17. Rhaek
RHAEK
T he pod released and I was already moving.
I was looking for her before the pod had fully opened.
The platform resolved around me as I moved — the landing zone, the pale mineral dust, the impact craters from the drop, all of it registering at the periphery while the center of my attention went straight to the water's edge.
She would be there. She had been there before, when the tide was wrong and the instinct was wrong and everything her wound had built in her sent her directly toward the thing that frightened her most.
And she was there.
Same position as before. Arms wrapped around herself, shoulders curved inward, facing the water. From this distance I could not see her face. But I could see the set of her body, the stillness that was not calm — that was the opposite of calm.
I crossed the platform at a run.
She didn't turn. She knew it was me. I understood that, understood that her body had its own system for registering my approach, separate from whatever her mind was doing right now.
She didn't turn but her shoulders changed. Something in them, some small degree of the held tension, acknowledging that I was here.
I slowed as I reached her. Came up beside her, not in front — not yet.
I could see her face now.
The tracks on her cheeks were still wet. She had been crying. Her eyes and and puffy. She had been carrying this since before she landed.
I raised my hand and touched her shoulder. Lightly. I wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold.
"Helsa?"
She turned.
And then she was against my chest, her arms around me, her face pressed into me, and the force of it — the sudden weight of her against me — moved through me like a wave. I brought my arms up around her. Held on.
She said something into my chest. Muffled. I felt the words more than heard them.
"Say that again?"
She lifted her face slightly. Not enough to look at me. "I want this moment." Her voice was wrecked. "Just this. Just between us. Before it gets — before things become—" She stopped for a moment then, before the silence could work against her, she said: "You should have told me."
The last four words landed differently from the rest.
I squeezed her tighter.
I knew what she was talking about. At least, I thought I did. But I couldn’t figure out how she had figured it out before I told her.
She didn't say anything else. Neither did I. There was nothing available that was adequate and I had enough self-knowledge to understand that attempting inadequate things right now would cost more than silence.
So I stood on the platform in the morning light with her arms around me and my arms around her and the water moving at our backs and the other males somewhere behind us beginning their approach. I gave her what she had asked for.
This moment.
Just between us.
The last one that would exist on this side of giving voice to the secret I had held for so, so long.
I held on to it the same way I was holding on to her.
With everything I had.
Finally, she pulled back.
Not all the way. Her hands stayed on my arms, gripping the fabric, but she dropped her head.
I watched her find it — that internal strength she has built out of necessity and maintained out of habit.
I had watched her reach for it before. In the ruins, in the dark, with the keth'var coming and everything going wrong.
The steadying. The Helsa who handles things reassembling herself over the Helsa who is broken, one breath at a time.
She lifted her head.
Her eyes were bloodshot. Her jaw was set.
"I know you," she said.
I said nothing.
"Not from here." She watched my face. "Not from any of this. From before." A breath. "There's a reason you were in the warehouse. When all of this started. I asked you before why but you didn’t want to explain. You weren't part of it — I knew that—" She stopped. "But now I want to know. "
The platform was deathly silent. Even the lapping tide seemed to still.
Somewhere behind me the other males were moving. I could read the moons without deciding to now. Everything I had trained for, everything I had built across the length of my professional life — all of it running in the background, silent and automatic.
None of it was useful right now.
"I think I know why you were there," she said. "I think I know what you were doing. But I want you to say it."
I looked at her.
I had run this conversation in my head hundreds of times. Thousands. Across the years, across the length of this mission, in the spaces between other things. I had constructed versions of it. Found the words, arranged them, considered the order of them. I had prepared.
None of the versions had started here. On a reset platform with her eyes red and her hands still gripping my arms and the whole truth already on her face waiting for me to confirm it.
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came.
She watched me not speak. Something moved across her face — not anger, not yet. Something more complicated. Something that had been a long time building and was very close to the surface now.
"Okay," she said quietly. "I’ll begin."
She let go of my arms.
She turned slightly, looking out at the water, and I saw her jaw work. The movement of someone organizing something internally. Choosing their words with the care of someone who understands that once said, words don't go back .
"When I was eight years old," she said, "my family was on holiday. Near the coast." Her voice was steady. Controlled in the way that costs something. "Some older kids dared me to swim around a headland. I was eight and I wanted them to think I was brave, so I went."
I was very still.
"The tide caught me." She paused. "I wasn't going to make it back.
I knew that — even at eight I knew that.
You understand exactly what's happening when the water has you.
You feel so powerless. Out of control." Another pause.
"And then something — a figure, large, dark, moving through the water — pulled me to the beach. "
The morning light was flat and silver across the platform.
"I woke up breathing. My mother was there. All the kids were screaming. And I told my mother what I'd seen and she said—" A short sound, not quite a laugh. "She said I'd had too much Little Mermaid. That it was my imagination."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I've been afraid of water ever since. Because of what might be in it." She turned back to me. Her eyes on mine, clear and direct and devastated and something else underneath it all, something older, something that had been waiting twenty years to be in the right place. "Of what I know I saw."
I held her gaze.
Outside: nothing. My face, my posture, my hands at my sides — everything trained and controlled and giving back nothing.
Inside.
Inside was a different story.
Inside was the sensation of ground that has been solid for twenty years discovering it was never solid, discovering it was a surface over something that had been moving the entire time and had finally, in this moment, reached the pressure required to break through.
Not an explosion. Worse than an explosion.
The slow breaking that takes everything with it.
She took one step toward me.
"It wasn't a mermaid," she said.
Her voice didn't shake.
"Was it."
Not a question.
She looked up at me — all the way up, the full distance between us, her neck tilted and her eyes red-rimmed and her jaw still set with the effort of holding herself together long enough to say this.
The morning light was on her face and I could see exactly what it cost her to get here, to stand in this place and say this thing out loud when she had spent her entire life being told it wasn't real.
"It was you," she said.
The words landed between us.
The silence after them was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
She waited.
I had nothing.
Every system I had — every trained response, every professional framework, every version of this conversation I had constructed and rehearsed across the years — had gone quiet.
There was nothing running. Nothing available.
Just the platform and the morning light and her face turned up to mine and the words still hanging in the air between us.
It was you.
She had said it and it was true. And I could not speak.
Her jaw tightened.
"Say it." Quiet. The anger arriving now.
Not the hot kind that burns fast and winks out.
The cold kind. The type with grief underneath it, using the anger to stay upright.
"I'm not asking you to explain it. I'm not asking you for everything right now.
I'm asking you to say it. Out loud. Just — say it. "
I looked at her.
At the tracks the tears had left. At the redness around her eyes and the set of her mouth and the thing in her expression that was not quite betrayal — not quite, not yet — but was something older and more complicated than betrayal and in some ways harder to look at.
I did this.
Not the arena. Not the reset. Not any of the disasters arranged around us.
This — specifically this — the thing on her face right now, the twenty years of being told she had imagined something real, of being afraid of the water for reasons she couldn't explain to anyone because the explanation was impossible?—
This was mine.
I had carried that. I had known I was carrying it. I had told myself it was the right call, that intervention had been necessary and disclosure would have been worse, that she was safe and alive and that was what mattered.
Standing here, I could not find that argument.
"Yes," I said.
One word.
She closed her eyes.
"It was me," I said. Because one word was not enough. Because she had stood here and said the true thing out loud and I owed her the same. "You were not imagining it. You were never imagining it. I was there."
She made a sound.
Not words. Something underneath words, something that had been waiting a very long time to be allowed to exist. All at once, without warning, without the dignity of a gradual release.
She broke.
I caught her.
My arms were around her before she could go anywhere. Holding her up, holding her together, holding all of it. The dam had burst and threatened to wash her away.
She wept.
I held on.
There was nothing else I could do.
There was nowhere else either of us could go.