Right Back After This

Episode 25

"After your performance."

Those are the only words that Ares gets to Riz before his mic is turned back on. It's said with a frown and a lingering touch on his jaw, but Riz hears a threat. It's all the more threatening because it isn't supposed to scare him.

It's funny, the human condition. Your brain doesn't like things to ever get better.

Riz imagines sitting around a campfire- a real one made of splintered pieces of wooden buildings and dried bushes that didn't quite burn the way you wanted them to- and explaining to his family where he was now. His older sister, Iman, if she was still alive in this hypothetical, would've asked him what the problem was without a hint of humour. She was practical like that. She'd be resting against an old concrete wall, thin arms around her knees, watching him speak with disbelief.

On Gahren Six, he eats a breakfast of fresh fruit, yogurt, juice, delicious pastries of a kind he's never had before that are flaky and warm, and he imagines what she'd say. 'You have everything.' She wouldn't mean it to be judgemental, but the thought doesn't make Riz grateful. It makes him sad that it was something she never got- that everyone on that planet would never get to experience.

Past that sadness, there still isn't gratefulness. Just stress. The knowledge that Ares has some plan to take him out of here, to take away the one thing he's doing that might possibly help anyone else sitting around similar campfires, listening to their siblings. Iman is gone, his brother Ilyas is gone, and who knows about little Inaya or their mother- but there are other families, just like them. He thinks of the Marten twins, the Skyes, of Amarita, the little blonde orphan girl you wouldn't know was blonde for all the dirt caked in her hair most days. He never heard of any of their deaths. Maybe, if he's lucky, he's here for them, alongside the thousands of others he never learned the names of.

Still, Iman would probably think he was lying if he said this was how he was helping. If she saw this with her own two eyes, she'd nudge him and tell him to be grateful that all he has to do is smile, and not burn out, and not lose Frater Raro the lifejacket that keeps him above Thornton's raging sea.

"Are you alright?" Riz is asked, and that is how he knows he fucked up.

It's Amello, laying a hand on his. Riz is conscious, as always, of every angle from which he's being seen. 'Not too close', Paloma had just warned them.

"I'm just distracted," Riz says. He pulls his hand away, and returns to breakfast.

He tries to heed the imaginary advice his sister would give him, and that is to appreciate what you've got. He puts aside Ares' words, puts aside the way the threat hangs over his head, and could fall and crush him at any time- after a performance that could be in fifteen minutes, or days away. Instead, he tries to stay in the moment. He is not fifteen minutes nor five days in the future. He's in the now.

He hasn't yet explored the full extent of the beach, and the host who ushers them to various things when need be has ushered them nowhere, and so Riz gets the idea that he's about to have some time to himself- especially as he sees Wrenley and Jace headed off together. They're supposed to be playing out some kind of breakup, now, and he can't imagine that the spa area they're going towards will be exactly camera-free. He has as long as they can drag out some drama before anyone's really going to wonder where he is.

He's mostly thinking all of this because as he's on the beach, heading to dip his toes in the water alone, he spies Kiel down the coast. He's headed towards the bottom of a cliff- towards some rock pools, far from where any cameras are likely to be set up, and far from where any cameramen can follow.

Riz finds himself smirking at nothing. He wouldn't tell Iman that this is the here and now he's about to appreciate, and he certainly hopes her ghost isn't watching. She might appreciate the moment he's taking to bury his feet in the sand, to feel its warmth, comforting in the way heat can only be when you've felt true cold before. She might not appreciate that he's only doing that as a specific and purposeful waste of time, so that it's not obvious he's following Kiel.