15. Helsa
HELSA
T he stone was cold against my back and I didn't care even slightly.
He was warm. That deep, steady warmth that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with whatever he was made of. I was pressed against the length of him with my cheek on his chest and his arm around me and the ruins open to the sky above us.
And for approximately thirty consecutive seconds I did not think about a single thing that was trying to kill me.
It was, genuinely, the most relaxed I had been since this whole thing started.
"The mist will come," he said. His voice rumbled through his chest against my ear. "When it does, it will sweep the platform. Reset everything."
"Everything?"
"The males. The pods. The tide cycle. All of it back to the beginning."
I thought about that. "And us?"
His arm tightened fractionally. "We'll keep what we know. Nothing else. "
That was something, at least. The thought of forgetting him, what he meant to me, was too painful to bear.
I turned my head and looked at him.
He was looking up at the sky, jaw set, the scales along it quiet. The morning light caught the angle of his face and held it, and something in the pit of my stomach moved. Not the pleasant thing that had been happening in my stomach for the last hour.
Something else.
Something that felt less like warmth and more like standing on an edge and not being sure of the drop on the other side.
I looked away before he could catch me looking.
I was too slow.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he shifted, sitting up, and the warmth of him left my side. I resisted the urge to follow it.
"Nothing is wrong," I said again. "Everything — actually — feels right. That's almost the problem."
He looked at me steadily. "You regret mating?"
"No, I—" I stopped. "That's not what I meant. I meant—" I stopped again. I was making a mess of this. "I chose this. I meant what I said. I'm not — that's not the thing."
His hand came up. Found my cheek. His thumb moved in that slow way that I was beginning to understand was him choosing to be careful with me. That was its own problem, its own entry in the growing list of things I was not going to be able to process right now.
"Then what is it?"
"It's nothing. I'm just?—"
He tilted my chin up .
I met his eyes. That color. Amber doing the focused, patient, entirely implacable thing that meant he was not going to let me redirect my way out of this.
"You're thinking something," he said. "What is it?"
I opened my mouth.
The thought was right there. Had been right there since I'd turned my head and looked at him in the morning light and felt that thing in my stomach that wasn't warmth. It had a shape. And a name.
I could feel the edges of it and if he kept looking at me like that, if he kept his hand on my face and his eyes on mine and asked me once more, I was going to say it out loud.
But then the mist arrived.
It came from the south. Fast — faster than weather moves. A low green wall of it, rolling across the platform.
I grabbed his arm.
"Rhaek —"
"That’s the mist." He was already moving, pulling me against him, his arms around me from behind. "It's alright. This is the reset."
"It doesn't look alright."
It swept across the ruins faster than I could track — pouring over the fallen walls and the deep red vines and the pale carved stone, rising as it moved, gaining height.
It swallowed the camp. The craters where the crabs had been. The grooves in the rock. One by one it took them, soft and absolute, until there was nothing left of the night except us and the stone we were sitting on and the wall of green coming up fast.
"Breathe it in," he said against my hair. "Don't fight it. Just breathe."
"That’s easy for you to say. "
His arms tightened. "I've got you."
I believed him.
The mist hit the base of the rock.
It rose.
I made myself breathe.
It came up over us slowly. I felt the cold kiss of it first, against my skin.
And the thought was still there. That shape. That almost-name.
I turned it over one last time as the mist closed over my head.
His arms around me. The warmth of him. The thing I hadn't said.
I breathed in.
And the world went dark.