Chapter 33

chapter 33

ELLE

Dinner and Cepharius were waiting for me by the time I got out of the shower. I put my dinner on the desk, raked a towel through my hair, and picked up my tablet, my blankets, and my "shopping bag" on my way to the window.

"What is it like to have to bathe to be clean?" he asked, as I retook my position, sitting down in front of the glass.

"I, uh...don't know?" I guessed, looking back over my shoulder at him. "You all are always under water...do you ever get dirty?"

"Not as you understand it, no."

"Sounds like that's another point for the ‘krakens are superior' camp," I said, turning the tablet on. I rummaged around inside the bag like I was on a game show, pulling out winning numbers. "Let's see who we get." I plugged the first one in. "The cameras upload to the tablet each night, so we're only going to get their final day," I warned Cepharius.

"It'll be better than nothing," he said, and I could almost sense his attention through the glass.

Everything on the screen was black for a moment, and then a man's face appeared—he was wearing a helmet, like the rest of the suits. His face had a subtle glow from the lights inside his helmet, and he was a handsome man, with dark hair and brown eyes.

"If you're seeing this, Mom and Dad," he started off, sounding solemn.

"Shut the fuck up," someone off camera said to him, and then a gloved hand hit the back of his head, making it bob, as the suit the camera was attached to changed views.

"We're on a mission—be serious, Luis," someone else said.

"I am serious! It's a goddamned spaceship!"

I knew the feeling.

They trudged together across the plain, the viewpoint camera owner swinging his head from side to side.

I felt a little bit like I was playing Borderlands , or any other number of first-person shooters; I just didn't have a game controller in my hand.

"And you're sure it's safe for us to go in, Haberman?" said another voice on their line.

"No, of course not," Haberman said with a snort. The camera shifted, and I realized my colleague was somewhere off to the right. "But I'm going to go in. You all can stay outside, if you want to."

"Glad to see making bad decisions is not an Elle-particular trait," Cepharius said in my head, and I wasn't sure if he was teasing or not.

"Shhh," I hissed at him.

The men walked through the deep dark, and when they got to the ship its lights were off, but the gantry was open.

They took a moment outside the ship to check themselves over—and make sure the rifles they'd brought that'd work underwater were loaded.

Then they walked up the stairs and—I tapped the tablet screen so it would pause. "Do you see that?" I asked Ceph.

"What?"

"The writing around the door is different." I gestured around the screen with my fingertips, then hopped back to my camera's view from earlier in the day, spreading my fingers on the screen to zoom in. "They got different circles than you did. There's one here, with four others surrounding it, one big one and three small ones—whose life is that?"

Ceph made a thoughtful sound. "We already know it can control its presentation."

I grunted, and started playing the show again.

What followed was somewhat incomprehensible, because right after they got inside—and the spaceship stayed dark for them—they started acting weird. One of them started jerking, like something was wrong with his nervous system, while another tried to pull his umbilical cable apart with his hands. The man who owned our camera was buffeted to the side as another...punched him? And then two of them began to wrestle.

"What are we watching, Elle?" Cepharius asked me, with rising concern.

"I have no idea," I said, as the screen went black.

We watched two more, which only enacted the scenario we'd seen from different points of view, but the outcome was always the same.

Four men went in, and none of them came out again.

And, oddly, none of them used their weapons.

"We are not going back in there, Elle," Ceph said.

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. "I hear you. And—I'm scared too. But think about it this way: we're already ahead. Whatever lives inside there decided not to kill us."

"And what did they do wrong, hmm?" he thought, imperiously.

"I'm not sure. If they'd been here for months, like Donna said—maybe it had to let them in, to stop them? Or it was an instinctual thing?" I stood up and started pacing in my room. "Maybe it was acting like, I don't know, a white blood cell?"

I sensed his utter confusion, tried to share a few biology texts with him, and then felt him give up.

"What are we in this example?" he asked.

"Bacteria—but the good kind that you want around. Like they sell for your stomach on commercials." I knelt in front of the window again, looking out at blackness. "They didn't get the same invitation we did, Ceph. They didn't get any lights."

"That doesn't make me feel better about continuing."

"I know," I said, because I could feel his qualms in my mind. I sat back on my heels. "But as nervous as I am about all this Ceph—and I am, really—I just want to believe that all of this is happening for a reason."

I thought it at him, and then I groaned. If I could've gone back thirty seconds in time to punch myself out I would have.

"I take that back. I never want to think that. I want everything to be chaos all the time, because if shit happens for a reason I'm gonna need to throw down with someone about it, you know?"

I felt a blanket of Ceph's calmness wrapping over my mind. "No, I do not know. But—I am with you Elle of the Air, regardless."

"Thanks." I leaned forward and let my forehead thunk against the glass.

I wasn't an idiot, and I didn't believe in deterministic behavior at large scales, least of all from an alien species.

No, my real problem was that I didn't want to stop running forward—because the second I did, I knew my past would catch up with me.

"Come on, let's watch the last one," I said, reaching back into the bag, but it was at the bottom, and the lovely piece of coral I had been given had A) probably been killed by bringing it into my atmosphere, way to go Elle and B) been broken up in transport, when it'd gotten roughed up by me dropping the bag and making it rattle around with the data sleeves.

I pulled it out—but it wasn't coral.

It was a completely smooth and particularly shaped piece of stone.

I upended the bag at once, and one data sleeve, one kraken figurine, one piece of now-dead coral, and two more of those kind of stones fell out, in slightly different sizes .

And the one I was holding was the smallest of the set.

"Ceph," I asked, doing my best to keep an open mind. "What are these?"

"The rest of my gifts," he said, as if that should be self-explanatory—and when it was clear it wasn't, he continued. "The males of my species have the ability to change the size of our pumping arm. When we court, it is customary to provide the ones you're courting with replicas, so they can see what is on offer, if they choose you."

I felt myself turning bright red. "Oh."

"Obviously, when you pump just to pump, without courting, everyone just does the best they can," he went on. "But this is the older, more official way, and seeing as I did not know what type of girth you could accommodate, I thought I would start small with you, just in case."

Small was not the first adjective that I would use for the apparent kraken dildo I was holding in my hand.

"Well, thank you. They're very . . . nice."

"I made them with my suckers," he informed me, sounding pleased. "They can excrete acid. It took me some time last night to find the correct kind of stone. I had to wander quite far off."

I had an opportunity to let it lie there. I could have just appreciated them for what they were, and taken them home to use as bookends and have a very good story, in my imaginary future where I did sane things.

Too bad that future was never going to exist.

"And this is . . . uh . . . accurate?"

All three of them had one tip that was a little blunted with a short spiraling ridge about an inch down. And they all went on in a slow flare until there was another circular ridge, about an inch from their bases.

I set them on the corner of my blanket. They went up in size like a set of Allen wrenches.

"Entirely. The ring on the bottom is to mark how deep I would need to be inside you for satisfactory insemination to occur. You want to know that your future mate can accommodate you—it is especially important for certain portions of the kraken breeding cycle. Sometimes courtings are called off, because the pieces won't fit," he went on, like he was David Attenborough on a science program.

"Uh-huh." Nothing in any of my prior education or research had quite prepared me for this moment. "And...you say sometimes krakens pump just to pump?" I asked, having acquired his term for it.

"Certainly. For us, it feels good," he said, then asked with concern. "Does it not feel good for you?"

My hand flew to my forehead. Oh Lord, I am not strong enough.

"And not all of those krakens wind up mated for life?"

"Oh no. I mean, that happens, of course, some people pump their mate accidentally, their first time—but mostly there is a process of trial and error, until you find the right one. Some krakens never do."