Chapter 30

chapter 30

ELLE

I followed him—he'd taken me way off the map on my helmet, and I assumed I wasn't supposed to just be wandering around.

I knew I'd hurt him. And I felt like an asshole. But I hadn't been untruthful. There was no point in playing house at the bottom of the sea. We could just be friends. Coworkers, even. Or, he could go back to just guarding me, which was supposed to be what he was doing in the first place, not confusing me with all his unwarranted affection.

I could only barely feel his presence in my mind now, and I knew that he'd withdrawn to lick his wounds.

We arrived at the spaceship in grim spirits, and somehow figuring any part of it out seemed even more daunting.

Maybe I should give up and just go back to the habitat and wait two weeks after requisitioning some cavalry.

Even looking at it now, all the symbols seemed upside down...until I realized that they were.

"Ceph?" I asked, my thoughts rushing to his.

"Yes?" he asked, and then I felt his subsequent curiosity. "I see it as well. "

"Why would they all change?"

"I couldn't tell you." He swam up and out of my field of vision. "They are all flipped here, too."

" Goddammit, " I thought, and cursed aloud. Figuring anything out about an alien language was going to be hard enough, without it also being written on a Rubik's Cube.

But this placed the end of the writing squarely in front of me, on the wall a few feet to my right. I moved to stand in front of it, feeling hopeless, when a new symbol started to appear, written in the glow that the rest of the glyphs released when light shone on them.

"Ceph!" This time I shouted, and he returned in an instant.

"Are you all right?"

All I could do was point at the incoming marks on the wall. He turned to watch them as well, their arrival was mesmerizing, and they followed the same base as the others—the "waterline" up above, a circle in the center, and this time there was another separate circle. In the prior symbol they were together...but now they seemed to be falling apart.

Ceph stared at the symbol.

"What is it?" I asked him. I'd normally hesitate to ascribe a personality or motive to a structure, but..."It's like it wants us to see this, right?"

"I'll be back," Ceph announced, and then started swimming to my left and disappeared.

I didn't know what to do, so I stepped forward and touched the wall again, like I probably shouldn't have, especially now that I knew that it could kill ROVs. But while the symbols around my contact reacted with their colorful splashes, nothing bad happened to me.

It took forever for Ceph to return, and when he did, his mood was somber.

"Where did you go?" The only reason I hadn't been panicking was because I could feel him. I was more angry at having been abandoned .

He pointed three symbols back. "The circle was two. Then it became one. And now it's two again, Elle."

"Two eggs, two spaceships," I said with a shrug.

"No," he said. "That circle is me." He gestured with his other arm and half of his tentacles. "For some reason this entire spaceship is covered with the story of my life."

I made a face at him. "I refuse to believe that."

"It doesn't matter—it's true," he said, and picked me up without asking.

"Ceph!" I shouted at him, struggling—until he pulled to a stop in front of a particular portion of the wall.

"Look here, Elle. I counted back—this is three lunar years and thirty-one days ago. The same day Cayoni and our egg died. There were three circles conjoined before that—but then I became one circle again."

"So there's been one symbol a day? For your entire life?" I asked, my voice arching as my thoughts did. "Why are so many of the days the same?"

"You underestimate how boring my life was before your arrival," he said with a snort. "These strokes could be the manatyls I was guarding. I moved as they did, keeping them safe on their route to their breeding grounds." He pointed out hashmarks near his circle with the tip of a tentacle, that sometimes rotated around the circle's sides. "But I went back before that for long enough, tracing memorable events—meeting Cayoni, going out hunting, and twice off to war—it's accurate. To the day."

I stared at the wall in even more confusion. "Even if I grant you that—why?"

He shook his head. "I do not know. You are the thinker between us," he said, taking us both down to the ground again.

"And you're absolutely sure no one has had a thought about this on the 'qa before?"

"Even more now than I was; something this strange would resonate with us for a very long time." His resolve was firm—and then he tensed, his attention on something behind me. He flowed over to me, faster than I could see, dragging me and my cable back in a blur of his tentacles.

"Ceph?" I whispered into his mind.

"Turn off your lights," he commanded, and I did so at once. "There was movement in the water, up ahead," he explained, moving to press me between him in the wall. "But it has stopped now."

Had Mr. Marlow sent down another ROV?

Ceph crouched against me, pulling me down. "I am going to go look. You stay here, but do not move, my pearl. Many things in the deep cannot see, but they will sense motion."

The thought of losing him panicked me, and I grabbed his arm. "I can't have anything happen to you."

"Nothing will. Not now, not ever," he said, and pulled away.

He'd left me right beside the wall—and now none of the symbols were glowing, and I was afraid to tap them.

If Ceph was right about the spaceship, and it was trying to communicate with him—and I had no reason to doubt it, Cepharius was as smart as he was handsome—then what did that mean?

I bit my lip inside my helmet, and I couldn't come up with any answers.

"Ceph?" I whispered on the 'qa, wanting his mind to touch mine.

He was back less than thirty seconds after. "You need to go back." He picked me up without asking and began jetting us away—I could feel my umbilical cable dragging behind me like an errant piece of yarn.

"What is it?" I could sense the panic radiating off of him, but he wouldn't give me any insight.

"We are leaving," he announced, and took a stroke forward.

"Why?" I asked—then a blinding amount of lights turned on.

I screamed and threw an arm up, right before my helmet adjusted its tint. "Oh my God?—"

"We are leaving. Don't look."

But it was too late— I'd already seen it.

The ship lit up behind us like a convenience store appearing out of nowhere beside the highway on a hot desert night. "Oh my God, Ceph. That's a motherfucking gantry."

The spaceship had opened for us.

"You didn't see that," Ceph said, telling me to lie to myself.

I fought him. "Ceph! What is wrong!" He was impossible to peel off of me—he was letting me win, so his suckers didn't hurt my suit, but there was physically too much of him to gain any traction. "What is happening?"

"We need to go back is all."

"If you take me back to the station, I'll only walk out of it again!" I shouted at him with my mind.

"Then I will close the door behind you when I drop you off!" His thoughts were a low growl.

"Why?" I pleaded. "What did you see?" And then realized I only had one card left to play—and it was true. "You're hurting me!"

That finally made him pause.

"Stop this!" I said, wrestling parts of him back. "You're scaring me—and I don't like whatever the fuck it is you're doing right now, making all the decisions for me. You either tell me what you saw, or you put me the fuck down and let me go back there."

I sensed his frustration and fear rushing up, and his mind slammed into mine. "THERE ARE DEAD HUMANS IN THERE WITH SUITS THAT LOOK LIKE YOURS!"

I cried out, the full force of his mind sending me reeling, making a migraine blossom so hard and fast I saw flashes of jumping lights like fireflies.

"My pearl!" Ceph shouted, taking us immediately down to the ocean floor, smoothing his hands against my helmet, trying to reach me. "I am so sorry. I didn't mean to—I never would have. You were right to deny me?—"

Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I panted in agony. I lay in his lap, mainly because I was unwilling to move and risk making all the contents of the snow globe inside my head shake up again.

"You were scared," I said, when I could speak. It wasn't a question—just a statement of fact. "But that was a little disproportionate, don't you think?"

I stared up into his large black eyes that weren't circles—they were closer to squares. He'd shut himself down almost entirely, and I could only barely feel him.

"Ceph—I'm not Cayoni."

"No, you are not, Elle of the Air," he said, after a very long while. "But you feel the same to me."

And for the first time his mind opened up for mine, entirely uncontrolled. I was bombarded by chaotic images from what I assumed was his past, fragments of thoughts, little blips of his history, too quickly for me to hold onto, although I saw other krakens, a mighty battle, and Cayoni, the prior love of his life—and I saw her like he did, like I was a kraken, and I had to say he was right, she was pretty—then peace with the manatyls, if not solace, up until the day he met me.

And.

Then.

"Stop—stop—I understand. And if you make me throw up in this helmet, I'm going to be pissed." His memory of bonding with me was just as traumatic in its own way as my memory of mine was, and being caught in a loop of drowning and suffocating, one after the other—it felt a lot like being in love.

Which I realized he was.

With me.

"Oh, Ceph," I whispered quietly.

"I did not ask for this to happen," he said, taking my hand in his own and bringing it to his chest.

"I know."

He'd shown me his horror at the moment of it occurring—but also its inevitability.

And how now for him, it was too late.

"That is why I cannot let you go in there, little pearl—Doctor Pearl," he said, moving my hand to his cheek, where all the strong small tendrils that lined his jaw clasped it. "Because even if you deny it, I feel you in my soul—I cannot let anything happen to you."

How many times when I was a teenager had I wished something like a mating would happen to me?

All of us humans were aware of what the monsters had, that we lacked—some innate ability to find the person you were meant to be with for life, if you were lucky.

And it seemed like those monsters who did got to be happy— truly happy—while my kind was left just scrabbling around in the dark.

I didn't want that for myself anymore.

I wanted to be found.

And if I didn't know we were going to have to be separated eventually, I would've let myself love him back in a heartbeat.

But as it was...I put my other hand on his jaw as well, so that he was looking at me fully. "Cepharius—I like you. I do." There was no point in denying it, when our minds were so close to overlapping. "But I will not be mated to any man or kraken who gets in the way of my work."

I felt his beak grind as his thoughts churned, but he finally nodded. "You cut off your very breasts to defeat death. There is nothing that can stop you." He said, then took a breath so big when he released it all the silt burst up around us in a cloud. "When we go back will you at least try to be safe?"

"Very," I promised, taking my hands away from him, and giving him a smile. "And you said it yourself—I don't want to die."