27. Helsa
HELSA
T he tidal spire was worse up close.
I had seen it from the bone reef hill. Dark, narrow, rising from the far north edge of the platform like aliens had built it— ha!
From a distance it had just been a landmark. Up close it was the sound first: the water at its base forced through a channel in the platform's edge, churning, irregular, nothing like the tide I had learned to read. Violent. The kind of sound that had a physical weight to it.
I did not look at the water.
I looked at the ledges on the spire's southern face instead. Narrow. One person wide. The only way up.
He was taking me up.
Time is running out.
I drove my heel back into his shin again.
"Stop," he said.
I thought about Rhaek on the ridge with his back to the cave. Standing there, being responsible, giving me what I asked for. I thought about myself on the bone reef hill having my emotional breakthrough while the Controller swam across from the eastern islands.
The wind was blowing the wrong direction and there was nobody there to tell me because I had sent the one person who would have known to go away.
I had done this.
I had stood there and told him I wanted to be alone. And the universe had taken me extremely literally. Now I was being carried toward a tidal spire by an alien the size of a small building while my only hope at not being mated was another male who bled blue-green blood onto the rock behind us.
And if he got hold of me, he would do the mating instead!
Brilliant. Really excellent decision-making skills, Helsa.
The Controller shifted his grip to navigate the first ledge and I felt it — just a fraction of loosening, his weight redistributing for the climb.
I went boneless.
Let everything go at once, all resistance, become dead weight. And I slipped through his fingers and he lost me.
Not all of me. One arm caught, his hand closing around my wrist as I dropped. But enough. I wrenched sideways and my wrist came free. My legs were pumping, back the way we had come, across the collar of rock around the spire's base and toward Rhaek.
“Haha! Sucker!” I wailed with joy. “See you in the next life?—”
Ten feet.
That was how far I got.
The Withholder came out of nowhere from the left and his arms closed around me, scooping my up like I was doggy doo-doo. And I was off the ground again, different grip, different smell, same shifting position.
“No!” I screamed. “No! No!”
I was struggling before I had fully registered what had happened.
He made a sound that was not language but I understood nonetheless. Triumphant and wet.
The Withholder's grip tightened as he twisted to dive into the water.
Fuck! Doesn’t he know I would drown?!
I had approximately ten seconds before this became a different problem.
And I used three of them to think about how much I wished I had not told Rhaek to leave. Again.