn't allow permanent elimination. He'll respawn back in his pod. Ready for the next round."
She stared at me .
Then she looked at the empty ground again. Then back at me. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. "I know. You told me. But… But… His pod?" she said. "He just… respawned back to his pod?"
"Yes."
"Like a… like a—" She appeared to search for a framework and found none available. "He just reset."
"Yes."
"And then he can just… come back? In the next round?"
"After you die. Or a male mates with you. Then the round resets and we go through this all over again."
Something shifted in her expression. Something new moved through it, quieter than the shock. She looked at the empty ground one more time and then back at me. This time her gaze was different. Steadier, more open. It was the look of someone who has just confirmed something they had been resisting.
"You weren't lying," she said. "About any of it."
I cocked my head to one side. "You thought I was?"
She had the good grace not to deny it. She just held my gaze with that new steadiness and let the fact sit between us without apology or explanation. I found I didn't need either.
A muscle twitched at the corner of my mouth.
She caught it. Her chin came up slightly. Then, slowly, a smile arrived on her face. It lit the whole tired, muddy, blood-and-adrenaline reality of the last ten minutes.
"Sorry," she said. She didn't sound sorry at all.
"Don't be," I said, and meant it. “You never have to apologize. Least of all to me.”
We stayed there for one more second, the both of us. We were just two people who’d survived something and were waiting for whatever came next .
The sound reached us both at the same moment.
It came from no single direction but all of them at once. The audio signature of water moving in volume toward a fixed point.
Toward us.
I reached down and grabbed the beast’s makeshift weapon. An upgrade on my flint blade.
"What is that?" Helsa said.
"The tide."
“It’s coming already?”
She turned. Through the western tree line, perhaps three hundred meters out, something was visible at ground level that had not been visible before — a flat dark line moving through the pale soil. "I thought we had more time."
"So did I."
She looked at me. Something crossed her face. "You miscalculated."
"The Wild Moon moves against us."
I grabbed her by the arm and we ran.
The water was already at the tree line when we hit the eastern edge of the forest. I could hear it behind us now, a cleaner sound in the open, the flat rushing of a surge crossing the tideland flats with nothing to impede it.
The flatlands flooded fast.
She ran well. Her stride was efficient and she didn't waste anything on panic. She kept up without being asked to.
"How far?" she gasped.
"The ruins. Half a kilometer."
"Half a kilometer? Eugh!"
I glanced back. The tree line behind us was dark at the base now, the flat dark line arrived and advancing, the first fingers of it finding the low ground between the roots. "Faster than us," I said. "If we stop."
She processed this in one stride. "Then we don't stop."
"No," I said. "We don't."
The ruins were a pale shape in the middle distance, catching the light of the three moons in the colors that ruins earned after long exposure to alien water.
Behind us the tide filled the flatlands with the patient of something that had been performing this dance for far longer than anything on this platform had been alive, and would be doing it long after.
The first water found us fifty meters from the tree line.
Helsa felt it on her heels and whimpered.
The ruins were visible ahead — pale against the platform's sky, the partial walls catching the moonlight in fractured planes of grey and silver, the bioluminescence in the stone just beginning to show as the light shifted.
Four hundred meters. Maybe three-fifty.
The ground between here and there was open and rising slightly, which was the only thing working in our favor. It might buy us time. Minutes, maybe.
I looked back.
The flatlands forest was already changed.
The water had found it fully in the thirty seconds since we'd left. Not the creeping advance of the early tide but building with momentum. The Fast Moon and the Wild Card combined their pull into a surge that crossed the exposed rock of the tidal flat and hit the tree line like a decision.
The alien trunks took the first of it and held, their root systems deep and old and designed by long experience for exactly this — but the canopy above them was another matter.
The wave-front pushed through the lower forest and the trees leaned.
Not breaking — leaning, bending hard away from the surge, the alien branches sweeping sideways in a long slow arc that looked almost graceful from a distance and sounded, even at three hundred meters, like the world rearranging itself.
Then the second surge came behind the first and the trees went further.
"Don't look," I said.
And, of course, Helsa did. "Oh my God! We… we were just in there!"
"Luckily, not anymore."
"Those trees are… they're nearly horizontal!"
"Keep going!"
The water at our feet was deepening. The sheet that had been ankle-deep was shin-deep now and cold. So very cold. It grabbed at each stride with accumulating resistance, slowing us.
I looked toward the moons.
The Wild Card was even closer now, almost taking up the entire sky. Closer than it had any right to be in this arc of its transit. The Fast Moon was a third of the way through its arc. We had… maybe eight minutes.
We had to be at the ruins in eight minutes.
If we failed, we would drown.
If we failed, we would miss the pick-up.
If we failed…
I shook my head and refused to consider it.
"Faster," I said.
"I am going faster!" Helsa said, with some feeling .
"More faster."
Her stride lengthened and her arms drove. She found a deeper reserve somewhere deep inside and deployed it. The mud from the flatlands was still on her face. Her hair had mostly escaped whatever she'd had it in.
Behind us the forest groaned.
The whole canopy sounded pained as another surge hit, a long low structural sound that carried across the open ground and arrived in the body before the ears.
I didn't look back. I knew what it was. The wave had hit the tree line harder than the first, the water deeper now, the force of it enough to take the upper canopy fully horizontal.
Slowing it. Not stopping it.
"Rhaek." Helsa said between exhausted gasps.
"I know."
"The water is?—"
"I know."
It was at our knees now and we waded as best we could. The grade had levelled briefly. A flat section of rock between two rises, a natural channel that the tide found and use. The water crossed it fast, finding the low points, and filling them.
My boots were full. I could hear hers were too. The sodden weight of running with water in your shoes, every stride a small argument with gravity.
I looked forward at the ruins. Two hundred meters.
I looked for the sharks.
Nothing.
It wasn’t deep enough for their massive bodies. Not yet.
"I can see them," Helsa said. Breathless, not stopping. "The ruins— I can see them!"
Just keep going, Helsa. Just keep going.
We were close — really close. And as the waves crashed in and the latest surge hit, slamming into our backs, knocking us off our feet, I prayed to the Creator that for once — just this once — he might give us a little help.
We were in the final strech. But it was the last few yards that were always the most dangerous. It was where hope lived.
And where it went to die.