Aloy stayed on the outlook until it was dark then remained there until she could feel her core temperature dropping. She didn’t want to leave or go inside but if she didn’t move soon, she would start shaking from the cold.
Just when she’d decided not to avoid the base because she might run into Tomas, she heard the base doors open.
“Aloy, are you out here?”
Beta would have known she was there. Her FOCUS would have told her…or Gaia…or Zo.
“I’m here.” Aloy replied, knowing full well she was playing into Beta’s little façade. She heard her approach in her soft soled shoes, skirting the pool of water and coming up to where Aloy sat on the outlook.
“I thought you might be cold.” Beta said, putting something around Aloy’s shoulders. It was a blanket. “You’ve been out here a long time.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Oh…” Beta fidgeted. “I’ll go.”
“No. Stay.” Aloy shuffled to the side, her feet tingling painfully as the blood rushed back into them after being still for so long. Beta sank down beside her, crossing her legs.
“I like to sit out here too.” She confided. “Varl spent a lot of time sitting with me, not asking questions really. Just sitting and talking.”
“He was good like that.” Aloy licked her lips. “I…I’m not…” She shivered and pulled on the blanket, suddenly spying the rather unnatural weave of it. She stiffened. “What is this?”
“A thermal blanket.”
Aloy’s nose crinkled, the smell of it making her shudder. “Oh…” She cringed, trying so hard not to ask what she was thinking. “Did Tomas print it?”
Beta seemed to be expecting the question. “If I said yes, what would you do? Thank him? Throw it off? Burn it?”
Aloy swallowed. “It’s…fine.” She licked her lips again. “So…I’ve been meaning to talk to you…”
Beta was quiet for a moment. “Alright.”
Aloy steeled herself. “About…it’s about Tomas.”
Aloy could almost feel Beta tense up. “Okay…”
“Specifically about you and Tomas.” Beta made a frustrated huffing noise as she stood and started to storm off. “Wait, Beta wait!” Aloy forced herself to stand past the pain in her legs and feet.
“You have nothing to say about Tomas,” Beta retorted over her shoulder before Aloy grabbed her and pulled her back, “certainly nothing I want to hear…unless it’s an apology.”
Aloy let her yank her arm out of grasp and gaped at her. “Me? Apologise? What on earth for?”
Beta gestured wildly. “I don’t know…how about humiliating me in front of Tomas and Alva? Treating me like a child? Acting like an overbearing parent instead of my sister?”
“I’m trying to protect you!” Aloy was so grateful a soundproof layer of rock was between them and the inhabitants of the base as their voices were echoing across the mountainside. Beta rolled her eyes at Aloy, scorn across her face which made Aloy angrier than ever. “And if you were doing your part to come up with ways to capture HEPHAESTUS, I wouldn’t have to treat you like a child because you’d be acting like an adult!” She slapped her hand in the direction of the base. “As opposed to Tomas who is only ten years old!”
Beta folded her arms. “Physically he’s the same age as I am.” She argued.
“So are a million other people on this planet.” Aloy insisted, stepping forward. “Please, Beta…anyone but him…”
Beta’s arms fell slack by her sides as she stared at Aloy, her jaw agape and her eyes wide. “Is this about Tomas…or me?” She asked limply, her vulnerable voice giving Aloy reason to pause, the heat of her anger wicking away into the cool of the night.
“Him…of course…”
“Fine.” Beta breathed in through her nose, readying herself. “What is your problem with him?”
Oh how Aloy had been looking forward to this moment! “He’s rude, abrupt, demanding, intolerant,” she paced back and forth, “I mean it’s like having another Sylens around!”
“He’s not like that with me.”
“Did he tell you how he got so many Quen slaughtered?”
Beta shook her head. “From what I hear about Los Angeles, more Quen died from your interference than his.” The air in Aloy’s lungs evacuated as Beta looked aside. “I know he’s not perfect…but when I’m with him he’s sweet and funny…and thoughtful. And he is trying.”
“He’s very trying.” Aloy couldn’t believe Beta was defending him. “He’s an egotistical, superior jerk who only sees the negative. Surely you can see that?”
Beta stepped back from Aloy, hands on her hips. “From where I’m standing, that sounds like you, Aloy.” Her words hit Aloy like a kick in the stomach. “Is Tomas perfect? No. Is he hard to get along with? Maybe for you but we get along fine…and so does almost everyone else who is in the base!”
“That’s just because they don’t know what he’s really like!” Aloy snapped. “He’s the clone of the man who wiped out the earth with a plague of ‘peace keeping’ robots!”
“And he should be condemned for something he didn’t do?”
“I’d keep a close eye on him.”
Beta put her hands against her face and groaned. “Aloy, can’t you see that you’re the one making this difficult! You can’t see past the Ted Faro façade at the young man underneath who has a chance to make entirely different choices! Even history agrees that before the plague, Ted Faro did so much good for the earth.”
“Before he got greedy.”
“Everyone has the potential for good or evil!”
“I know that!” Aloy roared. “But Beta…why him? I’ve seen the way you smile and blush when he’s around. It makes my skin crawl. Please…anybody but him!”
Beta clenched her teeth, keeping her anger in check. “You don’t get to tell me who I can and can’t like, Aloy.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“I’m telling you now…no!” Aloy felt herself stamp her foot, furious that Beta was unable to grasp the concept that Tomas was not a good guy.
“I notice you didn’t ask my permission or advice about Kotallo!” The boiling in Aloy’s veins chilled within the blink of an eye as Beta accused her. “You just leapt right in…and you were so happy!” Beta shook her head. “Why can’t you let me have just a little bit of that happiness?”
Aloy stared at her, feeling sick and faint. “What…” She cleared her throat and tried again. “What do you mean…about Kotallo?”
Up until this point their discussion had been loud, harsh and forceful, bouncing off the rocks, echoing from the shallows of the mountain slope. But as Aloy spoke, her words faded into timid, almost hesitant, tones. Beta faltered, the change in atmosphere a little stark for her to understand.
“Well…that…you know…” Beta’s skin flushed hot and Aloy’s followed, neither willing to confirm what Beta was saying but their complexions doing it for them.
Aloy looked at the ground, grasping at the blanket. “Did Gaia…tell you?” She whispered, trembling.
“No. I saw the two of you with my FOCUS.” Aloy groaned, dropping the blanket to put her hands over her face as Beta’s eyes widened. “No, no, no…I didn’t mean I saw the two of you…well, I did but I didn’t see anything…” She watched Aloy walk to the edge of the outlook, on the far side of the gravestones and sit, her legs over the lip of rock. She picked up the blanket and went over to her and sat, wringing the blanket between her fingers.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Aloy’s voice was a shadow of its former self.
Beta shrugged. “You didn’t tell me so I thought you didn’t want me or anyone to know…but it wasn’t hard to see how happy you were,” Aloy turned towards her, surprised by the comment, “and I just can’t understand why you don’t want me to have what you do.”
Aloy was unaccustomed to crying but her eyes stung with unfamiliar tears as her throat closed over. She took the blanket from Beta’s hands and draped it over her legs, knowing that her sister wasn’t used to the weather like Aloy was.
“You mean what I had.” She tucked Beta in.
“What do you mean, had?”
Aloy didn’t look at her. “I ended it.”
“Wha…why?”
Aloy licked her lips. “Because the end of the world is coming and I’ve got more important things to focus on than being shackled in a relationship and stuck in a home, raising children…being domestic.”
Beta tilted her head, studying her. “That doesn’t sound like Kotallo’s expectations…or even the tribal ways of the Tenakth.”
Aloy sighed. “I suppose they aren’t.” She swallowed. “He told me he loved me…and I foolishly thought at the time, I was falling for him as well.”
Beta lifted the edge of the blanket and put it over Aloy’s legs, twisting towards her on the shelf of rock. “What happened?” She asked calmly.
“I…I’m not sure.” Aloy confessed. “He made a commitment to me and I suddenly realised I wasn’t sure.” Aloy saw the confusion in Beta’s eyes. “And it wasn’t just me.”
“Kotallo?”
“No. Elisabet. Tilda said that even though they were…close…she always felt like Elisabet kept a part of herself separate…like Tilda never really got to know her.”
“That doesn’t sound like being separate,” Beta insisted, “it sounds like you’re scared of letting down your guard and being vulnerable.”
“Uh, trust me…I’ve been vulnerable.” Aloy snorted.
“Aloy, even if you were stark naked, I doubt you’d ever feel safe enough to be vulnerable enough to let down your guard.” Aloy blanched, recalling the time she had been naked, standing in the water, waiting to get Kotallo’s attention…and she had a horrible feeling Beta was right. For while she had been in no position to defend herself physically, Aloy had almost tackled Kotallo as if their frantic affair could be ended like a crash on the ground after falling from a cliff. She hadn’t been vulnerable. She had used her nakedness to her advantage. “I thought, if anyone could make you feel safe enough to be vulnerable…it would be Kotallo.” Aloy gazed at her, her frightened heart trembling. “He seemed kind of perfect for you.”
Aloy’s fingers twisted through the weave of the blanket. “Then why did I…in Los Angeles…” She took a deep breath. “I met a woman, a Quen midshipman called Seyka. And during my time there I felt…I don’t know…”
“Describe it.” Beta said softly.
Aloy looked up at the stars. “She put on a FOCUS, risking capital punishment because it was the right thing to do. She was stubborn and bold…”
“Bold? How?”
The memory was almost as strong as the moment in which it had occurred. “She put her arms around me on the Sunwing and I felt…a thrill...and she kissed me, briefly, just the once.” Aloy’s cheeks were burning. “I even asked her back to join us…but then the whole thing soured after I messed up like you said…”
“No offence, Aloy,” Beta’s tone wasn’t as sympathetic as Aloy had predicted it would be…or as scathing, “but it sounds like Seyka was attracted to you and was making it known…not you to her.”
Aloy braced herself. “She was a young woman.”
“And you’ve asked other women to join like Zo and Alva…and you’ve not been like this with them.”
Aloy cringed, sensing Beta didn’t understand or know. “It’s…it’s also about Elisbaet and her…relationship with Tilda.” She gazed at her clone sister, knowing full well the damage Tilda had wrecked upon Beta already. “They were lovers.”
Beta blinked. “I heard what she said up on the launch platform. But I also know Tilda was a liar, a manipulator and a narcissist. You can’t trust any of it to be true.”
Aloy flinched. “But what if it was true?”
“It’s still just her side of it.” Beta said firmly with remarkable clarity, twisting to look at Aloy. “Back at Gaia Prime, you scanned all the logs of the Alphas. I read them. There was one by Charles Ronson.”
“Yes…he made a memorial to Elisabet.”
“And in his journal, after she died, he said he had to live out the remainder of his life with people he despised…and without the one person he cared for most.”
Aloy’s eyes widened and she gasped softly. “I never made that connection before,” she admitted then shook her head, “but it’s still just his side of it and there’s no way of knowing if Elisabet reciprocated.”
“Exactly!” Beta smiled. “And regardless if any of it, or none of it, is true…you are not Elisabet.”
Aloy pulled a face. “Technically…”
“Genetically you are but after that, your upbringing, your life skills…your style…it all makes a unique you, very different from her or me.” Beta shrugged. “And then there’s me…”
“You?”
“Well, if we’re genetically bound to the same attractions…why am I not insanely jealous of you and Kotallo? Why am I attracted to Tomas and you aren’t?”
“Then I don’t understand!” Aloy exclaimed. “Why did I feel what I felt in Los Angeles? And why I still feel so guilty now?”
“The guilt is binding you to her expectation…and you were on the rebound.”
“What’s a rebound?”
Beta thought for a moment. “You’d ended a relationship because you felt it was the ‘right’ thing to do then felt the thrill of a new connection that covered your hurt. It’s not healthy and it never lasts.”
Aloy stared at her. “How do you know all that? I mean any of it? Wasn’t your education strictly limited?”
“Officially, yes…but in the data channel Tilda made, I was able to access media files, cushy media soap operas I believe is the term?” Aloy cringed and Beta laughed. “Most of them focussed on the complexity of relationships.”
Aloy flicked some grit off the edge of the outlook. “So…what do you suggest I do about Kotallo?” She asked quietly.
“I guess that depends on what you want.”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Then wait until you do,” Beta offered gently, “and whatever happens…I’ll be here.”
She bumped Aloy with her elbow and smiled at her. Aloy nodded.
“Thanks, Beta. I’m…I’m sorry for what I said before. I had no right to interfere.”
“Maybe not but you’re allowed to talk to me about it.” Beta held up her finger. “Talk…not rant, rave, berate, accuse…”
“Yes, yes…” Aloy laughed softly. “I get it. We should go inside. That breeze is really quite frigid.” They stood up and folded the blanket together.
“Aloy?”
“Mmm?”
“Can I ask…what is it like?”
“What’s what like?” Aloy caught sight of Beta’s hesitant look and made an ‘O’ with her mouth. “Oh…you mean…”
“I just…it seemed to be the culmination of every relationship, the tension before the plunge and I…wanted to know.” Beta’s eyes seemed to ache. “Is it as good as they made it out to be…or just a ploy for the media series?”
Aloy gazed at Beta, wanting to tell her sister that it was terrible, awkward and humiliating…
…but Aloy knew she’d be lying.
“Honestly…it was incredible.” She admitted. “The way we fit…the way the whole thing feels…” Her cheeks flushed so hot she felt like she was in front of an Oseram’s forge. “I can honestly say it’s wonderful…and a terrible mistake.”
“How can something so good be a mistake?”
Aloy smiled sadly. “Rost said once to not go down that path as it is the ultimate distraction. Now that I have…I know he spoke the truth. Once your body wakes to those sensations…all it wants is more and more. You’re never satisfied, not for very long. It interrupts your thoughts, your dreams…your plans…” Aloy swallowed. “And now I’m not sure if what I had with Kotallo was just physical…or something more.” She looked at Beta. “Does any of that make sense?”
“Yeah, it does.” Beta nodded. “Thank you, Aloy. I needed big sister advice.”