9. Helsa
HELSA
I f I didn't know any better, I'd have thought we were on holiday.
A fire. A beach. Stars coming out one by one overhead like someone was switching them on. If you squinted past the ancient alien ruins and the adrenaline still metabolising in my bloodstream, it was actually quite lovely.
"The ship will come here?" I said.
"This was always the extraction point." He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head. Entirely relaxed, which I was choosing to find annoying. "The ruins just happen to be in the pre-arranged quadrant the ship would extract us from. Easy to locate from orbit."
"And how long?"
He looked up at the sky. Did that thing where he seemed to be calculating something I didn't have the instruments for.
"A few hours," he said. "Difficult to judge precisely. But a few hours."
A few hours and I would be out of here .
I could hardly contain my excitement.
I lay back and looked at the stars and decided a few hours was fine. A few hours was wonderful. A few hours meant I didn't have to do anything except lie here, which was currently my entire ambition.
Safari, I thought. This is basically an alien safari.
The fire had burned down to something steadier and warmer, and in that light I finally actually looked at him.
I mean — I'd looked. Obviously I'd looked. How could I not? But not like this. Not when we were still and quiet and I wasn't busy figuring out threats or trying not to die.
His profile against the firelight was — well. It was a lot.
Strong jaw. Clean lines. The kind of bone structure that looked like it had been drafted by someone who took their work very seriously.
His eyes caught the light when he turned slightly — that color that I still didn't have a name for, somewhere between amber and something that didn't exist on Earth.
Dark hair, pushed back from his face. The shadows did him absolutely no disservice.
He was, I realized, with the calm clarity of someone making a completely objective observation?—
Very attractive.
Extremely, inconveniently, very attractive.
I gulped and looked back at the stars.
I cleared my throat. "What are those?"
I'd noticed the shapes earlier. Dark masses out on the water, too regular to be rock, too large to ignore. In the dim light they were silhouettes. Vast, flat, just sitting there on the horizon.
He followed my gaze. "The other platforms."
"Other platforms? Like ours? They're enormous."
"Yes. An entire world in miniature. "
We were quiet a moment. Then he lifted his hand and pointed past them, up and out, to where the stars thickened.
"See there," he said. "Past the outer marker. That cluster."
"What about it?"
"There are seven inhabited systems in that direction. Two of them you would call Earth-like, though that comparison would annoy the people who live there."
Annoy? Wasn’t my planet good enough for them?
"It is a very large galaxy,” he continued. “Humans have seen very little of it."
I looked at the stars and tried to make that feel real. Mostly it just felt like a lot of sky.
"Have you been? To those systems?"
"Some of them." He said it the way people say yes I've been to Prague, casual and past-tense. Like it was nothing special.
"Oh," I said. “Was it nice?”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I’ve seen more beautiful things.”
Then his eyes slid over to me, the corner of his mouth quirked, and he focused on the stars again.
I gritted my teeth and tried to prevent the blush from rising to my cheeks. Needless to say, I totally failed.
Damn him.
That's when I noticed the crabs.
They were just — there. On the beach below, doing whatever crabs do. Right now, that appeared to involve a great deal of sideways movement and colliding into each other like drunk bumper cars. One of them was carrying something. I had no idea what. It seemed committed to it.
"Are those?—"
"Yes."
"Just, crabs? "
"More or less." He watched one of them walk directly into a rock, reverse, and try again. "They're harmless. They come out at night."
I watched one steal something from another one. The victim seemed outraged and thumped the thief on the head. It appeared not to care.
And I focused back on the stars.
Somewhere in the last twenty minutes we'd drifted closer together.
I wasn't entirely sure how it had happened. The fire, probably. The night air had teeth in it and the warmth was where he was. At a certain point, physics just takes over and you stop pretending you're not noticing the heat coming off a very large, very solid person six inches to your left.
I was noticing.
"So the cluster," I said, wetting my very parched lips. "The seven systems. What's the furthest one you've actually been to?"
He told me. The name meant nothing to me but he described it — the light there, the color of the sky, something about the way the seasons worked that made my brain work harder than it wanted to at this hour.
I was maybe thirty percent focused on the content.
Seventy percent was on the fact that when he'd turned to point at the stars, he hadn't moved back.
He was close. Really close.
I could feel the solid presence of him like a change in air pressure. He smelled comforting like woodsmoke. And that, according to my nervous system, was very important information.
Down on the beach, a crab thumped into another crab. Neither of them seemed troubled.
"You're not looking at the stars," he said .
"I am," I said, returning my gaze to them.
I was also extremely aware that he was looking at me.
The fire crackled.
Somewhere below, the soft percussion of small waves. The occasional crab-related commotion.
He'd stopped talking about the stars.
I'd stopped pretending to look at them.
The distance between us became loaded, heavy. Because neither of us had moved to increase it.
I looked over at him.
He was already looking at me.
The firelight. The ruins. The absolute absurdity of this entire situation, and somehow, also — this. This moment, this quiet, this pull that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with the fact that we were both still here, still alive, and sitting very close together in the dark.
“H-How much longer u-until the ship a-arrives?” I asked, trying desperately to ignore the shiver in my voice.
“Not long,” he said, his eyes drifting down to my lips.
And I was lost.
I leaned in.
So did he.
Oh my God. I can’t believe this is actually happening! I’m about to make out with an alien!
Our lips parted. I dabbed my bottom lip with my tongue, ready for a game of tonsil tennis.
When he jerked back sharply.
The spell broke like a dropped glass.
"I-I'm sorry—" I started immediately, already pulling back, face going hot. "I didn't mean to… If that's not… I wasn't trying to make you uncomfortable?—"
"It isn't that."
He looked down .
I followed his gaze.
Blood ran down his leg. A clean, dark line of it, sliding from a neat gash just above his ankle.
I looked at the edge of the firelight.
One of the crabs was there, blinking morosely with its eyes on stalks.
The ones on the beach had been incidental, comic, the kind of background wildlife you file under local color.
Up close, they were enormous. The shell alone was the size of a bin lid.
Its legs were thick as my wrist. It sat at the very edge of the light with a stillness that the beach crabs had not had.
And its claw was wet. With red.
"That—" I said.
"Yes," he said.
He grabbed a length of wood from the fire's edge — a heavy piece, the size of a small bat, one end still glowing — and brought it down on the shell.
The crack of impact was solid and loud.
The crab barely moved.
He hit it again. The shell dented, fractionally, the way metal dents. But did not give way.
"Okay," I said. "Okay, that's not great."
Then we heard the sound from the foliage.
Chuck-chuck. Chuck-chuck-chuck.
Dry. Rhythmic. Coming from everywhere at once.
We both immediately stood up.
They came out of the bushes in a line.
Not a few, either. They were no longer the scatter-brained, bumbling beach crabs with their sideways comedy and stolen treasures. They were dangerous.
Dozens of them. All the same size as the one at the fire. All moving with that same horrible lumbering patience, shells up, claws forward, that wet clicking sound building as they spread in a slow arc across the sand.
Chuck-chuck-chuck.
The ruins pressed at our backs. The fire was between us and the beach, which was no longer an option because the beach was also crabs.
"Um," I said.
"Indeed," he said.
"When you said they were harmless?—"
"I was referring to those on my homeworld." He didn't take his eyes off the line of them. "These have been changed."
Chuck-chuck-chuck.
The arc tightened. They were in no hurry.
"Changed how, specifically?—"
"These are much larger. And far more aggressive."
"I can see that?—"
"And they do not usually eat meat."
Meat. Us. We’re meat.
I looked at the wall of them.
"Great," I said. "That's one hell of an upgrade."
He handed me a log from the fire.
Safari? Sure, I thought. The same way Jurassic Park was.
Why did I have to go and open my big mouth?