Chapter 22

chapter 22

CEPHARIUS

I set Elle down near the base of the wall, and she did exactly that, wandering back and forth, thinking hard as her cable trailed behind her.

"Is there a reason we are no longer looking at the symbols?" I asked her, after quite a bit of time had passed.

"Yes," she answered, but kept the rest of her thoughts to herself until, at last, she returned. "Remember when you asked me if my kind had been to other planets?"

"Of course." Her thinking that the sea floor looked like the moon had been charming, and then all the rest of the images she'd showed me were quite interesting—except for all the ones where people were fighting with light-based weapons.

I didn't think those could truly work underwater, although I had seen some two-legged welding before.

"Ceph, I'm going to need you to keep an open mind."

I laughed bitterly on our 'qa, seeing as my main wish in life was for my mind to be anything but. "For you, I will attempt it."

"Okay." She stood in front of me, dimming her lights so that I could look at her more easily. "What if I told you I didn't think this thing was from Earth at all?"

"Where else would it have come from?"

"Outer space." I felt her bracing for me to mock her, and I didn't understand why.

"But your people travel to space all the time," I said. "You showed me images of them, yesterday."

"No, Ceph—that's not real, I was thinking about Star Wars —see, that's what I was afraid of, letting you inside my mind." Her hands rose to hold the outside of her helmet as she shook her head. "My kind's just gotten to the moon, but only barely. We've got satellites in the sky," she said, and I nodded, because I'd heard of those before. "Past that, we've never made contact with entirely alien creatures. We didn't even know for sure there were any."

Then she turned back to the wall and gestured to include the whole thing. "But I think this is a spaceship. It's why it's made of metal, shaped like it is, and that's why you were able to destroy that ridge—it wasn't rock, it was just made up of the sand the ship pushed out when it crashed."

I pondered these facts with her. "How do you know it crashed?"

I heard her gasp. "I...don't. I just assumed. But you're right. And no wonder I don't know any of the symbols on it—but now that that's what I think it is, I don't know." She stepped back from it. "It could be dangerous."

"How so?"

"Uh, I can list the ways—it could be a prison ship of some sort, sent out with other dangerous entities their homeworld isn't interested in dealing with anymore. It could contain some sort of hazardous waste they wanted to expunge. They could've sent it here intentionally, full of things to poison us, so that our planet would be ready to be colonized at some point in the future."

"Is your imagination always so dark?" I asked her.

"Recently? Yes." She sighed, awkwardly crossing her arms in front of her suit. "In the best case scenario, all the symbols on it are an informational or decorative calendar of sorts, meant to demarcate its time in space, as it bopped around doing research before it had some kind of failure state and crashed here. Worst case scenario, it's some version of a ticking time bomb that was sent here eons ago that hasn't gone off yet. Like how some bombs didn't go off in World War Two, or during the Ancient Monster Uprising, and when they come across them they still have to decommission them today."

"Then we should go," I said without hesitation as I reached for her. Keeping my mate safe was paramount.

"No," she said, waving me off and stepping back. I paused, hovering in the water.

All the other times she'd refused me had happened when I'd startled or frightened her.

But this was the first conscious time she didn't want to let me in—and it reminded me of all the times I'd swam back from other krakens.

Now I knew how much that hurt them.

"This isn't just the find of a century," she thought with vehemence. "It could be lifechanging. For the whole planet. If I'm right—if I'm not crazy."

"You are not," I told her, and she frowned as I went on. "I would know. I'm reading your mind."

She snorted. "Well, that's comforting, at least. But someone else was here before me." She started pacing again. "And I'm sure the man who sent me knows about this too, the billionaire who's paying for all this," she said, unsuccessfully plucking at one of her suit's sleeves. "But why send me alone? Why hire you? Why build that whole damn lab, and then not give me any other scientists to talk to? I just don't understand." She'd turned to frown at the structure instead. "I don't even know if it crashed right side up. Or what if their language is meant to be read top to bottom, back to front—or a million different other ways? "

I stepped up to the wall behind her, tilting my head. "May I come into your mind?" I asked her.

"Of course," she said, relaxing, as I had trained her the prior night—and I gave her the three nearest symbols in front of me, in quick succession, only this time with the images inversed.

"What does that look like to you now, little pearl?" I asked her.

I felt her excitement flare. "The lines that we thought were at the bottom—you're right—it makes more sense if they're at the top! Like a water line! And if that's the case, and these are upside down, then..." She reached out and held her thumb over one of the circles in the center of the symbols, without touching it. "I bet this is the ship. Under the waves."

I inspected it more closely. "It looks like an egg."

"Why not both?" she said cheerfully before sobering. "But Ceph—that's Doctor Pearl to you."

I couldn't tell if she was joking or not—but I suspected I'd been too familiar.

Before I could worry about it more, she went on.

"Can you pick me up again? Because if I can scan the entire thing now with my cameras, it'll be a lot easier to flip the footage and see if any of it makes more sense that way."

And now that I understood more about how her camera worked, having witnessed its output myself in her mind, it was easier to tease apart the images she'd sent me earlier, her learned fiction from her actual memories.

"May the force be with you," I told her, reaching my arms out, as she stopped and crossed hers.

"Please say you are kidding."

I grinned at her, and I saw her inside her helmet, grinning back. "But you sent it to me!" I protested. "It was brighter than all the other memories you shared, too," I complained, letting my amusement trickle across our 'qa.

"Bonding with you was a mistake," she complained, while also laughing, coming nearer at last. I picked her up again easily, and started ascending up the structure's wall with strong, even strokes.

"It was not, Elle of the Air. You are exactly where you need to be," I said—meaning nothing about the site surrounding us, and everything about the fact that she was held within my arms. "Although maybe when we are finished with this, you could explain more of your Star Wars to me."

"It would be my pleasure."