13. Rhaek
RHAEK
T he grooves were eight inches deep in places.
I ran my fingers along the nearest one. The rock face was old — pre-platform, probably, older than the Malquaran construction by centuries. It had not been cut easily.
The ship had not cared about that.
Forty thousand tons of alloy and drive core, moving at terminal velocity, does not negotiate with stone.
It takes what it takes. It leaves what it leaves.
Here: three parallel channels gouged into the hilltop rock and running thirty metres to the platform edge, where the stone ended and the water began.
I followed them to the edge and looked down.
The water was low. Morning light across it, flat and silver, and beneath it — nothing.
The depths here had swallowed the ship whole.
No hull breach visible. No debris on the surface.
No floating wreckage catching the light.
Nothing to confirm that forty thousand tons of anything had ever made contact with this water at all .
If you didn't know to look for the grooves, you would not know.
I looked for the grooves.
Three of my crew had been on board. Standard extraction compliment. They had followed my coordinates, held to my timeline, run silent on my instruction. They had done everything correctly.
I had scanned the water for an hour in the dark after the crash. Looking for suits. Looking for emergency beacons. Looking for anything that would tell me they had made it out before impact, that the ejection protocols had fired, that someone had been fast enough or lucky enough or both.
Nothing had come up.
The water gave back nothing.
The morning light was strengthening. Low water meant the tide cycle was completing. The next round was already beginning. On the distant platforms, the males would be reading the same tide. Making their calculations. Beginning to move.
I had no ship.
I had no crew.
I had no extraction point.
I had a female sleeping on the far side of these ruins who had trusted me to get her home, and the closest thing I had to a plan was three gouge marks in the rock and thirty metres of empty air above dark water.
The Malquarans had let me enter the arena.
I had not asked myself why.
I was asking now.
I heard her wake. The small sounds of it — breath changing, movement, her voice saying my name with the rough edge of sleep still in it.
I did not turn around .
She came to stand beside me.
I kept my eyes on the water.
"Rhaek."
"Give me a moment."
She didn't. She put her hand on my arm — just her fingers, light, the way you'd touch something you weren't sure would hold — and the contact went through me like a current. I stepped away from it. Moved further along the platform edge, putting distance between us that I needed.
"You don't have to —"
"I said give me a moment."
She went quiet. Thirty seconds, maybe. Then: "Your crew?—"
"Don't."
"I'm just?—"
"I know what you're doing." I turned then.
Looked at her. She was watching me with that expression I found it hard to understand — not pity, not fear.
Something more complicated than that. Something I didn't have the capacity for right now.
"It doesn't help. Nothing you say helps.
I need you to understand that and give me space. "
She held my gaze. Didn't move.
"This wasn't the plan," I said. The words came out harder than I intended.
"None of this was the plan. We should be gone.
We should be two hours off-platform in a class-four vessel with my crew alive and you in a med bay getting checked over and all of this—" I stopped.
Looked back at the water. "All of this behind us. "
She said my name quietly. “Rhaek…”
"My crew followed my coordinates," I said. "They held to my timeline. They ran silent because I told them to. They did everything I asked them to do and they are at the bottom of that water and I am standing here and I cannot?— "
I stopped again. I was not good with this… this feeling. Anger, I had mastered. Physical pain, I could handle. But this…
She reached for me. I moved before she could make contact.
I had run the sequence a hundred times since the crash.
Looking for the variable I had miscalculated.
Looking for the decision I should have made differently.
There were several candidates. I had ranked them.
At the top of the list, sitting above everything else, above the timeline and the coordinates and the silent approach — was this:
I had entered the Games.
I had entered the Games and I had not asked why they let me.
The Malquarans ran these games for one reason. One reason, always, and I had known it since before I took this mission, since before I had ever even heard her gorgeous name.
They ran these games because they wanted to watch something interesting, something real. Something genuine. That was the entire architecture. Every rule, every structure, every platform and tide cycle and keth'var in the dark — it was all built around that one appetite.
They had let me in because I was the most interesting thing they could add.
I had thought I was the extraction. I was the variable. I was the entertainment.
I had known this and I had entered anyway and I had told myself I was the exception — that my training, my preparation, my years of running these extractions made me the exception — and I had been wrong in the most catastrophic way available to me.
And now she was standing in the wreckage of that wrongness right now looking at me with her complicated expression and her hand still outstretched.
"Don't," I said. My voice came out low. The warning underneath it was genuine. "Helsa. I'm asking you. Don’t."
She took a step toward me.
Her hand found my arm again and this time I didn't move fast enough, or I didn't try, and her fingers closed around it and she held on. I looked down at her hand. Small against the scale of me. Completely certain of itself.
"I know," she said. "I know it wasn't the plan."
"Helsa—"
"I know." Her voice was steady. "And I know that doesn't help. You told me it doesn't help and I believe you." She didn't let go. "I'm not trying to fix it."
"Then what are you doing?"
"I'm standing here. Beside you."
I looked at her.
She looked back. No flinching. No distance in it. Just her, in the morning light, with the ruined camp behind her and the water below and everything that was supposed to save her sitting silent at the bottom of it — standing here because she had decided to.
Something moved in my chest.
I turned away from it. From her. Looked out at the water again, at the flat silver surface that gave back nothing, and I felt her move — felt the shift of her presence, closer — and then her other hand came up and found my face.
Both palms. Against my jaw.
She turned me back to her.
I let her.
She was up on her toes. She had to be — the height difference made it necessary. She committed to it without hesitation, steady, her hands sure on my face. She pressed her lips to my cheek.
I closed my eyes.
I had dreamed of this moment countless times. But never like this. Never after I had failed her. Again.
Her mouth moved. Slow. My chin. The line of my jaw. Her thumbs moving against my cheekbones in small strokes, the way you'd try to smooth something out that couldn't be smoothed.
The fury was still there. I couldn’t eradicate it. It was a part of me now.
It had been building since before the crash. Since the moment the lasers fired and I understood what was happening and couldn't stop it. It had nowhere to go. I had nowhere to put it that wasn't going to cost something.
I opened my eyes.
She was right there. Looking up at me. Her hands still on my face, her expression still that thing I couldn't categorize, and the morning light was doing something to her that I wasn't going to be able to forget.
The fury had nowhere else to go.
And so I leaned down and kissed her.