Chapter 5

chapter 5

CEPHARIUS

I made it twenty lengths up before I needed to start metering out my magic, keeping my body from aching as I rose. The two-legged called it decompression, and it was why they couldn't swim among my kind—and I knew they had something similar that happened to them, above, if they went too high in their own atmosphere, past where all their frightful air was.

In general, krakens didn't have much use for humankind. We'd come to an uneasy alliance, depending on the territory. When fights broke out centuries ago and monsters above realized we were sentient too, they'd come to our aid, and so the humans had had to stop fishing where we told them to, and they had to work with us whenever they wanted to drill or dredge thereafter. Things had been awkward for a while, but were tolerable now, as long as the two-legged didn't get too greedy—and my brother was known for his largess. As long as whatever the humans wanted to do didn't harm the environment, or we were able to mitigate the harm, he would allow it—and in turn, if humans did do the wrong thing, like attempt to poach the manatyls I'd so recently been guarding, most two-legged authorities would look the other way when bad things happened to bad people.

After all, the ocean was a dangerous place.

I reached a plateau and paused, assessing my current condition. I still had plenty of magic, and my internal buoyancy structures were doing well—but I waited for a handful of minutes, after looking up to judge the position of the sun. I didn't want to seem too eager to accept my new assignment, and honestly part of me enjoyed the thought of poor Royce up there waiting, his pale skin turning bright red, the only color-change that humans seemed capable of.

Balesur's and my father had made us "Ambassadors" for our people when we were younger, so we'd been forced to interact with other species, which was how I knew human minds were exhausting. But those bondings had never lasted longer than a few hours...I couldn't even imagine what interacting with a human for days on end would be like, and the thought of it filled me with distaste.

But I couldn't avoid Royce forever. I braced myself for the final leg of the pressure change, floating upwards, feeling my body growing more uncomfortable all the while, using my magic to mitigate the damage, until I felt a familiar mind brush against mine.

"Omara?" I asked. I knew she was a siren who worked with the Monster Security Agency, because some sirens could talk telepathically to any species.

"The one and only!" A delighted laugh traveled across the 'qa to me. "Cepharius! It's been too long!"

"And yet somehow, not long enough," I said, but I made sure to think it like a tease.

She came into view shortly, her long blonde hair streaming all around with each beat of her scaled, glittering, dark blue tail as she held herself below the shadow of a boat. She was as long as I was, tail and all, and happy to see me, her full lips pulled back and smiling over a row of small sharp teeth. Her human breasts made her look soft, as did the extended iridescent frill at the end of her tail, but I knew better. While we were acquaintances, I always remembered that sirens were dangerous creatures—in the olden days when krakens attacked men, we'd had to destroy their boats in groups, but a solitary siren could sing a whole boat's worth of men right into the ocean.

"How are you?" Omara asked.

I decided to be honest, rather than tempt her to pry. "I have been better. But—now I am here, and willing to talk."

She made a face. "Are you sure, Ceph?"

I didn't know what she was basing her hesitation on—if she'd read my mind already, in her siren-way, or if she knew more about my upcoming job than me.

"The king has given me a job and I shall do it," I said with resignation.

Omara nodded. "All right—hold on," she said, blinking a thin white membrane over her eyes and briefly frowning.

"What do you get out of interacting with humans?" I wondered aloud, curious if contact with the two-legged also dismayed her. "What do they trade for your time?"

I knew what the Monster Security Agency did for me—they promised to keep my kind abreast of any unauthorized two-legged incursions into kraken territory with the satellites they flew in the sky.

"Shhh," Omara thought in my direction, and then Royce came on the 'qa at the same time as I saw his hairless white head peeking out over the side of the boat above.

"Cepharius of the Krakenkind!"

It was all I could do not to groan. His mind was way too loud. All humans were loud. It was their awful, horrible way.

"Is it really you?" he asked, when I was quiet.

"What happened to the sad, short tentacles on your face?" I asked him, knowing full well that human men had face-hair.

He laughed, and reached up for his chin. "I decided to shave— that was a few years ago. We weren't sure you were going to show?—"

His thoughts tumbled out of his head, plinking onto the miniature 'qa Omara was providing us both with like hard drops of rain.

No melody, no beauty, and no subterfuge—yet.

"Look, I know neither of you enjoy this, so I'll cut to the chase: we need you to guard a scientist at the Aquatic Life Research Installation that's been placed at the bottom of the Georgiana Trench."

Of course the two-legged had a different name for Kalish—and hadn't bothered to ask my kind ours. It wasn't worth correcting him.

"They're putting her into the compression chamber tomorrow, and they'll have her installed down at ALRI shortly thereafter?—"

"Her?" Both Omara and I thought at once, and I was glad I wasn't the only one surprised.

"Yeah, noted historical xenologist Elle Kepzler. She studies ancient monster civilizations, and she's got enough letters after her name to fill a dictionary," he said. "Not that you, uh, have those down there," he added, after a second thought.

He was right, we didn't, but I could intuit enough of what he meant through our siren-aided bond.

But letters were not floatation devices, nor were they oxygen. "The deep seafloor is barely a place for us much less a female human," I said, at the same time as Omara chimed in.

"We don't go that deep."

I knew all that she was implying. If the deep sea was too inhospitable for a siren, a half-human, half-oceanic-magical-creature, then what was an entirely human woman doing down there?

"I'm feeling some resistance from the two of you—and honestly it's making me queasy." Royce said. Humans weren't good with the 'qa either. I think it made them uncomfortable, being so open to others. "But this is the job, Cepharius. I explained everything to your brother, and he said he'd call you back personally to take it."

Which was not what my brother had told me. I gritted my beak together. Perhaps Balesur's exposure to humans as the king of "krakenkind" as Royce had put it, had made him better able to hide his thoughts than I had given him credit for.

"He informed us this morning that he'd send a replacement to your post," Royce went on, "so we'll honor our prior arrangement with your people. But if you're not the right man—er, kraken—for the job, then?—"

"I am," I said at once.

Taking this assignment was the only way I'd ever truly be free.

I felt his relief wash over the 'qa like a wave. "Phew—well, that's good then—great—thanks, Ceph, we'll give Omara here the coordinates, and I'll let you both go for now—Omara?—can you hang us up?—"

And then suddenly Omara and I were alone on the 'qa again. My mind felt ten stones lighter for not having a human mind nearby. I shook my head and shuddered.

"He never knows how to end these things," Omara said, with a chuckle.

"He's probably too nervous that you're reading his thoughts."

"There is that, too," she agreed, as the boat above us turned its engines back on.

"Well?" I pressed. "Is he hiding anything?"

"What, you would have me give my boss good reason to be scared of me?" She blinked at me with both sets of her eyelids, horizontally with her flesh-toned ones, and vertically with the nictating membranes she had to further protect her eyes.

"You heard him—I am the brother of the king of krakenkind," I said, with a snort. "And if something happened to me, Balesur would be pissed."

Potentially.

I supposed it depended on how long it took Sylinda to quiet Gerron's mind tonight.

I felt a twinge of guilt over leaving again—but Sylinda was right. Me leaving for good was the best way to be free and not hurt anybody.

Omara gave the 'qa between us a thoughtful thrum. "Royce's mind is very full. He's cunning when he needs to be—but when he doesn't, he's earnest. He suspects he doesn't have all the information he should about this assignment, but he's not lying to you. Plus, he'd never even try around me. He knows better." She gave me a smug look, then held up her hand, as the white lids flashed across her eyes again. She was communicating with the humans above, this time thankfully not including me.

"Here are your directions, Ceph," she said right afterwards, impressing a directionality, a depth, and several topographical images inside my mind, along with a few pictures taken with a remotely operated vehicle's external camera.

It was dark in the pictures otherwise, but I knew that didn't indicate the time of day—it meant that the bottom of the trench was beyond light.

And when her membranes opened back up again, she thought out to me. "And what I asked for, and received in trade—and still do—was you." She gave me a smile, showing all of her teeth. "Or one of your kind."

It took me a moment to remember my question, the one I'd asked before Royce had joined our ‘qa.

"I like the manatyls. They need protecting. But there's only one of me in the sea, and the other sirens have siren-things to do. Royce, however," she said, and I caught something on the 'qa from her, like the faintest brush of a sweet memory, before it was hidden away. "I have something he needs, and thus he does something I ask," she finished quickly.

"So you're responsible for him granting us—my entire people—the Monster Security Agency's aid?"

I let all of my disbelief and astonishment flood onto our 'qa, which made her laugh, before beaming sweetly at me and nodding. "Yes! So don't waste it!" She propelled herself forward with her tail to kiss the water near my cheek and then whirled over herself, to start stroking away faster than I could've given chase if I'd wanted to. "Good luck with your human, Cepharius!" she thought back at me, just before she was out of reach.

I stared back into the deep blue behind me. The Kalish Trench was far away and right now there was some strange human woman ready to risk her life to work in it—all I could hope was that she would be better at controlling her mind than Royce was.