11. Helsa
HELSA
T he rocks were not forgiving.
We went up fast, jumping gap to gap, avoiding every patch of sand like it was live wire.
Which, given the last half hour, it basically was.
He moved ahead of me and I followed his exact path — his foot, my foot, his hand, my hand — and I didn't look down and I didn't think about my arms or my legs or the various places I was bleeding from.
Just up. Keep going up.
The pinnacle opened out without warning — a flat shelf of rock at the top of the world, wide enough for two people, exposed to the whole sky. I straightened up and the wind hit me like a wall.
I saw the islands first.
Scattered out across the dark water, each one just a shape, just a mass of shadow — but I could see figures on some of them. Small. Steady. Waiting.
"They're still out there," I said. “The other males.”
"Yes."
I looked out at them. Counted what I could see .
Then the wind hit me again and I stopped counting because my whole body had decided it was done.
I was shaking before I knew I was cold. Deep, structural shaking, that started in my core and worked outward. I wrapped my arms around myself and it did absolutely nothing.
"T-The sh-ship," I managed. "P-Please t-tell m-me it's c-coming s-soon."
He didn't answer right away. He was looking at me with that careful, assessing look.
Then he stepped forward and put his arms around me.
It wasn't tentative. It wasn't a question. He simply did it — gathered me in, turned so his back took the wind, and held on.
The difference was immediate and total.
The wind disappeared. The cold retreated.
The shaking slowed, degree by degree, like something being dialled down from the outside.
I could feel the heat coming off him through his shirt — not body heat, not the way humans run warm.
Something steadier than that. Something that went all the way down.
I didn't move.
Didn't say anything clever.
My cheek found his chest and I just… stayed there. His chin rested on top of my head and I could feel his arms adjust, pull slightly tighter, and outside the wind screamed across the rock and I couldn't feel it at all.
I could stay here.
I thought it. Didn't say it.
We didn't talk for a while.
That was fine. That was more than fine. The silence had weight and warmth to it, the kind of quiet that happens when two people are somewhere between exhausted and something else entirely.
The moons were out. All three of them, staggered across the sky in their different phases — one full and silver-white, one smaller and edged with the faintest blue, one a thin curved sliver of gold low on the horizon.
Their combined light came down across the water in three overlapping paths, silver and blue and pale gold all at once.
It turned the sea into something almost beautiful.
Almost.
I would be glad to see the back of it.
"I hate the water," I said.
He didn't move. Didn't push. Just waited.
I found my mouth moving before I’d decided to open it.
"I was eight," I said. "We were on holiday.
I went swimming with some older kids — neighbours, I barely knew them — and went around a headland because one of them dared me to.
" I stopped, remembering it clearly. "The tide was running hard on the other side.
I didn't know. I was only eight. One second I was swimming and the next I was just…
gone. Pulled out. The current had me and I couldn't fight it.
The shore kept getting further away no matter what I did. "
His arms tightened. Just slightly. Just enough.
"I remember going under. I remember looking up through the water and seeing the light on the surface getting further away.
And I remember thinking — very clearly, very calmly, the way your brain goes calm when it's run out of options — this is it.
I was ready to go. I had nothing left." I blinked away the years and exhaled slowly. "And then something had me."
I felt him go still.
"A figure. In the water. I couldn't see it properly.
I was choking. I could hardly even breathe.
Just a shape, just the outline of something large and dark moving through the water toward me.
And then I was moving upward. The next thing I knew, I was on the beach, breathing.
The older kids were screaming and my mother was there.
I felt rough but I was fine." I paused. "It was only later, when I woke up from my nightmares, that I remembered seeing something.
That shape over me. I told her about the figure.
She said I'd been watching too much Little Mermaid.
She was so relieved I was alive I don't think she really heard me. "
The moonlight lay across the water.
"I've been afraid of it ever since," I said. "The sea. Not drowning, exactly. More like — what's in it. What I might have seen." Another pause. "What I know I saw."
He was quiet for a long time. Too long.
"I was probably imagining it," I said. I didn’t want to look like a fool.
He turned me around and lifted my chin from my chest so I was looking at him.
His face in the triple moonlight was composed, careful — but something in it had shifted. Something had come open that wasn't open before.
"You were not imagining it," he said again, quietly. “If you saw something, then you saw it. And it was real.”
I stared at him.
He looked back at me.
And the thing I found in his face — the thing I hadn't expected and had absolutely no idea what to do with — was grief. Old grief, carefully kept, the kind that lives in a person so long it becomes part of the architecture.
I didn't say anything.
Neither did he.
His hand came up slowly. Found my jaw. His thumb moved — just once, just barely — across my cheekbone .
I forgot to breathe.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to my cheek. Warm. Certain. His breath against my skin.
I closed my eyes.
His mouth moved. Slow. Unhurried. Like when you've waited long enough that a few more seconds are meaningless. My nose. The corner of my mouth. Each one its own separate moment, its own separate weight, like he was learning the geography of my face one small point at a time.
I could feel his breath now. Against my lips. The distance between us had become thick again — a centimetre, less, the kind of distance that stops being distance and starts being intention.
His forehead dropped to mine.
We stayed there. Me wrapped in his arms, protected from the wind.
His eyes were closed. I could see every detail of his face from here — every line, the way the silver-blue moonlight caught the faint ridge of scale along his jaw. The muscle working once in his throat.
He was shaking.
But not from the cold.
When he finally kissed me it was soft and slow and unfurled a curl of knots in my chest I had no idea was there.
His hand at my jaw, careful. His other arm drawing me closer by degrees.
I felt the shiver run through him the moment our lips touched.
A visible thing, moving across his scales like a current with three moons.
I kissed him back.
We stayed like that for a long moment while the unpredictable moons roamed overhead and the wind went on howling across the rock like it was the most important thing in the world .
It wasn't.
Not anymore.
He pulled back first.
Not far. His forehead was still against mine. His eyes still closed. But I felt the shift in him — the decision happening somewhere behind that careful face — and then he straightened up and looked out at the water and exhaled.
"We can't," he said.
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Not here. Not now." He wasn't looking at me. I sensed he couldn’t, or else lose control once more. And that time, there would be no going back. "If an alien male mates with a human female on the platform—" He stopped. Started again. "The game resets."
I stared at him. "The game resets. "
He nodded. "The male we killed. He’ll come back. The extraction point becomes compromised. Every male on every one of those islands—" he nodded at the dark shapes on the water "—will know exactly where we are. And they will come." He finally looked at me. "All of them."
I took that in.
"So basically," I said slowly, "we would undo everything we’ve done up till now."
"Yes."
"The crabs. The climbing. The boot."
"Yes."
"Your boot," I said, "died for nothing."
Something quirked at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. But close.
I looked at him for a long moment. At his jaw. The moonlight on his scales. The expression on his face that I was finally beginning to be able to read — the careful, controlled surface of it and the very different thing happening just underneath.
"That's a shame," I said. “Poor boot. I don’t want it to have died for nothing.”
No quirk this time. He just looked at me.
The scales along his jaw shivered.
Just once. Involuntarily. He didn't seem to know he'd done it.
Almost as if… he might be willing to burn everything we’ve been through. The escape we have planned. Just so he can feel me.
My body shook and this time it had nothing to do with the cold.
I turned and looked back out at the water. The three moons were higher now, their overlapping light shifting as they moved — the silver and blue and gold rearranging themselves slowly across the surface of the sea. Beautiful, if you didn't think too hard about what was in it.
I thought about what he'd said. You were not imagining it.
I didn't ask how he could be so certain about that. Not now. There would be time.
I hope there will be time.
Then I heard it.
Low, at first. More felt than heard — a vibration in the air, in the rock beneath us, building from somewhere above and behind the cloud cover. I tensed.
"What is that?" My hand found his bulging arm without thinking. "Is that another creature?—"
"No." He was looking up. His whole body had changed — the set of his shoulders, the angle of his head. Something loosening that had been locked tight all night.
When he looked back at me, something was different in his face .
Hope, I realised.
That was hope.
"That," he said, "is my ship."
I looked up at the clouds.
The sound was growing. Building. Getting closer.
His hand found mine in the dark.
"We're going home," he said quietly. "Both of us."
I held on and didn't let go and watched the sky.