Chapter 13

chapter 13

ELLE

After that, there was just the matter of getting into the tactimetal suit. I'd read the manual on it when I was on the submersible; it would keep me at ALRI's precise pressure, oxygen/helium atmosphere combination, while simultaneously monitoring my metabolism. It was a two-layer procedure, first the drysuit underneath, and then I needed to get into a protective metal shell, to guard me from the additional pressure outside.

I kicked off my pants readily, but when it came to pulling off my top, I paused. My swimsuit was a one piece, and there was no hiding that post-mastectomy I was flat as the proverbial board.

No one else but Grant had seen me—and look what it had done to him? But I changed my mind's course quickly. English tea sets. Small white dogs, I thought, and internally groaned.

Maybe being bonded with a kraken was going to be like a really strange version of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

"You okay?" Donna asked.

"Yep!" I said with fake cheer, then got into the drysuit's boots. I adjusted them around my feet and quickly wriggled myself into the rest of the thing, slipping off my scrub-top at the same time as I shrugged the shoulders up around me.

After that, stepping into the armored half was easy. It was like this suit had been made for me—and with Arcus Industrial's money behind it, there was an actual chance it had been.

Marcus took his spot back in the crane-operating nest and started unlooping the umbilical cable I'd be dragging into the sea behind me. It held all the plumbing I needed to stay alive at depth: my air filtration system, my heating system, and the power for the cameras collecting footage on everything I saw. The suit was covered in them, and I had bright lights on either side of my helmet.

After putting it on, I felt like an Autobot.

"Are you finally ready to meet me?" Cepharius asked when I was finished. He sounded amused.

"I'm more worried about meeting the ocean, currently," I muttered in my head as I went through the checks on my suit to make sure all of my connections were secure.

"Ready, diver?" Marcus asked on my intercom.

"Ready," I announced, then started walking toward the wall.

"Have you ever done this before?" Cepharius asked before I breached it, with a note of concern.

I was glad he was asking me, though, rather than rifling for the answer inside my mind.

"No," I answered him—and Marcus came on my intercom instantly.

"Are we aborting this mission?"

I groaned inside the suit. It was going to take more practice to not say thinking-things out loud. "Sorry, I was talking to the kraken."

"And that's a sentence I've never heard before," Donna chimed in.

Great, now everyone was in my head.

I felt a wave of Cepharius's forbearance. "I will be nearby but quiet until you get your bearings. "

"Thank you," I managed to solely think, and reached the water's edge.

I willed myself not to hesitate as I crossed the line—but I couldn't help but hold my breath as I passed through.

It was like stepping out onto the moon.

I stood there for a moment, letting all the silt my boots had kicked up die back down.

I was at the bottom of a shadowed plain. The lights on my suit turned on like headlights in a tunnel, but they only penetrated five feet of water in front of me, and my first two steps had already sent up obscuring clouds of dust. I took a few more, careful not to shuffle my feet, following the map the station was projecting onto my helmet's internal screen, and left the clouds behind.

And now I could see I wasn't entirely alone. I couldn't have named any of the fish that crept up to inspect the umbra of my lights, or the snot-like slugs floating by. I wasn't that kind of scientist, but it was amazing—magical, even.

And everything that was terrible?

I'd left all of it behind.

Half of the reason anyone did free dives was to feel like you were in another world, or outer space maybe, just away, away, away.

This feeling was like that, on steroids.

"All suit systems stable," Marcus said in my helmet. "Including the diver."

"Gee, thanks," I snarked, but I was smiling—a real smile—so hard I could feel it, because I hadn't had one in months.

"I am glad you like it here," Cepharius's thoughts rang out.

I'd almost forgotten about him. "Where are you?" I asked, and then tried to look around, swiveling my helmet from left to right.

"Your lights blind me. I am off to your side."

"Oh!" I gasped, and moved to tap my suit's controls, which were a line of sensitive buttons on my left forearm. A tentacle reached out to stop me, and I only barely bit back a shriek of surprise at seeing it.

"I will be fine. You need to see." His tentacle paused before wrapping me again, and I viscerally felt the memory of his touch at my wrists and ankles. I wondered if it would always be like that, for as long as we were connected, but then tried to push that thought from my mind.

Small white dogs.

"Keep following the map, diver. Twenty meters forward, and ten to the right. You'll have to go around a corner, there's a rock formation between here and your destination," Marcus announced, and I made my way carefully.

As much as I wanted to get to my discovery, I knew it was unsafe to rush under the sea.

"Have your two-legged kind truly been to other planets?" Cepharius asked, from his unseen spot to my side.

"I thought you weren't listening?"

"I apologize. The bonding is fresh, and your mind is very loud."

There was no point in being mad at him. "Do you know what the moon is?" I asked, while thinking strongly of every photograph of an astronaut and moon-walking I'd ever seen, probably including some TV shows.

"I have eyes, Elle of the Air. And my kind rise to the surface, occasionally." I could feel his mind pressing against mine. It was a pleasurable sensation, like when someone brushed your hair. "May I...look?" he asked, and I realized he was asking permission to search through my thoughts for more.

"No." I tried to shake my head inside the helmet but it was hard.

"As you wish," he said, the sensation of his nearness fading again.

"It's nothing personal," I said, not wanting to affront him—and maybe because I liked when he was near. English tea sets, Elle. "Because—how would you know? The difference between a photograph I saw in a class, versus a story I'd seen on television?"

"Television?" he asked, and then pressed, again. This time I didn't fight him. "Ah. One of your many attempts to replicate the 'qa."

"Something like that," I said. "But those are stories—although sometimes we watch the news on television, which is actually the truth...depending on the channel?"

I felt his amusement at my inability to account for my kind. "I agree, it would be difficult for me. But you can always choose what it is you wish to show me, and tell me whether or not it is true." The rock I was supposed to turn at loomed. "Will your cable be safe against this stone?" he asked. I saw some of his tentacles reach out and grasp it, and this time I didn't panic. They were long and thick, the diameter of my wrist, until they trailed off into delicate finger-like seeking tips.

"Yes," I thought at him intentionally, though I didn't really know.

"And now you are seeing if it's possible to lie to me," he said—and at that very second, his tentacles became the color of the stone he held, almost impossible to see.

I swallowed. "I was curious about it, yes."

"You could try to, Elle of the Air," he said, and his tentacles flashed bright blue, then faded to ominous black, before he pulled them out of my helmet-limited vision. "Things that you think of as true, I would assume to be so, even though you could be factually incorrect. I only have your mind to go on. So you could tell me made-up stories from your television and your news —but what would that gain you, down here?"

I inspected the area on the ground that the umbilical cable keeping me alive would rub against—and it appeared that something else had recently taken that path before. There was an inch deep, four-inch-wide groove seemingly carved around it. Due to the presence of an undersea current, swishing around the base of the rock? I scuffed my toe into the ground, sending up a cloud of silt, but it only went up and then drifted back down.

Someone else had been here before, dragging their umbilical cable behind them.

Maybe I should've checked my suit over for blonde hairs .

"Is there a reason you've stopped, diver?" Marcus asked on the intercom.

"No," I answered.

I felt Cepharius give a thoughtful rumble. "Now, that was a lie," he said.

I thought back to him. "Yes."