Chapter 31

chapter 31

CEPHARIUS

"You only think lights are good because that is your air-part, thinking," I told her, carrying her back to the spaceship slowly. "Down here, lights are dangerous."

"Lures. I know," she said. "I'll be careful."

"I will make you be," I muttered, and heard her laugh in response. She'd heard my thought, I'd forgotten we were close. "I am sorry—I will leave."

Her panic was instantaneous. "No—don't," she said. "You're already in my mind. Might as well make yourself at home. And maybe I could use your help helping me think on things? You indexed the whole Predator thing last night pretty fast."

All I wanted to think about right now was leaving. But if I could not—this was second best. "As long as I am not hurting you anymore."

"You're not. I promise. And I'd let you know." Her hand grabbed mine and squeezed it as we came upon the structure.

I lifted both of us up a safe distance away from the entrance that'd appeared in the ships side, without going near it, so that she could see what I had seen—four people in suits just like hers, clearly dead, floating around inside—and when I put her back down, I made sure to stay between her and the stairway's first step.

"Did they all come from the station?" she asked, and then looked around. "Where are their umbilical cables?"

"The other humans back there are not telling you everything," I warned her.

"Yeah. I'd noticed."

She was pacing in one of her thoughtful circles again, and all that was in me wanted to whisk her away.

"Okay, so," she said, coming to a quick decision. "I want to see inside again." I moved to pick her up, and she said "Nuh-uh" and moved around me to take a step up the stairs.

I gasped. "Elle of the Air, what are you doing?"

"They died inside the ship, Ceph. I'm not going in, I'm just going high enough to take my own peek."

I was aghast. "But there are dead bodies!"

And that made her laugh for some reason. "Do you know how many dead bodies I've seen before?" she said—and it did seem like a lot of them, between her truths and fictions. She brushed around me, putting her boot on the next step up. "I mean, usually they're not juicy, but I'm not afraid of some skin and bones."

I hovered behind her, and had two lower-arms wrapped mere inches front of her, ready to pick her up at the slightest provocation.

At the least, she wasn't dying without me—I would follow her immediately.

I did not want to live alone.

Then she stopped. "Haberman," she whispered.

It was a word I didn't recognize. "What is that?"

"Who," she corrected, pointing up. "He was a friend. And he must've been the first person they convinced to come out here."

"Do you recognize the rest of them?"

"No," she said, but I could feel her thinking. "But some of them are carrying amphibious rifles." I pressed my disbelief at her and she continued. "I've been in some sketchy parts of the world before, Ceph."

"It's not that," I told her. I was confused. "Those images were real? Instead of hurting people with light, you shove pieces of metal inside them?"

"Sad to say, but yes." She sank back against me in thought, and then twisted her head to look at me inside her helmet. "I need to go in there."

I pointed in with an upper and lower-arm both. "With the other humans who died?"

"All their suits are like mine, which means they've got data sleeves. If I could get theirs, then I could figure out what they've already done—and what they did wrong." She sensed my impulse to deny her, and her thoughts gained fresh momentum. "Who's to say they died on their first expedition? This could've been their hundredth down here! Donna told me they'd had men at the habitat for months!"

I looked back and forth between the floating corpses and her in a panic. "You are weaponless!"

"No I'm not," she said, shaking her head, and putting her hand on my arm. "You're my bodyguard. I have you."

If the way she'd thought it had not been so pure and true—if she'd been trying to manipulate me even for a moment—common sense would've intervened and I would've taken her back to her underwater home and found a way to lock her inside.

But as it was all I could do was complain.

"Bah!" I exclaimed on our 'qa, flowing my body beside hers until I was in front of her. "If you die, I will regret that for the rest of my very short life," I muttered, grabbing my tentacles onto the metal of the floor, dragging myself in.

Everything inside was painfully bright, but the longer I was in it the more my eyes adjusted. The room was roughly half the size of the throne room at Thalassamur, and the walls appeared to be made of the same metal as the outside; they tasted similarly, too. Except there was more ambient glowing in here and on one wall, shades of blue and green repeating, going through a sequence. I couldn't tell if the strange shapes set onto the floor were meant to be furniture, like the two-leggeds used, or storage objects—or anything number of a billion different things that I now knew about, thanks to Elle's stories on our 'qa.

"Still alive?" she teased as she stepped forward and I watched her look around. Her awe inside her helmet was obvious, and she was true to her word; the dead bodies didn't really affect her.

"Have you truly seen so many people die?" Her fiction was littered with as many bodies in it as the bottom of the sea. I supposed that might create some inurement to the process.

"I specialize in reading old bones and languages. Monsters, mostly, but death's death. It's all kind of the same thing," she explained, still looking around—until she got to me. "It's sad when it's someone else's, but it doesn't gut punch you till you really know them."

"True," I agreed. "How would you like to proceed?"

"First off, I just kind of want to stand here a moment and get footage of all this. I can't believe I'm inside a spaceship."

The last part was said to herself, but as close as we were now, I still heard.

I decided, instead, to inspect the nearest corpse. It did still have the tail of an umbilical cable, dangling out for about three feet behind it—and I felt Elle coming up behind me. I held it up with a lower-arm to show to her. "It looks melted," she whispered. "But that wouldn't have killed him—the cables are separate from the suit, and he'd have had a bail-out bottle of oxygen with enough time to try to get back to the station."

"Did they shoot each other?"

"I don't think so," she said, peering into the suit beside me. "There's no water inside there."

"Why did they even bring the weapons?" I wondered.

"I don't know—just help me hold this arm still?" she asked, and I did so. She ejected something from it and caught it in the palm of her hand before it fell. "Where is my—oh, gosh darn it. I dropped that bag outside."

"I will go get it for you, later," I said, taking the piece of equipment from her and tucking it into my belt. I was not leaving her in here by herself.

We moved from body to body, her peering into the suits along the way, at the men who, with the exception of an expression of surprise on their faces, seemed to be entirely intact.

And when we reached the last one, she sighed. "Goddammit, Haberman," she said, frowning and shaking her head.

"Were you close?" I asked her. A dark and primal part of me wondered if I should be glad this man was dead.

"No. Just colleagues. Ran in the same circles, but didn't often overlap. He was smart though. Smarter than me."

"I do not think that that is possible," I told her, and she laughed.

"Keep pouring it on like that, mister," she thought, and then looked around again, crossing her arms to hold her elbows. "Other than that, I'm scared to touch anything."

"Finally, some sense," I agreed.

Her mind gave mine an irritated push on the 'qa. She was getting better at using it, quickly.

"Not because I think you're right—but because I'm scared if I hit the wrong button, I'll have to drive this thing. Assuming any of these weird bumps are buttons." She drifted over to one of the walls that was emanating interesting colors, and then looked to me. "Do any of these make sense to you?"

I blinked and considered them.

"Shift to match, Ceph!" she said, nodding fiercely.

"Why?"

"Because if the outside was the story of your life, maybe this has something to do with you too!"

I was unhappy—but I did as she requested, watching the colors for long enough to figure out and create their pattern, slowly timing it so that the colors on my body matched them. There were only twenty different ones; it didn't take very long.

"Okay!" Elle said, clapping, once I'd managed it. "Now tell me the story!"

"What do you mean?" I asked her, the colors on my body flowing in time with the lights.

"Pick a beginning—and then tell me what they mean!" I felt her mind swirl close, and realized thinking about these sorts of things delighted her.

I took a moment to concentrate. Blue and green had the feelings of beginnings—of calmness, friendship, joy and hope. And then there was the industriousness of brown and the thoughtfulness of gray, the courage of orange, then red-red-red, followed by an explosion of yellow, and the expansiveness of black.

My people used black as an amplifier, to provide more context to colors before and after—but this was quite a lot of it, in comparison to the other colors in the pattern. Was this the black of the space they had traveled through to get here?

And then red-red-red-red in another sequence of flashes, and then, at last, blue—the same color that was Elle's favorite—and then the color of light that was unique to her skin, Elle's precise and beautiful shade.

It was why she shone to me at night through her window or her helmet, when she was my little pearl—the wavelength I knew she couldn't see with her human eyes.

Like it was referencing her.

Only I knew her own eyes couldn't see it.

"Ceph?" Her mind pressed against mine in a question.

I swam away from the color-shifting wall. "I cannot say."

"Can't or won't?" she asked. "I'm in your mind."

"Anything I tell you would be a guess. We'd be better off taking these back for you to analyze," I said, grabbing for the pocket I'd put the data sleeves in on my belt.

And then the lights went off around us .

Elle let loose a cry of surprise—and I had her out of the ship before she could finish it. She teetered as I set her down outside, and she gave a short laugh. "That must be how Lois Lane feels."

I sorted through her mind rather than asking her who, and only wound up more confused. Elle shook her head at me. "Don't worry about it—I'll explain it to you some other time." She was looking back at the ship—all of its external lights had gone off as well, and the stairs we'd entered by were retracting.

"Maybe it's in power-saving mode?" she guessed, and it was yet another thing I didn't understand.