guarded by the kraken

MONSTER SECURITY AGENCY

CASSIE ALEXANDER

Copyright © 2024 by Cassie Alexander

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

www.cassiealexander.com

Published by Caskara Press.

Cover by Cassie Alexander and Layla Fae.

Book design/formatting by Jackie Kranz & PR Publishing Group in conjunction with Midjourney V6 ALPHA, Canva, and Magnific.

Used with permission.

dedication

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

– “THE KRAKEN”, TENNYSON

For my husband, Paul, who suggested this book be called Whackin’ with the Kraken, and for Dani for all the listening to me.

contents

Author’s Note

Underwater

Chapter 1

Cepharius

Chapter 2

Cepharius

Chapter 3

Cepharius

Chapter 4

Elle

Chapter 5

Cepharius

Chapter 6

Elle

Chapter 7

Elle

Chapter 8

Elle

Chapter 9

Cepharius

Chapter 10

Elle

Chapter 11

Cepharius

Chapter 12

Elle

Chapter 13

Elle

Chapter 14

Cepharius

Chapter 15

Elle

Chapter 16

Elle

Chapter 17

Cepharius

Chapter 18

Elle

Chapter 19

Cepharius

Chapter 20

Elle

Chapter 21

Elle

Chapter 22

Cepharius

Chapter 23

Cepharius

Chapter 24

Elle

Chapter 25

Cepharius

Chapter 26

Elle

Chapter 27

Cepharius

Chapter 28

Elle

Chapter 29

Elle

Chapter 30

Elle

Chapter 31

Cepharius

Chapter 32

Elle

Chapter 33

Elle

Chapter 34

Cepharius

Chapter 35

Elle

Chapter 36

Cepharius

Chapter 37

Elle

Chapter 38

Cepharius

Chapter 39

Elle

Chapter 40

Cepharius

Chapter 41

Elle

Chapter 42

Cepharius

Chapter 43

Elle

Chapter 44

Cepharius

Chapter 45

Elle

Chapter 46

Cepharius

Chapter 47

Elle

Chapter 48

Cepharius

Chapter 49

Elle

Chapter 50

Cepharius

Chapter 51

Elle

Chapter 52

Elle

Chapter 53

Cepharius

Chapter 54

Elle

Chapter 55

Cepharius

Chapter 56

Elle

Chapter 57

Cepharius

Chapter 58

Elle

Chapter 59

Cepharius

Chapter 60

Elle

Chapter 61

Elle

Chapter 62

Cepharius

Chapter 63

Elle

Chapter 64

Cepharius

Chapter 65

Elle

Chapter 66

Cepharius

Chapter 67

Elle

Chapter 68

Cepharius

Chapter 69

Elle

Chapter 70

Elle

Epilogue

Cepharius

Elle

Cepharius

Elle

Cepharius

Elle

Sneak Peek

“Guarded by the Nightmare”

Also by Cassie Alexander

About the Author

author’s note

Dear Readers,

Do you trust me?

I hope by now you’ve read some of my books in the past, and that’s why you’re here.

If you have, then you know I like to put my characters through a wringer before everything turns out beautifully for them on the other side.

But this book . . . hooboy.

I just need to warn you up front that these are the most emotionally injured characters I’ve ever written about and the heaviest topics I’ve ever covered.

I utterly guarantee you a Happily Ever After for Ceph and Elle . . . but, honestly, I need you to know I’m going to drag you through hell and back first.

So please keep that in mind—but don’t give up on me, and don’t give up on them. I’ve got you, I swear. And while the journey to get there may be heart wrenching, I promise you everything will be so, so, so worthwhile in the end.

Love,

Cassie

underwater

This book contains lots of deep, dark ocean, my over-indulgence in my obsessive interest in saturation diving, and before the book’s actual timeline or events, the off-page death of a sibling due to breast cancer, the off-page death of a spouse and child, and Elle’s recent history of having had an elective double mastectomy.

chapter 1

CEPHARIUS

A DISTANT REQUEST came in from one of my kind, through the aqa like a tiny fish nibbling on the tip of an arm. I instantly responded, “No.”

The messenger wasn’t close enough for me to see, but sight was an often useless concept in the oceans we lived in. Waters could be choppy, or we might’ve swum too deep for light to reach. It was one of the reasons we relied on the aqa to transmit our thoughts, allowing us to communicate over vast distances, depending on the terrain.

“No? What do you mean no?” the other kraken asked back, like he had no concept of the term—and by now I was certain his mind was unfamiliar to me.

“I mean no,” I thought at him with intent, while considering which direction I should swim to stay out of his range.

I felt his confusion travel into my mind just the same as his words did. “You don’t get to say no when it’s the king asking.”

“You do when he’s your broodbrother.” In fact, when he’s your broodbrother, you can tell him to go pump himself. I was careful to partition that last thought off, though, so it didn’t travel to him.

“But—” the unseen kraken began.

“NO!” I shouted at him, flashing red in the sea I hovered in.

The pod of endangered manatyls I’d been guarding had been ignorant of my presence until that very moment; krakens could be utterly still when they wished to be, controlling our buoyancy via manipulating internal structures. But in my anger I’d betrayed myself. All of the small herd scattered, swimming through the water in different directions with their large sweeping wings, and I clicked my beak in annoyance, which only frightened them off further. I closed my mind to the ’qa, unwilling to let anyone else’s thoughts in, in my vast irritation.

After Cayoni had passed, I’d swum away from my home on purpose, trying to escape the low-level thrum of everyone else’s lives. I’d taken this job with the Monster Security Agency in the frigid Upper Ocean protecting the manatyls because they weren’t entirely safe from humans, no matter what kind of treaties the two-legged kind signed with one another on their land, and I intended to keep doing it.

But . . .

I hadn’t even asked the other kraken why my brother had wanted to see me. I’d just protected myself from the sharp pain of my past on instinct.

What if Balesur’s mate had died? Or he was sick? Or, worse yet, Gerron?

The manatyls were slowly regathering in their protective formation. I hadn’t moved in the water yet, so they’d forgotten I’d existed.

If only the rest of my family could do the same.

I hovered in the middle of nowhere, halfway between the waves above and the ocean floor, thinking hard, while hiding my thoughts from the ’qa, lest another of my kind be near.

Which would I regret more? Briefly returning to the torment of Thalassamur, or discovering that I’d missed my chance to see a loved one one last time?

I raced my mind out along the ’qa and felt the weak flashes of thoughts the manatyl possessed—some were hungry, others were tired, and one eagerly lusted—but the kraken I’d shouted at was gone.

I’d had this assignment for three years. The two-legged above knew of me, and it would take a long while for their fear of me to subside.

For now, this pod was safe.

“I will be back,” I promised the broad-winged creatures, even though I knew they couldn’t understand me, then spun in the water, and started swimming for my home.

IT TOOK two weeks to travel from the cool waters I had been in to the warmer waters of my childhood, but I knew I was getting close when I could feel the loose, chaotic, and intrusive thoughts of other krakens.

“You will—”

“Move!”

“A sharper hook—”

“—don’t you agree?”

I slowed my swimming and clung to a rock outcropping covered in purple anemone and orange sea fans that furled and unfurled with the current, trying to deal with my emotions before I was discovered.

Until then, I pretended to be like a piece of kelp, letting the current gently rock me, and once I’d accomplished that, managing to keep the thoughts of all of the rest of the krakens out of my mind, I let go and started swimming again, cleaving to the shadows of the outcroppings of rock and coral that created the broad road of sorts that led into my kingdom, my city, my home.

IT WOULD TAKE any kraken a day to swim across Thalassamur—which didn’t matter much, because every kraken in it could think at almost any other, and if your thoughts weren’t strong enough, if you were old or infirm, or if you needed to talk to many krakens at once, there were plenty of skilled countrymen who could act as amplifiers, shouting your message for you across the ’qa.

I avoided every kraken I could, sensing them far before they could sense me, doing my best to imitate the land around me, swimming in slow silence and getting my bearings—because every time you visited Thalassamur, it had changed.

It was almost impossible to create structures that could survive the ocean’s inexorable flow, and so few truly tried. Most kraken just had patches that they tended to, that they understood to be “theirs”, inasmuch as they could feel the thoughts of anyone coming upon them, and they built whatever home they found most pleasing at the time. Some didn’t build at all, others belted themselves to stones each night so they wouldn’t float away, some dug pits and breathed through sand, others lived in caves, created cairns of stone, or claimed vertical territory along steep walls.

But certain krakens attempted to create something real.

Some of few took their time and chiseled out pieces of living rock and carefully placed it, stone over stone, until they’d crafted the perfect home for their mate over years, building a place both tame and wild, as only the best gardens could possibly be.

And then one of those krakens discovered when they’d returned from their hunting party that their beautiful mate had been crushed beneath the stones they’d so lovingly arranged to shelter her, because she’d been unwilling to abandon their precious egg in the middle of an undersea tsunami.

Tsunamis were what the two-legged called them—something I’d found out when I’d been forced to interact with humans as a child.

Krakens called them the Killing Wave because of what they did to the sea floor.

And I knew if I thought on it for one moment longer I’d be found—

“Cepharius?”

Another mind touched mine. I pulled in all of my sorrow like an eel pulling back into a burrow, trying to hide myself, but it was too late.

“Cepharius!”

And once my name was on the ’qa, there was no way to take it back.

“Cepharius is back!”

“Who is Cepharius?”

“Balesur’s brother!”

“Madron’s child!”

I felt myself pummeled with thoughts and joys and curiosity, and it took all my strength not to turn and swim back into the open sea.

“Please, stop,” I thought out in all directions. “I am only used to solitude.”

This did nothing to abate my countrymen.

“Shhh—”

“Leave him alone.”

“Everyone be quiet!”

“I am!”

“Stop saying things! He wants us to be—”

“Cepharius.”

One sweet and calm thought cut through all the rest, quieting them instantly. Balesur’s mate, Sylinda, and I felt her mind flow towards mine along the ’qa. I focused on her at once, shutting out all the rest as best as I was able.

“Are you well?” I asked her. Her thoughts were not tinged with sorrow—so Balesur was alive, and their child too—which meant that I could go.

But then she found me in person, coming up from behind a mound of porous rock. She waved a hand at me in recognition, as the rest of her long tentacles swept beneath her in a calming blue. She swam up before I could retreat.

“Are you?” she asked of me in return, hovering just out of touching range.

I didn’t dare answer her.

I knew how the two-legged communicated above, with their words that traveled through air, with voices and how they were unable to hear one another think or to truly know one another’s feelings.

This was how they were able to easily lie, whereas for the most part, my kind could not.

“Let us talk where it is more quiet. For you,” she said, providing me with a graceful exit and then I had no choice. She turned, and I was forced to swim beside her.

SYLINDA CUT a magnificent swath through the waves, bunching her lower-arms in and swirling her mantle between them as she pushed them back out, jetting herself forward and not giving me a chance to do anything but follow.

I recognized the path we were taking though. To the center of Thalassamur, where the most formal of the structures were, a series of lava tunnels with ceilings that time had worn down to have large gaps in them, so that light could pass through.

I could hear the thrum on the ’qa of everyone reacting to my presence, so I knew news of my return had preceded our entrance to the central throne room. It was a large open cavern, filled with life and other krakens, many of whom were leaving after Sylinda sent them a request to depart.

They stayed long enough to see me in person though, and I didn’t need to wonder about their thoughts.

“Where has he been?”

“Poor Cayoni—”

“—their egg—”

And this was why I’d left.

I felt anger rush inside me, as I clenched my beak and scowled with my lips above it, the short tentacles that framed my face clutching one another in my fury, until a high-pitched thought crashed into my mind.

“Uncle Cepharius!”

You couldn’t hear the thoughts of children until they were within a body-length of you or so most times, which allowed adults the chance to be adults, and our young the chance to be innocent, without growing up in a stew of other people’s opinions of themselves and others.

But Balesur’s son, Gerron, was close enough for me to hear him now, as he raced into the room to meet me, his entire body an elated pink as he bounced around, making excited gestures with his upper arms and hands, while his lower-arms shot him from place to place in speedy squirts while squealing.

“Where have you been? Why haven’t you visited? Why didn’t you take me?”

His thoughts crashed into mine, and I realized the second reason kraken children couldn’t join the ’qa until they hit their breeding age—because most of them talked far too much, and were far too loud. If Thalassamur’s ’qa let children into it, we’d never hear the end of them.

“I was working,” I told him, twisting my neck to keep an eye on him as he zipped about the room. I could sense he didn’t believe me. He finally slowed and made a disappointed sound. “Far away,” I went on. “Guarding manatyls.”

“Why?”

I huffed, trying to come up with an answer that would make sense to him, without bombarding him with my sorrow.

“Because he had an important job to do,” Sylinda cut in, saving me from myself. “It is a trade we make with the two-legged for certain information.”

That part was true at least. I was one of the few krakens that had willingly had contact with the outside world.

“But manatyls are stupid,” Gerron complained, and he wasn’t wrong.

“They are dense creatures, to be sure. But they deserve to live, same as any other.” And to not be hunted for their meat, which certain unscrupulous two-legged above believed had magical powers, a thing that I knew to be manifestly untrue. I contained more magic in one lower-arm than a manatyl did in its entire body, but the two-legged didn’t need to know that.

Gerron wove back and forth, clearly holding something back, and I was proud of him for managing to keep it from us—he was growing into his abilities, and a few years more he’d be ready to join the ’qa. As it was, either Sylinda or I could’ve upended his mind to make him tell us what he was hiding, but that was not our way.

Then finally he confessed. “You didn’t leave because I broke your statue?”

I blinked.

“No, of course not. How many times have I told you that?” Sylinda said, close enough to hear us and answer for me.

“I just needed to be sure!” Gerron shouted at her, then hovered in the water between us, anxiously winding his lower-arms.

“What statue?” I asked, while questing with my thoughts.

Sylinda sighed on our connection. “The one your grandfather had carved, of you and Balesur.”

Gerron took a moment, staring at me, before flaring red and shoving anger across our ’qa, then turning to flee the room, all eight of his tentacles spiraling behind him.

“Gerron!” Sylinda shouted after him. “Don’t be rude!”

I was terribly confused. “I could care less about that statue.” My visit to Thalassamur was not going well.

“You left right after,” she said, turning back to face me, her own colors going dark. “He’s been obsessed, thinking that’s why you disappeared, ever since.”

“I didn’t even know it was broken.” Not that it would’ve mattered to me besides.

“Oh, I know,” Sylinda went on. “Because to have known, you would have had to come home, and tell us why you volunteered for your assignment.”

I curled some of my lower tentacles in frustration. “You know why I left—”

“And you didn’t say goodbye!” The shades on her skin, which had been so cool and calm prior, now flashed angry patterns of maternal rage. “What was Gerron to think? That he didn’t mean anything to you? Or your brother? It would’ve been better that you had left because of a statue than for him to know the truth.”

I clenched my beak, rather than respond to her. I was one moment away from letting all the pain I felt over Cayoni’s death pour out onto the ’qa and if I started, I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to stop.

But then the patterns streaking across her skin slowed. “Didn’t you know I also missed her?” she asked, and that was somehow worse. “She was like a sister to me—and then I lost the two of you, both at once.”

Sylinda reached for me with her hand, and I pushed back in the water. I knew if I touched her skin on skin, I would be flooded with her thoughts. Physical contact was even stronger than the ’qa, and I knew that she was hurting; I could see it in her eyes.

I could barely stand my own pain. I could not take on another’s.

“Cepharius!”

I felt my brother’s mind as he finally caught up to us, entering the room with broad strokes of his mantle, and I looked him over for fresh scars. The lower-arm he’d been missing after a battle we were in when we were younger had fully grown back, and nothing new marred his hide.

So why was I here?

“You came!” he went on—and I realized at that moment that he hadn’t been sure that I would.

“I did,” I said. He swam up to me, the same as Sylinda had, and I, again, swam back.

I could feel his sorrow at my instinctive response. His thoughts had become more sonorous since I’d seen him last, like the responsibilities of being the ruler of all our kind had weighed on him.

“Are you so set on never touching a kraken again?” he asked calmly, his tentacles drifting beneath him in the stone gray of determination.

The last kraken I’d touched had been Cayoni, after her death, three years ago—and I’d been avoiding physical interactions with sentient creatures the entire time since. “I have no reason.”

He briefly took on a knowing look. “Then you won’t mind me reassigning you.”

“Balesur,” I began, swimming back even further, to begin my escape, as he continued.

“We need somebody to touch a human.”

My entire body flashed red at once. “No.” But his mind took on the inflexibility of the rock surrounding us. “I will not,” I said, emphatically.

“You will,” he disagreed. “Because the same two-legged who gave you your job out in the cold Upper Ocean has requested our services again.”

The red on my skin began pulsing, and I was only barely controlling my anger. “Find someone else.”

“No. He asked for you, personally.”

“Pump him!” It was the rudest comment one of my kind could make. “I don’t want to—”

“I’m not asking as a brother. You’re doing as your king commands.” His skin flushed the same color as mine and he thought at me hard, before looking to his mate. “Syl,” he said, and she swam to be between us quickly.

Sylinda was an amplifier—but she was also capable of sensing other krakens on the ’qa at great distances. “We are alone,” she thought out to the both of us.

My brother’s red tone only increased. “They want you to guard a human scientist at a research facility they’ve created on the bottom of the ocean, inside the Kalish Trench.”

I’d swum over it before, of course, but all krakens knew that past the first few thousand feet down, trenches were desolate and deadly places, suitable only for creatures that could sense prey in the dark. I couldn’t imagine humans managing to live there—but I’d also interacted with enough humans to know I shouldn’t put anything past them.

And in the end, it was my curiosity that doomed me. “The very bottom?”

Balesur nodded solemnly.

“Why?”

“I do not know. They asked permission before doing so, of course, and I granted it, with strict limitations—no mining, no nets, none of their ridiculous pipes or cables—thinking that would scare them off. But it didn’t, and they decided to build it anyways. We watched them to make sure they were honoring their word, and they have been, but they are clearly up to something. We haven’t been able to figure out what it is they’re doing, or if it is important to us. But now—we have this opportunity.”

As did I, I realized—to free myself for good. “And I must be the one to help?” I pressed, cornering him as much as myself.

“The two-legged asked for you in person. He’s been floating on a boat above us, waiting for you to return for the past two weeks.”

“And what were you going to tell him if I didn’t show up?”

My brother shrugged. “I would’ve sent someone else up there. We all look alike to them.” I could feel Balesur’s dark humor on the ’qa between us. “You haven’t been home in years, Cepharius.”

“And all this time, you’ve just been looking for an excuse to recall me.”

“To bring you back to your family, and your duties.”

“Which include sending me away, again? To the bottom of a trench, to touch a human?” I gave him a mad laugh.

“Because I trust no one else.” His colors shifted to a deepwater blue, trying to soothe me. “You have the skills, you’ll have the opportunity, and I know you will come through.”

Sylinda hovered nearby, listening to our thoughts no doubt. I felt a wave of her sorrow over Cayoni’s death pass over me, as she felt me think of her, and I had a dreadful realization before I returned my attention to my brother. “But mostly because I have no one else here that I care about. No one I would be tempted to leave my post for. And I am used to living without the ’qa.”

Balesur reached out to me with an arm and tentacle both, and I swam further back. “Those are your thoughts, brother,” he protested. “Not mine.”

“It doesn’t matter, when I know them to be true.” I looked up through one of the many holes that allowed light to shine into the cavern. It would be night soon, when the crystalkrill dove, and the amberdines rose to take their place, participating in the circle of life that happened again and again in the sea.

I wanted out of it entirely.

“As you wish, brother,” I said, making the colors of my skin match his own. “But after this, promise me you will not call for me again. I will go back to the Upper Ocean and do as I please and I will never rejoin the ’qa.”

“Cepharius!” Sylinda said, swooping as close as she could without touching me. “You do not mean that!”

I stared over her shoulder at my brother. “Do you swear?”

If whatever the two-legged were doing at the bottom of the trench was this important to him, it was the least he could do for me—to promise me the freedom to feel my pain alone.

“I do,” Balesur said.

“No!” Sylinda shouted at the two of us, but it was too late. Both of our thoughts were on the ’qa and there would be no taking them back. I would do this onerous task and then be free of my obligations forever after.

Sylinda shot away, propelling herself out of the room in a purple streak of pain and frustration.

“The two-legged expects you near the air at noon tomorrow. Your old bedroom is free; be sure to get up early enough to rise safely.”

“You already sent messengers ahead?” I was surprised and then irritated, that he had been so sure of me.

“I already told you. If not you, I would’ve sent someone else up to pretend,” Balesur said with a snort, before coming carefully closer. “How are you, Ceph?”

“Don’t ask,” I snarled, and then relented as I felt his concern radiating from him. “Please. Don’t.”

He shook his head again. “You have been alone too long, Cepharius. Your mind feels feral. And,” he began, paused, then decided to finish in a rush, “you do realize you’re not the only one this tragedy has happened to?”

I roiled in the cave, ready to swim out and hide in my childhood room, where at least I could pretend not to hear anyone. “Your wife hurts too, I know—”

“No, not that—I mean, yes, obviously—but there are other mateless kraken, you realize? You could talk to them.”

“I would prefer not to.”

He puffed himself up like he would when we were younger and he wanted to be in charge. “That’s your problem, Cepharius. You’ve always been stubborn. And you never wanted to take chances.”

And Balesur’s problem was that he never realized I didn’t want the life he led. He had been groomed to rule, ever since he’d hatched, whereas all I’d wanted in life was what I’d had and lost.

When I didn’t respond, he deflated some, giving in to whatever tenor our relationship had now.

“Go out tonight, brother—if for no other reason than because your pumping arm must be the weight of an anchor. Use this opportunity at home to find someone to put it in before tomorrow. Release some stress and pressure before this mission.”

“There is no need, brother,” I said, in the exact same tone that he spoke to me. “All of my stress and pressure will be gone the second this mission is finished.”

He took a long moment to stare at me. “As long as you are happy,” he said, and swam away, leaving me alone in the cavern just like I’d always wanted.

chapter 2

CEPHARIUS

THE STATUE GERRON had broken was right outside my bedroom cavern.

It wasn’t even that badly damaged; only the tip of one of my tentacles had been chipped off. I wouldn’t have noticed it even if I’d stayed, although I could see where someone had used some kind of adhesive to try and stick a different stone on.

They hadn’t done a very good job.

I felt the sharp inquiry of a youthful mind come near. “I tried to fix it,” Gerron said, peeking around the corner at me. He’d been waiting inside my room for me to return.

I swam lower to inspect the break. “How many times?”

He made a noise rather than answer me, and I imagined him, working in futility with the quiet desperation of a child, trying to mend something so that I would return, like healing the stone would work a magic spell.

“Your mother is right, Gerron,” I said, twisting to look at him. “Always.”

The portion of him that I could see flashed a confused orange.

I settled to the ground in front of the statue, curling some of my tentacles around its base. The sculptor had captured my brother and I in motion, returning home from the fight that had temporarily cost my brother one of his lower-arms, and given me a scar across my chest in the shape of a star, where an enemy’s spear had pierced me.

I remembered going home after that to Cayoni, and how horrified she was that I’d nearly been lost. I’d played it off at the time, but now that she was gone I understood her fear and pain.

“My dad always said you were the best at carving things. Building things, too.”

“Your father says a lot of things.” I finished my inspection of the piece and rose up. Gerron hadn’t moved from his spot in my cave’s doorway. “No one comes to my room, I take it?”

He moved aside as I neared. “Not really, no.”

And when I pushed past him, I realized the room beyond was full of toys—some of which I recognized from my own childhood.

“What is all this?” I wondered at him.

He frowned deeply and zipped to the side in shame, to hide in the shadow of a wall. “I’m supposed to put them aside,” he thought out at me. “But I don’t want to!”

“So you keep them here,” I asked, while making sure to keep my tone calm. “So when you play with them, no one else will know.” My old room was quite large, which kept other krakens away from his thoughts naturally.

“Yes.” A softer color flushed his skin. “You won’t tell, will you?”

I gave him as gentle a smile as I was capable of. “What kind of uncle would I be, if I did?”

His gaze was wary, and I knew what he was thinking, even as he was able to keep it away from me: the same kind of uncle I’d been when I had left him.

But I couldn’t apologize for leaving without him thinking I’d pressed his mind—so instead, I did the next best thing. “I am tired now, Gerron. I have swum in from very far away. But we will fix the statue tomorrow morning before I go.”

“Together?” he asked, clarifying my offering.

“Yes,” I swore, and I felt his thrill of delight at the same time I felt his decision to quickly zip away before I could change my mind.

AFTER HE LEFT, I made sure to close the door quickly to keep his secret. I brushed a hand through the forest of anemones on the wall, and a gentle glow struck up from wherever I had touched them, helping to illuminate the room.

Gerron had hidden the little army figurines Balesur and I had carved as children here. They were all pieces of stone or coral, carved and polished down to tentacled fighters, some with spears in their arms, others balanced on pieces of fortifications that they carried, and some with decorative necklaces, belts like mine, and crowns. A few of them were feminine, their forms more lithe than the rest, with longer lower tentacles, and none of the curling thoughtful ones our men had circling our jawline.

I remembered the rules—to roll dice well enough that you won the other player’s figurines. You would add those figurines to your own collection, winding their tentacles again and again, until all of yours were in a chain, and the loser was left with only one.

Gerron must’ve been playing against himself, because there was a nearly complete line of figurines in a neat half-circle, and one solo kraken in its center, which I picked up.

Once Gerron joined the ’qa, he’d never be alone again. He’d be part of the grand chain of kraken for however long he wanted to be—whereas I wanted no part of it.

I tucked the solo figurine into one of my belt’s pockets before I took it off. Gerron had had to guess my feelings the last time I’d gone, but once I’d left again, he read his game in here and know.

Then I hung my belt from an outcropping, and found the part of the wall I’d liked to sleep on in my youth. I wound my tentacles across familiar worn pieces of stone, until I was comfortably tucked against it.

I hadn’t lied to Gerron about that at least. I was exhausted, and I hoped to be asleep before the rest of my kind returned—but my mind had other ideas.

I couldn’t believe my brother had let the two-legged build anything in Kalesh, much less some kind of semi-permanent dwelling. He had to be right; the humans were up to something, but what on earth could they want down there, in the cold, deep dark?

Who would this human be that I was guarding—and why?

And, perhaps more importantly: from what?

I twisted, suddenly unable to find any position that felt right, and missed my window to sleep entirely, feeling all the krakens Sylinda had sent away slowly rejoining the local ’qa.

I closed down my thoughts to keep them to myself. The other krakens had no such compunction though. I could feel them without trying, each of them a bright pinprick of energy, living a life without shame, sharing trickles of everything on the ’qa, until there were so many of them it felt like I was swimming in a raging torrent.

At least none of them were thinking about me. Probably because Sylinda had threatened them when she’d sent them away.

But what was happening now was almost worse. One by one I felt certain krakens fade as they fell asleep, but some of them turned their attentions to other matters. I clenched my beak to brace as a pair that was particularly close to me shot one another messages.

“. . . do you know how beautiful you are?”

“You always say that!”

“Because it’s always true!”

They were laughing and happy—and while I was glad it wasn’t my brother and his wife, it was awful none the less.

“. . . come here!”

“Catch me!”

I lifted my hands up and pressed the heels of my palms against my broad eye sockets, in an effort to somehow physically block out what I otherwise could not, as the most intimate thoughts of even more of my kind leaked in.

“Let me lift you—”

“. . . my arm is ready—”

“Twine with me—”

“Let me hide it in you—there—”

Balesur hadn’t been wrong. I hadn’t pumped, not even once, since Cayoni’s passing. And feeling all the swirling emotions of my countrymen and women on the ’qa as they satisfied themselves was agonizing.

The hunger and need of the rest of my kind flowed through me, and it made my pumping arm ache. The only thing that stopped me from relieving myself for the first time in years was knowing just how empty I would feel when I was through. I pulled myself against the rock wall with more ferocity, wishing I’d picked a different spot, one where the stones weren’t quite so smooth, so that I would have something else to concentrate on.

And then the first couple that had started things finally finished—I felt their joy and pleasure splash along the ’qa and it reminded me of all the times prior that mine—no, ours—had, and I grasped the wall tight enough with all my tentacles to twist against it so that I could pummel the rock nearest me with my fist.

Dark blue blood poured out of my knuckles, and I bellowed in surprise, both with my mind and an open mouth. I’d hurt myself—but it’d felt good just to feel.

I’d forgotten what it was like to manifest pain rather than just having it live inside me.

And while the other kraken nearest me sensed something—I could hear a few of them wondering “What was that?” and “Are they okay?”—I quickly managed to hide myself again, and all of their evenings continued.

Me cutting myself had done nothing to stop them, but as the anemones I’d brushed on earlier turned off, one by one, the taste of my own blood in the water of the room reminded me why I needed to be alone.

chapter 3

CEPHARIUS

I WAITED by the statue the next morning until the very last minute—I even reached out to Sylinda for help.

“Where is Gerron?” I thought out to her.

“I assumed he was with you?” she thought back to me, with a tinge of concern. “Shouldn’t you be ascending already?”

Even those of my kind needed to be concerned with rising or falling in the water too far too quickly. “I swim with the manatyls. I’ll be fine.” I’d built up a tolerance for pressure changes while on guard duty, and had learned to use my magic at just the right time to keep myself safe—and, more importantly, not run out of it before my body had reached equilibrium with whatever new depth I’d chosen.

I sought around on the ’qa for Gerron as best I could, without running into too many other krakens’ minds, and then after that I physically searched the next few rooms, before finding Sylinda back where I’d been, in the hall.

She looked at me and crossed her arms. “He’s testing you.”

“Why?”

“To see if you’ll stick around long enough this time to say goodbye.”

I groaned. I didn’t want to disappoint Gerron, but—I saw the back of my right hand, healing from the damage I’d done the night prior.

“Don’t worry,” Sylinda said, going on. “I’ll try to explain to him that you had a job to do. For your country.” Sad slow patterns flashed across her skin in muted tones. “At least this time there’s a reason.”

Implying that the last time I’d left there hadn’t been. But I managed to keep my thoughts to myself, turning my skin a shade of stoic gray. “Whatever it takes to make him understand,” I granted her.

“I don’t know if he ever will,” she said, her tone on the verge of snapping, and then she added. “But don’t make me do this again, Ceph.”

I blinked. “Do what?”

“Put his little heart back together,” she said, and I could feel the sorrow coming off of her in waves. “Don’t ever come back if you’re not going to stay.”

I heard the emotions beneath what she was saying on the ’qa.

She didn’t want me to come back—even if something happened to her, or to Balesur—not unless it was forever.

Which was what I wanted, too, right? To go, and never return? I looked at the statue of my brother and I in much happier times. The leg that Balesur had lost, and that was commemorated as missing on the statue, he had since regrown—whereas my recently chipped tentacle would stay broken until the end of time, or when Thalassamur was swallowed up by the sands beneath the sea.

My damage being permanent felt apt.

“I understand,” I told her, and then before either of us could say anything further, I swam for the nearest hole in the ceiling and propelled myself straight up.

chapter 4

ELLE

“DR. KEPZLER?”

The intercom inside the small compression chamber I was in crackled before it came online.

“Yeah?” I sounded like a cartoon character. They’d been slowly siphoning off the nitrogen in the normal atmosphere I was used to and replacing it with helium, because at pressure helium was safer to breathe, it wouldn’t give you the bends like nitrogen would.

And it wasn’t worth trying to figure out which of the many cameras overhead my minders were watching me from—I couldn’t even pee without a camera during the blowdown phase, in case becoming compressed somehow incapacitated me on the toilet.

“You’ve got a call coming in.” I recognized Captain Darius’s voice. “Do you want to take it?”

He, of course, already knew who was on the other end of the line—whereas I only had a sinking feeling that I did. I rubbed my sweaty palms against the hospital scrub-like clothing I had on to dry them off, not liking the familiar flimsy feel of the cotton.

I was halfway to being pressurized enough to be transferred to the Aquatic Life Research Installation, or ALRI for short, which was an incredibly innocuous-sounding acronym for a mysterious and dangerously deep ocean institute founded by billionaire Arcus Marlow, far past where any international treaties could officially reach. I had no idea how he’d gotten the krakens’ permission to build it—I guessed somehow money talked, even underwater.

And I knew that Mr. Marlow had had enough money to do a thorough background check on me. It wouldn’t have taken long for him to find all the reasons he shouldn’t have hired me on the internet, in either obituaries or medical records; the only point in my favor for this job was a brief stint when I’d gotten into free diving for a year, because I’d been working on a dig by the Blue Hole in Egypt. It was strange skill to have, diving into the water without gear, to see how far down you could go.

Little did I know though how much it’d prepare me for my current life.

I felt like I’d been holding my breath for months.

“Doctor Kepzler?” the captain asked again.

I exhaled, in a rush, knowing what was coming. “Yeah, I’ll take it,” I said, and heard a familiar voice come on the line.

“Hey, Elle.” It was my husband, Grant.

“Hey, baby,” I said back, out of longstanding habit, and bit my tongue too late. “What’s up?” I asked, trying to sound cheerful. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I didn’t want it to go down like this.

He groaned on the far side of the line. “I forgot that you were going to sound like Donald Duck.”

I snorted. “Me too.” Then there was a long pause, during which I only grew more certain of how this conversation was going to go. “This call’s probably costing someone a thousand bucks a minute, so hopefully it’s collect.”

He gave a sad laugh, and then began. “I just can’t do this anymore, Elle. It’s not you, it’s me.”

A bitter taste zapped across my tongue, and I became deathly still. I’d known the knot of our relationship had been unraveling these past few months, but I’d wanted to live in denial, and so I had, hoping that we’d find a new normal together.

Only we hadn’t—

“And it’s not about the double, either.”

I rolled my eyes to the low looming ceiling of the pressurized cargo container I was in and sighed.

“It’s not, Elle. I’m better than that. You know it’s true.”

“I don’t know—seems like you love me less now that there’s not breasts involved.” I was sarcastic on purpose, because I wanted to hurt him like he was hurting me.

Hadn’t I been hurt enough already? I’d found out the hard way that I had the BRCA gene which genetically predisposed me to breast cancer like whoa when my sister Lena died, almost overnight. She and I each had half of a heart tattooed on the inside of our left wrists, so they’d match up with each other if we held them together just right—and right now it felt like the other half of my heart was missing.

I’d gotten a double mastectomy the day after her funeral, and here Grant was, breaking up with me.

He was the last person I had left alive that loved me, and he’d only lasted six months solo.

“It’s not that at all!” he protested. “It’s the future.”

As in, we didn’t have any.

I’d finally gotten enough of a name in my field that I felt safe taking time off from work, and Grant and I had had a giddy month of trying to get pregnant. It didn’t happen, but we were undeterred, until I’d gotten the news about Lena. Caring for her took sex off the table entirely, and then when I tested my own genes and found out that I was also at risk, and any of my offspring would be too—I went from dreaming of motherhood to being horrified by the timebomb I’d become, while watching Lena fade away.

“I don’t mean to be cruel,” he said, going on. “It’s just that—you know how my family is.”

I nodded, but only the crew members watching in the ship above could see me. Grant’s mother dropped hints for us to have kids like old men at the park dropped crumbs for pigeons.

“There’s always adoption,” I said—like I’d told him a hundred times before. But I already knew what he’d say before he said it.

“Not for me.”

I didn’t understand that in the least. Kids were kids. How could you not love them? Why did they have to be yours?

“Because you’re so special?” I scoffed. If this was the end, I was bringing out the knives. “Because you can’t love someone who doesn’t look like you?”

“Elle—”

“Or because you know you can still go on and have a family without me?” I said, my voice rising higher even than the helium. “Because you don’t love me enough to stay.”

I heard the words echo in the chamber I was trapped in, and imagined them reverberating up the line and into his ear—and him standing there, listening to me drowning, from the safety of his shore.

“I do love you, Elle,” he said softly. “I’m just not in love with you anymore.”

I’d had to fly halfway across the world for this job, and then live in an isolation tent by myself for a week to make sure I wouldn’t be bringing any active infections down to any of the other crew members at the bottom of the sea. “And you couldn’t have told me that before I left our apartment?”

“I didn’t have the guts, okay? Is that what you want to hear? Fine. I’m not as strong as you—I think we both know that. Is this the easy way out? Yes. The thing is, I don’t care anymore, Elle. And you deserve someone who does.”

A weight heavier than all the atmospheres of pressure being placed on the outside of this submersible’s shell landed on my shoulders.

“I’ve gotta go, Elle. I’ll have papers waiting for you when you come up,” Grant said, then waited for me to respond. When I didn’t he continued. “I’ll be fair—I’ll—”

“Fair?” I screeched. I’d just lost everyone I’d ever loved, and was still grieving the loss of my future, then I caught myself. Technically, I was at work and in front of an audience—and what’s done was done. “Goodbye, Grant,” I said with force, and then mimed hanging up a phone to one of the cameras. I heard the connection sever. “And fuck you,” I said more quietly, before throwing myself into my bunk to read my tactimetal suit’s manual one more time.

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.

chapter 6

ELLE

TEN HOURS LATER, the compression chamber I was in shifted. “Prepare for docking!” the intercom announced.

I was honestly surprised that Arcus Industrial hadn’t decided to yank me back out. Either there was sunk cost fallacy involved, or someone really liked the paper I’d released on an ancient avian harmotone language last year. It’d taken me months of studying old relics before I realized that the hieroglyphs on their tablets represented actual sounds based not only on the image itself, but on the depth of the glyph’s carving. It made sense, because so much of the native South American avian tongue involved changes in volume rather than changes in the individual sounds—I’d just been lucky there was a centenarian Quetzalcoatl elder who recognized the sounds from his own great-grandmother, in his childhood, and who could independently confirm my theory.

Then again, I was trapped in this chamber with a bunch of crated supplies—maybe they just wanted to finish dropping things off at the lab before taking me back up again.

“Docking initiated!” the intercom shouted again, and I heard a solid thunk as the chamber I was in mated with the laboratory.

I got up and walked over to the door, waiting for the go-ahead to open.

If I opened it up a hair too early, I would die faster than I could even think about it. The air inside the chamber would burp out, and the ocean would rush in and hit me like a brick wall. The concussion might kill me, but if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be crushed; flesh was far too solid for that. But any air that was inside my body would shrink down, instantly compressed to the current undersea pressure, which meant my lungs would be yanked from the inside of my rib cage and shrunk down to the size of golf balls—and then I’d definitely pass.

“Airlock safe! Door clear to open!” was announced overhead, and I was able to dial the locking mechanism open on my side, like I was opening up the vault of a safe, retracting the two massive arms that were braced into either wall of the chamber.

The same thing was happening on the other side of the door, I knew, and soon I’d meet the team I’d be entrusting with my life—assuming no one had secretly fired me.

I let go of the breath I’d been involuntarily holding as the door in front of me opened up, revealing a curvy dark-haired woman and a lanky Norwegian-looking man.

The woman spoke at once. “Did they send you with lettuce?”

I was speechless. “Uhh—”

“Nothing’s ever going to be crisp down here, Donna, sheesh,” the blond giant spoke up as he pushed his hand out. “I’m Marcus.”

“Maybe they sent snap peas?” Donna asked, forlornly, before laughing. “I’m Donna.”

“What I’m hearing is you miss the color green. I’m Elle.” I shook both their hands, while looking beyond them for more people. “Is it just the two of you?”

“And baby makes three!” Donna said, pointing at me.

“Ha ha.” I laughed awkwardly, rather than let on how her joke stabbed me to the core. It wasn’t her fault, and I didn’t want either of them to think I was an emotionally wrecked weirdo.

We had two months down here together for them to discover that.

At least I wasn’t fired.

“Just the two of us,” Marcus confirmed, as he edged around me in the narrow neck of the hall that connected our two abodes. “We’re more than enough, as you’ll come to find. Let’s unload first, then we’ll show you around.”

chapter 7

ELLE

I HELPED Donna bring in all the crates of supplies that’d come down with me, becoming just as pressure acclimated as I had, tucking them into a storage alcove in the hallway, while Marcus filled the submersible back up with color-coded duffle bags full of . . . trash?

But some of them made clinking sounds when he set them down, and unless there were beer bottles on board, or one of them was distilling their own hooch, I doubted that was the case.

“How long have you all been down here?” I asked as Donna and I finished. She started going through the crates, popping off lids to look for fresh vegetables, while I helped take up Marcus’s cause. His duffle bags were heavy, and now that I was carrying them, I could see that all the zippers were tag-locked.

“That’s classified,” Marcus grunted as he set a bag down.

It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t joking. “Oh.”

“Welcome to the private sector,” he said, with an amenable smile.

“How long does it feel like we’ve been down here? You can ask that, though,” Donna said, coming up. “Because I feel like we’ve been down here for long enough to miss the entire last season of Gray’s Anatomy.”

“Donna,” Marcus groaned her name as he walked into my submersible to take one last look around.

She didn’t care, she pounced on me. “What happens?”

“I—I don’t watch.” And even if I had, I would’ve stopped the second my life started intersecting with hospitals in bad ways.

“What? What good are you! Who doesn’t watch Grey’s?” Donna said, stomping her foot.

I raised both hands helplessly. “I would’ve, if I’d known.” A little white lie wasn’t going to hurt anything.

“Yeah, you seem like the helpful type.”

“Okay, that’s everything,” Marcus said, returning, then looked to me. “Last chance to stowaway back home.”

And go back to my sister’s grave and my soon to be ex? I put my hands into my Arcus Industrial branded pockets. If my new boss hadn’t fired me, I sure as shit wasn’t going to fire myself. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for a bit.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “Just remember later on, I gave you a choice,” he continued, then shooed both Donna and I back, spinning shut the doors.

My jaw dropped a little at his phrasing, but Donna grabbed my arm before I could say anything. “There’s the whole rest of the lab to see—come along!”

She picked up a crate and made me do the same, then we took them both into the kitchen, which was the nearest wing to the chamber dock. It seemed state-of-the-art to me—I was used to going out to digs and making due with whatever we could hike in with us, sometimes for weeks at a time, so I was entirely okay with a lack of fresh greens.

It did look a little lived in, however. There were scuffs from their boots on the smooth metal here and there, and I saw a flash of a poster taped inside one of the cabinets where Donna was restocking supplies.

The sight of it made me smile. Humans were going to human, no matter where they were.

“Who is that?” I wondered aloud, when she put away some condensed milk and I saw it a second time.

“McDreamy, d’uh,” she said, looking over her shoulder in no small amount of horror. “You really don’t watch, do you!”

“No, sorry,” I said and winced apologetically.

She snorted to let me know what she thought of that, and then it was as if she read my mind. “I put it there because Marcus never cooks. It’s not sexual harassment if he never sees.”

I couldn’t help but grin at her. “Unassailable logic.”

She nodded smartly. “Thank you—and hand me that?”

I helped her restock, learning where everything was in the meantime, while Marcus handled disconnecting the smaller submersible and sending it back aloft.

“Want to see your room?” she asked when we were finished.

“Room” implied I got to close a door on them—a rare thing on a scientific adventure. “Yes?” I said hesitantly, braced to be introduced to a bunk bed in a space we all shared.

“You really do,” she promised, and then led the way through another one of the circular doors into another short hall.

I could tell all of ALRI was built out of separate modules—we walked past an engine room, and she announced, “Don’t go in there, and don’t ever touch anything,” then took us past a large operations node, with several desks in front of a bunch of computer screens, currently reporting in scrolling data, and she tsked when I got distracted. “This is all Marcus’s, don’t touch anything here either,” she said, jerking her head further down the hall.

And there was an actual hall, with actual doors in it. Circular doors, clearly less substantial than the ones between the prior modules—but there were quite a lot of them. “They had to house the workers when this place was being built,” Donna explained. “This is mine,” she said, “and this is Marcus’s.” She pointed at the second, and then we reached the third. “And this is yours,” she said, rolling it open to show me like she was doing a magician’s trick.

Inside, there was a space like a college dorm room, with a small desk, a narrow bed, and—“A window?” I asked with a gasp. “Down here?”

Marcus caught up, ducking into the room to join us. “Yeah, it’s insane.”

The window faced out onto utter darkness, just a yawning, gaping black.

“If I turn the outside lights on, all sorts of critters will swim up to say hi,” Donna said, preening a little at my awe. “But don’t worry. I won’t do that without telling you.”

I stepped forward, waving my hand in front of me, realizing the window was slightly concave, bubbling forward into the nothingness beyond.

“I put a blanket over mine for the first two weeks,” Marcus offered.

“Scared of the dark?” I guessed, looking back at him.

“No. Because I have no idea how the thing doesn’t shatter.”

“Oh,” I said softly. I hadn’t been worried before—but now I was.

“ALRI is full of surprises—wait till you see the dock.”

I was mystified. “Where I just came in?”

“Nope. C’mon,” he said, and led our group back into the hall. We went back to the office-node—which I now realized was the center of the operation, and that all the rest of the halls radiated off of it, rather like a starfish—and took a different door.

And it, too, opened onto a curtain of blackness—only in here, I could also hear lapping water.

Because one whole wall of the room was the ocean.

If I hadn’t so recently stared death in the face twice, my sister’s and the potential of my own, I would’ve jumped back into the hall we’d come from and slammed the door on utter instinct.

“What the fuck is that?” I demanded, feeling anxiety swell in my chest.

Marcus gave my fear an accommodating nod. “It’s what we have that no other sea floor facility has had before. The ability to keep a portion of the space pressurized with magic.”

I finally hazarded to look around and saw the dive suits that were stored in alcoves along the wall. There were six slots, but only two tactimetal suits, with their umbilical cables neatly looped above them. I knew from the manuals I’d been given to read up on that they were each five million dollars a pop, and realized this was where we walked—quite literally, walked—them into the sea.

No chambers, no doors, no airlocks.

We just put on our suits and walked down the goddamned ramp.

“And that’s open water?” I wasn’t proud of the way my voice rose up, but I had to hear him say it. Because I could see it rippling and hear the slight sloshing sounds it made and scent the salt and what I assumed was deep-ocean funk in the air—if I was hallucinating, I needed to know.

“Yeah. If you cross that line, though,” he said, gesturing to a red-laser created square hovering about six inches on our side of the water, “without a suit, you’d die. Or if you fell in, got pushed, et cetera—no roughhousing in the dock room.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“And don’t put your hand through there either,” he went on, like he’d given this lecture before. “In addition to the pressure, that side of the line is fucking freezing, the same temperature as the water outside. We’re heated and powered geothermally, but past that line you might as well be in the sea,” he said, and paused. “Doctor Kepzler?”

“I hear you,” I said, even though I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the rippling blackness. It had the same quality as an old-fashioned static-y TV, or one of those magic-eye thingies—hell, even thunderclouds in the Midwest, if you were lying down on your back on the ground before a storm rolled by.

It felt like if you looked at it long enough you could see anything you wanted in it, up to and including the future, and despite all my PhD-level reasoning, the salty square of darkness had me in a chokehold.

“It’s like staring into the abyss, huh?” Donna asked.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

And just like in the proverb—somehow I knew the abyss was staring back.

I managed to rip my gaze away from it to look at Marcus though. “Are you going to tell me what my actual job is now?”

He jerked his chin up. “I’ve got a dossier waiting for you in my office. Go unpack and then come meet me.”

I WALKED BACK to my room unaccompanied—it wasn’t like I could get lost; there weren’t that many places to go—and my bags were waiting for me outside my door.

I brought them in and tossed them on my bed. The dark window along one wall held no interest for me now. I felt like I’d left a piece of my soul back in their “dock” room, and I was eager to go retrieve it, once I knew why the hell Arcus Industries had shipped me here.

I hadn’t brought much along—just more sets of plain cotton clothing, swimsuits, some underwear, socks, and no bras.

This was the first trip I’d gone on since the double. And I could remember standing in front of my dresser, packing, ready to open up my bra drawer out of habit, before I caught myself.

The nice people at the surgery center had given me some brochures about breast replacements, and I’d hunted down information on the internet. It would just be another surgery to heal up from; it was a common enough procedure.

But I couldn’t imagine doing it just yet.

Because to have breasts again would mean that things were getting “back to normal”, and after Lena’s death, I didn’t want anything to be. My sister and I had fought like cats and dogs, but only because yelling was our love language. Growing up we were both so self-assured, and confident verging on cocky. We knew we would achieve anything in any field we desired, and we had. I’d become a historian and linguist for ancient monster civilizations and she’d gone on to work for a Michelin chef.

What I hadn’t realized was how much of my own success was possible because she was there. She wanted to hear about my expeditions, and was very likely awake any time I called, no matter the time zone. She’d fly out to meet me when she could and give me grocery lists of exotic ingredients to smuggle home when she couldn’t. After our parents died, we’d been each other’s support system, and when something good happened to me, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to her. Same if it was something awful.

So “fixing” what was “wrong” with me, so that I would meet other people’s expectations, felt like it would be a denial of what we had—and permission for me to carry on.

I didn’t want to fucking carry on.

I wanted precisely what I’d had, when I’d had her on speed dial.

I stood in one place too long, struck by grief, which seemed to be my only current long-term relationship—then I made my way to the bathroom to splash water on my face. It tasted strange, and I guessed it’d been desalinated from the water outside. I blinked it out of my eyes, regretting not looking for a towel first, when I spotted something strange on the counter.

A long, blonde hair.

My hair was a shoulder-length brown, and it didn’t match Marcus or Donna.

So either there was someone else I hadn’t met here at ALRI and they were lying to me, or—

“I was wondering what happened to you,” Marcus said, from the doorway, catching me.

I about jumped out of my skin. “Do the doors here not lock?”

“Not if you don’t lock them,” he said with a shrug.

“Whose was this?” I asked, holding the hair out curiously.

His eyes focused on it. He groaned, then hollered, “Donna!”

It only took her a moment to appear. When she did, she saw what I was holding and sighed. “Okay, look, just because Marcus treats me like a scullery maid doesn’t mean that I actually am one. We’ve had a lot of other scientists come through—I did my best,” she said, and shrugged. “I changed your sheets?” she said, apologetically.

One hair didn’t really disgust me, I’d traveled rough before. I just found the situation strange. “If other people have been here, why haven’t I heard about this facility?”

Marcus twisted his head like a confused puppy. “Did you or did you not sign an NDA the length of your arm?”

“There’s NDAs and then there’s hanging out a bar with other nerds drunk. I may not be much of a party animal, but when someone builds something like this,” I said, pointing at the frankly extraordinary structure surrounding us, “word gets around.”

“Not when those people are hired for Arcus Industrial. They don’t talk. Mr. Marlow makes sure of it,” he said, handing an Arcus-branded tablet over.

“I’m going to pretend that didn’t sound ominous as fuck,” I muttered, taking it from him. “How private is anything here?”

“All the bathrooms in the facility are—you’re allowed to shit in peace. Or agony. As the case may be, with Donna’s cooking.”

“You take that back right now, Marcus.”

He grinned at her, then looked back to me. “Other than that, once you’ve started your research, we’ll turn off the cameras to your room, and you’re expected to lock the door when you’re not in here. It’ll be keyed to your handprint, just for you.”

“Wait, are you telling me, I’m classified?” I asked, pointing at myself.

He nodded. “Precisely. None of us can get into this room from the outside if you don’t unlock it. So make sure if you have a medical emergency, you can somehow hobble to the door.”

I made a concerned face. “I’m waiting for you to tell me that you’re teasing.”

“I wish I was, but our instructions regarding scientists are very precise, Dr. Kepzler,” Marcus said and shrugged—and I realized I was going to need to go back to my maiden name, or make my peace with Grant’s last name haunting me for the rest of my life.

It was already the name I’d used on most of my accepted papers.

I ground my teeth as Marcus continued.

“We don’t even transmit out data. We send things out the old-fashioned way, on hardware.”

“Why?”

“Trade secrets. What’s that saying—two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead? Well, it’s a lot easier to keep secrets if you don’t port all your data into the outside world continuously.”

Which would explain all the duffle bags we’d shuffled back and forth, and all the armed guards on the boat I’d come out on, who’d appeared more mercenary than military.

“Huh.” It’d take me awhile to wrap my head around the reasons for all of this, but when he handed me over a tablet, I took it.

“Read up on your dossier and rest tonight. We’ve got your first time out scheduled tomorrow, after your bonding ceremony with the kraken.”

I was already stepping away from them, when I paused, not sure I’d heard him correctly, before slowly turning back around. “You’re . . . kidding, right?” I asked, and when neither one of them denied it, I went on. “No one mentioned that when I was topside.”

“You might’ve noticed, this is a ‘When Mr. Marlow says jump, we say how high’ situation down here.”

I shook my head strongly. “But I don’t want to bond to a kraken.” I was fucked up enough currently, the last thing I needed right now was someone else mucking about in my head. Krakens hardly ever bonded with humans, choosing instead to use telepathic intermediaries—because the problem with bonding was that it was almost entirely one way. Your small human-mind could telepathically talk to a kraken once they’d bonded with you, but those fuckers could see right into your soul and read every thought you’d ever had, from what you were currently thinking down to who you shared lunch with in the third grade.

It hardly seemed equitable.

“They’re supposed to guard you,” Marcus said, gesturing to the open seas outside.

“From what?” I demanded, panicking. Was that what happened to the mysterious blonde that’d been in my room? Had she decided to back out at the last minute, rather than share all of her most intimate thoughts with a stranger?

“I recommend you read the provided dossier.”

Donna reached out and put a comforting hand on my arm. “You’re a xenoscientist, right? I’d have figured you’d love the chance to interact with a kraken. Personally. If you know what I mean.” She waggled her eyebrows as I reached up to rub on my temples.

Everyone always assumed you went into monster sciences to fuck them. “I study dead monster languages and cultures. It’s different.”

“We’re not going to push you out the dock,” Marcus said, and when I gave him another nervous look he went on. “You’re not the first scientist we’ve had here—and you’re not even the first one we’ve seen freak out. I don’t know what’s on that tablet you’ve got in your hand, because it’s classified and will only open with your biometrics, but I do know that every time a scientist reads that, they’re suited up to go out the next day. Read it and see. There’s a storm overhead. You’re going to be trapped here for a bit, regardless.”

Donna nodded strongly beside him. “Hopefully the dossier will explain more of what you want to know.”

“Hopefully,” I said, mostly without any, and then waved them both out of my room.

chapter 8

ELLE

ONCE I WAS ALONE, I sat down on my bed and turned the tablet on. It flashed, scanning my face quickly, and then the screen went live with a video from Arcus Marlow himself.

“Doctor Kepzler, welcome to my Aquatic Life Research Installation, I hope my other employees are helping you to feel right at home.”

I felt my eyebrows crawling up my forehead. If I’d been given some Arcus Industrial employee indoctrination video, I was absolutely going to violate my NDA at the nearest topside bar.

But then the image changed away from him, showing a view from a remotely operated vehicle, shining a light beam into the dark.

“I’ve selected you to be given an extraordinary research opportunity. First dibs on a find from an unknown civilization,” he narrated over the ROV’s footage as a structure came into view.

Due to the way light traveled down here, I couldn’t see past five feet out the entire time, but once the ROV got closer, I realized it was traveling in front of a wall which seemed to be covered in writing. It seemed to glow slightly, like the ROV’s light was setting off some latent bioluminescent organism in the carvings.

I instantly knew it didn’t match any writing I’d ever seen.

“This is the outside of an unknown structure, Doctor Kepzler. I need to know what monster species this is from, how old it is, what it says, what culture it represents—I want to know everything about it.”

I did too. In fact, I was practically drooling over the screen. But why just me, why not a huge team—

“We’re in international waters. Depending on which species it belongs to, there may be jurisdictional issues. And if we’re found out ahead of time, any other group with enough money to excavate it can claim it’s salvage.”

I swallowed—he was right. Any time we did a dig we had to be careful to get the permissions of the groups involved, which was sometimes a morass of legalese, depending on local politics, or if the monster species had any current descendants that we could find. Oftentimes I was in a race against builders who would bribe their way into paving over whatever I could study rather than letting me have at it for a year or two—and I’d read an article recently about people claiming rights over the remnants of the Titanic.

The deep ocean was the wild west, especially where artifacts were concerned.

“So right now, it’s just you. You will go down, investigate the site, and see if you can’t figure out which species or political entities we need to be coordinating with based on your expansive knowledge of monster histories and communications. You give me something solid to start with, I’ll confirm it with other scientists, and we’ll go from there.” The ROV’s footage finally reached the base of the structure—it was at least three stories high.

I was in awe.

“The rest of the data on this tablet is all the information we’ve accrued on the site remotely. You’ll be downloading your data into this same tablet every night, and we will retrieve this tablet the next time we send a submersible for exchange. I will expect weekly reports for as long as you’re down there, and no finding is too small, Doctor.”

I nodded, like he could see me, and then gave a soft laugh.

“And one more thing—while you should follow the instructions given to you by the rest of your crew as though they were me, everything you do in the water and see in the water should be kept confidential. Do not share any of your findings with them. They are merely crew.”

That sounded harsh, but I supposed billionaires weren’t known for being trusting.

“If you agree with these stipulations, and still want to take on this opportunity, say the word, ‘Understood.’”

“Understood,” I said quickly—and then the video stopped and a screen full of neatly labeled folders appeared.

I had the gist of everything they knew so far in fifteen minutes, but I pored through every ephemeral piece of documentation I was given afterwards for the next several hours, scans done by remotely controlled vehicles, infrared, sonar, core samples near the freakin’ thing. Donna brought in my dinner for me, and I only grunted at her, so lost in what I was reading.

“Wait!” I called out, just before she left. “Donna—can I get some paper?”

“Sure,” she said. “But we only have pencils, not pens.”

That made sense—the pressure change to get here would cause ink to leak.

“And don’t go crazy,” she said, returning with both for me. “We don’t get another shipment of supplies until next week, and that’s when we send out the out-going requisition forms. So if you run out, you won’t get it till the week after that.”

“Got it,” I said, then went back to my desk to stop the footage repeatedly and try writing out the “words” to start a rudimentary cryptanalysis, based on image repetition and frequency.

I could’ve probably figured out how to have the tablet help me, but I liked to get into my work. It was the rubbings I’d made of the avian tongue that helped me solve it. And I was glad my suit was tactimetal—it’d give me a limited amount of feeling, so I could “touch” the words myself, tomorrow.

But before then—oh God—I remembered something else was going to have to touch me.

I pulled back to the tablet’s main screen and looked around for a Bonding-with-a-Kraken Manual, then considered doing a search for it, only to realize that there was no Google down here at the bottom of the deep. I got up to stretch my legs and started pacing back and forth in my narrow quarters.

Had the structure been made by ancient krakens? Was that why there was a kraken assigned to the project?

I didn’t even know if krakens had any technology. In fact, I didn’t know much about them past their obscene strength and telepathy. They kept to themselves, and humans generally avoided them. I’d never given a shit about them because they were a living species.

But they must have had some way to pass along information from one generation to the next. Was this structure something they’d lost? Did it pre-date them, or was it part of their mythology?

Six hours later, when my body was telling me I needed to sleep even though I disagreed, I bothered to take a few bites of my now-cold food, and when I was done, I went to go look out the window.

This whole situation was perfect. It was the kind of work I could throw myself into for the next few months—hell, decades, depending on what we found. With Arcus Industrial at the wheel, I’d never have to beg for grants or wonder when the money would run out.

And if I had my druthers, I’d never resurface again. Grant could just forge my signature on the divorce papers for all I cared.

But thinking of him—I realized I still had my wedding ring on my left hand. It was a simple gold band, the only jewelry I wore. My diamond solitaire engagement ring was safe in a jewelry box at home, because I never wanted to take anything fancy out to worksites—maybe Grant could give it to his new baby momma when he found her.

I imagined him bouncing all the children he could have without me on his knees.

Fair, I spat in my mind, just how he’d said to me.

I twisted it off my ring-finger and then came to a sudden decision, walking out of my room and back down to the dock.

The square of ocean there was every bit as mesmerizing as it had been earlier, rippling just behind the magical forcefield that kept us safe. I walked until I was six feet in front of it and hurled my ring at it without a second thought.

It plunked into the water and then tumbled almost straight down inside.

I’d been hoping it’d go further, but I couldn’t see it now, and that was good enough.

Whether I liked it or not, I was free.

chapter 9

CEPHARIUS

WHAT HAD she thrown into the water?

I’d been following the new human ever since a submersible had decanted her into the laboratory earlier in the day.

I’d been surprised at the sophistication of the structure I’d found on the sea floor two days prior—and even more so that I could see into it. I’d seen humans swimming before and seen them float by in their boats and submarines, but I’d never had the opportunity to watch them live their lives. I knew humans had “aquariums” where they sometimes kept oceanic creatures, but this was the first time I’d encountered the reverse, where they were trapped for me.

They were fascinating, but also pathetic. So small and so uncoordinated. They could only move in two dimensions and were only able to grasp with their hands. I would’ve felt sorry for them if I didn’t know how horrible they could be as a species.

But I hoped that she’d be different. I couldn’t tell just from looking at her—she was possibly more serious than the other woman also trapped inside, but their interactions with one another all seemed normal.

I waited until she was alone, looking at one of their screens—without the ’qa, humans were forever finding ways to transmit information from one to another—and let my thoughts reach out to hers.

I wasn’t intrusive; I couldn’t be without a bonding, but I could get a feel for her just as I had the manatyls.

And when my mind touched hers, I found her mind busy.

Her thoughts were like glints of sunlight on mica in black sand—or viewing the stars above the sea.

I couldn’t tell what she was working on, but she was thinking hard, trying to figure it out.

I watched her pace, I watched her draw, I watched her stare off into space—even sometimes outside, and I wondered if she thought at all of tomorrow, or meeting me—and then she came to some kind of quick decision, and I followed her through the building, until she took off something from her hand and threw it into the water to land beside me.

A token for good luck?

Or another piece of the trash the humans seemed so fond of throwing in the ocean?

I waited until she’d left the room to pick it up and inspect it.

It was a ring, and while it must have come from her fingers, it was far too small to ever fit on mine.

I rolled it in my palm and then placed it into one of the pockets on my belt.

When I’d arrived at the station two days ago, I’d found the structure that must’ve attracted their attention, after swimming out in a spiraling circle with my chromophores lit just enough for me to see.

It was behind a rippling ridge of rocks, and it appeared to be like some of the very large dwellings I’d seen before in human minds. It had a floor and a ceiling, although I couldn’t find a door, and on the whole everything was at slightly curved angles. Portions of it were covered in eons of silt, but the part that was exposed was made of metal and tasted weird when my suckers touched it. I surveyed all of it and found it twenty-lengths high, and thirty-lengths long and wide—and noted a strange graveyard of remotely operated vehicles irregularly scattered around its base.

I couldn’t figure out a way in, but I also didn’t try very hard—I didn’t want the humans to come across it later and see tentacle marks where I’d accidentally smeared biofilm off the sides. Clearly they had a plan for what was going on, and as long as I was included in it, and thus my people, I could bide my time.

Her ring now in my belt-pocket, I swam back to her room, feeling her mind begin to get tired. Once she was there she walked to the window, and I could clearly see concern on her oval face as her full lips pulled into a frown.

What was bothering her?

I found myself curious—and then angry about my curiosity. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t even have to be here! I would bond with her tomorrow and then put in the bare minimum of effort so as to seem helpful, and when this mission was through, I’d be free.

Then she leaned forward, placing her hand against the window. Her skin gave off a low-level light, and I swam back on instinct before realizing the irony of the situation—we would touch in the morning for the bonding.

I just hoped she would be the last person I would ever have to touch.

chapter 10

ELLE

I GOT up when a melodic alarm rang inside my room.

My body ached, and I had a headache like a hangover except the only thing I’d had to drink for the past two weeks had been water.

I’d been doing too much thinking, too hard, and operating heavy machinery on three hours of sleep was probably not going to be optimal, same for meeting other species, but I still I swung my feet out of bed.

The thrill of the hunt would make everything worthwhile. Deciphering a thus far unknown language? Learning new words and their world? I couldn’t imagine anything better. I’d been fueled by adrenaline before. I knew it could keep me going for days—and how amazing it would be to use it for something I enjoyed, rather than stalking up and down hospital corridors after dropping off Lena.

I went to the bathroom, pulled on a swimsuit and another set of my cotton scrubs, then walked to the dock. On my way there I found coffee, a bowl of oatmeal, and pieces of bacon left out on the kitchen counter—practically civilized. I gulped the coffee, wolfed down the oatmeal, and took the bacon with me.

I’d worked side by side with certain telepathic species in the past, but I’d never had to bond with any of them—just mostly keep my thoughts to myself, which wasn’t that hard. I tended to get obsessed with any project I was working on, so it was easy enough to think on that, or if I noticed my thoughts trailing, something innocuous, like small white dogs or English tea sets. If that made me seem weird to the monsters listening in, they’d always been kind enough to keep it to themselves.

You only had “don’t think of the pink elephant” problems when you were too nervous to think of an actual pink elephant, but I was rather shameless where my work was concerned, and willing to think of anything if it got me closer to my goals.

Then again, all of those times before had happened before, when I’d been happier.

Right now I knew if I stopped moving forward, I’d fall apart. It felt like my past was chasing me like a boulder in any number of archeological thrillers I’d seen as a child.

I just needed to concentrate on what was coming up next.

I’d finished the last piece of bacon when I found Marcus and Donna in the dock room. Marcus was standing behind a crane-looking operating deck, using a mechanical arm to pull out one of the tactimetal suits out for me to wear, and Donna was on the floor waving her hands, spotting him, until the suit’s feet touched the ground and it was balancing on its own. I took a step forward to inspect it, surprising her, and she startled, jumping back.

“No sudden movements dockside!” Marcus shouted, as he climbed down from his perch.

“Sorry,” I told Donna.

She shook it off. “It’s not your fault. This room just creeps me out.”

“It technically shouldn’t exist, so I can’t imagine why,” I said, giving her a slight smile. I squinted toward the water, trying to spot where my ring had fallen, but I couldn’t see it anymore. It was fitting that it’d been swept out to sea. “Thanks for the bacon.”

“I figured if you were going to touch a kraken and all, you might need some energy,” she said with emphasis, as her lips curved up into a sly smile.

“If any of them are TV doctors, I’ll let you know,” I said with a snort, and she gave a dark chuckle.

“All right, back it up,” Marcus announced, beginning to wheel a contraption over. It looked like an electric chair from a haunted house, with leather restraints halfway up the arm rests and front legs. “I was up all night building this thing,” he complained, bringing it to the edge of the black watery square, before crooking his finger for me to come forward.

“And it is . . . ?” I prompted, without moving.

“For you. Keeps you still for the bonding. Can’t have you toppling forward into the water halfway through. You’ll need to cuff your pants up.”

I continued to inspect it from afar. “This looks more like I’m being sacrificed.”

“For science. Sexy, sexy science,” Donna deadpanned.

I stared at the thing. If I didn’t know that the find of the century was out there in the salty depths, I never would’ve done it—it would’ve been too weird, too fast.

But I looked down at the empty ring-finger on my left hand, and my half of a heart tattoo that would never match anyone else’s again.

I had nothing left to lose.

I moved to the front of the chair and sat down quickly, tugging up my pants and sleeves.

“That’s my girl!” Donna whooped, as Marcus moved to strap me down.

Marcus was careful not to extend any part of his own body over past the red laser square while he tied me, and he was finished he pushed the whole chair down so that my knees were just an inch or so away from it.

“Have you done this before?” I asked him, as he started to step away.

“No. But I’ve read the handbook.”

“There’s a handbook?” I asked, my voice rising. “Why didn’t I get to read the handbook?” I started, but then something came out of the deep toward me.

I could make out a massive figure floating on the water’s far side. My heart jumped into my throat and my bladder considered emptying.

“Oh no,” I said. “No, no, no—I’m not ready—”

“The handbook said you’d say that!” Marcus shouted, from a safe distance back. “Just try to relax! Don’t fight it!”

I turned back to look over my shoulder at him. “Fuck your handbook!” I shouted, just as something firm, cold, and slippery touched my right hand and then wound about my wrist. I shrieked, and I would’ve jumped the chair away if it weren’t so heavy.

It was one of the kraken’s tentacles. It was dripping wet, and just as frigid as the sea it’d come from. Why wasn’t he—or she!—using their hands? They had hands, right? I squinted, trying to see through the dark water, to make sure I wasn’t being fondled by some other random-ass sea creature.

I panted in fear, then checked over my mind. I still felt alone—which was right—because I was alone—which was why I was down here, doing stupid things in the name of science—oh-my-God—two more tentacles pushed through the barrier, each looping one of my ankles.

“The handbook says you need four points of contact for the bonding to occur!” Marcus shouted from his much safer perch behind me.

“Again, and I mean this truly, fuck your handbook!” I shouted back, this time without turning away from the ocean. “English tea sets. Small white dogs. English tea sets. Small white dogs,” I started hissing to myself in a protective susurration as I saw the final tentacle come through. It looped around my left wrist and I found myself completely immersed in dark water.

Do you know why you die when you drown?

It’s because the oxygen in the air we breathe is the final electron acceptor for your main energetic battery-like processes. Without it, your individual cells cannot function, which means they also cannot work in aggregate—the muscles of your heart cannot contract and the nerves in your brain cannot fire.

And it felt like I could feel each and every one of my cells was screaming for air now.

I thrashed, trying to get free, and was completely unable to. My eyes were closed, so I opened them, but I was surrounded by water, cold and pressing. My lungs were burning, using all of their oxygen up; the kraken must have pulled me into the sea. I needed to reach the surface before my air ran out—why wasn’t I dead yet?—I was dying—everything was agony—

“Elle of the Air—relax. Breathe.” It was a sonorous command, coming from all around, a masculine voice in a tone I couldn’t ignore.

“I can’t,” I whispered, in my mind, with my lips clamped shut.

“You can. Inhale for me.”

I didn’t have a choice—my lungs were on fire—I was going to die with or without water in my body.

I gasped—and found myself breathing air.

The panic I’d been suffused with began to die down, and I realized I was still inside my body, and not the sea. The tentacles at my wrists and ankles were pulsing different colors in a mesmerizing array—and I realized I hadn’t been near death, just sensing what it was like to be him—and I was sure it was a him—on the other side of the water-wall.

It was so strange. And—peaceful.

Quiet.

And—his tentacles cinched tighter for a moment, distracting me as I stared down at them with an open jaw, taking deep breaths of air.

My mind felt disconnected from my body, like I was hovering outside myself.

“I feel the same,” he told me. “Are you here of your own volition?”

I blinked, and realized how curious I must look to him, lashed to a chair like an erstwhile Odysseus.

“I am,” I said, then asked, “You?”

“Yes. And I am pleased I do not need to summon my people to rescue you.”

“Me too.” Although the thought of being rescued by a kraken army had a slight appeal.

What if Andromeda had been pissed when Perseus showed up?

“Your kind’s myths about my people are so interesting,” he said—and I realized he’d been able to hear my thoughts.

Oh, fuck!

English tea sets, small white dogs, English tea sets—

“Calm yourself, Elle of the Air,” he said, and I heard him inside my mind, clear as a bell. Normalcy was slowly being slowly restored. The suckers on the bottoms of his tentacles were pulsing against my skin, and it was like they were pulling me back into my body. “You have my word, as both your bodyguard and a kraken, that I will not pry into your mind without permission. It is just that both of our minds are very close to the surface right now, because of the bonding.”

I blinked and nodded. “What is your name?” I asked, with my mouth and with my mind.

“Cepharius.”

“Of the sea?”

“If you like.”

The safest thing for me to do now was to pepper him with questions, rather than give myself any extra time to think. “How long does this take? How long will it last? What does it feel like for you?”

The last question I blurted out on our connection and then wished I could take it back, feeling myself grow flush, because it felt invasive.

He took my questions in stride though. “It takes as long as it takes. It lasts until I sever it. As for what it feels like for me—I would rather not say.”

“Oh,” I thought softly. “Am I . . . hurting you?”

He paused, as though assessing himself for damage. “Not currently,” he answered, then began unlooping his tentacles from me. “The bonding is through,” he announced, and I sagged against the chair.

chapter 11

CEPHARIUS

FEELING like I was going to suffocate in air was awful, but at least I knew it was coming.

No one seemed to have warned her about the bonding process. I was worried about the bound state they’d left her in on her side—I would’ve rather had her avid consent, but there was no way for me to judge her mind until we were through. I would have to trust in the fact that she’d sat down on her own, and made the journey to the deep to join me to begin with.

I hesitated before putting my first tentacle on her. I had gone three years and thirty days without feeling another’s touch, and I would’ve readily gone the rest of my life.

I didn’t want to mar Cayoni’s memory, or have anyone else erase my sorrow—but to ensure that might occur, the only way out was through.

So I reached across the magical line and wrapped her wrist.

Because we weren’t bonded yet, our contact was merely physical, although my suckers began reporting in all of her minutia. Her wrist was small. Her bones, delicate. I could feel the thrum of her pulse, and the slight heat radiating from her body. And her taste . . . a lick of salt, the last chemicals in which she’d bathed, and something beneath both of those, something inexorably hers—I wanted more of it, and I wound her ankles readily, without thinking. My suckers pulsed against her skin, trying to take more of her in, as if they realized this might be the last contact with another sentient entity they would ever truly have.

I held back my final tentacle, waiting, wondering if her heartbeat would slow down, if she was terrified of me or excited, knowing full well the answer to any of my further questions lay just inside her mind.

I reached out, bound her other wrist, and enveloped her in my ’qa.

My mind’s horizon breached, pulling away from the space I thought of as mine and invited her in to share in it.

I felt her panic as she imagined herself doused in the deep water I was swimming in, and swallowed my own at feeling my “lungs” breathe her “air.”

I knew what was happening, however—she did not. Her terror was a living thing as the same mind I’d admired the prior night thrashed wildly, looking to escape. I envisioned myself reaching for it, trying to send my thoughts to settle hers, wrapping not only her limbs but herself, trying to give her a concept of safety, wrestling her fear for her own wellbeing and—

My colors shifted from gray to black, and a surprising low heat stoked inside of me.

Then I shifted from black, to green, to gray again, each color raking through me, the decisions of my body becoming written on my skin.

It’d been so long, I almost didn’t recognize the signs. “No,” I whispered.

She was thrashing, because she thought herself drowning—but what was happening to me was real because I felt my pumping arm swell and descend. I only barely kept my panic from matching hers as my colors began changing more quickly.

“No!” I shouted internally at what was happening, helpless to stop it because—because—I didn’t want to.

My suckers pulled at her skin like I was trying to drag her into the sea—a thing I could’ve done accidentally if I were not careful—and my mind soared, bathed in the release of mating endorphins. I shook my head from side to side, trying to clear it, attempting to use internal musculature to pull my pumping arm back up.

I didn’t want this—I didn’t want her—I wanted what I had—but it was too late.

I felt her thoughts like I felt my own, far deeper than any obligatory bonding I’d had to perform with humans in the past, and her bright mind didn’t just meet mine—it possessed me.

It sank into all the cracks where I was broken and for a moment, I was whole.

My ’qa had fully taken her in—and we were mated.

I was suffused with her, and she was closer to me than the water I breathed.

I knew her name was Elle. She was thirty-five years old. I knew she was very smart, very sad, and I was to be with her for the rest of my life—while at the same time, I ached with the knowledge that that was literally impossible.

She was of the air and I was of the sea.

This would be the only time we would ever touch, and my heart, that had felt so healed a second ago, was already falling back apart.

What is happening to me?

I felt her struggle with our bonding, and it hurt me.

“Elle of the Air—relax. Breathe,” I commanded her.

“I can’t,” she thought at me. She was holding her breath, still scared she was drowning.

Her drowning was imaginary. Mine was real.

All I wanted to do was be with her.

We would never touch again.

“You can,” I promised her. “Inhale for me.”

I took the breath with her, breathing for her, while cold inevitability began to crush my heart.

Elle trusted me enough to do as she was told . . . but that was it. There was no flare of new purpose from within her, no heat of love or lust.

She was an unmated human and I was doomed.

I was going to lose a second mate—and I already knew that it would kill me.

“I don’t feel like myself.” She didn’t say it, so much as she thought it, and I was able to catch the moment like a bubble rising nearby.

“I feel the same,” I told her, filled with concern. And then I had to know, “Are you here of your own volition?”

If she was not, if I was now mated to someone being tortured—I would have my people rip this entire structure from the bottom of the sea, and pull it slowly aloft in shifts for weeks until she was safe in the air once more.

“I am,” she said, then considerately asked, “You?”

I was now.

I would never want to be away from her again.

“Yes,” I said, relaxing a degree. “And I am pleased I do not need to summon my people to rescue you.”

I felt a brush of her amusement. “Me too.”

And then I saw what I’d seen before in other humans I’d bonded with—some images from a made-up story from their past, of a woman chained to a rock. “Your kind’s myths about my people are so interesting,” I murmured—which ruined things.

I felt her mind flit from image to image, trying to hide herself from me. I shook my head—it only made me want to chase her more.

And nothing about her could ever truly be hidden from me again, but I couldn’t tell her that; it would only scare her.

“Calm yourself, Elle of the Air,” I said, willing her to trust me. I needed to release her. My tentacles were dry, and accommodating the pressure change on her side of the wall was hurting me. I was pouring through my magic—but I wasn’t ready to let her go yet. “You have my word, as both your bodyguard and a kraken, that I will not pry into your mind without permission. It is just that both of our minds are very close to the surface right now, because of the bonding.”

I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Cepharius.”

Left unsaid: the kraken who is yours.

“Of the sea?” she said with a tease.

“If you like.” Because I liked it when she thought about me.

I felt her beautiful mind churn. “How long does this take? How long will it last? What does it feel like for you?”

This last question embarrassed her for some reason that I didn’t investigate. I’d given her my word, but more than that, I knew the truth—the more enmeshed in her I became, the more this would damage me when it was through.

“It takes as long as it takes,” I answered her—but I wanted it to last forever. “It lasts until I sever it.” Which I would never do—she would take a piece of me with her when she left the water. “And as for what it feels like for me,” I began, feeling emotions build inside me, an evenly matched war of hope and fear, “I would rather not say.”

“Oh,” she thought delicately. “Am I . . . hurting you?”

Her question was thoughtful, but only that—she didn’t care.

Not like I did.

But it was better that way—because even if she felt the same, what would it change?

At least this way I was the only one aching.

I gave myself one more sweet moment to feel her heat and taste her skin and listen to her pulse, like I knew I would never get to again—and it allowed me to tell her a technical truth.

“Not currently,” I said, then quickly unwound my tentacles from her before I could make myself a liar.

chapter 12

ELLE

ONCE I FELT at one with my body, I wasn’t scared anymore.

It was like I’d was waking up from a good dream, when it was still clinging around the edges, before reality caught up—and I remembered the last time I’d been with Lena, before the hospitals, when we’d been sitting on my couch together, throwing marshmallows at each other instead of putting them in our cocoa.

“Elle of the Air?” Cepharius asked. “Who is she? She looks like you.”

I blinked and shook my head, as the peaceful bubble of clarity I’d brought back with me popped.

Was that was this was going to be like?

Having someone endlessly look through my life like a photo album?

“It is because you have joined my ’qa,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “This is how my people speak. And I apologize for intruding on your thoughts . . . it’s just that you are very . . . loud.”

“Just—don’t—please?” I asked him, shaking my head. A piece of my hair had fallen in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t brush it back because I was still tied to the chair. “Marcus!” I called out. “Can you get me out of here?” And then, to Cepharius alone. “Just don’t go too deep, okay? There’s a lot of stuff down there I don’t want to share with you. I’m here because I want to be, but that doesn’t mean you need to go exploring.”

I felt Cepharius’s presence lighten in my mind. “I understand.”

“You’re both finished?” Marcus asked, coming up, looking from me to the blurry figure still looming behind the water-wall. Cepharius was even taller than Marcus was, and much broader across the shoulders.

“Yeah.”

Marcus started unlatching the buckles that’d kept me in place—and in hindsight, I was glad they’d been there. “So what are the rules?” I thought out to Cepharius, and saw him tilt his head. I couldn’t make out his face though.

“Now that we are bonded, you will be able to call for me, at any time, and I will hear you, so long as I am near. I will also be able to sense your mood and emotions—these are shared on the ’qa whether you like it or not. But while I have the potential to read your mind, yes, and see all of your memories, I swear to you, Elle of the Air, I will not do so without your permission, inasmuch as I am able.”

“Thank you.” I let go of another breath. “And what will I sense from you?”

“Only what I want you to.”

I frowned at that, as Marcus moved down to unbuckle my ankles.

“Do not be upset,” Cepharius continued. “You already experienced what it was like to overlap me. You did not like it much.”

“It still seems unfair,” I thought out at him. “I’ll essentially be naked, and you’ll be wearing clothing.”

I caught a strong, echoing wave of his amusement on the connection between us. “Do you think krakens wear clothing?” he asked, and I had to bite back a grin.

“Are you okay?” Donna asked, coming up to give me a worried look.

“Yeah. So far.” I brought my hands up out of the shackles to push my hair back, and then stood, as Donna helped shuffle the chair away. “I mean, it’s weird, don’t get me wrong,” I said with a shrug, knowing Cepharius could hear me. “But it’s not . . . bad?”

I inspected my newly freed wrists and saw where one of his suckers had given me a hickey over my half-a-heart tattoo—and suddenly I felt him rush up.

“Did I injure you?”

His concern slammed into me like a physical thing, and I stumbled beneath its force. Marcus caught me fast and hard around the waist before I could fall into the wall, at the same time as I saw two tentacles lash out of the water behind him, either to keep me from falling over—or to drag Marcus in.

“I’m fine!” I told all interested parties, aloud and with my mind, firmly stepping away from the red zone.

Marcus and Donna hadn’t seen Cepharius’s tentacles intrude, but I sure as hell had.

“What was that?” I thought as loudly as I could in Cepharius’s direction.

“Nothing, apparently,” he responded, sounding slightly wounded. “But the marks on your wrist—”

I inhaled and exhaled, trying to calm the both of us down. “You just broke some capillaries is all. And the stronger line is a marking I chose—” I started, and then decided to not excavate everything in front of him if I could help it. “It’s not a big deal. My skin is softer than yours,” I finished quietly inside my mind.

“I had noticed,” he told me just as quietly back.

I stared into the water and swallowed.

“Earth to Elle,” Donna said, snapping fingers in front of my face, before giving Marcus a worried look. “You’re going to need to be on your A-game down there, missy. You can’t fade off at weird times. Just because you’ve got a bodyguard doesn’t mean the water’s safe.”

Which brought up a pertinent point. I stared out at Cepharius. “Just what will you be guarding me from?”

He considered this deeply—and I would’ve sworn I felt the rumble of his thoughts between us, like a purring lion.

“Knowing humans?” he eventually offered. “Most likely yourself.”

chapter 13

ELLE

AFTER THAT, there was just the matter of getting into the tactimetal suit. I’d read the manual on it when I was on the submersible; it would keep me at ALRI’s precise pressure, oxygen/helium atmosphere combination, while simultaneously monitoring my metabolism. It was a two-layer procedure, first the drysuit underneath, and then I needed to get into a protective metal shell, to guard me from the additional pressure outside.

I kicked off my pants readily, but when it came to pulling off my top, I paused. My swimsuit was a one piece, and there was no hiding that post-mastectomy I was flat as the proverbial board.

No one else but Grant had seen me—and look what it had done to him? But I changed my mind’s course quickly. English tea sets. Small white dogs, I thought, and internally groaned.

Maybe being bonded with a kraken was going to be like a really strange version of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

“You okay?” Donna asked.

“Yep!” I said with fake cheer, then got into the drysuit’s boots. I adjusted them around my feet and quickly wriggled myself into the rest of the thing, slipping off my scrub-top at the same time as I shrugged the shoulders up around me.

After that, stepping into the armored half was easy. It was like this suit had been made for me—and with Arcus Industrial’s money behind it, there was an actual chance it had been.

Marcus took his spot back in the crane-operating nest and started unlooping the umbilical cable I’d be dragging into the sea behind me. It held all the plumbing I needed to stay alive at depth: my air filtration system, my heating system, and the power for the cameras collecting footage on everything I saw. The suit was covered in them, and I had bright lights on either side of my helmet.

After putting it on, I felt like an Autobot.

“Are you finally ready to meet me?” Cepharius asked when I was finished. He sounded amused.

“I’m more worried about meeting the ocean, currently,” I muttered in my head as I went through the checks on my suit to make sure all of my connections were secure.

“Ready, diver?” Marcus asked on my intercom.

“Ready,” I announced, then started walking toward the wall.

“Have you ever done this before?” Cepharius asked before I breached it, with a note of concern.

I was glad he was asking me, though, rather than rifling for the answer inside my mind.

“No,” I answered him—and Marcus came on my intercom instantly.

“Are we aborting this mission?”

I groaned inside the suit. It was going to take more practice to not say thinking-things out loud. “Sorry, I was talking to the kraken.”

“And that’s a sentence I’ve never heard before,” Donna chimed in.

Great, now everyone was in my head.

I felt a wave of Cepharius’s forbearance. “I will be nearby but quiet until you get your bearings.”

“Thank you,” I managed to solely think, and reached the water’s edge.

I willed myself not to hesitate as I crossed the line—but I couldn’t help but hold my breath as I passed through.

It was like stepping out onto the moon.

I stood there for a moment, letting all the silt my boots had kicked up die back down.

I was at the bottom of a shadowed plain. The lights on my suit turned on like headlights in a tunnel, but they only penetrated five feet of water in front of me, and my first two steps had already sent up obscuring clouds of dust. I took a few more, careful not to shuffle my feet, following the map the station was projecting onto my helmet’s internal screen, and left the clouds behind.

And now I could see I wasn’t entirely alone. I couldn’t have named any of the fish that crept up to inspect the umbra of my lights, or the snot-like slugs floating by. I wasn’t that kind of scientist, but it was amazing—magical, even.

And everything that was terrible?

I’d left all of it behind.

Half of the reason anyone did free dives was to feel like you were in another world, or outer space maybe, just away, away, away.

This feeling was like that, on steroids.

“All suit systems stable,” Marcus said in my helmet. “Including the diver.”

“Gee, thanks,” I snarked, but I was smiling—a real smile—so hard I could feel it, because I hadn’t had one in months.

“I am glad you like it here,” Cepharius’s thoughts rang out.

I’d almost forgotten about him. “Where are you?” I asked, and then tried to look around, swiveling my helmet from left to right.

“Your lights blind me. I am off to your side.”

“Oh!” I gasped, and moved to tap my suit’s controls, which were a line of sensitive buttons on my left forearm. A tentacle reached out to stop me, and I only barely bit back a shriek of surprise at seeing it.

“I will be fine. You need to see.” His tentacle paused before wrapping me again, and I viscerally felt the memory of his touch at my wrists and ankles. I wondered if it would always be like that, for as long as we were connected, but then tried to push that thought from my mind.

Small white dogs.

“Keep following the map, diver. Twenty meters forward, and ten to the right. You’ll have to go around a corner, there’s a rock formation between here and your destination,” Marcus announced, and I made my way carefully.

As much as I wanted to get to my discovery, I knew it was unsafe to rush under the sea.

“Have your two-legged kind truly been to other planets?” Cepharius asked, from his unseen spot to my side.

“I thought you weren’t listening?”

“I apologize. The bonding is fresh, and your mind is very loud.”

There was no point in being mad at him. “Do you know what the moon is?” I asked, while thinking strongly of every photograph of an astronaut and moon-walking I’d ever seen, probably including some TV shows.

“I have eyes, Elle of the Air. And my kind rise to the surface, occasionally.” I could feel his mind pressing against mine. It was a pleasurable sensation, like when someone brushed your hair. “May I . . . look?” he asked, and I realized he was asking permission to search through my thoughts for more.

“No.” I tried to shake my head inside the helmet but it was hard.

“As you wish,” he said, the sensation of his nearness fading again.

“It’s nothing personal,” I said, not wanting to affront him—and maybe because I liked when he was near. English tea sets, Elle. “Because—how would you know? The difference between a photograph I saw in a class, versus a story I’d seen on television?”

“Television?” he asked, and then pressed, again. This time I didn’t fight him. “Ah. One of your many attempts to replicate the ’qa.”

“Something like that,” I said. “But those are stories—although sometimes we watch the news on television, which is actually the truth . . . depending on the channel?”

I felt his amusement at my inability to account for my kind. “I agree, it would be difficult for me. But you can always choose what it is you wish to show me, and tell me whether or not it is true.” The rock I was supposed to turn at loomed. “Will your cable be safe against this stone?” he asked. I saw some of his tentacles reach out and grasp it, and this time I didn’t panic. They were long and thick, the diameter of my wrist, until they trailed off into delicate finger-like seeking tips.

“Yes,” I thought at him intentionally, though I didn’t really know.

“And now you are seeing if it’s possible to lie to me,” he said—and at that very second, his tentacles became the color of the stone he held, almost impossible to see.

I swallowed. “I was curious about it, yes.”

“You could try to, Elle of the Air,” he said, and his tentacles flashed bright blue, then faded to ominous black, before he pulled them out of my helmet-limited vision. “Things that you think of as true, I would assume to be so, even though you could be factually incorrect. I only have your mind to go on. So you could tell me made-up stories from your television and your news—but what would that gain you, down here?”

I inspected the area on the ground that the umbilical cable keeping me alive would rub against—and it appeared that something else had recently taken that path before. There was an inch deep, four-inch-wide groove seemingly carved around it. Due to the presence of an undersea current, swishing around the base of the rock? I scuffed my toe into the ground, sending up a cloud of silt, but it only went up and then drifted back down.

Someone else had been here before, dragging their umbilical cable behind them.

Maybe I should’ve checked my suit over for blonde hairs.

“Is there a reason you’ve stopped, diver?” Marcus asked on the intercom.

“No,” I answered.

I felt Cepharius give a thoughtful rumble. “Now, that was a lie,” he said.

I thought back to him. “Yes.”

chapter 14

CEPHARIUS

I WAS NOT okay with Elle’s cable.

It looked like one of the cables we let two-legged run across the bottom of the sea, only I knew it housed everything that kept her safe—and there was no way I was going to let it chafe against the bottom of that stone.

I picked it up once she was past me and let it flow through my much smoother hand instead.

If I had my way, she wouldn’t even have been out here at all.

I would rather torture myself and only ever see her again through the windows of her station, knowing she was safe, then have her out here in the water beside me. I knew how dangerous the deep was, and while her outfit seemed well-made, I knew firsthand how many two-legged skeletons littered the bottom of the sea.

Elle walked out ahead without knowing I’d stayed back, as I felt my anger and concern at the situation rising, and I tried to fight it logically.

Another two-legged had been here before and lived. My tentacles informed me that the rock wasn’t that rough. She would probably be fine.

But probably wasn’t good enough.

Not where the ocean was concerned—nor where my mate was.

I was pinned to the spot by a knifelike need to protect her. Cayoni had been a kraken, and thus had some agency beneath the water, but being mated with a human down here?

I would never know a good night’s sleep again.

And then thoughts of Cayoni ambushed me and I felt a wave of sorrow over everything that I’d missed with her, and it reverberated off of this, my current betrayal and—

“Cepharius? Are you all right?”

Elle’s voice on the ’qa was timid, and I glanced up to where she’d paused, slightly looking back and at the ground, probably trying not to blind me.

“No. I am concerned. Tell your helper to release as much slack on your cable as he can to me.”

“Give me a second,” she said, then followed up with, “He says he will.”

I started to pull her cable forward quickly, unspooling it from her habitat. It was hard work, the cable was almost as thick as a palm-span, and I wanted to do it quickly so that she could carry on with her mission—I wasn’t entirely sure what it was yet, but I knew that it was important to her. Clouds of silt burst up from my movement, and I kept going until I heard Elle give a panicked, “Stop!”

I did as I was told, then physically carried the massive pile of looped cable to the rock’s far side, where it could unspool much more safely.

I didn’t realize until then though, as the silt settled down, that she’d come back to watch me.

I threw up one of my arms, to block my large black eyes—darting into the shadows would’ve just made it seem like I was hiding something.

“Sorry!” she said, quickly looking away—which made it easier for me to look at her.

The pale light she carried within her illuminated her face inside her helmet. It made her seem like a pearl trapped inside a shell, and I was filled with urges that the physicality of pulling her cable forward hadn’t helped.

“I just need you to be safe,” I said. I was breathing hard and my thoughts felt rough.

She gave a nervous laugh. “I want that, too.”

Then confusing concepts burbled inside of her mind, and I dearly wished for clarity.

“What do you think of me?” I asked her before I could stop myself.

She snapped back to looking at me. Whatever her answer was instantly made her panic further, and I pulled my mind away from hers rather than find out things I didn’t want to know.

But it was a good question.

I braced myself. If she found me horrific, better to know now than later.

I threw an arm up in front of my face to block the beams from her lights, as they landed at the height of my chest, then scanned higher as she looked up slowly.

And then all of her thoughts were a confusing jumble of things I didn’t understand. “Oh my God—I’m sorry, you’re—” she started, and then her voice and thoughts both faded.

The only thing that came through on the ’qa clearly was shame.

Same as when she’d thought of that other human man in the habitat earlier.

Why?

I lowered my arm slowly, as my eyes grew used to the brightness, letting her take all of me in. My large black eyes were made to see things in almost utter dark, and while my mouth was somewhat like hers, and my lips capable of smiling, I had a solid beak of bone instead of teeth inside it, and beneath that were the grasping line of tentacles that flowed down from my chin, which helped me hold living prey still to eat. “I’m . . . ?” I pressed her, curious what she would answer.

“Pretty,” she offered, and I saw her cheeks grow darker.

I, who was her height and half again, who had eight lower-arms instead of two legs, and who bore the scars of enemies they’d killed in battle? “Pretty?”

I sensed her anxiety and frustration. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said as she averted her eyes, taking the beams from her helmet with them.

I wanted to tease apart her thoughts more thoroughly, but I knew if she felt my mind move against hers, I would lose all her trust and never regain it.

“Perhaps I can be,” I said, letting myself flush a soothing green and creeping back into the periphery of her vision. “What is your favorite color, Elle of the Air?”

She’d regathered herself—and had some conversation with the humans she’d left back at the station. I waited patiently until she was finished.

“Royal blue,” she told me, daring to look slightly up.

“Think on that color. Hard. And let me see,” I told her, and she did, showing me an array of times she’d seen it—on items of clothing, feathers from birds, the paint on a favorite wall, and in the memory of that other woman’s eyes. I caught a name from Elle this time: Lena.

I changed my skin to reflect that exact shade back at her, and she smiled.

“My people agree with you,” I told her. “We like this color.”

“Do you speak with your colors?” she asked, now fully distracted from her prior pain. I could tell she enjoyed this kind of topic, and made a mental note to revisit it again.

“Not fully—but we use them to share moods. The color you have chosen we consider sociable and calming. It is the type of color you would flash when seeing a close friend. So now you are right, I am indeed pretty,” I said, retaking my place out of the light and at her side. “And as you are safe—we can continue.”

chapter 15

ELLE

THE FIRST EMBARRASSING thing I’d noticed about Cepharius was his forearms.

The man—I mean, kraken!—was dragging up cables like he was working out to audition for the lead in a Marvel franchise. His shoulders and arms were layered with muscle, his chest was wide, and it drifted down to an exceptionally chiseled stomach, below which his hips were wrapped with a belt that had pockets, and beneath that, instead of legs, he had a kilt of muscle, leading down into eight long, strong separate tentacles.

And watching him drag arm over armful of cable up did importune things to body parts I’d forgotten I even had.

Then I remembered that I was a human boobless wonder, I’d never touch him again, and Marcus chimed in with, “Diver heart rate rising,” at the same time I realized Cepharius could be reading my thoughts right-the-fuck now. I was chilled with so much embarrassment the only reason I knew the integrity of my suit wasn’t compromised was because I hadn’t died.

And then I’d told him he was pretty?

Small white dogs, Elle!

We traveled together after that in silence, me mostly marveling at our surroundings, as the helmet’s map showed the structure nearing.

“I believe what you are looking for is just ahead,” Cepharius told me.

I latched onto the safety of that conversation. “What do you know about the site?”

“It tastes weird.”

I blinked. “Why would you—”

“Twenty feet to screen black,” Marcus said, and I came to an abrupt stop.

“What do you mean?” I asked Marcus, as Cepharius spoke inside my head with concern.

“Elle? Are you all right?”

I held up a finger to tell Cepharius to cool it.

“Past that point, the only people who can see the information you’re about to visually acquire are you and Mr. Marlow,” Marcus explained.

“And the kraken!” Donna added.

Nothing in the dossier had mentioned this. “I don’t understand—”

“All information past that point is classified. We take that very seriously down here. We’ll still be monitoring every other indicator of your health, and there’s a panic button installed on your suit’s chest—and if you tap the button on your neck, we can speak to you, if it’s required.”

“But I’ll mostly be on my own,” I wondered aloud.

“Not entirely,” Cepharius said.

I shook my head rather than explain to him, and walked forward, hearing Marcus count my steps down.

“Screen black in ten . . . in five . . . screen black zero. Good luck, Doctor.”

I paused on the other side of the “line.”

“Elle?” Cepharius wondered.

“They turned off communications on their end.”

“Why?” His concern was instantaneous.

I sighed. “Because this mission is classified.” Which I understood, but fuuuuck. I turned to more profitable lines of thought instead. “What did you mean when you said it tasted weird? Why would you taste it?”

“I can taste things with my suckers—the metal tasted strange.”

“Metal?” I asked—and then the outskirts of my headlights found it.

I took two more steps forward, and then looked up, and found myself standing at the base of a wall of dull metal, at the bottom of the sea.

It was covered in the inscriptions similar to the ones I’d seen in the ROV footage. Each of them were the size of my hand, and any of them that were hit by my light began to glow a cool blue.

“See?” Cepharius said.

“Oh. My. God,” I whispered. I started walking sideways, praying the cameras attached to my helmet were taking everything in.

“It is twenty of my lengths tall and thirty of my lengths wide,” he informed me.

I risked looking at him again. “Then that’s massive.”

“Why, thank you,” he said, with a chuckle. “But yes, it is.”

“And your people have no idea what this is?”

“I haven’t gone back to ask them, since I arrived—but no, I’ve never heard anything about something like this on the ’qa.”

“Would it be possible for a find like this to be ignored—or forgotten—this whole time?”

“The bottom of the ocean is a very large place.” Cepharius’s mind gave the impression of a shrug. “I take it your people do not know what it is, or who it is from either?”

“No. But I am the best person to figure it out.” I ran my tongue along the outside of my teeth in thought. I looked back at how much cable I had left behind me. It was like a leash, and I couldn’t outpace it—which meant the top of the building was probably lost to me. It was frustrating because I needed as much data as I could get, although the thought of deciphering an entirely unknown language—by myself!—without a computer was almost laughable.

I could feel Cepharius thinking beside me. “I believe I can help,” he said, then swam away vertically.

“How?” I wondered.

“It seems my bioluminescence is enough to trigger their intrinsic light,” he explained. He was so far away I couldn’t even see him.

“How good is your memory?” I asked.

“Exceptional.”

“How many of these do you think you could memorize and then think back to me in place order with complete accuracy?” Many monsters had incredible memories, and I hoped krakens were among them. I would’ve crossed my fingers in my suit, if I could’ve.

Cepharius paused for a long while, presumably looking at them and considering. “Probably a hundred. Many of them repeat, which will make it easier.”

I exhaled a little, relieved. If I could run a frequency analysis on the icons that repeated, I might be able to make a start, looking for patterns. “Okay, then—let’s make a grid of things.” I showed him what I wanted in my mind. “You attempt to learn every symbol in that top upper quadrant, and I’ll systematically use the camera down here.”

“Understood.”

WE WORKED in blissful silence for hours, making our separate scans of the structure.

While I had never seen any of the symbols before, after a time I began to get a feel for their general structure. I thought of each of the symbols like bricks almost, comprising the wall itself. There were a different number of vertical slashes in each upper corner, then what I believed to be pictograms in the center, finishing off with a certain repetitive slash across each bottom, like an artist signing their work repeatedly.

I was glad I had the camera working for me, and that Cepharius seemed independently busy, because I couldn’t imagine concentrating on memorizing my own symbols while I tried to figure out other, larger, questions, like how the fuck something the size of a mid-range office complex had wound up here, at the bottom of the sea.

Islands could be destroyed by the same volcanos that created them, but that seemed unlikely given the rest of the terrain, and while my NDA had prohibited me from knowing where in the ocean I physically was, I didn’t think many islands were near places this deep besides.

Could it have been transported out here?

Why? When it was this big, and presumably this heavy? I rapped a gloved hand on the side out of curiosity. It felt solid—and the symbols nearest where I’d tapped it flashed red.

“Cepharius!” I shouted out on our bond, and he raced down in an instant.

“Are you all right?”

“You didn’t have to come down here—just—try touching the wall.”

He did, slowly setting a hand on it, and nothing happened. But if I tapped it—red.

“Do it like I’m doing it,” I said, and he followed my lead.

The symbols flashed red again.

“What does it mean?” he asked me.

I started tapping lightly, and then more heavily, until everything flashed red within three symbols’ length.

“Maybe it’s kinetosensory?” I guessed, and felt his confusion at the word. “Reacting proportionally to vibrations, turning our energy into a color change.”

“Should I punch it to see what it does?” he asked raising up an arm. I reached out and grabbed hold of his bicep quickly.

“No. You could damage it—we don’t know enough yet.” The tactimetal of my gloved hand registered more sensation than I was prepared for, allowing me to feel the insane strength in his muscles as they bunched beneath my palm—then his free hand engulfed my own, to slowly remove mine from him.

“Sorry,” I apologized.

“There is no need. However, my mind is just about full, and you are hungry. Shall we return?”

I would’ve complained about him reading my mind—but he wasn’t wrong. And it was already going to take me hours to “download” the symbols he’d gathered from him.

“Sure,” I said. I knelt down and found a rock I could use to mark how far I’d gotten with the camera, before turning to walk home.

chapter 16

ELLE

I WAS MUCH MORE confident heading back into the lab. Cepharius picked up my cable as we returned, a feat which I did my best not to watch, but it was touch-and-go, and when the dock appeared out of the rest of the murky deep, it looked like a window into a whole other reality.

Marcus began respooling the cable after I stepped inside. I was thirsty, starving, caked with sweat—but goddamn, I felt alive. For the first time in what seemed like forever.

“Give me thirty minutes to get settled, and then come find me?” I asked Cepharius.

“As you wish, Elle of the Air,” he said, and I felt him retreat.

Donna was waiting dockside to help me undress. “Well?” she asked.

“Donna!” Marcus chastised from his spot in the crane.

“I’m not asking about the research!” Donna yelled back at him, and I laughed.

“Everything’s fine. Good, actually,” I said, peeling out of my drysuit. I was sure to do it with my back to them, and my face to the water, until I could grab my scrub top and pull it back on. “How’s the water pressure for showers here?” I asked her, hitching my scrub pants up.

“It’s great!” Donna said, then leaned forward to quietly whisper, “Also there’s nozzle attachments. Only thing here that’s kept me sane.”

I gathered her meaning and blinked, before sparing a glance at Marcus. “You sure you haven’t missed three seasons?” I teased, then asked, “Is he not single?”

“Would you date him?” she countered, then sighed. “He’s too serious about the mission. Won’t even tell me his last name.”

I blew air through my lips and gravely nodded. “Sorry, then.”

“Eh, it’s all right. My contract down here’s only for another two months.” She shrugged. “Go take your shower, and I’ll bring dinner to your room—unless you’re eating it with us?” She gave me a hopeful look, and I winced. I had a metric shit-ton of data to go through and limited resources.

“I’m sorry—I really need to get started.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what everyone says.” She rolled her eyes but still smiled as I ejected the suit’s data sleeve to upload to my tablet, and started walking away. “Just so you know, it’s chipped beef tonight!” she called after me.

chapter 17

CEPHARIUS

I WENT BACK to Elle’s window immediately, waiting for her safe return. She went into a smaller room inside her own, and then came out of it with wet hair, and I realized what she’d been doing—I always found it curious that humans bathed in water, when no kraken in his right mind would bathe in air. She had a towel around her body, but she dropped it to dig through a small chest of drawers, allowing me to see all of her for the first time.

I knew that spying on her was shameful and I should look away, but by the time I could’ve talked myself out of it, the damage was done. I’d already imprinted her beautiful figure on my memory, the same as I now knew all of the symbols she found so intriguing. She was lithe and lightly muscular, with slender hips and no breasts or mammalian nipples, just a matched set of scars where they might be.

The sight of her scars made me rush to the window. What had hurt her? Was she currently safe? They didn’t look fresh, and I’d never gotten any sense of danger from her while in the station—had she been in battle, too?

Or were they ceremonial, like the lines of bruises on her wrists and ankles that I could now see, that I’d given her while bonding?

My eyes lingered on those for an inappropriate amount of time.

Would that I could cuff her so.

After she’d pulled on clothing, I felt her call to me. “Cepharius?”

I waited a moment before responding. “Of the Sea,” I teased, and she laughed.

“I am glad I please you.” The thoughts came out before I could stop them, and I watched her tense. “I am sorry to be so informal.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right.” I watched her look around her room. “Where are you right now?”

“Outside your window.”

She blinked and turned to look right at me—then realized she’d been naked recently. “How long have you been there?” she asked, panicking, and I got more waves of shame from her, something to do with the man she envisioned—who I decided to hate—and something about the blue-eyed woman, and her scars.

“Not very. I also needed a break from the bond,” I managed to lie.

She’d crossed her arms across her chest—she felt violated. Perhaps not by me, but by something in her past.

Let me see you, I wished to beg her. Let my eyes feast on you as though I were starved.

Then she resigned herself and sat down at her desk—before deciding that that wouldn’t do. She grabbed the tablet and came closer, sitting against the window with her back to me.

I was worried I was being punished, then she moved her wet hair to one side and I could see the curve of her neck. I reached for her instinctively, like anyone would a lover, only to have my tentacle taste her window’s glass.

“Let’s start with your symbols first,” she thought at me, while she turned on her screen, making a grid. I could see it over her shoulder, and then I felt her pout. “Did you happen to count how many symbols there were across the whole thing?”

“I did not. I can tomorrow.”

“Please.” She tapped into the grid she’d created. “Okay—give me the first symbol in the uppermost cover. And then we can go down, or across, whatever’s easiest for you, as long as we stay organized.”

I summoned up my vision and gently pushed it into her mind.

She gasped and tensed.

“Am I—”

“Hurting me?” she guessed, quicker than I could finish asking. “No, it’s just strange, having your thoughts coming this direction.”

“It is,” I agreed. “Shall I show it to you again?” I asked, and she nodded. “Then relax. Breathe.”

“I’m not drowning,” she said ruefully—but this time she was more receptive. She took a moment, and then drew what she’d seen. “Is this it?” she asked, holding her tablet up over her shoulder.

“Yes,” I told her. “Also, you do not have to lift it. The window is curved. I am slightly above you, and I can see all of you from here.”

That made her tense again, and she wriggled to sit in a different way, pulling the neck of her shirt up.

“Is your clothing uncomfortable?” I guessed.

She shook her head. My mind was closer to hers now, so I could read scars-family-sorrow, flittering through her thoughts like the flutter of a sea fan, before being yanked away.

I got the feeling that it wasn’t just because of me—that she’d been living clamped down for quite some time.

“Are you ready for the second?” I asked, to change the subject.

She nodded, and I gave it to her.

IT TOOK ALMOST two hours for her to get them all, but when we picked up speed, it was a thing of beauty. Me giving and her taking, both of us using all of our concentration on the effort, again and again and again. My pumping arm lowered without me thinking of it, and Balesur was right; I was so heavy with the thought of using it on her in the same way our minds were conversing, that I worried if it so much as tapped against her window it could’ve shattered the glass.

When we were through, I swam back so that couldn’t happen—and so she wouldn’t look back and accidentally spot a ninth lower-arm on me.

“What do you make of it?” I asked her, as she started sorting through the pictures.

“I don’t know yet.” She’d gotten up to get whatever food the other human woman had brought her halfway through, and was eating it hungrily, which pleased me. My mate needed her strength. “I don’t think it’s from any culture I know, and I have no idea how it got there to begin with. I can’t even say with certainty what it is.” She set her plate aside and got up to pace. “Did it used to be a building? Was it public art? A temple? A jail? Or another billionaire’s folly—some elaborate ruse, designed to waste Arcus Industrial’s money and time?” There were other things concerning her too, I could feel them. I wished I hadn’t sworn not to pry. “In any case—I need to spend the rest of the night transcribing the information from my camera feeds. You can go away now,” she said, dismissively.

I was not so easily dissuaded. “And just where do you think I would go to, Elle of the Air?”

She pouted out the window. “Were you going to watch me sleep?”

It didn’t seem worth lying about. “Yes. I am guarding you, after all.”

Her astonishment was obvious. “From what?” she sputtered.

“Currently? You, I think. You are tired. Your camera images can wait. Sleep well tonight and be more fresh tomorrow.” Her frown became more prominent. “I am not even reading your mind right now, Elle,” I went on. “It is written on your face.”

And that brought me a new flavor of her wrath. “Are you saying I look tired?”

I didn’t understand. “My job is to care for you. And true caring begins with honesty.”

Her jaw dropped, and I realized I might have said something wrong—but then she laughed. “Oh my God, Cepharius—”

“You can call me Ceph.”

She put her fingertips to her temples and rubbed them. “Okay, then—Ceph. Fine. You win. And I hope you’re writing this down in a calendar somewhere, because Elle Kepzler doesn’t ever let anyone else tell her what to do. But I’ll let you put me to sleep like a three-year-old, as long as you promise not to read my mind during my dreams.”

I was aghast at the thought. “Oh, no, I would never. Human minds are chaotic enough during the day.”

That made her laugh again. “Then it’s a deal. Just let me pretend to have some privacy, would you?” she asked, fluttering her hand at the window like I should depart.

“Of course,” I said, drifting back a little. “I will not pay attention unless you call me.”

I saw her nod, and watched her crawl into bed. She wound herself in her bedding, and I was wishing it were all of my arms wrapped around her instead as I felt a quiet tap from her mind.

“Goodnight, Ceph of the Sea.”

“Goodnight, Elle,” I said, and I felt her slowly drift off to sleep.

I was a kraken of my word; I did not pay attention to her dreams, but I could not help but think of all my own.

I wanted to keep her. I just didn’t know how.

I’d only barely believed the stories of similarly widowed krakens finding second mates, having never met one who had managed it before.

And I knew I’d never heard of a kraken with a human mate—that was the kind of history that would reverberate on the ’qa for several generations.

I felt my stomach sink as I considered what lay ahead for me.

At least the structure was massive. She could be down here for months studying it, with me at her side. And I was so glad that it was just the two of us, and not teams, though I wondered how long it would stay that way.

I also wanted to know how come the humans were so worried about information from it getting out, and what that meant for Elle’s future safety. I didn’t know anything about the other two humans inside her habitat, but I had had enough dealings with the two-leggeds to understand their ways. While the majority of them were good, the ones that weren’t more than made up for it.

Mostly I just felt helpless.

Helpless to change my fate, knowing that once again I was hurtling towards the sharpest pain imaginable.

The only useful thing I could think of to do, was to go and take my frustrations out on the rock that could hurt Elle’s all-important cable. I flexed my arms and jetted off at once.

chapter 18

ELLE

DOES A BODYGUARD COUNT AS A STALKER?

I snorted at myself, still thinking after I closed my eyes.

I believed Ceph that he’d gone away. I couldn’t “feel” him around. I was also sure that was the wrong word for it, but I couldn’t think of anything better—I was just worried I could accidentally summon him, like he was Beetlejuice or something.

Which was really hard, because I did want to think about him.

Hanging out with him today was probably the most I’d hung out with anyone in months. Even Grant, and I lived with him.

Had lived with him. Past tense.

Like everything else in my life.

I ran my hands over my body. This was the new and improved Elle now. Streamlined to be more aerodynamic, I thought as I reached the place where my breasts used to be. I hadn’t experienced any phantom breast syndrome—which was good, because how ironic would it be to be haunted by my old tits instead of my beloved sister—but I still wasn’t used to being me.

Which meant I probably wasn’t in a great place to start a new relationship.

Although, really, how much difference was there between Ceph and Donna’s Doctor McDreamy? Neither one of us could touch them—except, well, I had. I winced, flashing back to when I’d accidentally groped the bulging muscles of Ceph’s arm—and how he’d pushed my hand away right after.

In hindsight, it was humiliating. I rocked my head back and looked at my room’s ceiling.

Just stick to the science, Elle. And English tea sets.

Luckily Ceph was right, I was exhausted, and sleep quickly caught up with me.

chapter 19

CEPHARIUS

I WOUND my tentacles around the offending stone, wriggling them down through the silt I’d tasted earlier. I needed to know just what kind of rock I was dealing with, so I could prepare the acids my suckers exuded appropriately, but now that I was concentrating, I realized it wasn’t stone at all, not really, just earth from the ocean floor in a mound. It’d been there long enough to have a thick crust, but it wasn’t hard. It didn’t need acid—which meant I could pulverize it.

With my hands.

I started doing so at once.

How good it was to get to take action.

I took out all my frustrations on the task, clawing and ripping as I had not since Cayoni died—and then thinking of losing her, I took that out on the sediment too. Why was I the unluckiest kraken there had ever been, in all of kraken-kind? I used my tentacles to grasp and excavate massive clots of sand, sending silt everywhere, feeling the ancient ground crumble and sift away, like the thoughts now running through my mind.

I knew Cayoni loved me. I knew she would want me to be happy—which was one of the reasons why I’d had to leave Thalassamur. Because to pretend that she would’ve wanted me to be alone and despondent for life when I was around other krakens would’ve been impossible.

She would’ve wanted for me to know joy again, if I could’ve managed it, and perhaps there was another world in which I’d made that choice—to stay behind, cope with my grief, becoming the greatest uncle of all time.

But instead, I had not, I had isolated myself, too scared to share any of my pain and now, here I was, about to have everything compounded further.

How was it that I was going to lose both the women I loved? My tentacles hit against the ridge of dirt that was disappearing and it was not enough to destroy that—I moved on and kept going, there was an entire length-wide area here and I was going to break it like my broken heart.

I was positively bestial for hours. Anyone watching me would have been frightened, and when I was finished, when I’d beaten down everything that might pose a threat to Elle and her precious cable for lengths around me, the only thing left to hurt was myself.

I stayed hidden in the swirling silt and sediment that my fury had freed and let my pumping arm descend, feeling it fill with heat and intent. It curved up, the skin on it shaded a heavy purple, begging for release, and for the first time in three years, I grasped it, feeling my fingers cinch its girth. The tiny sensitive muscles that lined the entire outside of my body came alive at the sensation, and my first stroke sent a tremor running through me as I groaned.

Five strokes in, I knew I wouldn’t stop. Ten strokes in, I started to speed up, curving my fingers against my pumping arm’s belly, to help move the seed up inside, enjoying the feel of restraining the pressure.

There was no going back now. Was there shame in this? I was certain of it. But I couldn’t keep being stoic in every facet of my life—the ground I’d beaten into submission proved it. My body craved release, and if I couldn’t give it Elle, then my hand was better than nothing.

Then I thought back to her hand on me, earlier today, when she’d been worried I’d punch the wall. Was that what she thought of me? That I was an animal?

If she saw me now, desperately rutting my own hand, what would she think?

Would she be terrified?

Or would it turn her on?

All I knew was that each stroke I took pushed me further from the life I’d known and pulled me closer to her. I loved feeling her joy and awe as she entered my world. I loved listening to her mind at the wall while she thought. And I loved feeding her my thoughts, with every stroke of each shared symbol, making her mind accommodate mine, bit by bit.

Other tentacles grasped lower on my pumping arm, helping my hand, all of my body working in synchrony, just like it had when I was new on the ’qa and dying to find someone, anyone, to let me hide my arm inside. It was a good thing everything was already encased in darkness; I was going to come so hard I would dye the entire plain around me black—and my chromophores on my pumping arm lit up, taking on a glowing sheen, letting me see myself stroke.

I threw my head back and hissed through my beak, so near release, being ridden by my urges—and closing my eyes let me picture Elle there, stroking my pumping arm along with me, her expression just as lost as mine. My pleasure chased my imagination, and I groaned and jutted, emptying myself, making my pumping arm twitch against my grasp like a separate living thing that I could barely hold onto.

Spasm after spasm flowed through me, and I came like a volcano, feeling the hot byproduct from my body trail down my hands before floating away, the blackness that was my seed clouding over my pumping arm’s glow, until I was finished.

Then I hovered there, feeling just as empty as the plain around me—just like I’d known I would, pumping alone.

But the tension was slowly releasing in my body.

Between that and tearing apart the ground, maybe I could sleep tonight, as long as I was close enough to sense Elle’s ’qa.

And as if thinking about her had given her a voice, I heard her call my name.

“Ceph, Ceph, Ceph!” she called out, but then there was silence. Terrorizing the ground had taken me too far out to truly feel her.

My pumping arm inverted at once, and I raced back through the sea.

chapter 20

ELLE

I FOUND out my imagination wasn’t finished with me when I was sleeping, because I had the most wondrous dream.

You know how when you watch modern dance or ice skating, sometimes there’s a moment when the whole stage is black and then just one person gets a spotlight?

It was kind of like that.

Everything was emptiness . . . and then there was Ceph. He was hovering, like he did in the water, but I was there too, and I was breathing—and dream-me was smart enough not to ask questions, especially when dream-Cepharius looked at me like that.

Like I was the answer to all of his dreams.

I couldn’t imagine that I could be, but what was the harm in indulging myself? How long had it been since I’d had a dream like that?

Or since someone else had touched me, non-clinically?

You never knew how alone you were until you were in bed with someone who left you to yourself.

And so as the spotlights drew us closer, I followed, like a moth to a welcome flame, until they merged, and then somehow we were together, without any clothes. He didn’t have his belt, and I didn’t have to explain why my breasts were missing, or what I wanted—he just knew—and he was fearless. I was surrounded by him, his tentacles grasping and pulling me in a million different delicious directions, and then I felt his thick fingers parting me. He slid one in, and crooked it, as if calling me closer, and I came so hard, so fast, I didn’t even get to warn him. Just one moment he was in me and the next I was thrashing, which would’ve been embarrassing except that I could tell it pleased him, and he kept going, thrusting his finger into me while his tentacles held me still, and I could watch myself being taken by his exceptional hand, attached to his marvelous arm, working on me like he’d worked on my cable and I squeezed my thighs together, shouting his name as I came a second time.

“Ceph, Ceph, Ceph!” I howled in my dream, right before waking up sweaty, slick, and uncomfortable.

It took a moment for me to get my bearings again in my unfamiliar room.

Oh yeah, Elle. You’re still at the bottom of the ocean. And you’re getting it bad for a kraken.

I closed my eyes to try to settle myself, and when I realized I wouldn’t find sleep again, I picked up my tablet and brought it back to bed with me.

A few minutes later I felt Cepharius’s mind. “Elle?” he asked, sounding worried. “Are you all right?”

I rubbed one of my eyes with the back of a hand. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re not sleeping, for one.”

I glared in the direction of my window. “Neither are you, apparently.”

“I can go for days without sleep. You cannot.”

“Can too,” I muttered, turning my back to him.

I thought I could feel his frustration with me—or maybe I was just projecting—but then he asked, “Would you like me to help you?”

“How?”

“Let me back into your mind.”

I sighed, put the tablet down, and then tried to relax. I felt his thoughts brush against mine, and I realized why I liked him—because he made me feel like Lena had when she was near. Like there was someone else strong, intelligent, and dependable in my life.

But I knew that feeling was temporary. Fresh sorrow hollowed me, until a hummed melody trickled into my mind, like a lifeline. It sounded entirely foreign, like background music at a restaurant whose cuisine you’d never eaten before, but I recognized its purpose just before he started singing.

In the deep where darkness sleeps,

And the ocean's secret keeps,

Gentle waves do softly sway,

Carrying all your fears away.

Rest now, young one, in the tide,

Where the ancients do reside.

Under stars that shine so bright,

In the sea's embracing night.

Where the seahorses parade,

And the light through water fades,

There, our tales of magic lie,

Underneath the ocean sky.

Close your eyes, let dreams take wing,

To where the mermaids softly sing.

In the depths, you're safe and sound,

With love and magic all around.

Sleep, young kraken, without care,

In the sea's protective glare.

May the currents guide your rest,

In the sanctuary of our nest.

HE WAS SINGING me a children’s lullaby. I supposed I ought to be embarrassed, as a grown woman—but the linguist in me was charmed, because I was fairly certain no other human had ever heard a kraken’s song before.

I started trying to commit the thing to memory, but I couldn’t before I fell asleep.

chapter 21

ELLE

WHEN I WOKE up in the morning I was alone, but also well-rested in a way I hadn’t felt like in months.

Maybe the dream orgasms had done me good.

Or . . . being sung to sleep like a kraken baby.

I groaned at myself, and wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to look Ceph in the eyes today, just as I was struck with an entirely different kind of horror.

Why had he sung me a lullaby? What if Cepharius had a wife and a family? Oh God. How inappropriate was I being? He was just here to do a job, whereas I was using this trip as Elle’s Avoiding-Real-Life-and-Doing-Research Extravaganza, with a dash of Fucking Horny.

Get it together, Elle. English tea sets!

I managed to tamp everything down, eat breakfast, and then get back to the dock—and Cepharius was waiting for me the moment I walked through to the water’s other side.

“Good morning, Elle.” I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t need to—I felt his mind near mine.

“Good morning, Cepharius,” I said back cheerfully, following my helmet’s map. I could still see some of my footprints from the day before—while the silt’s rain here was never ending, it wasn’t always fast.

“Did you sleep well?” he inquired.

I reached up to bashfully tuck my hair back—and wound up touching my helmet with my suit-gloved fingers. “Uh, yeah, thanks,” I said, feeling sheepish. “So do you, uh, sing that song a lot?”

It seemed like he pondered before responding. “Once upon a time, yes.”

“Oh,” I said, as my stomach sank.

His children were grown.

Oh God, Elle.

You are a perverted idiot, dreaming about somebody’s dad.

Small white dogs!

“So what’s it like being a kraken?” I went on, rather than ask him what I really wanted to know. I felt him laugh in response.

“Just ask already, Elle of the Air. It will be easier, rather than your emotions taunting me.”

“Taunting you? Like how?”

“Right now you’re curious. And that makes me curious why you’re curious, and we could go round and round, or you could just speak your thoughts plainly.”

I closed my eyes inside my helmet, but I didn’t stop walking. “Do you have a family?”

The space between us—what he called our ’qa—ran cold. My eyes snapped open and scanned the helmet’s readouts quickly, trying to tell if my heating line was pinched, before I realized the chill was definitely coming from him.

“I . . . did,” he told me slowly.

And I knew all about things that were intentionally past tense. It felt awkward to just leave it there, though.

“Did you want to talk about it?” I asked him.

There was another long pause. “I am not ready to. I am sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said, shaking my head quickly. I knew better than to pry. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

WE REACHED the place where the helmet told me to turn in silence—only the rock wasn’t there.

I looked around for it. “What happened?” I wondered aloud.

“I moved it for you,” Cepharius explained, from his spot beside and behind me.

“Diver?” Marcus asked, still listening in, because I hadn’t crossed into no man’s land yet.

“I’m fine,” I said aloud, and then tried to feel for Cepharius in the deep. “How? Why?”

“It wasn’t as solid as it seemed. And as for why—because it was in the way. You now have several more lengths of reach from your cable, and I don’t have to worry about it rubbing against it anymore.”

I knew krakens were obscenely strong, but—

“What happened to that rock, diver?” Marcus asked, finally registering what my camera was still transmitting.

“It wrestled a kraken and lost. Ceph—” I began—but then he picked me up and started jetting us both forward at speed. I screamed without thinking, which had both Marcus and Donna in my ear—I managed to tell them I was okay, right before the system cut us off, and I heard the intercom go dark.

“What was that for?” I yelled at him, twisting into his broad chest, which was now a dark shade of green. The multiple rows of pinkie-thick tentacles that lined his chin were the same color, and they streamed just like hair would, except for the way that their tips were curiously grasping.

“I would rather you not tell anyone else much about me,” he said, setting me down again at the base of the wall. “Not even my name.”

“Why not?” I asked, looking back the way we’d come with confusion. “They’re going to notice a piece of the terrain is missing, Ceph.”

“Consider it a favor to me,” he said, lowering himself so that we were even.

I couldn’t read anything from his face, but his bearing said he was ready for action. “You think you’re here . . . to guard me from them?” I looked around, as if there could be anyone else. “If they wanted me dead, all they would have to do is snip the end of this cable!”

“Don’t remind me,” he snapped, and his color flashed as black as the sea around him, before it warmed again. “Of course I know that—but the less they know about me, the stronger I am.”

Which possibly explained why he didn’t want to share anything about his life with me. “Oh. So that’s how it works then,” I said with sarcasm. “Got it.”

I reassembled myself and started pacing the bottom of the wall, looking for the rock I’d measured my scanning distance with last time. I found it, turned my cameras on, then I felt his presence behind me like a weight, until he spoke up on our ’qa.

“My wife and child died. He was still unhatched—but I sung to him through his egg sac.”

I heard his words and a moment later his raw pain at their loss hit me like a wave. I fell to my knees beneath it, putting a hand against the wall to stop me from falling all the way over—and after I did, the colors of the nearest symbols flashed, and kept flashing, for as far around as I could see.

“Elle!” Cepharius shouted, sounding panicked, picking me up again.

This time I didn’t fight it, I let him cradle me.

“I didn’t mean to overwhelm you—” he started to apologize.

“Don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s okay. I asked.” Because we shared his ’qa, I could feel his feelings reverberate, and it was like I was experiencing them myself. I was wracked with agony on his behalf, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, sobbing helplessly inside my helmet, as he tried to soothe me through my suit.

“I am sorry, Elle of the Air—I thought I could tell you without emotion.”

“It’s okay,” I said again, sniffling hard.

“It seems that part of me will be forever broken,” he thought, and bowed his head to mine.

I nodded fiercely. “The best part. I know.” I felt my throat squeeze again, but this time at the thought of Lena. “Can . . . I?” I asked him, on the verge of sharing everything about her anyways, unable to stop all the sorrow and despair that was burbling up.

“Of course,” he said, so I let it all spill out. The good, the bad, how we pretended we were going to be each other’s dates to prom so our folks wouldn’t find out we were dating the Nicholas twins, how she was maid of honor at my wedding, how she brought me my first publication to sign like I was Stephen King—everything, up until she was in the ground.

“Oh, little pearl,” Ceph breathed when I was finished. “I am so very sorry for you.”

“I know,” I whispered, because I could feel it, radiating off of him. I tucked my head against his chest, breathing roughly.

There was no way for me to wipe my nose inside my suit. I was just going to have to spend the next six to eight hours being disgusting.

At least he didn’t show any signs of setting me down.

“I guess this is why krakens don’t want to bond with humans, huh?” I said, after I’d regathered myself, giving him a sad smile through my helmet.

“I started things, if you recall,” he said.

I was still clinging to him. I knew it was inappropriate, and foolish, but fuck it, it felt right.

“Now that your cable has more reach, let me show you more,” he said, and I got the impression we were going up. “These are the symbols I told you about yesterday,” he said, and moved me so that I was shining a light on them.

I was already thinking ten steps ahead, worried about how I was going to edit the parts where I’d been sobbing off of the suit’s camera feed, but then the top of the structure came into view.

I looked around, as far as the lights on my helmet showed. The structure didn’t have true corners, in fact, where the two planes of metal met were sloped and smooth.

And the ridges Ceph had destroyed had been dirt, not rock like I’d assumed . . .

“Oh fuck,” I whispered sharply.

“Elle? What are you thinking?”

“We need to go down. Now,” I said, already wriggling in his arms. It only made him hold me tighter, which in any other circumstance I might’ve enjoyed, but not now.

“Why?” he asked, already lowering us.

“Because—I need to pace.”

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.”

chapter 23

CEPHARIUS

THIS TIME she wriggled with excitement—and I longed to put many more of my tentacles upon her. Every sucker that didn’t touch a part of her felt bereft.

But I managed to contain myself. She was happier now, because of me.

I carried her slowly over the entire side of the structure, sweeping across it at an even speed, and I heard her counting along the way until we got to a place where there were no symbols at all at the very top.

“Why would they stop?” She put her hand to her helmet, as if it helped her think.

“Maybe they ran out of time?” I guessed. “There’s more on all of the other visible sides, but your cable won’t stretch that far.”

She groaned. “I can’t believe how limiting this is.”

“If they’d crashed somewhere more accessible, you wouldn’t be with me,” I teased, and felt her stiffen. I was worrying I’d said the wrong thing, when she agreed.

“Is it possible they landed in the ocean on purpose? Something this large hitting the ground, it should’ve left a blast radius, but there’s still deep cliffs on both this trench’s sides. So maybe if they didn’t crash. If they landed, did they come here to hide?”

I had no idea.

All I knew was I loved to watch her think.

She moved to stare up at me, blinding me with her lights. “If I give you a camera, how fast do you think you could film the other sides of the ship for me?”

“Very quickly.”

“I’ll snap one off of the other suits tonight for you,” she said, then laughed. “I can’t believe I’m going to ruin a five-million-dollar suit—but I think Mr. Marlow would agree it was for a good cause.”

I didn’t like the idea of her damaging any of her suits—what if she needed a spare?—but then I had a different question. “Have they not already taken pictures of them?”

I felt her confusion. “Huh? What do you mean?”

I took us to the ground and released her reluctantly. “Stay here.”

I knew what remotely operated vehicles looked like. I went and scooped two of them up, holding them like children as my lower-arms jetted us back to her side.

She knew what they were the second I landed, too. “The tablet did have footage on it.”

“How much?” I pressed.

“A couple of seconds’ worth. Enough to make me interested, not enough to make my life easier?”

“Twenty of these litter the plain behind the ship.”

She stared up at me, her jaw dropped. “Ceph—when were you going to tell me that?”

“I had forgotten about it, truly, until now. But these have your cameras on them, do they not?”

“They do, but—yeah, I don’t know,” she said, biting her lips together. “It doesn’t make sense.”

I set both of them carefully down. “Tell me more about this man who sent you here, the one who knows more than he is sharing.”

I saw a blank wall of panic in her brain. “Do you all . . . uh . . . how does your economy work?”

“Economy?”

“Oh no,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t really upset. “In the air,” she began, pointing straight up, “we have this thing called money that we pass around and exchange for goods and services, like places to live, and heating. Up there, we have to pay for everything.”

I stared up into the blackness above us. “Why do you not share?”

“Because some people just are jerks and keep more than they need. And Mr. Marlow, the man who is paying for all of this—by some definitions, he’s just the biggest jerk of them all.” I saw her wince inside her suit. “Anyhow, in the air, sometimes when people have more money than sense they try to do things no one else can, or that no one else ever has. Like, admittedly, sending people into space. But I don’t think that’s the case here.” She toed one of the broken ROVs with her armor-covered boot. “Why would he send so many? And what happened to them?”

I looked from her to the wall, trying to wrap my mind around things. “And what will he do with your findings when you share them with him?”

She inhaled and exhaled deeply. “That’s . . . a really good question,” she said and started pacing again. “This thing is definitely bigger than the two of us can handle, Ceph. I’m going to have to report in eventually, and then he’ll send more people down, I’m sure of it.”

“I do not want that,” I thought at her quickly.

“Me either. But I don’t know if it can be avoided. And I don’t know that keeping this all to ourselves is entirely fair. I mean,” she said, with a grand gesture up at the wall with both arms, “what if it’s some sort of knowledge-containing device? Sent here to help us out when it’s the right time?”

“You mean like you?” I wanted to think at her, but I didn’t. She was busy looking at the wall, thinking hard, hopeful, scared, and wondering.

What I wouldn’t give to have her feel that way about me.

Then she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled. “Let’s go back to the ship and see if we can’t harvest any local memory off of these.”

chapter 24

ELLE

“DOCTOR KEPZLER?” Marcus asked, the second Ceph and I passed over the line.

“Yes?” I answered, wondering if somehow he’d gotten a message for me.

“Wow—uh—we’re just surprised you’re back.”

I looked around the inside of my helmet nervously. “Was I gone a long time?”

Did the spaceship I’d discovered have a time distortion field?

“No, of course, everything’s fine.”

“Oh yeah!” I agreed. “Totally!”

“Elle?” Cepharius asked with concern.

“I’m trying to seem normal,” I thought out at him—and not like I hadn’t stumbled across a fucking spaceship in ALRI’s backyard.

“Is it working?” he thought back—and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

My kraken thought Star Wars might be real. I didn’t think metaphors were going to be his strong suit.

“Shush,” I chastised him, shooing him away from my head, so I could pretend I hadn’t seen a motherfucking spaceship today around other people.

Cepharius’s voice came into my mind, very quietly. “Why would you pump your own mother?”

“Ceph!” I shouted, and then I laughed at him.

I’d let him in when we’d both been crying and as exposed as I felt now, I didn’t want to push him away again.

I walked into ALRI through the water wall, but kept my suit on, so that I could safely bring in the ROVs Ceph had carried over. Ceph made it look easy, but they weighed about forty pounds apiece.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Marcus said, the first time one breached. “That seems mission related!”

“Probably!” I agreed, clomping away from the water to set it down gently, and go back to get the second one.

“I will go get you some more of your submersibles,” Ceph said. “This time I’ll look for ones that seem more intact.”

“Thanks,” I thought after him, while Marcus came down from his crane-nest and pointed at the broken metal box at my feet like it offended him.

“How am I supposed to ignore that?”

I put both my hands on my hips and stretched my back. “I don’t know what to tell you, Marcus. Don’t look at it, maybe?”

I heard Donna snicker as she helped me take off my suit.

CEPHARIUS SPENT the next two hours bringing in any ROV that he could find, and I did my best to pop out any local memory circuits, hoping that I’d be able to run them through my tablet tonight. I got used to feeling Ceph’s presence ebb and flow as he came near and then went far physically.

“Are you two playing fetch?” Donna asked, unafraid to hang out in the dock room with me.

“Something like that,” I said, rubbing my gloved hands to warm them up—the ROVs came in at the temperature of the sea, so they were freezing—and I wasn’t familiar with all of Arcus Industrial’s tech. Plus, they weren’t all the same. But the dock room came with power tools, and I wasn’t afraid of using them.

She watched me eviscerate another ROV, pursing her lips and blowing air through them. “Damn. I really want to ask you things.”

I pried off the latest ROV’s top with a grunt. “I don’t know if anything I could tell you would make sense.” It looked like the sea had gotten into this one; it was filled with sand inside.

“What do you want for dinner?”

“Whatever you feel like making. You’re a good cook,” I said, taking a moment to grin at her as she squinted at me warily.

“And you’re just one of those people whose happy she’s not cooking, aren’t you.”

“Guilty as charged.” I laughed. “See you in a little bit.”

I felt Ceph’s presence coming near again, and turned to smile out toward the ocean.

“This is the last of them, little pearl,” he said, parting the black square of water to hand a final ROV over—it looked like it’d been stepped on by Godzilla, and sand had scoured almost all its paint off. I guessed it was the oldest of the lot. “Doctor Pearl,” he then said, correcting himself, after I dropped the ROV into my line.

“I was teasing.” I liked him having a nickname for me—I just wasn’t ready to tell him that quite yet. I stood up and took the gloves off my hand. “I think seven of these might work. I’ll try to dock them to my tablet before dinner.”

“But you will eat?” he asked, and I felt the press of his concern.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I could only barely feel my fingers. How did he live out there? “You should go eat too, Ceph.”

“Taking care of you fills me.” He said it like it was the world’s most simple explanation—and then he did something unfamiliar on our ’qa.

He panicked.

I felt a wave of anxious energy from him as he tried to explain. “I apologize. That thought was not for you.”

I stared at the black square where all of his life was. Out there. Without me.

But he’d called me his “little pearl” more than once before now, there was the way he’d held me at the site—and then he said things like that?

If I didn’t know better, I’d start to assume that Ceph liked me.

I’d guessed the structure was a spaceship with fewer clues.

“I think we need to have a talk, Ceph,” I thought out at him.

There was quite a long pause, and then he agreed. “Yes. I suppose we should. But it can wait until after you eat. Enjoy your dinner,” he said, and then I felt his rapid departure.

chapter 25

CEPHARIUS

WHAT IN THE depths had I been thinking?

I had a feeling that I’d just ruined things with Elle, which was why I’d swum so far away I could only barely feel her.

I knew I had come on too strongly. She’d only been beneath the waves for maybe two of her air-days, and now she was frightened. I could feel it when she was staring out at me.

She liked me, yes, but not to the degree that I liked her.

That I wanted to care for her.

That I would now yearn for her, until the end of my time.

I inhaled and exhaled deeply, sending up soft clouds of silt all around.

Something about being soft with her at the wall earlier had tricked me—made me think that we were closer than we were. Or maybe it took two-legged longer to feel a mating? Had I ever heard of any stories of their mating one another? There were trickles of love stories all over Elle’s mind, but none of them were real, they were all movies, books, or her TV.

And none of them called it what it was.

But they didn’t use the same word we did—and they didn’t have the same concept.

Other monsters understood, I knew, having conversed with them before.

But humans?

How could anyone be mated to one? They were shallow and fickle and oftentimes disastrous.

Except for Elle.

Who was not.

Who was perfect for me.

I just didn’t know if she would ever realize it—and there was no one else around who could help.

For the first time in my long absence away from my people I missed the ’qa. Because if I’d been closer to another kraken, I could’ve reached out, and they would’ve shared my burden. Given me advice, or quiet understanding.

I wouldn’t have had to suffer like I currently was, alone.

I looked back into the darkness, where I knew the lab to be.

Was Elle also hurting?

Thinking that she was going to have to say cruel things to me?

Pain was the knife with a million different blades. Was my affection cutting her as well? Was she weighed down by the knowledge that she needed to speak to me?

I both wanted to swim closer to hear her thoughts, and wanted to swim far enough that I’d never be hurt again, which was why I’d gone up to the Cold Upper Sea to begin with.

If only Balesur had left me there—but then I wouldn’t be here, with my heart in my hands, holding it out to a human.

I loved her.

And I was mated, even if she was not.

Mates did not run away.

chapter 26

ELLE

I DECIDED to go to dinner with the others, rather than sit in my room alone wondering why a kraken had a crush on me. My presence thrilled Donna, but Marcus much less so.

She and I chatted about pets we’d had growing up, times we’d been to the same cities: New York, LA, and Chicago, how weird it was to miss weather, because everything was permanently temperature controlled down here, and at the end of it, when I was helping her clean up, she stopped me.

“Thanks.”

I looked around ALRI’s small galley, as though there were someone else nearby she might be talking to. “For what?”

“For hanging out,” she said, giving me a tight smile. “Things always get weird with you all here. Marcus likes to pretend it doesn’t happen, whereas I just dive into the awkward.” She grabbed the nearest plate and began scrubbing it. “You’re gonna get all busy soon and forget we exist, and while I don’t want you to feel bad that you do—I just want you to know how nice it’s been to have another woman to talk with. It’s been a dick festival down here for months.”

I almost choked on my own tongue and then laughed out loud, not just in my mind. It felt good—like I was talking to Lena.

“It just gets so boring, you have no idea,” she went on. “I’ve read all the books I brought twelve times already. I’ve watched all of Friends, Homeland, you name it. I think I can recite the whole first season of Grey’s from memory. But it’s not the same as talking to someone new, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then thought around. I couldn’t feel Ceph nearby, and Donna was as close as I was going to get to a confidant down here. Plus he wasn’t technically mission related—hell, they’d both seen him. “Donna?” I asked, and she looked over. “Would you date a kraken?”

She stared at me as her eyes went wide, and then she got a serious look. “Girl, I have been down here so long I would date a fried fish sandwich.”

I giggled at the preposterousness of her statement. “How would that even work?”

“You tell me!” she said, laughing back. “Love is love, baby! But—a kraken? Really?”

Saying it like that made it sound like there might be room for more than one in my heart.

I didn’t think there would be.

“Yeah,” I breathed—and only barely remembered not to tell her his name.

She reached back and flipped open her pantry cabinet door, so I could see her poster, before holding her hand out beneath it like she was a game show presenter. “You know what this says?”

I couldn’t see any words on it, so I shook my head.

“It says live the life of your McDreams.”

I pretended to be serious for a minute. “Is that like a new thing on the McDonald’s dessert menu?”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said with a laugh, and I dodged her throwing a towel at me, before heading back down the hall. “I recommend nozzle setting number four!” she called after me, and I turned bright red, hoping like hell that Marcus hadn’t heard her.

I COULD TELL Cepharius was waiting for me by the time I got into my room.

I could feel the sensation of his presence in my mind slowly growing as I neared, like I was easing into the world’s most perfect bath.

“Hi,” I told him, waving at him from the door as I came in. I moved to stand in front of the window, and wondered if I could ask Marcus about getting his help setting up a curtain situation if this conversation went badly.

“Are you full?” he asked solicitously.

“Yeah,” I said, and then we were both there, waiting for the other to take the lead.

What was it Donna had said, about diving into the awkward?

“I know I’m a human—and you’re a kraken,” I started off, at the same time he did.

“How did you get your scars?”

Him asking that totally derailed me. It meant that he’d seen me the prior night—or he’d seen me looking at them in a mirror in my mind, which was the same kind of peeping-Tom thing.

“You saw me! You lied!”

Ceph was undeterred. “There was no point in telling you the truth then, but now there is. Are you of your species’ breeding age?”

I took a step back as though he’d stabbed me, and my hands flew across my chest to rest on their opposite shoulders, trying to protect me, too little too late.

“Are you asking me because I don’t have breasts?” I managed to keep the quaver out of my thoughts, but my eyes were filling up with tears.

I wasn’t prepared to have this conversation—I’d assumed I’d be with Grant up until about seventy-two hours ago. I didn’t know how to talk about my surgery with strangers.

“No,” he answered. “I’m asking you because my knowledge of human breeding cycles is limited, and I would like to court you—but only if it is appropriate.”

I thought I felt my heart stop.

“Are you all right, Elle?” he asked, and I nodded, so he continued. “You have hurt, and I have hurt. Let us not hurt, anymore, together.”

I put a hand to my mouth, half a second away from sobbing. The thought of having a relationship with a kraken was insane—but then so were all of the events that’d led me here, and I was 99.99 percent sure there was a spaceship at the bottom of the ocean less than a mile away.

So why the hell not?

Especially when it felt so right?

“Okay,” I whispered, both out loud and with my mind.

“Yes?” he repeated, as though he hadn’t heard me, though I could feel his elation building. “I can court you?”

“Yes,” I said, with a stronger nod and a silly smile. “But only if you explain to me what that means.” I wiped the tears away from my cheeks. “The human in me is a little nervous, but the xenoscientist in me is pretty thrilled.”

I felt a wave of the most pure, most perfect joy from him. It was just as strong as the sorrow he’d given me earlier over the loss of his wife, and it also took my breath away.

“Then I will endeavor to make both halves of you happy—and I will do better than explain things. I will show you, beginning tomorrow morning.”

I walked up to the window and touched it with my hand—and another hand came out of the depths to meet it, matching mine, half again as big in any direction, in the same blue I’d told him was my favorite, on the opposite side of the glass.

“But for now, open your tablet back up,” he said in my mind. “Were you able to flip the feed?”

I blinked myself back to reality. “Yes.” I’d set up a basic algorithm to do it and extract the symbols in order before I’d gone to dinner.

“Good. Then let us consider how we might solve this puzzle together.”

I curled back up against the window, knowing that he was behind me, and we were working together.

It was the perfect first date.

chapter 27

CEPHARIUS

I HAD HAD no idea how imaginative two-legged were until Elle let me see inside her mind—nor how fiction driven.

We’d been working for hours, discussing what we thought the additional marks on the symbols might be: weather patterns, tide patterns, astronomical symbols, signals of ambient pH, and Elle had an example either from the air or their made-up stories for almost all of them.

Then I’d had to be patient while she worked through setting up the cameras she’d pulled from the ROV’s loading—but now she was back near me, where I preferred her, by the window.

She rested her head back against the glass, and I wished with all my might that I could touch her. “Okay—what if it’s supposed to be scary?”

“Back to the bombs?” I asked.

“No, more back to the plague ship. There’s places in the world above, where they’re trying to figure out the best way to mark where they’ve left nuclear waste, where they’re trying to figure out how they can warn someone ten thousand years from now that a site is dangerous.”

I found this entire concept intriguing—and then was worried about what the pump the two-leggeds were doing to their ground.

They had so little of it, compared to our oceans. One would think they’d take care of it better.

“What did they do?”

“I don’t think they’ve done it yet. But they were going to use impressive architecture—like make huge thorns jutting out of the earth, or put black obsidian slabs over it, just in case people in the future lost the ability to read the words.”

“Ah. Yet another instance wherein having a ’qa would come in handy for you humans.”

Elle stuck her tongue out and made a face. “Stop making your way of life sound so superior.”

“Only because it is.” She turned to smile at me, and I smiled back, even though she couldn’t see me. “May we take a break, so I can tell you how beautiful you are?” I watched her flush bright red. It seemed a significant color choice—then I remembered that two-leggeds couldn’t control themselves like that.

“Sure,” I heard her tell me quietly.

“You are the most beautiful human I have ever seen.”

She spun in front of the window, laughing. “And just how many have you seen, sir?”

“Three?” I guessed. “Twenty?” I teased. “Or maybe all of the ones that you have seen prior, in your life, through you in your mind, and yet you are still the most lovely.”

Elle’s jaw dropped with surprise and she looked away, but then she slowly turned back to face me. “And what about your wife?” she asked, with a curious tone—I knew she wasn’t being mean.

“She was the most beautiful kraken. And I fear you will have to let me give her that.”

She gave me a sad smile and one of her hands went up to her heart. She’d felt my sorrow over losing Cayoni—surely someone as smart as she was could infer that it came from a great love. “How long were you together?”

“Ten years.”

“And was your . . . egg . . . your first?”

I nodded, although she could not see me. “Kraken breeding cycles are very erratic. But I was the most joyous kraken under all of the sea, for a time.”

I watched her swallow, and I felt her holding something back. “I don’t feel safe having children.”

I knew absolutely nothing about how two-leggeds bred. “Is it because you are so small?” I asked.

She gave a short laugh. “No. Remember how you wanted to know why I had scars? That’s why. Kind of,” she said, and then pushed memories at me. Of her sister with the blue-eyes, and strange buildings with long, cold halls. Metal knives and waking up alone, having lost parts that will not regrow. “I can’t put anyone at risk of that. But—don’t get me wrong—I do like babies.” I felt her heart thrill at the thought of children, before it quieted again. “I just would be scared to have my own.”

I could only tell her what I knew to be true. “There is nothing wrong with you, Elle of the Air.”

She gave me a rueful grin. “I bet you tell all the ladies that.”

“You are the first sentient creature I have touched in three years. There are no others, nor will there be.”

I watched her swallow again. “Anyone ever tell you you come on a little strong?”

“Is that good or bad?”

She bit her lower lip for a moment. “Honestly? I like it. It’s been awhile since anyone was interested in me. I’m getting a divorce.” I had no idea what that meant, so I pressed my confusion forward. “My husband. He . . . left me. We were married. I mean, that’s what we do in the air. It’s our version of your mates,” she informed me.

“No, it is not.”

She pouted. “How do you know?”

“Because if it was, he wouldn’t have left you.”

We stared at each other in silence, me at her great beauty, and her out at the ineffable darkness I was encased in, until the tablet made a beeping sound behind her.

“Let’s see what we got from the ROVs!” she said, quickly changing the subject, and because I sensed she was uncomfortable, I let her.

chapter 28

ELLE

I GOT blankets from my bed to snuggle in and brought the tablet out again. Two of the ROVs’ footage was so damaged as to have been worthless—and the others weren’t much better. It was like they were functional, drifting across the structure’s sides, recording, but then did the wrong thing and died, dropping down like so many flies.

One of them tried to take a scraping of the wall—and my best guess was that the wall didn’t “like” that.

Another tried to drill into it—and summarily went dead.

A third went black, but I didn’t even understand why.

“What did it do?” I asked aloud.

Cepharius grunted. “Couldn’t you see?”

I turned back to shake my head at him. He thought for a moment. “The concept is complicated. May I look for something related in your mind, to help me explain?”

As complicated, or less complicated, than divorce was?

I nodded—and felt him slip in.

Now that he knew most of my secrets, I wasn’t scared anymore. In fact, having him use my mind to think—which was a concept that would’ve panicked me even a few hours ago—was pleasurable.

“Ahh. This. Like here.”

He showed me images I’d forgotten I’d ever seen.

“What is that from?” I wondered aloud.

And then Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared.

“Ceph! That’s not even real!”

I sensed his confusion. “But there is an alien in it, and everything.”

“That’s Predator. It’s a movie,” I said, pushing him out of my mind with a laugh.

“But that’s what your ROV did to the wall,” he protested.

“Oh!” I gasped and went up on my knees. “It scanned it! At some kind of frequency the wall didn’t like!” Just like how the Predator could find his victims with his heat-vision in the movies. “But—how did you know?”

“My eyes are much larger than yours. I believe I can see many things you cannot—and this is the only footage that contained it. But you are tired now, Elle of the Air. I should let you sleep.”

“Am not,” I protested, but then glanced at the top of my tablet. It was almost midnight and I’d been going hard since 6 a.m.

I felt his amusement wash over me. “Fine, then, you are not tired, but I have a courting to plan, so I must go, and I would be very sorry if you solved everything here while I was not personally present.”

“That’s better,” I granted him, smiling. “Goodnight, Ceph,” I thought out at him, before yawning.

“Good night, Elle,” I felt him think back as he faded, but he quickly returned. “May I ask you a few courting-related questions?”

“Oh my goodness,” I said, standing up, ready to carry all my blankets back to bed. Just what had I signed on for?

“Tell me, how is it that humans breed?” My jaw dropped, as he continued. “I know if I were to inseminate you, you would die.”

“What?” I said, aloud, and in my mind, panicking.

“Not from me, to be clear! But because we cannot truly touch for long. I would require longer and more vigorous stimulation than the place where you walk into the sea makes safely possible.”

“Oh,” I said, also aloud, in a high-pitched voice.

“But I still want to know how it is done among your kind. Do you lay eggs and then flutter seed over them? If so, how do you do that in the air?”

“Oh my Lord,” I went on, putting a hand against the window’s glass and laughing. I knew from sensing him he was absolutely sincere—and I was one-hundred-percent going to tell Donna about this the next girl’s chat we had.

“Ceph—no. We, uh—there’s a part—oh, God.” I broke into giggles, and everything that was useless to send him burbled up in my mind—the night I’d lost my virginity, shitty sex-ed classes I’d had growing up, my favorite girl-girl-guy porn—and before I could make a choice, he interrupted me.

“Ah. So you have a breeding hole.”

I was never going to be able to look him in the eyes again. “Uh . . . yes?”

“Good. I know what to do with that.”

I gasped, and bit my lips before I could say the wrong thing, but his tone when he thought it?

My God.

“Can you bring an opaque bag out with you tomorrow morning?”

“Also yes?” I had no idea where I would find one, but I was sure I could figure something out.

“Please do. Good night, little pearl,” he said, and swiftly swam away.

Any chance I had of going quickly to sleep had entirely evaporated. I stared up at my ceiling after crawling into bed, wondering what on earth I’d gotten myself into and smiling.

chapter 29

ELLE

THE NEXT MORNING I raided every storage spot inside ALRI I could open, till I found what Ceph required—a black fabric grocery-bag looking thing—and took it to the dock with me.

“Going shopping?” Donna asked.

“Yeah. I’ll snag you some lettuce if I see any,” I said and grinned. She kept giving me a look, and I kept laughing.

“What’s so funny, ladies?” Marcus asked, when he came on the scene, and then somehow that made it worse, especially when Donna muttered something about “setting number five” and he groaned. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. You two ganging up on me,” he said, stepping up into his crane roost.

I got into the suit, still beaming, and walked confidently into the water. “Ceph?” I thought out.

“My pearl,” he said, swimming up to me. He flashed blue and then purple, and I realized I really needed to talk to him about his colors—I wanted to know what all of them meant to him. “Did you solve everything last night in a dream?”

“Ha. No, I wish.” I hadn’t dreamed at all, really. And when I had fallen asleep, it was into a deep slumber, and I woke up rested again, even though I couldn’t have had more than a few hours of sleep. “But I’m ready to try and work on it again today.”

We had a few more safe days together at least, before I was supposed to write a report for the next submersible run so that Mr. Marlow could know what the fuck I was doing with his money.

Ceph swam ahead, and then swam back. “I will carry you as soon as we reach the part where they will not see.”

“Okay,” I told him, with a blush. And then once we reached it, he picked me up again, swimming both of us off in a slightly wrong direction.

“The ship’s over there!” I told him. At least I thought it was—it was easy to get spun around in the darkness.

“I know,” he said, setting me down gently. “But I made this for you here.”

At first I couldn’t tell what it was I was looking at—but then I realized there were intricate lines and patterns on the ground.

“Is this your language?” I wondered, carefully kneeling down, to get closer.

“Why would we use language, when we have the ’qa?” he asked me, coming to be by my side. “It is part of our ceremony.” He took my hand, so that I would stand up. “It is a thing that my people have always done. You are meant to follow them.”

I scanned left and right—and realized that the lines were a path. “Oh!”

He nodded, and then disappeared. He was still in my mind, I knew he hadn’t gone far, so I walked along the path, feeling like a monk wandering a meditative maze. And the first thing I came across was a piece of coral that glowed after my light left it.

“What is this, Ceph?” I asked in wonder, picking it up.

“It is for you. To light your way in the dark.” I was touched. I put it in my bag. “Keep going,” he urged.

I followed the next steps of the path—until I came across a small kraken figurine. It was wonderfully detailed, and smooth to my tactimetal’s touch.

“Ceph!” I squealed, picking it up. “Is this you?”

I heard him laugh inside my mind. “Not exactly—but it could be. I carved it, a very long time ago. It is so you will always have me close.”

“It’s perfect,” I told him, holding it out, so that he and it were side by side. His lips were peeled wide, in a smile, revealing his fearsome bone-beak, but nothing about me was frightened of him.

“There is more,” he promised, darting off into the dark, to wait for me at my next stop.

I walked down the rest of his path, going whichever way it required, until I wound up in front of a small shiny rock—and on it was my wedding ring.

“And this is what you thought you lost, but now have found.”

I inhaled deeply. “Ceph.”

“I saved it for you,” he said, and I could feel his pride building. “Traditionally, I am supposed to feed you now, but I did not kill anything, since with your helmet on you cannot eat—”

“I don’t want that back,” I stammered on our ’qa, and he went silent.

“Why not?” he asked, when an explanation didn’t come.

“Because. I threw it into the sea for a reason.”

“Ah. So it was trash.” I could feel him chastising himself.

“No, it wasn’t—it was just . . .” A sign. That I was rebounding too fast—like I was bouncing on a goddamned trampoline.

What the fuck had I been thinking?

I’d wanted to throw caution to the wind, but—it was one thing to know I was going to hurt me.

It was an entirely other thing to know I would be hurting him.

“Look, Ceph,” I started, taking several steps back. “I’m glad I know you, and flirting with you has been lifechanging, but I’m human and you’re not, and even though you’re really hot and kind and pretty much amazing—there’s gonna come a day when I have to get out of the ocean. And if I take that,” I said, pointing at the ring, my heart squeezing hard. “Other people make promises and get to break them—but not me. Taking that from you—someday it’ll make me a liar.”

I watched him breathe, his chest swelling and falling, as his tentacles gently worked to keep him afloat. “I understand.” He bent down to pick the ring up, and put it back into one of his belt’s many pockets.

“I’m so sorry, Ceph.”

“I know you are,” he said, tapping the side of his head meaningfully—because he could hear it from me. “So you do not need to say any more.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Let us go back to your spaceship, and see what we can learn.”

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.”

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.

chapter 32

ELLE

“LET me go and get your bag for you,” Ceph said, leaving me alone outside the spaceship.

I still couldn’t believe I’d been inside of one. It’d looked so different from all the spaceships I’d ever seen, but why shouldn’t it be? All of those were made up, of course, and created for things like human hands, human sizes, and gravity.

Whereas the room I’d just been in, down could’ve been up. There was nothing helpful to orient us inside of it, not even a viewscreen. But come to think of it, why should it have any? Those were just there as narrative devices in TV shows—maybe the aliens didn’t have eyes?

Who the fuck knew!

And . . . where were they?

Had they come out of the ship eons ago?

Or were they frozen somewhere safe inside of it, waiting for an intrepid explorer and her trusty kraken?

“Here you go,” Ceph said, returning into the beam of my suit’s lights, holding the bag out. “I already put all of your things in it—and the rest of the gifts I made you. I realize you do not want them now, but I did not just want to leave them lying on the sea floor.”

“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t realized there were more stages to his courting ritual. “Thanks.”

“Shall we go back?” he said, gesturing me forward.

“Please.”

I felt his mind in mine, hovering closer than he was, present but quiet for our entire return, until we were close.

“Are you safe in there, Elle?” he asked me.

“I don’t really know.” I turned toward him. “I mean, they leave me alone, but—”

Marcus and Donna had to have known that the others died. Hell, they’d put me up in Haberman’s old room—he was a little older than me, with long blond hair he wore in a ponytail.

“Will you be able to pretend with them that you do not know the things you now do?”

“I guess I’ll have to.” It wouldn’t do me any good to come at them about it, and I still needed them on my side—I couldn’t operate my suit by myself.

WHEN I ARRIVED in the dock room, Donna made a lettuce joke, but didn’t try to look in my bag. She helped me out of my suit, and then followed me down the short hall. “Will we be seeing you at dinner tonight?” she asked me, with a smile.

“Elle,” Cepharius warned, sensing the words that were going to come out of my mouth.

“Were you not going to tell me that everyone else on this mission has died?”

Donna groaned. “Oh, fuck.”

“Did you know?”

She held up both her hands. “They were here for awhile, and then they weren’t. We didn’t know what happened. They just didn’t come back. But that’s why we figured Mr. Marlow gave you the kraken. And look, you’re still alive, right?” She made a face. “Did you . . . find them?”

“If she did, she couldn’t tell you,” Marcus said, appearing behind her in the hall. “It’s classified.”

“Marcus,” Donna complained, as I swallowed.

“No—he’s right,” I said, looking between the two of them. “And I’ll be eating dinner alone tonight. You can leave it in the hall.”

“What happened to subterfuge?” Cepharius asked, the second I was alone in my room.

“It’s not my strong suit. You might have noticed. Give me a bit,” I said, and felt him go away.

I grabbed a change of clothes and went into the bathroom to take my current scrubs and swimsuit off, before making the mistake of looking at the mirror before I hopped into the shower.

I was always surprised by my scars.

I figured I’d have to have them for as long as I’d had breasts, say, since, I was twelve or so, for them to finally feel like they were normal. Now that they were six months old, they’d gone from looking angry to being like brief topographical maps—two horizontal lines across my chest that didn’t meet, like my breasts had been turned into imaginary rivers.

The joke Lena always made, after she’d had hers removed, and before we’d accepted that her cancer was far beyond surgical solutions and chemo, was that she was going to send my future kids to college with all the money she saved on bras and fractional amounts of unused soap.

“Fuck,” I whispered, and then got into the shower.

I wondered if Donna had a nozzle setting for washing away painful memories.

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.”

chapter 34

CEPHARIUS

“AND SOME KRAKENS FIND THEM TWICE,” I thought, but managed to keep that from her, barely.

I had no idea if she was asking me things out of sheer curiosity, with her bright mind, or if she was considering it.

If so, then I was glad I’d gone so far to find the right rock.

I watched her trail her fingertip around on top of one of the stones, following the spiral there, and my pumping arm descended at once.

It was all I could do not to project my heat at her—and I was so glad I’d taken myself in hand the other night—if I hadn’t done that, I would have had no control at all.

“And so sometimes you pump and it doesn’t mean anything?” she said, slightly pouting.

“Yes.”

“So we could pump and it wouldn’t mean that we were mated . . . right?” she asked, looking through her lashes out the window at me. “I mean—we’re not even touching.”

“Right,” I swore to her, even though every fiber in my being disagreed.

I watched her pick the smallest of the stones up and bring it to her lips. “Do krakens do oral?” she asked, flicking her tongue over its tip.

We did not do oral as she thought of it, I realized, quickly skimming her memories—but I would do anything she wanted.

“You would be my first,” I said, and she beamed.

“I can’t just put this into me, Ceph. It’s cold and dry,” she said—and began licking it to wet it, and heat it up inside her mouth.

“Of course you couldn’t,” I agreed. Several of my lower-arms began stroking my pumping arm’s base.

She got up to go grab the rest of the bedding from her bed and bring it over to the window. “Have you ever seen human legs before?” she wondered, giving the stone a playful lick.

“Not really, no.”

Never that I’d bothered paying attention to before at least.

She undid the string that held her pants up with one hand and let them fall—and then she glared at me.

“Except for mine the other night. Are you saying they weren’t memorable?”

“I knew I should not have been looking—so I did not look long.”

“And now?” she asked, pulling the stone out of her mouth, and holding up her shirt, to trail a line of her saliva down her belly, to where another layer of her clothing hid her from me.

“Now, I will look,” I promised her.

“Good,” she said, letting go of her shirt to reach her newly freed hand inside her underpants, touching herself between her legs.

“I want to see,” I pressed.

“My breeding hole?” she said, giggling.

“Yes,” I said, my tone so serious it sobered her and made her stare at me.

“What are you doing to yourself out there?” she asked. “It’s no fair that I’m the only one putting on a show.”

I lit up all of my chromophores, emanating a radiant blue light, everywhere except for my pumping arm, which I knew she would see against my stomach by its shadow.

“Ceph,” she gasped, her jaw dropping a little, as she watched me work myself with my own tentacles. I did my best to make it mesmerizing, winding and pulling, rising and falling.

“I know the stone is not me, Elle, but put it into you. Please.”

chapter 35

ELLE

HE WANTED ME—AND I wanted to be wanted.

I gave up on trying to be sexy and folded my bedding together and lay down, kicking out of my underwear before I could think about the fact that I was going to fuck myself with a dildo from a kraken.

My kraken.

The one who was so furiously—and beautifully—stroking himself right outside my window.

I ran one hand between my legs and parted myself with my fingers, and used the other to pull the dick down. There was no way it wouldn’t still be a little cold; the thing was solid stone, but—

I moaned as I worked it halfway in.

I hadn’t had anything inside of me in months, and there was nothing quite like when you first hit the right place.

I’d forgotten how good it was.

“Good,” Cepharius purred inside my head. “Oh, Elle, your breeding hole is perfect.”

I tried not to chuckle on our ’qa. “I don’t know how I feel about you calling it that.”

“What does your kind call it?”

I thought of all the other words other men had ever called my vagina—and none of them were really any good either.

“Breeding hole’s okay, I think. It just sounds kind of dirty. But I like it.”

“So dirt is good, in this case?” he asked, sounding lightly amused, and I pretended to glare out the window at him.

“Keep stroking, mister.”

“Anything you desire,” he promised, and I felt it echo inside my mind.

He really did mean it when he said that. It wasn’t just the trite thing some human man would say to get into my pants—it was his truth, laid bare to me, and it might have scared me, if I weren’t so horny.

“I feel you, as well, Elle—take the rest of your clothing off.”

I reached for my shirt, and then paused.

“I want to see all your perfection.”

I . . . didn’t feel very perfect.

But even before, when I had breasts, I never had. There was always something, you know? Your skin, or your ass, or your hair—even before the double, I could’ve probably only counted the times I’d felt “perfect” before on one hand—and I realized that was sad.

If I was perfect now, I’d definitely been perfect then—just not smart enough to know it.

“Elle?” Ceph asked me with concern, as my attention wavered. “You do not have to, if you don’t want to. But I promise you, I am ready.”

I took the stone out of my pussy and rocked up to my knees in front of the window. “No, I know,” I said, and shucked my top off.

Rows of suckers appeared on the glass’s other side immediately. “How I wish that I could touch you,” Ceph thought at me, with a longing that took my breath away.

“Don’t use your acid on the glass,” I teased, but I put my hands against it on my side. I could feel his surging feelings—the closer we got, the easier he was to understand.

And he loved me.

I had no idea why . . . but it was simple and pure, and if I kept staying right here, practically bathing in it, I was going to wind up loving him back.

It might already be too late.

I sat back on my heels. “I’m not going to want to go, you know.”

“I already do not want you to leave.” His suckers were replaced by his hands, although the rest of him stopped glowing.

“I don’t want to hurt anymore, Ceph. And feeling things for you—”

“I know.” His anguish slid across our connection, all the fears he’d been holding in for so long. “I do not know if I can survive losing a mate a second time.”

I wiped away unshed tears with the back of a hand, sorting through his emotions and feelings like he sorted through mine. “Then why aren’t you scared of trying? When you know better?”

“Oh, because, little pearl,” he began, and I felt his heart thrill. “I know that if I found you and you found me and there were some true way for us to be together, a chance at that happiness is worth all the pain in your air, or in my sea. Because I know what it was like to have it once before—I am willing to risk it all, to have it once again. And if it doesn’t happen, then so be it, but at least I know I tried.”

I reached higher on the glass, to where I hoped his cheek was close outside of it.

I’d never felt like this in my entire life before—and I knew I never would again.

It was time to be brave.

And at least this time, when I got my heart broken, it would be out of love, not sorrow.

I reached back to the sheets behind me and picked up another of his carvings, planting it between my calves, so that I could lower myself on top of it. I felt its cold stone part me and I moaned.

chapter 36

CEPHARIUS

A THRILL RAN through all of my body as she let my carving enter her, and I felt it as though it were happening to me. All of the sensitive little muscles I possessed pricked up to attention—although none more so than the ones atop my pumping arm.

One of my tentacles clasped on to her window. “Let me see, Elle, let me see,” I begged of her, and she quickly changed positions, lying on one side, with one foot up against the window, bringing her breeding hole closer to the glass.

Her hand held onto the base of the stone as she pressed it in, and then began to stroke. She hadn’t taken all of me yet—but she would—and watching her hole stretch and flow as she pumped it in and out of her, I grabbed hold of my own pumping arm at once.

And I lit myself up again, for her. She looked out of the window at me with half-lidded eyes.

“You’re so pretty,” she said, as a tease, and I laughed.

“You make me want to pump you all the time.”

And then it was her turn to laugh. “What are you, sixteen?” she said, giggling. “Wait—should I have asked you if you were of breeding age, before we began this?”

“Shush,” I told her more seriously, but I loved the way her lips curled in amusement. “Pump yourself like it is your job for me.”

She wriggled on the ground and reached down with both hands, now, using the second one to touch a different spot. “Mmm—what does kraken pumping pay?”

“We do not have your money.” I thought back at her. “But if you were here, my little pearl, I would satisfy you morning, noon, and night.”

I thought back to my time in the breeding caves with Cayoni, and imagined Elle there, trapped and waiting for me—

The thought was almost enough to make me explode.

“Oh my God, Ceph,” she whispered, feeling me on our ’qa.

And my sense of her whole body began to change. Up until now I had stayed apart from her as much as I was able, so as to resist this level of temptation, but now, I let my mind flow alongside hers, feeling her changes, and allowing her to feel mine, like we were fish in a school of two.

“Yes,” I whispered, coaxing her mind into the open. I could feel the way she shoved the stone I’d lovingly carved inside herself, how it stretched her and thudded someplace deep inside that felt good—and how she was frantically playing with another part, some pleasurable nub, that was building her energies up inside.

And I let her feel me, the weight of my pumping arm, how all of my fluids were rushing to it, how the channels on its insides were filling up with seed.

“Ceph,” she said, panting.

“Yes,” I growled. “Breed for me little pearl. Give yourself delight.”

“I’m going to,” she warned me, and then she did—she bit her lips but I could hear her screaming in my mind, as she writhed on the floor in front of me, letting go of the stone.

She pushed it out of her with her breeding hole’s great strength, letting me see her most intimate of places.

“It is as I told you,” I shared with her, my utter, bedrock truth. “You are meant for me.”

chapter 37

ELLE

I RODE the high of my orgasm for several minutes, trying to catch my breath on the floor, while Ceph watched me, apparently perfectly content.

And I couldn’t quite believe what I was going to say next.

“Did you come?”

Because I’d come so hard I’d forgotten half of my PhD thesis.

I felt Ceph’s amusement before I heard him. “No.”

“No?” I complained, moving to sit up. “Why not? I thought I was perfect!”

“You are—which is why I wanted to appreciate you.”

I collapsed against the sheets again. Up until now I never would’ve called myself a selfish lover, but—

“You are not selfish. If anything, I was. I wanted to bask in you.”

I gave the window glass a dreamy smile. “It’s kind of cheating if you always know the right thing to say because you’re in my mind.”

“It is a good thing you like me, then.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “Well okay, mister—Ceph of the Sea—whip it out again.”

“It was never un-whipped.”

“Fine,” I said, sticking my tongue out. “Show me.”

He went back to his beautiful phosphorescent hue, and I could see where he was still stroking himself, albeit slower than he had been.

I moved onto my knees and put the middle of his carvings to the glass. I was sure there was some refraction involved, but the “pumping arm” outside looked bigger than the one I’d just been putting into my body.

“The bigger the arm, the heavier the seed burden,” he explained, as I picked the final, larger, carving up.

Look at me, getting to play dick-Goldilocks in here.

I put a curious hand up to the window. “Does that make it feel different for you?”

He considered this. “Honestly, no. I would prefer to be the size of the one you’re holding now. But—I have let a lot of seed build up.”

“When’s the last time you, uh, pumped?”

“The other night,” he answered plainly. “But there were years before that, and you never express as much alone as you do with a partner.”

I was learning so many interesting things about kraken physiology this evening.

“Does being with me like this count?” I wondered.

His stroking paused. “I—I don’t know.”

“Should we find out?” I asked, settling back down.

“You would want to go again?” he asked, and I felt his fascination. “I assumed that humans were too frail for multiple breeding sessions.”

“Well, you assumed wrong, at least where this human was concerned,” I said. “Just keep pumping yourself like that, and let me catch up to you.”

This carving was bigger than the rest had been, but I was nice and wet now. It was cold—but I knew it’d warm up, once I got it in.

I felt him stop pumping, and I pouted. “What did I tell you?” His mind was so close to the surface with mine—that was how I knew he stopped, even before I saw it. “What?” I asked him, stopping too.

“I love you, little pearl,” he said simply. “I just wanted you to know it.”

And while I already knew that truth from him, I felt it unfold a thousand times over in my heart, like an unending blossom, echoing from his mind to mine and back again.

“Ceph,” I whispered—and there wasn’t any point in trying to slow down anymore. “I love you, too.”

I felt him thrill at this, my final acquiescence, and I knew I’d never take it back.

Whatever future we were hurtling towards, we were going there together.

A shudder ran through him, and I felt it in me. “Pump yourself, Elle. Pump yourself for your mate.”

I didn’t want to say that the intellectual parts of me disappeared at him thinking that, so much as every single part of my mind surrendered at once.

Any fears or doubts or bashfulness—any reason I’d ever thought I’d had to hide—went right out the window at him naming me.

It was what I wanted to be.

And I would do anything for him.

I nodded quickly and reached both hands down between my legs, trying to shove the largest of the three stones in.

He made a sound inside my mind, a cross between a purr and a growl and it ended in a click of his beak. “Good. Just like that. Pump hard.”

I groaned, and rearranged myself so that I was on my back and thrusting my hips up towards him in the window. This final carving was too wide for me to lie on my side anyhow, but also this was how I wanted him to take me, at least the first time we did this—I wanted to see and be seen.

“I can feel you stretching. You’re trying so hard.”

I watched his tentacles wrap and stroke the arm that was shadowed by his glow—and then they switched from stroking up, to stroking down, as though that arm were trying to pierce something.

“All I want to do is fit you, Elle. I know if I could just get my tip inside you, it would be enough.”

I swallowed and rolled my head back, while scooping my hips forward. “I could take you,” I promised him.

“I know you could,” he said, and I felt him all around me, surrounding me inside my head. He became both the blanket I was lying on and the air that I breathed and all the waters in all the oceans outside. “You were meant for me. Let me fill you. You’re so close to taking all of me now, down to the ring, Elle—good—good—”

I pulled the stone almost all the way out and then slammed it inside, squealing internally.

He grunted as though I’d punched him.

“Do you feel that?” I asked, because he was inside of me, feeling everything.

“Yes,” he growled.

“And that—and that—and that?” I started fucking myself with his carved cock now, sliding it deeper into me each time.

“Elle,” he said, and it reverberated through me, sending shivers down my spine and making my thighs clench.

“I want you to feel me coming,” I said, slamming him into me, more turned on by the moment, my calves tense, my ass high, my hips aching. I was on the cusp of another orgasm, but I didn’t want to go without him. “And—I want to feel you,” I said, pleading through gritted teeth.

“You—you—” he started to promise, “you—will!”

My orgasm shot through me, starting from someplace deep inside that’d never squeezed before, rippling out to every part of me. I only barely managed to throw an arm across my face before I screamed, but I could sense Ceph still working, and then—oh God—if I thought I was coming hard, Ceph’s orgasm snatched my soul from my body.

I heard him on our ’qa making feral, animalistic sounds, and saw a geyser of shadowed seed spurting out from his pumping arm, and at the thought of him being in me and me keeping all that in—I moaned low, putting a palm across my belly.

“You are my mate. I would fill you until you spilled,” he told me, still experiencing sharp, short, afterbursts of his orgasm that traveled to me like someone gently pinching my clit.

I lay there, trying to breathe the air I was in and come back to my body.

All I wanted to do was—all of that—again.

I would crawl over glass to get it.

I would face down death again for it.

I wanted to be his, and he was always mine.

I pulled the carving out and put it aside, sitting up, panting.

“My beautiful Elle,” Cepharius said, the colors on his surface now drifting in soothing patterns of light.

I reached out to touch the glass. “My pretty kraken,” I whispered to him, with a soft smile.

chapter 38

CEPHARIUS

OUR ’QA WAS NEARLY perfect now. Neither of us had anything to hide—and so I knew that she was tired, at the same time I also knew she wouldn’t want to go to bed just yet, because she wanted to be with me.

So I asked her questions about all of her fictions and TV. It was so strange to me that most humans could not use magic, and yet they had so many shows about it—and it was in their imaginary futures, too.

“It’s all kind of the same, if you think about it,” she explained, curling up on her side, and smiling out the window at me. “There’s this famous quote that any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic, and I think that it’s true.”

I considered this along with her. “In any case, it makes for good stories.”

I had no idea two-leggeds were so imaginative, but I supposed that, without always having a sense for the thoughts of others of their nearby kind, they needed something to fill their minds with.

And then she explained all the other kinds of ’qa replacements humans had—like books and the internet.

“And what do you use that for?” I asked her.

Elle pondered this for a moment. “Mostly cat pictures and pornography.”

I waited before responding to her. “I cannot tell if you are joking,” I said, and she laughed, which was the opposite of how she felt. “So you are not joking?” I asked, attempting to clarify.

This time, her laugh was pure. “I mean, I am, but in one of those terribly injured trauma ways.”

We talked for far longer than I should’ve kept her up, but I couldn’t help myself—and before I left, I sang her to sleep with a different lullaby, then I swam back to where the spaceship was.

There were no lights, there was no doorway—but all the writing on the side was the same.

And the next symbol had already been added—this time the circles were together again.

I went back to hover in front of where the doorway had been.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” I thought out at it. “But you are not allowed to take her away from me.”

Nothing seemed to change though—so I went back to be near Elle and rest.

THAT MORNING her mood was complicated—she still had to interact with the other humans, who had clearly lied to her—but she was elated every time she thought about me, and I remained so close to her on our ’qa that I could feel it, her eager thoughts returning to me and last night again and again, like so many fish nibbling on algae.

But we both waited until we were past the line where the others might hear her before thinking plainly—and the first thing she did was take my hand.

“What is this?” I asked her, after she did it—and then I answered my question in her mind. “Ah! It is because you do not have lower-arms!”

“Yes, silly,” she said with a grin. “Also I just wanted to touch you.”

I could sense what she got of me through her tactimetal suit.

It wasn’t much—but it was better than the glass was.

“Teach me how to get better at going through your memories? And maybe carry me to the ship, because you’re faster?”

I picked her up in my arms to do so at once. “Going through my memories should be easy. Everything inside my mind is real. Yours—” I clicked my beak, and she laughed.

“It’s hard though, Ceph. I don’t have frames of reference for a lot of your life. Like you sleep sideways, on purpose.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No, it’s just—I’ve never slept sideways before in my life. Or eaten live fish, or”—her mind raced off, zipping through a hundred things she’d never done before like thrown a well-weighted spear, wrestled with a friend, talked to sirens—“Oh my gosh, Ceph, is your brother really a king?”

“Ugh,” I said, setting her down in front of the spaceship. “Yes. But don’t remind me.”

The first thing she did was go over to where the symbols were, and point at the one I’d seen last night. “It is you!” she exclaimed, but then frowned and started thinking. “But how does it know we were together?”

“I am uncertain.” I felt motion in the water though, and knew to shield myself and her half-a-second before the lights turned on again.

This time we both got to watch the gantry come down.

“Are you still decided?” I asked her, even though I could already feel the answer in her heart.

“Yes,” she said—so I picked her up and carried her.

The inside of the spaceship was as we’d left it—except now there weren’t any floating corpses, and there was a new opening along one wall, apparently leading to a second glowing room.

“What happened to the bodies?” Elle wondered.

I’d had a chance to do more research in her mind on her white blood cells the night before. “Did it eat them?”

She gave me a look inside her helmet. “There’d be easier ways to get nutrition down here than waiting for humans in pressure suits to show up.”

I made a scoffing sound. “Maybe it has limited locomotion.”

She went up on her tiptoes, kicked up to float alongside me, and then ever so carefully tapped her helmet against my cheek. “That was a kiss,” she explained. “And we’re going down that hall.”

“Goddammit,” I thought at her, repeating back her favorite curse word, and felt her laugh as I began to follow.

We only made it halfway down the hall though, until her forward progress was thwarted.

She’d reached the end of her umbilical cable.

I sensed a surge of disappointment, as she looked behind herself. “No. It’s too soon—I can’t believe they didn’t make these longer!”

All I could feel was a vast sense of relief. Finally this madness would be through, and my mate would be safe, inside the habitat, where she belonged.

Her disappointment lingered, however, so sharp that it began to pain me.

“I will go ahead and look for you. But only this once.”

“No!” She grabbed for my hand again.

“Why not?” I asked, but then felt it from her. “So you admit that it’s dangerous!”

She made a face at me inside her helmet. “Of course it could be. But also, I can’t lose you.” She put a fist to her stomach. “I get that now.”

“So you know how hard these past few days have been for me.”

“I do,” she said, looking up—then she let go of my hand. “Just look a little bit. Be careful.”

“I will do my best,” I said, choosing to creep forward using my suckers on the ground, rather than jet. I had seen all sorts of fictions in Elle’s mind last night as we’d been chatting, plus I could feel her thoughts now, so I knew she was worried about booby traps, lasers, and rolling boulders for some reason.

The next room seemed the same as the first had. Mostly gold light, with occasional flickers of other colors, like the sun itself was shining down from above. I went back to go tell Elle that, and then I stopped with a gasp.

The entire hallway she was in was bathed in the light that she shone for me, like she was in the center of a never-ending crystal—and the door behind her was closing.

I rushed and grabbed her, jetting us toward the exit at full force, but by the time I got there the gap was already too narrow. I set half of my tentacles through one side, half on the other, trying to push the door back open so I could eject her safely.

She was screaming—both from surprise, and at realizing what was happening—and I was fighting like my life depended on it, because it did. Then a force plucked me, and through me, Elle, who I was holding, and pulled me back.

I shouted in surprise and fear, and wound all of myself around Elle as the door slammed on her cable and I saw it snap.

“My pearl, my pearl, my pearl,” I said, rocking her.

Her mind was frantic, but she managed to say, “I’m here.”

“You are not dead?” I asked her, unwilling to believe.

Perhaps I was, then. Maybe we had both died, and this was her heaven—another strange concept the two-legged had, that we did not.

“I don’t think so. But I’m scared.”

“Me as well,” I said, slowly unwinding. I kept strong hold of her cable though, unsure if the fact that I had it cinched in my lower-arms was the only thing keeping her alive. I looked back the way I’d come, and found that entrance closed as well.

We were trapped inside the ship.

“Did you trigger something, in the next room over?” she asked. “What was it like? What did you see?”

“Nothing,” I said—but I’d forgotten she was with me now, riding with me on my ’qa.

“Don’t lie to me, Cepharius,” she complained. “And don’t make me go through your memories either.”

“The next room looked like the first. But when I turned back and saw you—you were bathed in—in—light.” I didn’t have a word I could give her for it, just a concept of great beauty, like the inside of a shell.

“Why?”

“I cannot begin to guess.”

“The ship knows all the wavelengths you can use to see.”

“Oddly, that knowledge does not bring me pleasure.”

She frowned, tapping a finger against the glass of her helmet. “It’s not even alarming—and my bail-out bottle hasn’t gone off.”

“Did the other humans sabotage you?”

“I doubt it. Although—maybe the spaceship’s doing something weird to my systems?” I saw her eyes flicker, as she read the inside of her face shield’s screen. “It says the pressure of this room is changing.”

“That is untrue,” I said. “I feel no change.”

“And the salinity,” she went on. “And—the oxygen levels. Ceph, are you all right?”

“I am fine—but you are experiencing the madness that struck those other men.”

She took my concerns seriously at least. “Am I? I don’t understand—everything in here says I can take off my suit. It’s not totally back to the pressure I’m used to topside—but it says my surroundings match the habitat.”

“Whereas I am here, swimming, telling you, you definitely should not do that, as your mate.”

She looked over her shoulder, forlornly, at where her cable was snapped—and at the fact that the space we were in didn’t have any apparent doors.

“What should we do?” I asked her, as between the two of us, she was the Outer Space expert.

“Wait to be eaten?” she said, as a tense tease.

I made an unaccommodating sound and squeezed her more tightly. It was all I could do—that and watch her eyes flicker, reading and re-reading the inside of her helmet’s screen.

“But seriously . . . there’d be easier ways to kill us. Like whatever it did to the first team.”

I could feel her bright mind thinking, and I already knew I would not like what she would suggest next.

“I think I can get out of this suit, Ceph.”

“No,” I said, winding about her more thoroughly.

“It says the atmosphere here is breathable for me.”

“You saw what happened to the others!”

“I did,” she said, with a strong nod. “But none of them tried to take off their suits. So this is different.”

“Why?” I pressed. “Why would this ship treat you even remotely differently?” I was trying not to shout at her, because I didn’t want to injure her like I had the other day, but I was running out of options.

“Because—it showed you me. Right?”

I frowned strongly. “I would’ve never said anything if I’d known it’d lead to this.”

She squirmed up in my embrace to touch her helmet to my cheek again in another distanced kiss. “I’m not getting air in through my cable, Ceph, and my bail-out oxygen hasn’t released, so either way, I’m fucked. Unless . . .” she said, slowly wriggling her arms free—and I felt forced to let her. “Close your eyes.”

I stared down at her instead. I knew she was about to do something foolish, and if had to hold another mate’s corpse in my arms it would break me.

“I know, Ceph,” she whispered on our ’qa. “So close your eyes. I love you.”

I snapped my eyes shut, and felt her taking her helmet off.

I was preparing myself for agony while wrapping myself around her for as long as I could hold her, physically and mentally both, when I heard her calling my name. I only opened up one eye a sliver—and found her smiling at me, her hair flowing around her head like she was a siren. “I told you I could breathe here! My helmet was right!”

“How?” There was no possible way we could coexist in the same place.

“I have no idea. Magic? Science? Both?” She pushed away from all my arms. “But if you let me turn around, you can help me get out of this!”

I lowered my head quickly, running my cheek against hers, seeing as I still had the rest of her trapped. I felt the heat of her skin, and the contact made our ’qa light up.

“Oh,” she gasped, feeling it too.

I turned her at once, my tentacles searching for her suit’s fastenings.

“Up at my neck,” she directed. “And then there’s buttons you push at each hip.”

I did all these, and helped to hold it still till she’d shed it like a sea snake’s skin and was swimming in front of me with a scrap of clothing still on.

“I’m breathing!” she said with delight, swimming up, and then swimming down again. “And I’m not dying!”

She laughed, and I laughed too, one born of relief. I sent a seeking tentacle after her, catching her by an ankle to pull her near.

“None of this makes sense, Elle.”

She caught my face between her hands, flutter kicking to hold herself aloft, sending pleasurable waves from the motion across all of my lower-arms. “I like it when things make sense too, Ceph, believe me—but in this one case . . . does it have to?”

Whatever light source was shining in the room got brighter, and all of her was glowing—like she was meant for me.

chapter 39

ELLE

CEPHARIUS DIDN’T ANSWER; he just pulled me close, riding all of his tentacles around me, his suckers pulling gently at my skin. I became more enmeshed in him—I felt him flow around my body the same way I felt him flow around my mind—and the sensations of both things left me gasping.

“May I?” he asked, a second before he tore my swimsuit off of me—because he knew I wanted it gone.

“Hey!” I complained kicking back from him, and he let me go. “I’m going to need to wear that again!” I said, laughing, as he tossed the stretchy fabric aside.

He reached out with a lower-arm again, wrapping my ankle firmly, before sending the questing tips of other tentacles winding up. “I like the way you taste.”

“Maybe I should taste you, too?” I asked, bending inwards at once, using his grasp on me to propel my face to be even with his. “Do krakens do kissing?”

He shook his head. “Not really. But I’ve seen enough of your memories now to understand the intent.”

“Good,” I said, starting high on his cheek. His skin was rough there—and the second I lifted my lips, the spot where I’d kissed changed colors. I tried again, lower, chastely, keeping things sweet. “Do you like that?”

“I like anything with you,” he said, his eyes closing.

“And what about now?” I asked, laying one on the corner of his lips. His lips were bigger than mine—like all of the rest of him—and the tendrils of his beard eagerly grasped my skin.

I could feel him sorting through my memories. “I do not think my tongue is as prehensile as yours,” he began on our ’qa as I pressed my lips against his, and his slowly parted to let mine in. “But I like this—yes,” he thought at me as I wrapped my arms around his neck.

His hands circled me—they were so large they almost met around my waist—and then I felt one of them searching up my back.

“How is it that your skin is so soft?” he wondered, as I kept kissing him. “And that you have the hair of a siren?”

I laughed inside my mind, my lips smiling against his. “Just don’t ask me to sing for you. You will have to be the singer of our family,” I teased.

But on the ’qa between us, the thought of family had a different charge.

It was something we both wanted, both yearned for, and that we’d both lost the chance at before. I could feel his eager longing twining around mine, redoubling.

“Elle,” he thought at me, making my name into a question, and I knew it was his way of asking for permission.

I nodded fiercely. “Yes.”

All of him changed color at once, to a meaningful dusky red. Apart from the absurdity of the current situation, we were both realists, even on our ’qa. We knew that what we wanted was as unlikely to happen as finding an alien spaceship in the first place.

But both of us refused to live without hope, and we held onto it so fiercely that it overtook any remaining common sense.

I clung to him, feeling the muscles just beneath his skin ripple and tense, as he pulled his head back and stared down at me with great thought.

“You are so tiny,” he said, radiating with concern.

“It’s okay,” I promised him. “We already know you’ll fit.”

chapter 40

CEPHARIUS

“TAKE YOUR BELT OFF!” Elle declared, before beginning to work on it herself, undoing the knot that held it with her nimble fingers.

My mate was the bravest woman I’d ever met.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be gentle with her though, however.

I wrapped two of my lower-arms around her legs and knees, pulling her open as my belt floated away. For all that she could breathe the substance we were immersed in now, so could I, and I’d been scenting her in it since we’d gotten her out of her suit. Between that and the taste of her, beneath all my suckers—she was driving me wild, and she didn’t even know it.

I placed a hand behind her head and did my best to kiss her as she had shown me, moving my lips against hers, and then trailing them lower, kissing the space beneath her chin, and down her neck. I felt her shiver at my touch, as I sent the little tendrils along my chin seeking, until I’d almost reached her chest, and then she froze.

“Little pearl?” I asked along our ’qa—and felt her pull up and investigate old thoughts and feelings, before putting them away.

“Keep going,” she whispered back.

I did. I had my lower-arms release her, and I pulled her up, so that I could keep kissing her, across her scars—making sure to kiss each of these carefully, because they had kept her safe for me—then trailing my lips down the bottom of her ribs and her stomach, coming ever closer to her sweet, sweet space.

I hefted her up with a final lift, and she squealed but wrapped her legs around my neck, letting me move my lips against her softest flesh.

I felt her gasp and sigh above me, relaxing, as the tentacles on my face told me what I could taste—she was creating her own fluids now.

Her breeding hole was ready.

“Do you like that?” I asked her on the ’qa, even though I already knew the answer.

She didn’t use words, she just radiated pleasure.

“Good,” I thought, taking a final deep inhale, swallowing her taste, before pulling her back down. “Then I think you will like this, even better,” I said, inverting one of my lower-arms to rub her with my suckers.

Her eyes snapped open with surprise. “Ceph!” And then she bit her lower lip. “Oh, you’re right, that’s good.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “It’s—” she said, fluttering her hips against me, then slowly letting me hold her in place, as I wrapped her legs open again. “I like that.”

“As do I.”

My suckers enjoyed tasting her; her essence was all around me in the water now, and I liked feeling her twitch as her little muscles began to bunch with hungry need.

“Oh, Ceph.” She reached between her legs to still the lower-arm she rode upon. “Just—let me,” she whined, rubbing hard at her own pace, and then crying out on the ’qa, her head tossed back, her legs kicking. Her hips battered against me, until she finally sagged—looking down for the first time and spotting my pumping arm.

chapter 41

ELLE

“IS that what I think it is?” I asked, reaching for it.

Ceph whipped it away from me, leaving a small cloud of gray behind. “It . . . is,” he said, slowly bringing it back.

His color was still a dark living red, with patterns flowing all over his body, but while his pumping arm was an arm, it wasn’t like the rest of them. It didn’t have suckers—and it was several shades darker than him currently—and there was a slow trickle of black oozing from its tip, being diluted by all the water around us.

It had the same spiral and ring as the carvings.

“May I?” I asked, as polite as he’d been up until this point. Rather than answer me, he brought it closer, where I could touch. I brushed some of my hair out of my face, and then reached for it, unable to wrap my hand around its girth.

“I don’t know, Ceph. This one looks bigger than the practice one last night,” I teased—but I read the ’qa wrong. I’d only been thinking about my own thoughts; I hadn’t been listening to his—because if I had, I’d have heard how nervous this was making him.

He wanted to put it in me so badly, but he was desperately afraid of doing the wrong thing.

“You can’t,” I answered him. I squirmed free of his arms to let myself sink, so that I could take the tip of him in my mouth. He jolted at that—and it was like a record scratch on the ’qa, breaking him free.

“There’s nothing we can do right now that’s wrong,” I told him with my mind while I sucked him, looking up. His pre-cum tasted savory and salty as it burst across my tongue, and I reached down his pumping arm to circle it with both hands, stroking up. It made him growl with pleasure, so I did it again and again, until a small cloud of black burst out of his tip. I gasped, wondering if I’d hurt him, when his strong hands grabbed me, hauling me up.

“There is more,” he thought at me. “There is always more. And it needs to be inside you.”

Everything before this had been careful—but now his tentacles wrapped me with force, holding me open, presenting me for him—and then I could feel his pumping arm’s thick tip searching, running up and down my seam, pushing and probing.

I groaned when it entered me, and felt him do the same.

chapter 42

CEPHARIUS

AT LAST.

I took Elle in all my tentacles and rocked us both back.

Her breeding hole was exquisite. It was warm, and tight, but it stretched to take me like I knew it would.

She was meant for me.

Of course I would be able to pump her.

I took my time, working my way inside her, listening to her, feeling the small motions she made as my presence there pleased her. I twisted my seed-heavy arm from side to side, back to front, and both heard and felt her moan.

“Fuck—Ceph—right there,” she said as her thighs squeezed, so I did it again. It was nothing to curve my tip and press against the place she wanted, which made her hiss. “Oh my God, Ceph, rub that spot,” she pleaded, and I did so, feeling some small part of her interior anatomy give, and then push back, as her muscles clenched against me.

I wanted to be further in her, but there was no way I was going to miss an opportunity to please her, especially now that we were skin to skin.

“Tell me what you want,” I thought at her and she shook her head, as her hands grabbed my nearest tentacles tight.

“Just keep going,” she said. “Faster—don’t stop.”

I closed my eyes, giving into all her sensations, tasting her with my pumping arm as I rubbed her again and again, her scent flowing into the water I breathed, like she was becoming a part of me. The muscles of her ass and legs trembled, winding up, and she made small noises on our ’qa. I moaned to encourage them, asking her for more with every piece of me.

“Come for me again, little pearl,” I whispered. “Start our breeding right. Show me how ready you are.”

Elle tucked her head against my chest as her hips fought my pumping arm, which only made me rub her harder. Then she screamed as she squeezed it, and her compression around its tip made me shudder. “Ceph,” she cried out, and I felt the thought of us together roll through her—it was what she wanted—she wanted me—and I needed to be in her, up to my ring.

But then she collapsed on top of me, making helpless sounds, and I shook with unrequited tension.

It only took her a second to notice. “What’s wrong?”

“Little pearl,” I gritted out through my thoughts and my beak. There were no human words or thoughts for the way I hungered. How I needed her to reach my ring and hold me tight. How I knew if we ever made it to the breeding caves I would . . . “I need.”

Her mind lit on mine at once. “Tell me what to do.”

I bowed my head to hers. Of course she wanted to help—she was my mate.

I pushed her off of me a little, pulled out of her, and reached for my pumping arm immediately.

chapter 43

ELLE

I HAD no idea what Cepharius was up to—all I cared about was that it made him feel good.

What it turned out he was doing was somewhat jerking off—making his inky, black seed spurt out of himself like a smokestack.

“Your breeding hole hungers for it.”

It was all I could do not to laugh. “I don’t know about that, mister.” But seeing how desperate he was to fuck me definitely turned me on.

“It’s lubricating,” he said, reaching between my legs with his hands next, putting his fingers inside me. “It will ease the way for me.”

And feeling him touch where I’d dreamed of him the other night—plus the fact that he’d just given me two world-class orgasms—I was in. “Yes. Anywhere you want it to go. Let’s ride.”

It was his turn to be amused—but then I felt him sober. “I do not want to hurt you, Elle—but this part is important for me.”

“Then it’s important for us,” I told him, which turned out to be the exact right thing.

It was easy to say—because it was what I believed.

Just because I didn’t know how any of this was working currently didn’t mean I was willing to give any of it up.

And if it had to end someday, well, that was off-the-fuck then, whereas Cepharius was with me now and I wanted him.

All of him.

Mind, soul, and body.

He grabbed hold of each of my thighs with his hands and held me open against him. Certain of his tentacles came up to stroke against my back, kissing my skin with their suckers, before flipping to tenderly rub me with their softer upper-skin.

“I love you, Elle of the Air,” he said, his black eyes full of promise for me. “Tell me how you feel, hide nothing.”

“Like I could,” I pretended to complain as I felt him slide back in.

chapter 44

CEPHARIUS

THE TEMPTATION TO start pumping her hard at once was almost overwhelming, but looking down and seeing her there, clinging to my chest, reminded me otherwise. She was small—I just needed to get her down to my ring—then I could release in her, and finally be rid of all my old seed, and my pumping arm need never be this large again.

I was still scared for her, though, no matter how willing.

“Will you relax, my love, and breathe?”

She gave me an amused look. “Did you know I can hold my breath for two minutes?” she asked, at the same time as I pushed more of my pumping arm in. She grunted, but then moaned.

“Can you?” I asked her, beginning to play myself in and out of her with the new ground I’d gained.

She nodded, her mouth falling a little open. “It was a thing I used to practice.”

“Why?” I asked her, tucking a tentacle underneath her jaw, feeling the pulse pounding at her throat.

Elle took my question seriously, and showed me images of herself swimming in the deep with long fins. “I always loved the ocean. But it’s so hard for us to be a part of it.”

“Yes,” I agreed. I never knew a kraken who wanted to seek out the air, but some few of those trapped in the air sought out the ocean endlessly.

Of course Elle would be one of them.

“I need you, Elle.”

She reached both her arms up to trap my chin as she was fond of doing. “I’m right here.”

“No, I—” I said, and then gave up on words, pulling up precise memories to share with her on the ‘qa. The long years I’d spent among the manatyls, and how I’d made a deal with my brother for this mission to leave the ’qa—and then the surprise of finding her on the other side of the water-wall, and the thought of a new mate destroying up all of my prior plans for my life. “I want to be this version of myself now. I don’t want to go back to who I was.”

To being lonely.

“Ceph, I don’t want that either—not for you, or for me,” she said, offering her own past up—losing her sister, her dangerous flesh, and her weak-willed husband. “When I’m with you I feel full—and not just because you’re inside of me,” she said, grinning—and pressing her hands against my jaw to push herself further down.

It was my turn to groan, and my hands cinched her thighs.

Her eyes went wicked with delight. “How close are you to where you need to be?”

She was perfection itself. “So close, little pearl, so close.”

Her body was riding against mine, so I could feel her heat rush to her belly. “Then do it, Ceph. Talk me through it—talk dirty.”

chapter 45

ELLE

I FELT CEPHARIUS’S mind sorting through mine for clues, but I wasn’t sure how much help I’d be—I’d never wanted anything like this before.

But there was something about his raw desire on the ’qa that stoked something inside me, something primal, and as I gave that energy to him, he took it and reflected it back.

He released one of my thighs, giving it over to a tentacle instead, and ran his fingers through my hair, pulling my neck to the side, as though he were going to whisper, like I wasn’t going to hear him in my mind: “Do you know how badly I need you, little pearl?”

I pouted. This wasn’t what I had in mind. “You just showed me—”

“That was why I needed you,” he interrupted my thoughts with a growl. “And all of that was true. But this is how,” he said, pulling himself almost all the way out of him, and then plunging himself back in.

I cried out in surprise, as I felt him purr in satisfaction, running through all the memories in my mind. “No one else has ever stretched your breeding hole this wide, have they?” he asked me, even though he already knew the truth.

I shook my head.

“And no one else has ever been this deep,” he said, taking another heavy thrust.

“No!” I shouted out, shuddering against him.

He downshifted easily. “Are you okay, my pearl?”

“That was an agreement-no, not a real-no,” I said with a pant.

“You are the most precious thing in the all of the water,” he said, smoothing his cheek against my own. “So I am just checking.”

I thought about explaining the concept of safewords to him, but then he started to thrust again, and distracted me.

“You like being full,” he said, sounding amused. “And from here on out, nothing else will do for you but my arm.”

I groaned as he stroked—and he wasn’t wrong. There was no way I was going to be able to go back to a man after this. If I had to get out of the water, I’d buy a house by the sea, with one of those widow’s walks, so I could look out at the ocean the whole time—or maybe I’d go down to the beach at night, take off my pants, and let the tide fuck me, pretending it was him.

“Your mind is so interesting, little pearl,” Ceph mused. “But it is also very loud. Let me pump you quiet again.”

For a millisecond I resisted—I wanted to be too smart to ever be fucked stupid—but then in action . . . fucccccckkkkk.

“Yes,” I heard his mind hiss in triumph. “Your breeding hole feels so good, little pearl, so tightly wrapped around me. Take me to my ring, let me fill you up.”

My entire body was rocking against him with his pounding. I slid a hand between us so that I could grind on my fingers—and he removed himself at once. His actions caused a cloud of black to spray around us.

“Hey!” I protested—but then he spun me.

“I want to touch all of you,” he said, turning to hold me open, my back to his chest, and shoving his way back inside—only this time one of his tentacles wrapped across my waist, dipping a sucker to my clit.

I groaned, arching my hips, which let more of him in. I couldn’t even see the ring now, so it had to be close—but I could watch the rest of him, and everything looked obscene, the way he kept me spread open, the color of his grasping tentacles, and then the heated shade of his thrusting flesh.

“Yes, witness this,” Ceph groaned in my mind. “Let me in, little pearl. Take me—I’m so close, and once I’m in—” He thrust, I felt myself stretch, and then he made a sound on our ’qa like I’d never heard.

And even though I was underwater with him—it set me aflame.

That was the only word I could think of to use for it, and it was a poor substitution.

All I knew was that his thoughts called to me, my mind as open to him as my thighs were, and I was begging for it.

“Please. Please-please-please.”

“Oh yes, little pearl,” he promised, enveloping me in his mantle, his puckering sucker tugging at my clit—and I realized why he needed to sink up to his ring.

It helped to anchor him inside me so the rest of his flexible pumping arm could pulse in and out of his sheath like a fucking jackhammer.

It felt so right. I could feel him inside me, but I could also feel him as he felt me, too—what it meant for him to be pillaging me like this, how desperately he needed it. The sensation of both of us made me cry out, and for a second I thought I was losing my mind.

“I require this action,” he growled, making me grunt shamelessly with his wild thrusts. “The speed draws the seed up in me and prepares it to depart. Oh, little pearl, your breeding hole—is so good.” His thoughts devolved into chaotic sounds of pleasure—and his sucker at my clit picked up. I caught hold of his nearest tentacles.

“Ceph,” I warned, throwing back my head, and clenching my jaw.

More tentacles sank between my legs, pulling everything there wide, stretching me so open that the friction nearly became overwhelming; plus, his sucker wouldn’t stop. I could feel my clit swelling. It was getting harder and harder to deny myself.

“Your breeding hole aches for release, little pearl. Why won’t you give it up?”

“Don’t—want—things—to—be—over,” I managed to get out.

“Elle of the Air,” he said, slowing down, pulling himself out of me, making me moan. “As you are a human, I think you do not understand how mating works,” he said, filling me again, making me jiggle like a hand puppet as I groaned. “You are mine now. Time or distance may try to separate us—but nothing will.”

The second he thought it, I knew he meant what he said.

This was forever.

My hips thrust, and I gave a ragged shout, coming hard, my pussy clenching his pumping arm tight, and he snarled.

“You are mine.”

The thought flew through my mind and echoed until it was the only thing that was true.

I was his—and he was claiming me.

He was almost inverted around me, in his eagerness to keep me still for his pumping pleasure, and I—

I ate it up.

Even when I’d had breasts, I’d never had men wanting to lose themselves like this in me before. I got the feeling that if someone interrupted Cepharius now, he’d kill them and then he’d go back to fucking me. It was intoxicating, especially because I could feel how all of his urges were surging through him on our ’qa. It was like doing one of those hot tub, cold-plunge things, except all the water was made of horny.

His emotions flowed through me just as fast as the friction, and I howled through another orgasm.

I was wrong if I thought that was going to slow him down though. All he did was spin both of us so that he was over me now, demanding, “Again.”

And I gave them to him. One after the other, pulled out of my body by his suckers and his pumping arm, falling faster and faster like close-set dominos. My throat would’ve been raw if I hadn’t been suspended in whatever safe liquid I was in, because it got to where I was screaming all the time—and then I felt him tense. He did it with his whole body, all the tentacles that were wound around me, his arms, and the muscles of his chest—and his impeccable rhythm began to stutter.

“Yes,” it was my turn to growl, and I bit his nearest tentacle, just because I could. “Give it to me!” And if my pussy was his breeding hole, then, “Breed me!” I demanded, like I was a queen.

I heard him bellow on our ’qa, and all of his skin went as dark as his pumping arm had been—then all I saw was white. Shudders of pleasure moved through my body, and I knew I was feeling him, same as he had felt me, this was what it was like for a kraken to come—and I almost passed out.

“Oh my God, Ceph,” I hissed, as he made a wild sound in time with each burst of his release in my mind. “It feels so good—”

“It is because of you,” he snarled, shaking and trembling. “Take it, little pearl, take it.”

I did, and I cried out.

It felt like I was trapped in between two mirrors, making everything infinite for a moment in time.

I was him and he was me and we were both fucking coming.

“Shhh, little pearl, yes—feel the bliss when we move as one,” he said, still fucking me out of my mind.

“Cepharius,” I said, trying to tense. He hadn’t just fucked the other half of my thesis out of me—I could barely remember my name.

“Don’t fight it,” he said, stroking his hands over me, still thrusting. “It will last for as long as my release, if you let it.”

I rocked back into his chest, helplessly coming, in slow moving waves—until his hands roved over the space where my breasts had been. I trapped his large palms there, feeling naked on a level I hadn’t yet before—but I realized that was all me.

It wasn’t him.

He wanted me as I was—and so I gave completely in.

“Ceph,” I whispered, drawing one of his arms over me possessively and pushing his other hand down, so his fingers could take the place of his suckers on my clit. He did so eagerly, stroking it, making me come again as he thrust and purred.

“Elle of the Air,” he said, drawing out all of the sounds, like he found my name delicious. “My perfect and beautiful pearl.”

I DIDN’T KNOW how long we were like that, satisfied and slowly spinning, because sometimes he would thrust again, setting off another wave—all I knew was that this was what it felt like to be loved.

I would never have to wonder or guess.

He would always be by my side—or failing that, in my mind—and I knew I was going to be his for the rest of my life.

“Yes,” he agreed, running the back of one of his hands across my cheek. “I am going to pull out now, Elle—but I will always be with you. I am never going to leave you again.”

I groaned as he retreated. A cloud of black burst from between my legs, and I got a strong sense of his pride.

“You are bred,” he said. I rolled over onto my stomach and he held me on his chest.

We both knew things weren’t going to work—but that didn’t stop us from wishing that they would.

“Good,” I told him, kissing him gently, before falling asleep right on top of him.

chapter 46

CEPHARIUS

MY LITTLE MATE was tucked against me, and as ludicrous as the situation was—her being only a third of my total body mass, if that—it was as if someone had placed an anchor on my heart.

I wouldn’t move her till she woke up on her own. I stroked against her soft, soft skin. I didn’t really think she was bred—nor did she, I knew—but we had tried our hardest.

“Is that what you wanted?” I thought out at the spaceship.

Was that why it’d brought me here?

So that I could please Elle?

I didn’t get an answer, but the wavelength of light in the room that made her glow to me brightened a little.

“If you can see into my mind—why can’t you just tell me what you’re thinking?” I cast out, as loudly as I could.

It was a mistake—it roused Elle. “Cepharius?” she sleepily wondered.

I wound protective tentacles around her. “Shhhh, little pearl. Breeding is exhausting. Sleep.” She had done so well, and brought both of us so much pleasure.

“You should <<rest>> too.” A voice I didn’t recognize came onto our shared ’qa—and before I could panic and wake Elle up, it pushed me down until I also fell under.

chapter 47

ELLE

I WOKE up sleeping on Cepharius.

Naked.

We were touching—and everything that’d gotten us to this point had not been the world’s most amazing dream.

It’d been real, and I was sore to prove it.

“Cepharius,” I thought out, while shifting one of his arms. He was asleep, horizontally, for my sake, because he wanted me to be comfortable.

I thought I should wake him up, but decided instead to relish the moment between us here. There would be time to worry about the fact we were in a spaceship and my suit was broken later—but for right now—

“Little pearl?” I heard him ask on the ’qa, at the same time as I felt his mind brush mine.

I stretched against him with my body and wrapped myself around his thoughts. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said, but it had a tinge of concern. “I wasn’t supposed to fall asleep, Elle. I was supposed to be guarding you.”

“Does it matter? I was safe,” I said, gently pushing off of him.

“It does. There was something—I want to remember it.” I felt him sorting through his memories in a rush—but before he could figure out what it was, there was an intrusion on our ’qa.

“Have you <<rested>> adequately?”

I screamed—both with surprise, and because the new voice on our ’qa was so loud. Ceph wound around me on instinct, but there was no way he could protect me—the sound was coming from within.

“Please do not <<panic>>. I will not <<harm>> you.”

“My mate,” Ceph said, taking my head in his hands, before casting out. “Stop that! Be quiet! You are hurting her!”

I saw myself in his eyes as he did—a blood vessel in my eye had burst—and I felt him enveloped by fear and anger.

“I have been <<waiting>> for our minds to <<meet>>.”

I curled up into Ceph’s chest, knowing he was seeking exits from the room, but even if one appeared, I was out of my suit—there was no place safe that he could take me.

The voice in our heads sounded like if someone ran one voice through an entire choir and then played it back over an organ with a ton of reverb. I had more imagination than Ceph did though—I could just feel him thinking whatever-the-fuck was happening right now was bad.

And that he would give his life for me.

I put a hand on his arm and squeezed it. “Don’t do anything stupid,” I thought at him.

“Please, do not,” the ambient voice agreed. “I need your <<help>>.”

But it wasn’t just the word help, it was the sensation of helplessness, frustration, anything that was related to it in my mind—like the voice could only play chords instead of notes.

“Can you be quieter?” I begged.

“I will <try>. But I do not have much <time>.”

And when it said “time,” I was smacked with the feeling of infinity. It sent me reeling, the thought that I was nothing and that time would continue on without me.

“Elle,” Ceph said, calling me back. His hands stroked all over my body. “Stop talking to her! Just talk to me!” he demanded.

“I <cannot>,” the voice apologized. “Your mind is big enough to <hold> us. But she is the only one who can <understand>.”

I put a hand out, breathing hard. “Just—give me a second, all right?”

“My pearl,” Ceph whispered on our ‘qa. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” I was seeing kaleidoscopes in my mind every time the voice talked to us, fractals of synesthetic knowledge, thoughts, feelings that weren’t mine, that I could only barely comprehend. “What are you?” I sent out, and I could feel Ceph shielding me from the answer.

“I am the <<ship>> you are in.”

And the word ship came with the experience of being one, of traversing through cold, dark, space, a long journey planned, cut short—and then fear . . . of being lost?

No.

A fear of loss.

“Your <mind> is becoming <accommodating>.”

I didn’t think that was it; I thought it was the fact that Ceph’s presence was inside me, everywhere I turned, putting me back together just as fast as acknowledging that there was an alien presence trying to communicate with me was pulling me apart.

“<<Yes.>> This is why I facilitated your <mating.> Can you <<help>>?”

“What can you possibly need from us?” Ceph shouted.

“<<Energy.>>”

The way it said it caught me off guard—it was with such unexpected passion and longing.

“Why?” I asked—and I was rocked by visions from a distant past.

There was a war going on, and an intelligent race was trapped between two different fighting species, neither of which it was even a part of. And when they realized their planet was going to be swept up in the conflict no matter what they did, they created spaceships to propagate their future.

Several hundred of these flew off into space, to meet at a distant destination, but this one was hit by debris.

The safety of its cargo was paramount, so it fixed itself, but in doing so used too much of its power to continue, which is why it hid itself here.

And what followed was three thousand impossibly frightened years of sending off beacons, asking for <<help>> before its power ran out.

Help that had never arrived—until now.

chapter 48

CEPHARIUS

ELLE WENT limp in my arms.

I knew she was all right; I could feel her heartbeat and see her breathing, but her mind was quiet.

“Stop hurting her,” I whispered, shaking with frustration. I didn’t want to yell, I was afraid to strain our ’qa more than the ship’s intrusion was already doing—but if it hurt her and I lived, I would go back to Thalassamur, gather my kin, and we would raze this structure to the ground.

Then her eyelids fluttered open, and I felt her rejoining the ’qa more consciously. I saw the blood vessel the ship’s thoughts had burst in her eye again, and I delicately stroked over her with all of my tentacles, searching for any other damage.

“It’s so scared, Ceph,” she whispered, curling into a ball inside my arms, putting her hands to her head.

“Of what?” I thought to her, but she didn’t know.

I clasped her to my chest, ready to take on the entire ship if I had to, when the lights in the room we were in turned off, and the door to the next room opened.

“Come <<in>>. Please, <<help>> us. We will <<trade>> you.”

I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. I moved forward, carrying Elle.

THIS NEW ROOM was lit with the strange ambient light the others had been, just like I’d seen in it before returning and finding the one particular wavelength of light directing me to Elle.

She felt fragile against me—so unlike herself—was this what had happened to the other two-legged men?

“No,” the ship said. “We have tried to <<communicate>> many times. They <broke>. They were too <small> to <listen>. <<Communicating>> is <hard>.”

I got residual impressions of the difficulties it had had, trying to lure us closer, so that we were near it long enough to get a sense of our minds—the changing symbols, the colors, and then realizing that without Elle and I conjoining our ’qa, we would never be able to talk and understand it—it needed the space of my mind and the ’qa itself, but also Elle’s ability and willingness to make sense of what was happening to succeed.

If the fact that I wanted to mate Elle so badly had left her open for damage, I would never forgive myself.

“I’m fine, Ceph,” she whispered, answering my unspoken prayers. “I mean, as fine as anyone can be, when they’re talking to a spaceship,” she said, giving me a weak smile.

“I love you,” I told her immediately. I had not gotten the chance to tell it to her enough yet—I could start repeating it today, and never be finished.

“<<Yes,>>” the ship interrupted me. “That is why we will <<trade>> you for your <<help.>>”

I sensed motion behind me and whirled to find the chamber we’d been in closing off, leaving us in this new one—and beside me a portion of the wall cleared, revealing a newly hatched kraken, no bigger than the size of my palm.

chapter 49

ELLE

I WAS TRYING to combat the world’s worst migraine haze while I made sense of things.

The ship wanted energy—ALRI had power; I was sure we could figure out how to help it—but we needed to do it fast. One of its sister ships was en route to return to help it, and it needed to send up another beacon, but it didn’t have enough energy to do so, while keeping its cargo safe.

But I wasn’t sure what precisely that cargo was—until I felt Cepharius’s heart lurch.

I blinked up at him, and saw his eyes were for the nearest wall alone.

I followed his gaze—and saw a human child.

“Elle,” he said, reaching forward with one hand, but then I drew his back with my own, jostling myself and probably adding another twenty minutes onto my headache, because I could see what he saw, through his eyes, on our ’qa.

It was like being at the optometrist when they had you hold that plastic shield over your eyes—if I saw through his, it was a kraken, if I saw through mine, a baby.

“Ceph—it’s not what you think it is,” I explained to him softly, feeling his pain at losing his child all over again, only this time much more intimately. I moved enough to make him free me, but I stayed against his side.

“It is <not>,” the ship agreed. “But it can <<be>>. Will you <<help>> us? Can we <<trade?>>”

“Of course we’ll help,” I said, and meant it.

The ship opened up the glass and released the baby. Ceph reached for it at once, cradling it inside his hands to pull it close, and I wasn’t sure which was worse for my ovaries, seeing him hold a kraken or a human baby.

“Good. This one has <volunteered>. It is very brave. Choose how you would like it to <look> and please bring us <<energy.>>”

Every time the ship talked the reverb in my head got louder—and I realized it was because the ship was talking as a collective.

But my thoughts were currently my own, because Cepharius was lost in his kraken-baby’s eyes. I closed mine, and let myself feel how he did, full of love and the urge to teach and protect, and the stabbing knowledge that we would never have that together hurt me.

I stroked a gentle hand down his back. “What do you mean this one?” I asked the ship. “Just how many are you carrying?”

The nearest lights telescoped back, revealing that the room we were in was full of hexagonal chambers, all lidded with opaque glass. I assumed each one of them was occupied.

“Ceph,” I whispered, willing him to look around. He did so, and I caught a strong wave of his confusion.

“I don’t understand.”

“I do,” I said. This was the ship’s cargo. It wasn’t just a ship—it was a mothership. Quite literally.

Suddenly all the fear the ship had felt for so long alone made sense. It wasn’t just responsible for a child or two—there were hundreds of them here.

An entire future’s worth of children.

“But you don’t need to trade us anything. Of course we’ll help.” I reached to take the hatchling from him, and he handed it over reluctantly.

The moment it landed in my arms it became a baby for me. Chubby, a little dopey looking with those unfocused newborn eyes, waving its tiny hands, and I felt it, skin to skin. I was flooded by hormones. I liked the way it fit, its weight, the heat of it—I even thought I could breathe its clean scent in.

“Can you show me your real form?” I asked the creature I held. Its appearance muddied and changed, turning from the baby I wanted to see, to something that looked like a furry larva, with six stubby little legs, and a twitching, mole-like nose.

It was ugly-cute—the sort of creature only a mother could love.

“We can <<cell-shift>>. This one is willing to stay <<behind>> to satisfy your mutual desires for <<reproduction>>, if you will but save the other <<cargo.>>”

Ceph was awed by this reveal—but not horrified. “It is still a child. I can tell,” he said, sending it to me on our ’qa.

“I know,” I said, kicking forward to put it back into its chamber. “And too young to volunteer for anything.” I bit my lips, watching the glass close and become opaque again. I couldn’t help but feel like I was sealing away the only chance he and I would have for offspring.

Because there’d been a moment when I’d been holding it, when it’d felt so right.

So real.

“Elle,” he said, his voice low, reaching for me, thinking the same thoughts. He pulled me into his arms and held me close. “I am sorry.”

“I know,” I said, nodding into his chest.

One of his tentacles pushed my chin up so I was looking at him. It slid up my cheek, to catch an errant tear from my eye before it joined all the other water.

“We have nothing else to <<trade>>,” the ship began, interrupting our moment.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“My mate is right. Of course we’ll help you.” Ceph swam us forward to touch the outside of the glass briefly, before returning his attention to the ’qa. “How long do you have? And what do you need, precisely?”

IT TOOK a lot of thinking for the three of us to understand one another. The ship was convinced it only had one day before the <<opportunity for rescue>>.

“Why did you let us sleep, then?” My life would’ve been a whole lot easier if I didn’t have to rely on Marcus or Donna to operate my cable—what if once I returned the habitat, they didn’t want to help me come back out?

I could sense the ship’s frustration. “We couldn’t <<press>> you. If your minds <<exploded>> like the others, everything would be <<lost.>>”

I winced. I didn’t want to think about Haberman’s mind “exploding” but here we were, and after the ship had first slammed knowledge home inside mine, if I hadn’t had the ’qa and Ceph to balance against, I could see how it could happen.

I also had to sit still while the ship went through my mind and showed me what it thought would work—ALRI was powered geothermally, which meant its power was somewhat infinite. The problem would come in bringing enough of the power out for the spaceship—and that was what I realized had happened to the ROVs.

It hadn’t killed them; it’d drained them, looking for enough <<energy>> to survive.

The ship had identified what it believed to a spare battery in my memories from walking through the engine room, even though I hadn’t realized what it was I was looking at, at the time.

“But even if she comes back with the habitat’s extra battery,” Ceph began, his confusion at how to merge my two-legged technology and alien technology coming through clearly on the ‘qa.

“We will <<manage>>. But <<hurry>>. <<<PLEASE.>>>”

I put out a warning hand as things got sharp again inside my skull. “At least you’re polite. But for my sake—less yelling?”

“And how will she return?” Ceph asked, making my safety paramount.

I thought I felt the ship considering, then a wall in the back of the room opened up, revealing my pressure suit floating in it like a diver in a restaurant aquarium, with its cable now intact.

At seeing it, Ceph and I both paused.

I wasn’t ready to leave him yet.

“Nor I, you,” Ceph said, in response to my thoughts, as his tentacles wound around me.

“<<Energy?>>” the ship thought at us—and I didn’t want it panicking.

I was strong. I’d been through worse before. I knew I would survive, but I flung myself against Cepharius, and he wrapped around me, both of us placing all of the contact we might never have again into that moment.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” I thought at him, as he swam us closer to my suit.

“I know, my pearl. I know.”

And then I inhaled when I peeled myself away from him, like he was the air I breathed, and I didn’t breathe again until my helmet was on, and I was coughing up the strange water I’d been swimming in as my suit repressurized.

chapter 50

CEPHARIUS

I WAS MYSTIFIED that the spaceship had gotten me to see something that wasn’t there. “The hatchling felt very real to me.”

“Me too,” Elle said. I was holding her in my arms, while I used my tentacles to loop up her now-healed cable as we traveled across the ocean floor. She was just as hurt as I was, I could feel it.

“How did you know?” I asked her.

She thought for a bit. “Do you all have alcohol down here? Or something like it? Other ways to get high?” she asked, and presented me with some of her own memories.

I was even more concerned. “Hallucinations are a part of two-legged life?”

“Not all the time,” she said. “Just—sometimes. Yeah.”

I shook my head. “I would not be cut out for living above the sea,” I said, and I felt her smile.

“Don’t worry. Your tentacles are too sexy. I’m not going to Little Mermaid you.”

I didn’t know what she meant—and the thoughts and visions inside her head confused me. I didn’t want to press; communicating with the ship had hurt her mind. I wanted her to rest, but I knew she wouldn’t until our charge was through.

What would happen then, though?

“Well, for one thing, I think I’ll be out of a job,” she said, answering my thoughts. I’d forgotten how close a mating bond would be. “But we’ll figure something out, won’t we?”

I paused, setting her down just on our side of the privacy line, knowing that once we crossed it, her communications with the habitat would return.

“Yes. Somehow.” There were the pressurized tanks my brother and I had been put in when we’d been ambassadors . . .

Elle saw the vision of these in my mind and reacted with appropriate horror. “I’m not keeping you in my living room like some kind of Bond villain!” I had no idea what that meant, either, but I understood her sentiment. “One problem at a time, okay? Let’s get Snout home, and then I’ll worry about the rest of my life, with you,” she said, threading her fingers through mine, and even though it wasn’t her skin, just her suit, I liked feeling them there.

And I knew what she intimately both tasted and felt like, thanks to the spaceship.

What a strange gift this entire mission had become.

Then I was confused. “Did he tell you that was his name?”

She peered out of the corner of her helmet at me. She looked tired, her wet hair was clinging to her face inside her helmet, one of her eyes was bloodshot, and she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “Yes,” she said, beaming.

“He did not,” I protested, comfortably wound up in her mind now, just how I wanted to be for the rest of my life. “Elle of the Air, are you trying to lie to me?” I teased, and she grinned.

“How do you know he’s a he, hmmmm? Sexist much?” she thought back at me, laughing—and then we were both interrupted by her reality.

“Diver?” The intercom inside her helmet turned on. “Oh my God, Elle.” It was the voice of the other woman inside the habitat. “Are you alive?”

Elle blinked quickly, before answering. “I’m a little afraid if I try to make a joke about being a ghost right now you’ll cut my gas line. But—goddammit—it’s so tempting.”

“Shut the front door!” the woman on the other end whispered.

“Why is the front door open?” I wondered at Elle, at the same time as she made a “wooooooo” noise for her friend for some unknown reason on the far side of the line.

We heard the woman screech, and then the line went quiet again.

“I think she abandoned me?” Elle guessed aloud after another twenty seconds—but her cable began reeling in.

“In that case . . .” I gathered her up and jetted her forward, setting her down right in front of the water wall, where she turned to me, putting one hand on my chest, and the other on my cheek, for all the cameras attached to her helmet to see.

I should’ve pushed this contact aside, but some primal part of my being wanted her to claim me publicly, after everything we’d been through.

“I love you,” she said, smiling, and I watched her mouth say the words at the same time as she thought them at me, for all the world to hear.

“How touching,” announced a strange masculine voice over the intercom inside her helmet. “Doctor Kepzler, get your ass in here,” it demanded, right before the end of her cable tugged her through the water-wall, sending her sprawling in her suit to the ground on the other side.

chapter 51

ELLE

I LAY there on the ground in the dock room, surprised and sputtering, feeling Ceph panic in the water nearby.

“Don’t do anything rash!” I thought out at him, while I tried to get my bearings. There were several soldiers in the room in ominous all-black uniforms, with what looked like tactical armor on. Donna was handcuffed to the crane-nest, and one of the other men had Marcus tied up.

“Stand her up! The rest of you keep her in your sights!” the first one demanded, the same voice I’d heard. He had close cropped blonde hair, an aristocratic British accent, and he was nearing on me. “Have you made alien contact?”

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked, and heard my voice come in through the crane-nest, over my helmet’s intercom. I picked myself up off the ground, and heard multiple weapons readying.

“Don’t shoot in here!” Marcus pleaded. “If you puncture the habitat, we’ll all die!”

I felt white-hot rage on my bond with Cepharius: that I was in danger, that he felt like he couldn’t do anything. “Ceph, I really need you to calm down, please.”

He grasped hold of his emotions like they were a living thing. “Yes, my pearl,” he acquiesced and hid them all away.

“Disconnect her cable and take off her helmet,” the British man commanded. I was flanked by soldiers instantly, who did precisely what he said. “What have you been doing out there for two days, Doctor?”

I tried to shake off the men but couldn’t. “I’m not answering anything till I know who you are!” I shouted, the second I was breathing habitat air.

He took a few steps closer, but didn’t touch me, inspecting me from afar. “I’m Quentin Hargrave, your new boss.” He spent a long few moments, staring into my bloodshot eye. “Tell me everything you’ve seen.”

Somehow I didn’t think he was just going to just give me a battery. I heard Ceph growl a warning in my mind just before I responded, but that wasn’t going to stop me. “Go fuck yourself.”

He snapped his fingers, then shifted his gaze to one of the men standing next to me. “Teach her some manners.”

This man’s hand raised—and it was the last thing he ever did, because he was fractionally closer to the water-square than the rest of us. One of Cepharius’s tentacles lashed out, reached his ankle, and my mate yanked him into the sea.

He gave a shout of surprise that echoed in the metal chamber, and we all heard a splash as Cepharius pulled him through. His death, however, was eerily silent, as the pressure outside the water-wall crushed all the air in his body, compressing his lungs to the size of golf balls, ripping them away from all their surrounding tissue, and he started bleeding out of his mouth and nose, staining the dark water that faced us red.

Then the two men beside me pulled out their guns and started shooting into the ocean. I panicked for Ceph, but I knew he hadn’t been shot—if he had, I would’ve felt it on our bond.

“What the fuck is wrong with you!” Marcus shouted, flailing against the soldiers that held him.

“My men can aim,” Hargrave said, before crooking his fingers for his me to be brought closer. “We had good reason to suppose you were dead.” He inspected me without touching me. “How did you survive? Did you make contact?”

Whoever he was, he knew about the aliens. I grit my jaw. “It’s classified.”

He clucked his tongue—then took my arm and ejected my suit’s data sleeve. “Nothing’s classified for me.” He jerked his head, toward the rest of the habitat. “Take her to her room and tie her to a chair.”

chapter 52

ELLE

THE TOES of my boots scraped the floor as two soldiers dragged me down the hall—and I still had no idea what was happening.

I could feel Cepharius’s concern for me, like a constant thrum, and I held onto it like it was my lifeline.

When we reached my room, the soldiers easily let themselves in—so much for all the locks and secrecy.

And my tablet was gone, along with the ROV parts and data sleeves from the other suits.

I didn’t fight being tied, but I did ask the soldiers questions. “Who are you? Who sent you?”

They didn’t answer me, their faces kept stony silence, until they left.

“My pearl,” Cepharius thought at me, from the other side of the wall.

“This looks bad. I know. But I’ve been in rough situations before.” I thought back at him the times I’d gotten mugged—in the US, and abroad—how I’d had to bribe people for more time on sites more than once before, and a memorable prior hostage situation, out on a dig. In some countries, getting briefly kidnapped was so common there were almost rules to the game.

But those people had all just wanted money.

This was probably international conspiracy level shit, and Snout’s life was on the line—along with a few hundred of his friends.

It was way the fuck above my paygrade.

I tried to look over my shoulder out the window for Ceph. The second they’d disconnected my cable, my helmet my suit’s life support had turned off, so all the freezing chill I’d brought in me from the ocean had seeped into my bones—my teeth were chattering, and I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.

“I don’t suppose krakens have 911?”

“I do not know what you mean,” he said, swimming back and forth outside, trying and failing to keep his thoughts to himself, roiling with concern for me.

I rocked my head back, hitting the back of my suit. Even if krakens did have an emergency signal, it didn’t matter—they couldn’t come into the habitat, and if anything was breached I’d die.

“I know,” Cepharius thought with a dismay so deep it hurt me.

“It’s going to be okay.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, but I know that I love you.”

“And I love you, my pearl,” I heard him think with anguish, feeling all his painful memories merge with mine, because both of us knew that sometimes love was not enough.

I was about to respond, when my door opened up again. Hargrave came in with my tablet tucked under his arm, and two of his men dragged Marcus and Donna in behind him, shoving both of them to their knees as he leaned against my desk to face me.

“Hello again, Doctor Kepzler.”

I ran my tongue across the outside of my teeth. “It’s a little late to play good cop, bad cop, especially when there’s only one of you.”

He gave a dark laugh. “Well, things down here at the bottom of the sea are strange. For instance, there’s a gap in your recording.” He held my tablet up, using my face to unlock it. “See, we’ve got video of you going into the ship—but then everything goes blank for a day and a half, until you’re returning. So what happened during that time?” he asked, dragging his finger back and forth casually across the screen.

I shook my head. There was no denying the footage, but I’d never tell him things he didn’t know. “I blacked out.”

He responded without looking up. “Do you know how many men we’ve lost already?”

I glanced over to Donna in panic. She gave me a shrug, whereas when I looked to Marcus, he was turning bright red.

“No,” I answered truthfully. “I figured there were some, I saw the empty suit berths in the dock room, but—”

He cut me off. “Twenty-three. You see, my group’s been looking for this quite a bit longer than Mr. Marlow has—and unfortunately for you, we’re just as well funded. But after numerous failures, we decided we’d sit back and let him take the lead. We planted this one here,” he said, pointing at Marcus, “like a cuckoo in a crow’s nest, and waited.”

I gasped and looked at Marcus with horror, as did Donna, and he had the decency to seem ashamed. “I’m sorry, they were going to blackmail me—” he started babbling.

“Shut him up,” Hargrave ordered, and the soldier nearest Marcus punched him.

“And now you’re the first human being to survive alien contact, Doctor. My group wants to know what you found, how you found it, and how we can make it ours.”

I steeled myself to not show any emotion. “I blacked out.”

Hargrave clucked, casually flipping through screens on my tablet. “I don’t think so.”

“I did!” I protested angrily. “I don’t remember a thing!”

“You may be a very smart person, Doctor,” he said, flipping the tablet to show me a screen where all my vitals were peaking—a portion of my suit was still talking to the system. “But you’re a shitty liar.”

Goddammit! “Only because you’re scaring me.”

“Am I?” He pretended to be surprised, before his expression slid into something more determined and frightening. “That’s good. Because I want you to believe me. The people I am affiliated with will do whatever we have to to get to that technology before Arcus Industrial.”

I thrashed my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I made it inside the ship—but then I blacked out.”

He took two steps forward and ran one hand through my hair, yanking my head up and back, and planted the cold end of his gun’s barrel underneath my chin.

“Fine, then,” he said, and I felt the barrel nudge my jaw. “You may not remember. But I bet your kraken does.”

chapter 53

CEPHARIUS

FIRST THE TWO-LEGGED HAD TRIED to shove metal into me, and now Elle was helpless, with one of their guns pointed underneath her chin.

And because we were joined on our ’qa, I could hear everything.

“Does your kraken love you as much as you love him?” the man named Hargrave asked her and it was all I could do not to rip through the window—only the knowledge that breaching her room would kill Elle as well stopped me. “Tell him to acknowledge me.”

“Don’t you dare!” Elle thought out.

I managed not to move, but it almost killed me, as the evil man went on. “He never turned off the cameras in here, you know.” Hargrave jerked his head in Marcus’s direction, while keeping eye-contact with Elle. “And the other night—let’s just say we had a very interesting viewing party, while waiting to see if you’d make it back. Though we were all surprised to find out that you didn’t have breasts.”

I felt Elle’s horror and shame, at both the situation, and the fact that her scars had been so publicly on display—but she gathered herself faster than I would have, if our situations were reversed.

“Whatever he wants, don’t do it Ceph,” she thought back to me. “He won’t shoot me. He knows bullets might damage the building. He’s crazy, but he’s not insane.”

Then Hargrave rose up and looked back. He took his gun away from Elle’s chin, and used it to direct the soldier by Marcus away—then shot him.

I could not believe I was seeing up close what I’d seen so often in Elle’s stories—Marcus was dead. His blood covered half the room; it had spattered onto Donna, and both Donna and Elle were screaming.

Hargrave, however, was not, and he replaced the gun beneath Elle’s chin, where I could feel the heat of its barrel-tip against her skin. “Frangible bullets,” he announced. “Perfectly lethal, but unlikely to travel very far.” He looked to the glass I was swimming behind. “Acknowledge me.”

I could not accommodate Elle’s wishes anymore.

I put a tentacle against the glass, and the man stepped back.

“Two tentacles now,” he demanded.

“Ceph, no!” Elle pleaded—but I slapped another one up, and through her, listened to him laugh.

“So we understand one another,” he said, and I watched him put his gun back into its holder at his waist. “Tell me, kraken—do you remember what happened on the spaceship? One tentacle for yes, two for no.”

“Don’t!” Elle thoughts flew to mine, and I saw her trying to look back—but he caught her chin and wrenched her face around to look his direction, while his eyes stared resolutely out at me.

Daring me to challenge him.

I slowly lowered one tentacle onto the glass.

“Excellent,” he practically purred—and I watched Elle sag. “Then bring me a piece of alien technology, and if it’s good enough, I might let your girlfriend back into the water.”

chapter 54

ELLE

“CEPHARIUS!” I shouted on the ’qa, but it was too late; I felt him leaving.

I didn’t know what he could possibly bring back—and we were supposed to be taking the ship batteries.

“We’ll give your boyfriend a few hours,” Hargrave said, gesturing for the soldiers holding Donna to release her. She was spattered in Marcus’s blood and looked like she was going into shock. “Leave her here—if she gets her wits about her, she can get you out of your suit. I wouldn’t want you to be tempted to try to swim,” he said, with a malevolent chuckle, and then spoke to his men, who were following him on his way out. “One of you, guard outside the door.”

The second it was shut, I fought against the ties I’d been bound with and shouted out for my mate on the ’qa. “Cepharius? Cepharius!” When that didn’t work, I tried more quietly and aloud, “Donna?”

“Yeah, fuck,” she whispered, shaking herself. “I’m here.”

“Can you untie me?”

She blinked a lot, like she was trying to figure out where she was. “Sure.”

She stumbled over to the chair, slowly untied me, then helped me up. We made our way into the bathroom together. The first thing she did was turn on the shower, and then everything about her bearing and expression cleared. “We don’t have much time.”

“What?” I asked, as she started stripping pieces of my armor off of me.

“There’s no cameras in here, and the shower will make it impossible for them to hear us—you need to tell me everything. Now.”

I gawked at her. “Marcus just died,” I said, still not having quite come to grips with it.

She caught my face in her hands. “Yeah, and when motherfucking Quentin Hargrave chose to tell us his actual fucking real name, we became next on the list. Get out of your suit. I’ll go get you clothes.”

I watched her composure change the second she opened the bathroom door, stumbling and sobbing out to my dresser, where she knocked off several items—including Cepharius’s carvings—in her attempt to find me an outfit to bring back, and then did so, instantly straightening the second the door was shut.

“You’re not just a cook and cable operator, are you?”

“No—and you had a little more than alien contact, eh?” she said, looking at my shoulders, which were exposed from where I’d tugged my drysuit off. I had sucker marks from Cepharius all over my body—and Donna came nearer to peer at me. “You had to be someplace pressurized for all that. And where the hell’s your swimsuit?” Her eyes went wide. “You really did it, didn’t you. You made it inside the ship. The both of you. And—you used that opportunity to get down?” she asked, her voice arching, beneath the shower’s roar, her eyes skimming over me. “It’s a wonder you have any platelets left!”

I frowned at her as I finished pulling on pants. “Platelets?” I said in an accusatory fashion, wondering if she was the other kind of doctor.

“I wasn’t lying about watching Grey’s. I’ve picked up some things.” She gave me a grin, which I didn’t return.

“Tell me who you really are!” I demanded, snatching my shirt from her hands.

“I can’t. You’re dating someone telepathic,” she said, her nose wrinkling. “They’ll know what you know; it’s against the rules. But my only job is to keep you safe from that nonsense out there, and I’m very well compensated. I wasn’t sure Marcus was a traitor till his crew arrived—but there also wasn’t a way to flush him out before you managed to return and set his whole plan in motion. I’m sure if Mr. Marlow were here, he’d apologize to you for letting you meet so many of his enemies in person.” She knelt to the ground, pulled out one of the screwdrivers I’d brought into my room for help with the ROVs, and began working on an access panel. “Tell me what you saw, before they come in and ask questions.”

“No,” I said simply. “How do I know if I can trust you? You won’t even tell me your real name!”

She stopped what she was doing and looked up. “Why’d Mr. Marlow pick you?”

I stared at her.

“Because you’re on your own. If someone, or some alien, more precisely, kills you, there’s not as many people to care. Accidents happen, you know?” she said, answering her own question. “Haberman had three kids. You can’t have people sign NDAs when they’re under five. Toddlers have atrocious penmanship.”

“Fuck,” I whispered, as she went on in the same serious-but-somehow-also-lighthearted tone.

“And he involved the krakens this round because he’d rather not keep expending human lives, seeing as killing people and covering it up indefinitely is a hassle—but also because he knew they’d keep their mouths, or minds, shut. They’re not interested in inviting any more attention to themselves, or the deep.” She turned back to her job at hand.

“If he knew it was dangerous, why didn’t he tell us more?” I hissed. “About what we’d be in for? Or why didn’t you, for that matter?”

“Orders,” she said, with a shrug. “Something-something-scientific-method—I’m just muscle, for the most part. But I think Mr. Marlow didn’t want to color your perception of what you were going to see, because he did want you here for your mind. And I believe he thought sending amphibious rifles down with the last crew he might’ve given the aliens the wrong idea.”

The truth was the aliens hadn’t even noticed. “You know, I’m sure there’s entire branches of the government who’re better equipped to handle this!”

She gave a brisk nod, without looking back. “Possibly! Or whoever gets to alien tech first could just use it to start World War Three. So maybe you could just believe that the people who shot Marcus are the baddies?” She pried the panel off the wall with a grunt, and then gave me a look. “You’re a historian, aren’t you? How well does giving only one side gunpowder usually work?”

I didn’t want to answer that, as she started gesturing me down, into the exceedingly narrow tunnel she’d just revealed, that appeared to contain the room’s plumbing.

“Get in.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a pressurized lifeboat attached to the engine room. We’re getting into it, and then ejecting out of here.”

I took a step back from her at once.

“What, you don’t believe me?” she asked. “Your boyfriend can come with—Hargrave’s men won’t be able to hurt him out in the open water. You can just telepathize with him and tell him you’ve escaped, easy, done.”

“I can’t, Donna.”

“Why not?”

I crossed my arms, knowing just how insane what I was going to say next would sound. “Because the aliens need me.”

We were so deep it’d take us a week to decompress safely and reach the surface. If we did that there’d be no way to bring batteries back for the beacon in time, which meant that Snout—and all his siblings on the mothership—would perish.

One of her eyebrows cocked up. “Did . . . they . . . tell you that?”

I sighed. It was now or never—my window for helpful action was closing. “Yeah,” I said, and went ahead and spilled the beans.

DONNA DID a good job of listening, then rocked back on her heels. “An entire spaceship? Full of small furry creatures?”

“Yeah.”

“Like a space SPCA?”

I groaned. Ceph was right; the ’qa was better for transmitting information. I missed its simplicity so much. “I don’t think they’re cats, Donna. They have too many legs.”

“That’s just insane—and it’s been down here three thousand years? Just setting beacons off?” She was scrubbing blood off her face with a wet towel. “I bet that’s how they found it, you know,” she said, whirling in the small place. “They probably focused in on those periodic energy bursts.”

It made sense. “Yeah, but now if I don’t bring them batteries—”

“Okay,” Donna said with a sharp nod. “Plan change. You stay here.”

“What?”

“I need someone behind to fake out the guards. And there’s no way I’m letting you touch the habitat’s batteries, no offense.” She stood and grabbed me by the shoulders. “You stay behind, pretend to be freaked out, I’ll go get the battery, and bring it to the dock so when your boyfriend comes back for the trade, I’ll get it to him—and you’ll tell him the plan,” she said, tapping a meaningful finger on my temple. “Hargrave’s gonna want to show you off in person to make sure your kraken complies. I’ll fling it out, then he can go do what needs doing and hopefully the two of us survive.”

“And you’ll really help me?” I asked her, wanting, but not quite willing, to believe.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “I know you don’t watch the show—but trust me, it’s what Doctor McDreamy would do. And I’m pretty damn heroic,” she said, tucking into the narrow space. “Close this up, okay?” she said, and then crawled out of sight.

chapter 55

CEPHARIUS

I PROPELLED myself through the water as fast as I was able, until I was back at the spaceship’s side. It hadn’t closed up its main door, so I went in, and called out for it on the ’qa.

“Have you returned with the <<energy?>>” the ship asked me, sending me reeling with the force of its intent. “Where is <<it?>>”

I grasped hold of the nearest walls with my tentacles, like it speaking to me might blow me back outside. “I haven’t yet. Things got hard—but I need your help.”

“<<Time is flowing,>>” the ship said with concern, and I got the impressions it’d been running through Elle’s exceptional imagination about urgency and the massive loss of life it would experience if it didn’t get batteries in time. “<<Our energy ebbs.>>”

“I know.” I swam into the room and lifted my gaze up. “How far can you project your thoughts?” It showed me pictures of expanding circles pushing through the waves. “If I tell you what to say, can you get a message out?” I knew there had to be another kraken somewhere within fifty-thousand lengths.

I felt the ship’s hesitance like a physical thing. “Only if <<energy>> is <<guaranteed.>>”

Because it would cost the ship more of its precious power to communicate.

I sank back—but I wouldn’t have lied, even if the ship hadn’t been in my head.

“It is not.” I took a moment to show it what had happened on the ’qa—how a situation that we thought we might have had in hand was now wildly off-center: Elle trapped, and the other two-legged demanding tribute. “But if you can get a message out to others of my kind telling them that Cepharius needs them, I know they will come to help us.”

The ship did not respond—and for the first time since it’d interfered with my ’qa, I was angry at its lack.

“You know me,” I said, spinning slowly beneath its shifting colors. “You know my whole life! You wrote it on your walls!” I shouted. “And you know if I make a promise, I will do my best to keep it!”

Everything was quiet between us and then I felt a burst of sensation, rippling all over my skin.

“Your <<message>> is <<sent.>>”

I sagged. “Thank you.” Before I could recuperate—a hexagonal slab separated itself from the matrix of the wall and started floating toward me, like a strange crystal, the width and length of my arm.

“Take <<this one>> back with you. It will <<prove>> you have <<been here.>>” The walls of the “crystal” went clear, revealing Elle’s little Snout inside. The end plate opened, and the alien swam out.

“I can’t,” I refused. My pearl would never forgive me.

“It is not your <<decision.>> They are <<curious>> and <<brave.>> It is their <<choice.>> They want to <<see.>>” the ship told me. “Return with <<energy.>>”

I took hold of the hexagonal box the alien creature had brought with him. “I will try my hardest,” I said, then paused. “But before I go—where did you put the suits of the other men who came here?”

chapter 56

ELLE

I BOLTED the access panel back into place, then hid the multitool up my sleeve, walking back into my room with my shoulders slumped like someone who was upset and crying. I’d left the shower running behind me, like Donna was now taking her turn, and pretended to rifle through a drawer, looking for something I couldn’t find.

I made a show of being helpless, because I assumed Hargrave’s men were watching via the cameras, and after a while, I wrapped Marcus up as best I could in my sheets, while making sure to act disgusted and sad, before going to the window where I hoped I’d feel Cepharius.

About half an hour later, I did.

“Elle.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered on our ’qa. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, you?” he asked instantly, although I knew he could feel me. And I could feel him, too, which was why he said, “Do not be disappointed in me.”

“What. Are. You. Doing,” I thought at him, after grasping that one of the aliens was swimming back alongside him.

“I tried to send him away, Elle. He wouldn’t let me. And I tried to out-swim him—I couldn’t. Don’t ask me how, but he’s incredibly fast.”

“Cepharius!” I said. “He’s a child.”

“I know that—but I couldn’t very well tie him down to a rock. And the ship said he wanted to come. It is his right.”

“You cannot give humans an alien baby!” I thought out the plot to every shitty show I’d ever watched in college on the Discovery channel at him—all the autopsies and conspiracy ones.

“But none of that’s real!” he said, in confusion.

“Most of it isn’t, but I wouldn’t put anything past them!” I thought out at him. “Or us, I mean—goddammit. Just—read my memories and see what happened since you went away!”

I felt his mind brush against mine, and then sensation flowed over me like electricity.

“So she will be bringing a battery to the dock?”

“Yes. But do not give this man an alien baby, Ceph. If you do, I will never forgive you.” I made sure to send that thought to him with the appropriate intensity.

“I hear you,” he said, just as solemnly back. “Give me five minutes to prepare, and then tell them I’ve returned.”

chapter 57

CEPHARIUS

I HAD three of the amphibious rifles strapped across my back, the alien’s home under one arm, and the creature itself still swimming beside me. It taken the form of a hatchling again.

“Do not do that. Please,” I thought out at it, and it changed back into the furry larval form it had had earlier, when Elle had been holding it, so I knew it understood me. “Are you fully sapient? Or are you too young?” I pushed my thoughts at it, but only got a pleasant blankness in return. “Because I need you to wait here.”

We were within viewing distance of the habitat’s dock, and I would trade the two-legged man the child’s habitat instead, since the child did not seem to need it.

I swam forward—and it followed me.

I shook my head gravely. “That is not allowed, little one. Wait here,” I sent to it—only to have it follow me a second time.

“No,” I explained, setting the tube it had lived in down. Perhaps it was only following the tube? I moved forward, and it trailed after me. “Do not,” I said again, gently, this time capturing the creature in my hands.

It changed to a kraken child instantaneously, and I did not care how clear Elle’s reasoning had been—I knew I was not hallucinating. It may not have been a kraken child, but it felt like one to me. It had the weight of one—I had held Gerron often enough when he was a hatchling—and I could feel it curling its tentacles around my fingers.

Nothing about the experience I was having was pretend.

“I need you to be safe, little one. And I am not moving toward safety. But I am doing this for your people. Please wait here for me.”

I kept my thoughts separate and precise and finally the alien creature let go of me and jetted into the dark—I felt its departure with profound regret.

“I will be back,” I promised it, and then picked up the box it’d come in and swam swiftly in.

chapter 58

ELLE

HARGRAVE’S MEN had been so interested in what Cepharius would return with that they didn’t even realize Donna was missing—they must have assumed she was taking the world’s longest shower.

Whereas I found myself goosestepped down the hall, with a soldier’s arm tucked under my chin, and his gun with its frangible bullets shoving into my kidney.

Hargrave set us up at the back of the dock room, me by his side, with an array of his people standing in front of us in a line.

“Tell your kraken not to try anything,” Hargrave told me, as I made a face at him.

“He can see all this,” I snapped, before I was jerked up onto my toes. “Ceph?” I thought out for him.

“I am here, my pearl. Tell me how to proceed.”

I took a look at all the soldiers with their guns out. “Don’t come too close.” Then I spoke again. “He’s ready. He has—” And I paused, to find out what Cepharius was even going to trade with. “A piece of the ship,” I said, hoping that it would take the soldiers a bit to find out Ceph was carrying an empty box.

“Have him throw it in.”

Where was Donna?

Not in a lifeboat ascending to the surface, I hoped.

Ceph hurled the hexagonal box through the water’s square, where the men made a show of carefully retracting it while staying out of his tentacle range.

“Tell us how it works,” Hargrave demanded.

I thought of a lie quickly. “It’s a power crystal. It contains part of the ship’s energy.”

And as if to refute me, Donna came into the room, to throw something the size of a backpack like a discus into the water. “It’s the spare battery!” she shouted as a soldier hip-checked her and sent her sprawling.

Hargrave did not miss a beat—he whipped his gun out like it was a part of him and shot it.

Prior to that, I had no idea how incredibly explosive lithium-ion batteries could be.

The thing instantly turned into a fireball.

I screamed—but at least I was behind the front line of soldiers, who caught the worst of the sudden burst of flames with their bodies as we were all rocked back by the concussive blast. I could smell the scent of synthetic materials burning, and the soldier holding me let go, right before falling and taking me to the ground with him. There was a piece of battery casing sticking out of his eye.

chapter 59

CEPHARIUS

“ELLE!” I shouted, having witnessed the battery’s explosion on the water’s far side.

The only thing that stopped the habitat from breaking apart from the force of it was the remarkable resiliency of the magic that kept the dock’s water-wall in place—the force burbled out in my direction, releasing the tension, but it didn’t break the seal.

“ELLE!” I shouted louder.

“I’m here!” she shouted back. I could tell she was intact but stunned.

“Get to that lifeboat NOW!” I bellowed at her.

“I’m trying, I’m trying!” she said, and I had an image of her scrabbling down a hall. The other woman was with her at least, and although both of them seemed frightened, they were whole.

Until they passed the engine room—and my pearl made them take a detour.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Getting the last battery!”

“No!” I swam alongside the habitat, holding back an entire army’s worth of strength. “Do not—”

“Ceph, we have to!” she howled—and I had an image of her getting cut on her hand while operating a tool, which drove me to insanity. “Donna’s helping. We’re going to pull this off.”

I did not know whether or not she meant metaphorically or physically, all I knew was that she was in danger and what she was trying to do was absurd.

“Do not—do not—do not,” I told her, willing her with all my might to be safe and whole.

I could not lose my mate again.

“I know, Ceph. I love you,” she said back on our ’qa. I watched her through her eyes as she and the other woman fought with a piece of the habitat’s machinery. “Get ready to take this to the ship—we’re coming back.”

chapter 60

ELLE

IF DONNA HADN’T BEEN with me, I couldn’t have done it. As it was, when we got to the final piece to get the battery free, she did it with gritted teeth.

“Okay, this is it. And—just so you know—now we’re fucked.”

“What do you mean?” I said, holding the edge of the cold slab of electronics and metal as we waddled it back to the dock room.

“The other one was the spare. This is the actual battery. There’s nothing to replace this. All of ALRI will run out of juice in about an hour.”

“Oh,” I said, and winced, hoping I could keep that piece of information from Ceph.

I could not. “You drop this off, I watch you get into the lifeboat, and then I will take it to the spaceship to drop the battery off,” he thought at me with a growl.

“Understood,” I told him—but then Donna and I heard the sound of feet coming up the metal hall.

“Oh, fuck me,” Donna said, her eyes wide at seeing their owner first.

I looked over my shoulder, to find Snout trundling for us, then thought out to Ceph. “Why is he here?”

“So you admit it’s a he?” Ceph thought back, before adding sharp concern. “I told him to stay behind! He did not listen!”

“How did he get past you?” I said—and realized Ceph was too pained to answer. “I’ll keep him safe.”

That didn’t stop him from hurting. “There was chaos. I blame myself.”

“Don’t, Ceph. It’s okay—we’ll toss him out to you with the battery.”

Donna bit her lip and then looked at me. “Can we pet him?”

I didn’t think it was a good idea, remembering what touching the alien had done to me and Cepharius, but we needed to pick him up to get out of the way and go faster. I heaved the battery away from her. “Just grab him. We’re almost there—but don’t freak out if he changes.”

She boosted him up off the ground, making cooing sounds—but Snout stayed an alien for her. “Come on, buster,” she said, trotting forward faster than I could with the battery.

And Snout was the only thing that saved her—because Hargrave and the last five of his men rounded the corner, and I could see all of them focusing in on him.

“Run!” I shouted, turning around at breakneck speed.

chapter 61

ELLE

“LEFT! AND LEFT AGAIN!” Donna shouted behind me—and behind her, I heard the echoing shouts of Hargrave telling his men not to shoot—not because they didn’t want to kill us, but because they might accidentally shoot the baby.

I found the last strength in my body to make around the next bend, running through the engine room where we’d just pried this battery off the wall, to the airlock at the back of it, with the pressurized lifeboat attached to the far side. I set the battery down and started spinning open the thick circular door.

“Hurry!” Donna said, putting Snout down to help.

We hauled the door open—the space inside the lifeboat was only as big as an extra-long couch. Together we heaved the battery inside, she got in, and I gave her Snout much more carefully. I crawled in beside them, and was redoubling to spin the door closed behind us, when a steel-toed boot blocked me, and the circular door was yanked back open, revealing Hargrave, and his men.

“I can’t let you leave with that,” he said, before calmly shooting Donna in the face.

Snout squealed, I screamed—and I realized I didn’t hear Ceph.

I knew he was all right, I felt him on our ’qa—but whatever it was he was doing right now, he’d blocked off from me entirely.

“No!” I shouted, as hands reached into the lifeboat to pull me out of it. “Don’t!”

I heard my cries echo out—and then heard an answering cry from somewhere behind me, only it was much more masculine.

chapter 62

CEPHARIUS

MY MATE and a child were trapped somewhere in a metal tube at the bottom of the sea and I would die before I would let anything happen to them.

I sensed and saw the chaos when they changed direction, realizing they were in danger. I girded myself with all the magic I had currently, took a deep inhale of water, and pushed my entire body through the magical barrier at the dock, until all of me was on the horrible, dry, and less pressured far side. I could taste the chemicals from the explosion and the two-legged blood beneath my tentacles, but I didn’t have time to explore—I needed to save my family.

I surged through the dock room’s open door, following the path I’d just seen Elle take, while swinging one of the amphibious rifles off of my shoulders. I’d seen them in Elle’s memories, and knew they didn’t use bullets, but flechettes—strange little darts that shouldn’t hurt the habitat’s integrity, but would do enough distant damage for me, until I could get there personally. I pulled myself through the engine room, then down the next hall, spotted the soldiers, took aim, and fired.

The first projectile hit the man in his flank, and so I re-aimed the next, going for the more important spine. I hit it, and watched him drop, starting up with another. They tried to hide from me, hiding in the nooks and crannies of the crenulated walls, shooting back—but I was built to withstand the deep. Their bullets were nuisances to me, and nothing more. I pulled out another rifle, operating this one with my tentacles, alternating my attacks between the two guns, pressing them back using both weapons simultaneously, until there was only one left, the one who’d started everything with the accent—and he grabbed Elle, to hold her in front of himself, across her shoulders, with a gun to her temple.

“I’m going to get into this lifeboat with your woman now, and if you try to interfere, I’ll kill her,” he announced, while pulling her back with him.

Elle’s eyes were wide with panic, but her mind was clear. “Shoot him, Cepharius! I trust you!” she thought out at me.

“I can’t!” I shouted back at her. I’d already seen him kill one man without compunction—and I knew the darts my rifles shot weren’t as fast as the bullets from his guns.

Then I saw Snout hop down from the bench she’d sat him on, running up to bite Hargrave’s ankle, with teeth I did not know he had. Hargrave howled—until the metal dart I shot at him tore out his throat, and I surged forward, pulling Elle away from him as he fell back into the lifeboat, bleeding out.

“Elle,” I whispered at her. And here I thought I’d never touch her again. She wrestled away from me, and I had to let her; my magic was waning. I watched her close the lifeboat’s door and hit the button to set it free, my leaving my mate here, still unsafe, on my side.

“My pearl, what have you done?” I thought out to her—but this time once I broached the ’qa, everything I’d been hiding came rushing in. The pain of being dry, how my magic had now dwindled to its lowest point, and how all of the air in my tissues was trying to expand inside the habitat’s much lower pressure.

“Cepharius!” she said, running for me—no, not for me, but past me, to grab me as best she could, to help try to pull me back into the water.

I FOLLOWED her down the hall and through the engine room, using my hands to crawl in desperation, dragging myself as I felt death nearing, leaving a smear of my own juices behind from the wounds their bullets had inflicted on me, feeling my tissues begin to swell as I was losing control of the magic that compressed me.

“Come on, come on,” Elle said as we reached the dock. She was picking up my tentacles and shifting them forward one by one, until some small part of me was through the edge of the square and safe into the deep.

I focused on this and eased myself after it, feeling the pressure I was used to settling all around me again.

“Oh my gosh,” Elle whispered, once I was in. “Ceph, are you okay?”

“No,” I answered her truthfully. There was a lifeboat out there that she was not in.

I could feel her giving me a bittersweet smile. “Someone had to work the door.”

“It could’ve been you. From the inside.”

“Yeah, but,” she said softly. “It would’ve meant leaving the sea.”

I thrashed my head back and forth. “This is not how I wanted you to stay, Elle.”

“Me either—but the ship needed the battery, Ceph, so I don’t really think that lifeboat was going up anymore. Plus, I wanted to see things through.”

I breathed roughly, regaining my strength, and stared through the square of water at her, both of us trapped in our own worlds, and both of us in our own way dying: her, from the fact that her habitat was running out of power, and me from a broken heart.

There was only one thing left to say. “Would you like to come out here and watch with me?” I asked, reaching through the water-square to offer her an arm.

She nodded. “Let me get on my suit.”

chapter 63

ELLE

I GOT into the spare suit, and Ceph reached through the water to help me pull on all the pieces. Then I went into the crane-nest and turned everything that seemed reasonably cable-related on, knowing that no matter what I did, the power was going out.

“And you’re sure,” Cepharius asked when I was on the cusp of crossing over.

“With you?” I told him. “Always.”

I stepped across.

He’d gone up to get the lifeboat while I’d been flipping switches, and so now he was carrying both of us across the barren ocean floor, the lifeboat beneath one of his arms, with Snout and the battery inside and in fine form, and me beneath the other, with his tentacles metering out my cable behind us.

We weren’t talking, but I thought that was because we could already read each other’s minds. He was radiating a deep sorrow, and I was sorry too, to be hurting him.

But I was also filled with love, because I was proud of us and what we had accomplished and because there was no place else I’d rather be than at his side.

“I love you,” I told him, and he rumbled in response.

“I know,” he said, before looking down at me. “It is your only flaw.”

I grinned at him. “You’d better be joking, Cepharius.”

“I am. You have many flaws,” he said, with a tease, and I playfully pushed against him, right before his arm tucked me in harder to his chest. “I love you too, my pearl. I just hate that you are leaving. I am not ready to give you up yet.”

I reached up to put a hand on his chin. “Too bad I never made you a carving of my breeding hole to remember me by,” I said, and he laughed, hard.

“I am the luckiest kraken there ever was,” he said, setting me to my feet right front of the gantry, so that he could carefully float in the lifeboat with its precious cargo.

chapter 64

CEPHARIUS

“<<YOU HAVE BROUGHT ENERGY!>>” The ship’s excitement was deafening.

“Yes. But at great cost,” I said—and the ship seemed to ignore this.

“<<PLEASE OPEN THE CONTAINER!>>”

I frowned, but I supposed it had several hundred lives on its mind, while I only had the one, my singular and precious Elle of the Air, who would run out of breath shortly, and die down here.

I worked the latches of the lifeboat’s side with my tentacles, and wound up mostly prying the thing open, releasing the battery and the alien child at the same time, along with two corpses.

The child turned into a kraken again, facing me, and then squirted away.

“<<BRING THE ENERGY HERE!>>” the ship commanded, and I waved Elle back. Anything she could do to make her air levels last longer would be worthwhile. I grabbed the battery, and surged forward, hoping that I could quickly drop off the thing and get back to her.

It opened a hole in one wall, and I slid the battery into it, only for it to disappear.

“Is that . . . it?” I asked, waiting for something.

“<<YES,>>” the ship announced. “<<PLEASE EXIT.>>”

I quickly swam back to be by Elle’s side outside. “Is it done?” she asked me.

“I think so,” I said, taking her hand, as a beam of light strong enough to cut through the dark shot up from the top of the ship into the sea overhead.

“What?” Elle asked, sensing my distraction.

“Look,” I told her, picking her up, so her helmet was close to my head, as I shared my vision with her. She couldn’t see it, but I could.

“Oh, Ceph—it’s lovely.”

And then I felt a distant thrumming on the ’qa.

Elle felt it too. “Cepharius—what is that?” she asked, turning toward me and putting a hand to her chest.

“It cannot be,” I whispered to her—and yet it was.

Voice after voice, familiar from old times, were nearing, and I heard my own name called from the inky black. “Cepharius!”

It was my brother calling—and he’d brought our entire people.

“CEPHARIUS!” he shouted even louder, which made Elle jump.

“Who was that?” she asked, looking at me with wide surprised eyes.

“That,” I answered her slowly, “is my family.”

chapter 65

ELLE

ALL OF A SUDDEN a hundred other disjointed voices joined us on the ’qa—one after another after another—until it felt like I was swimming in them, their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams, their wisdom.

“Brother!” shouted the first kraken again, finally appearing—glowing for our sake, because I had cut my lights off to conserve energy. He took both of us in. “What is this? A human? Down here?”

Cepharius presented me, suit and all. “Her name is Elle. She is my mate,” he said, and the way he said it contained all the multitude of meanings it might have: that he loved me now, that he would love me forever, and that he would know great pain if anything were to happen to me.

I expected his brother to refute this, but he did not. Instead he glowed brighter. “I knew you were happy!” At least Cepharius was as confused as I was, as his brother went on. “You cut yourself off from the ’qa, but the ’qa was not done with you.” His brother moved to slap a broad hand across Cepharius’s shoulder, but then restrained himself. “I got a feeling not that long ago that you were happy, and I thought, if this thing were true, I needed to see it for myself! Then on the way here, we got your message and—what the pump is this?” he asked, gesturing behind us, before looking at me. “Excuse me for cursing.”

“You’re fine,” I said, biting back a grin.

“It’s a spaceship,” Cepharius told him. “Things have been complicated.”

“Let me see, let me see,” his brother said, holding out a hand.

Cepharius looked at it for a moment, and then took it gladly—and I could feel everything that’d happened since he and I had met, trickling over to him.

I knew his name was Balesur, that he was Ceph’s older brother, and that he really was a king.

“Yes, yes,” Balesur said, sorting through our memories—until he reached the end. “Oh, Ceph,” he said, looking at me with great sorrow.

“I cannot bear it alone this time,” Cepharius said.

“I’m also not dead quite yet,” I complained—just as the read outs on my helmet went dim, and the bail-out oxygen kicked on. “Well, I take that back. T-minus fifteen.”

Balesur was confused, but Ceph explained, finding the information more quickly in my mind. “It’s space talk,” he shared, before looking tenderly down at me.

“What can we do?” Balesur asked, and I got the impression that all of the krakens around were holding their breath on my behalf.

Then the ship rejoined our ’qa. “<<HELP!>>”

chapter 66

CEPHARIUS

“WITH WHAT?” I thought back angrily. It had already cost me my love, what else could it possibly want?

“Ceph,” Elle said, tempering me.

“We cannot <<rise!>>”

“What the pump—” Balesur began, raising the spear by his side.

“It’s the ship—it talks,” I said, waving a glowing arm to calm him.

“We have been here too <<long>>. We are <<trapped>>,” the ship thought out to everyone in the vicinity. “Our rescue <<awaits>> but they cannot come this <<deeply>>. We need to <<rise!>>”

“Trapped like how?” Elle asked, and received a picture of the ship trying to escalate. “Oh—I think that’s easy?” she said, searching out on the ’qa. “Remember how you broke down the rock, Ceph?”

“Ah, yes,” I said, transmitting that thought out to the rest of my countrymen. “It needs to be freed from ancient sediment.”

That was something useful to do, for everyone but me. My people swarmed the base of the ship and began tearing away the millennia of silt that had encased its bottom, while the entire thing kept glowing.

But I only had eyes for Elle.

“Let’s just disconnect this,” she said, reaching back to pop off her umbilical cable, still snuggled up against me. “And get it out of the way. It’s amazing.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, and she laughed.

“All of them. You. That I even got to have this experience.”

Her bail-out oxygen was breathing gas only, so I knew she would become hypothermic quickly. “Not as amazing as you,” I told her, stroking a hand against the outside of her helmet.

“But Snout and all the others are going to get back to space, right? We saved them?” she asked me, as I carried her away from all the activity.

“Absolutely,” I promised.

“I like the ’qa, Cepharius,” she went on. I got the feeling that she wanted to get all her words with me out now, while she still had breath to say them. “You were right. Being a kraken is superior.”

“I know, my pearl.” I bowed my head to hers, focusing on the ’qa just between the two of us. I stared at the beauty of her face, still trapped in the clamshell of her helmet. “My beautiful perfect pearl.”

“Cepharius of the Sea,” she whispered, trailing her hand against me, and then she gasped, her gaze flickering over my shoulder.

I turned to see what she saw—and found the ship finally rising, all aglow over a massive cloud of silt, illuminated by itself and the bodies of my brethren. “We did it, Elle,” I thought at her. “You and me.”

I felt her nod weakly inside her helmet. “You and me,” she whispered back—and then she started gasping.

“Oh, my pearl,” I said, falling to my knees, feeling her begin to suffocate.

It was like the bonding all over again, except this time it was real, and I was already in love with her.

I cried out on the ’qa, heard my cry echoed by my countrymen, and found myself surrounded by a hundred other mourners at once, carrying my pain, placing their arms and tentacles about me, holding me up, while I fell under the slight weight in my arms.

“My Elle, my Elle,” I called out, feeling her leave me, the sensation of her on the ’qa fading. I wanted the last thing she heard to be my voice. “My pearl,” I howled, sending her a wave of love and every good moment we had ever had together. When she accepted my courting—when she told me she loved me—when I got to touch her—

And then she was taken away from me.

Not from the ’qa, but literally. Something was pulling her up, at the same time as I panicked, trying to pull her back down.

I hadn’t been paying attention, lost in my grief, but the lights of the ship had gotten nearer and brighter, and one of their beams that only I could see and she could not was running over her now.

“She was <<brave>>. This is our <<trade>> for you.”

And then the spaceship disappeared, leaving me and all of my brothers in the dark.

chapter 67

ELLE

“CEPHARIUS?” I thought out weakly. I had died, I was sure of it. I was so cold now—but it didn’t bother me—so clearly, I was dead.

How many different cultures’ afterlives had I learned of in my studies?

I should’ve asked Ceph what krakens believed in.

It would’ve been better to die with some proper aim.

“My pearl?” I heard him ask back.

Which meant he was dead too.

A shame, really. I wondered what’d killed him? Did krakens have purgatory? Had I just been hanging out in a jug somewhere waiting for him to show up for me to go to kraken heaven?

Was I going to have to arm wrestle his first wife?

“My pearl?” I heard him asked with more force, and I felt myself shaking.

Being shook, rather.

Sort of the same thing.

I was in water still. Moving.

And—drowning.

“Oh my God,” I thought out on the ’qa, coming back into my own body, same as I had had to when Ceph and I first met. I was trying to breathe. It wasn’t working. I couldn’t get any air in. This was horrible, horrible, my heart was thudding, I was panicked—and—I had to get my helmet off.

“Elle, what are you doing?” Cepharius thought at me, just as panicked as I was. I opened my eyes and saw him—we were still in the dark somewhere.

Couldn’t fully rule out some sort of underworld.

But I would work on that later, right now I just needed to get my helmet—off!

A burp of spent air floated up from my suit, then I was completely underwater—and somehow still alive.

“Elle?” Cepharius grabbed me tight—but my lungs weren’t being ripped away from other tissues in my body.

I was still holding my breath.

He took my face in his hands. “Relax, Elle of the Air,” he said, with the beginnings of a smile curving the edges of his lips. “Breathe.”

I had to—I had no choice. I opened my mouth and let all the water in and—

I had gotten a second chance at life.

Under the waves—with him.

I heard and felt stunned silence go out on the ’qa, and then Cepharius had me out of my suit entirely, removing pieces of armor and my wetsuit, until I was naked, swimming beside him, and very much alive.

“My mate lives!” he shouted to the ’qa with pride—and everyone around us cheered.

IT TOOK me a bit to figure out what precisely had happened. I didn’t remember so much once the extreme hypothermia started to set in—but Ceph told me there was a bright light from the ship that’d run over me, and that it’d said some nice things before it left.

“It healed you, Elle—it gave you back to me,” he said with awe.

“We did watch that little alien change form a lot,” I said, still getting the hang of existing underwater. “It called it ‘cell-shifting,’ remember?”

I wondered what the Earth could’ve done with knowledge like that. If the aliens had stuck around, if we would’ve been able to get rid of cancer—or if, like Donna suggested, we’d currently be having World War Three.

“Will you miss it?” Ceph asked—because we both knew there was no going back to the air now.

I looked up. Despite the darkness that hung above us like a cloud, my heart felt light. “Not in the least,” I promised him. “For all that I’m a woman of my work—there’s no research project in the world that could ever top that.”

We swam back by the habitat on our way out of the trench. Once the power went out, the magical generator must’ve stopped working, because the whole space had filled up with water.

The krakens oohed and ahhed over seeing the inside, swimming through the spaces, reliving the story from both Ceph’s and my memories. His brother was kind enough to retrieve all of Ceph’s carvings from my room for me—the tiny kraken figurine and dildos alike. Cepharius thought this was hilarious, while I sort of wanted to die, but he put all of them in his pockets, in case I wanted them for later.

I couldn’t imagine when later would be, though, as we were surrounded by krakens who’d known him since childhood, his brother, and his friends—especially when all of them were so interested in me.

None of them denied that I was his mate; they all could feel that it was true, but most of them had never met, much less touched a human, and after I confused far too many of them with visions of my stories, Ceph said no one else was allowed to touch me until we made it back to Thalassamur.

And when I asked him where that was, he said that it was home.

chapter 68

CEPHARIUS

I SPENT two weeks tending to Elle, introducing her to her new world underneath the waves, mapping out a journey I would take her on as soon as she was well enough—there were so many sights I wanted to show her, and many of them were from civilizations she’d only read about, that had crashed below the waves and been forgotten.

We were in my old room in Thalassamur, having evacuated all of Gerron’s toys from it for me and Elle and privacy. Gerron was working on forgiving me—and luckily for me, he was entirely enamored with Elle.

“Tell me the story again,” he would ask her, and she would—any story, really. She was full of them, all sorts of monster history, the history of the two-legged, and then all of the things she had seen on her TV. I gathered from Sylinda that Gerron was becoming very popular as he translated these things to his friends outside, and they were eager to meet a human too—but as much as it was possible, I wanted to keep Elle just for me.

Until I was sure she was completely healed, feeling better, and certain about her destiny.

Because I knew that there were things that she’d miss from up above that had no corollary here below. Petting a cat, eating ice cream, talking with others of her kind—through her, I knew what it was like to touch grass, and sleep on the ground outside, beneath the stars.

But she seemed to have no regrets, being here with me, and when I felt her mind on the ’qa, talking to Sylinda or Gerron, even Balesur, it was always a delight.

“Are you well, my pearl?” I asked her as she woke one morning.

“I think so,” she said, waking up. “Are . . . you?”

The extra blood in her eye had almost gone away, and I was still holding her, chastely, in my tentacles, just as I did to sleep each night.

“I have not been this well in a long, long time,” I told her truthfully, bowing my head to hers.

“Are you certain?” she asked, pushing away, tinging the ’qa between us with concern.

“Utterly,” I swore, and she gave me a tentative smile.

“Then why haven’t we . . . ” she asked, her thoughts drifting nervously, like she was afraid to put them on the ’qa.

My tentacles pulled her closer without thinking. “I wanted to be sure you were healthy enough first.” I’d been horrified to see so many of my marks upon her, once I realized they were from me.

“And it’s not because you have regrets?” Her thoughts were hesitant and full of memories—of her human husband who had left her to have children with another, and her knowledge of all the other krakens I could mate with in the sea.

“Absolutely not,” I said, giving her a tender smile. “How long have you been holding these feelings inside of you?”

“A few days,” she said. “It’s been hard.”

I clicked my beak at her. “Ahh. How about next time, rather than deciding to torture yourself, you just ask me?” I asked, winding myself around her slowly.

She pulled her full lips into a pout. “I just thought—” she started, and I clicked my beak again.

“I love it when you think, Elle. But I also like it when you are thoughtless, because you are full of me.” I let my pumping arm emerge and ran it up and down the outside of her thigh—and her jaw fell open as she gave me a complicated look, mirrored by all her thoughts and feelings tangled up inside.

“It’s not really a breeding hole if we can’t breed, Ceph.”

“So? Not all krakens can. I told you our cycles are erratic. That does not stop us from seeking pleasure in the meantime.” I took her hand and placed it on my pumping arm, thrilling at her touch, and making sure to push that sensation onto her. “It is yours as much it is mine.”

Her eyes read my face, as her fingers tightened to hold me—and then she flushed. “But what if other krakens hear?”

“Have you not heard them?” I asked, knowing we were not so insulated from the ’qa.

I watched her swallow—and I could begin to taste her in the sea. “What if I’m loud?”

“I would be ashamed if you were not,” I told her. “I want everyone to know I make you happy.” I watched her panic, and then I moved to kiss her temple. “I love you, Elle, but I believe in this one case, you are thinking too much,” I said. “Trust me.”

I took her waist in my hands and pulled her up so that our faces were even.

She looped her arms around my neck at once, and wound her legs around my body. “Next you’re going to tell me to relax, and breathe,” she complained with an adorable pout, because she wasn’t really complaining, I knew.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Breathe—and let me enter you.”

I sent my pumping arm searching up the inside of her thigh, so she could feel its heat against her skin, and her eyelids got heavy as her gaze dropped. “Ceph,” she said, as I found her hole, just as hungry for me as the last time I’d left it.

“My beautiful pearl,” I whispered, pushing my way in.

What had happened inside the spaceship had needed to happen the way it had—when we’d been given one abnormal chance to be together, and had needed to drain the moment of its every last drop.

But now that she was my mate for life, I could take so much time with her—in fact, I was so slow that she groaned and rocked, trying to capture more of me.

“I want you to be ready,” I told her.

She made a face. “I want you to be in.”

I laughed at that, and began to take her. Now that I had less seed, it was easier, and claiming her hole was a delight—as was everything else about the moment being with her. Holding her in all my arms, the taste of her skin, the noises she made on the ’qa, becoming turned on—I ran a tentacle down to grasp at her clit and marveled at how touching something so small could matter so much.

Her knees clenched me, and she began to drop back, working in opposition to my arm, making me go deeper.

“Oh my God, Ceph,” she groaned.

“Is your deity really involved so much with your breeding?”

Her eyes flashed open. “No,” she said, then laughed. “Except for the fact that you’re the answer to all of my prayers.”

“I like knowing that,” I told her, slowly winding.

I ran my hands and tentacles all over her body, trying not to suck on her, except for all the times I couldn’t help it, and she seemed to love it besides—and then I couldn’t help myself.

“Prepare yourself to not think,” I promised, as I started thudding into her.

The change in her was instant. She arched her hips in a certain way, and my sucker on her clit followed. “That’s so good it’s almost unfair,” she said.

I reached up and pressed against her lips with a line of suckers, until she opened her mouth with surprise and let me hold her jaw.

“And what did I say about thought?” I asked her on the ’qa. She looked fit to defy me, then melted as I sped up. “There should be nothing else going through your head right now, except how well your breeding hole fits me.”

She groaned, starting to tense.

“Think it,” I told her. “Loud enough for everyone to hear.”

Elle’s eyes flashed open again, and she bit the tentacle that was in her mouth lightly.

“Little pearl, think it now, or I will take you outside to breed you, where everyone else can see.” Her heartrate spiked, I could feel it against my chest—at the same time as I could feel her hips fill with desire, tasting her with every stroke. “Do not deny me.”

She bit me again, and I felt her hands clenching, and that traveled through the rest of her body as she tensed, the muscles of her hips and ass and stomach preparing. “Fine. You fit—oh God—you fit.”

I pumped her even faster, while working that single solitary sucker at her clit and holding her in all my arms. I wanted to release with her, I wanted our shouts to join the ’qa as one—

“Cepharius!” she screamed, and I felt her shake, squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing, her strong breeding hole making me fight to stay in where I belonged.

“Yes,” I grunted low, jetting my seed into her in one lengthy burst after another. I imagined all of her small human womb covered with it, filled to the brim, until it couldn’t contain anymore, and began to leak out the sides of our seal.

“Cepharius,” she said more quietly, still shuddering, still pressed to my chest—and from somewhere else on the ’qa, I heard several distant cheers.

“What a way to wake up,” said another kraken—thankfully not my brother.

“—honestly I did not think a human would fit—” said someone else.

“She is one of us now—do not think of her as human.” And that was definitely Sylinda, ever the stateswoman, amplifying her opinion.

Elle looked up at me in a combination of shock and horror. “Ceph!” she hissed, punching my shoulder without moving from my chest.

I let my pumping arm fall from her, briefly satisfied—but I knew it would fill with seed again quickly.

“Do not think of it in your human way,” I told her, stroking her cheek with the tentacle she’d bitten. “Think of it as me proving to everyone I know how much I love you.”

“Well, when you put it like that.” She glared at me for half a second longer, and then a smile curved her lips.

chapter 69

ELLE

CEPHARIUS BROUGHT me food to eat, explaining that it was traditional for men to go hunting after breeding—but he didn’t have to hunt, he just had to go to the storeroom, which I gathered was like a very nice cave where the eating-fish were kept.

I still hadn’t gotten the hang of a lot of kraken habits yet—but it was a good thing I enjoyed sushi.

And he was feeding me—another tradition!—when we felt Sylinda on the ’qa. “Come to the throne room. Both of you, please.”

Ceph questioned her, but when she didn’t answer he took my hand and tossed the fish we hadn’t finished to the anemones on the wall. There were no other kraken in the hallways we took in, a thing that struck me as odd—especially when I couldn’t feel any on the ’qa.

“Cepharius and Elle,” his brother Balesur said as we entered. He always made sure to include me, but I was still nervous, especially given the circumstances, which were feeling strange.

“I sent everyone else away,” Sylinda said to calm me. “Because there’s someone here to see you both.” She pointed above her head.

I recoiled into Ceph’s side instantly. “No. I’m not going,” I said, and his arms were around me at once. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Cepharius.

“Who is it?” Ceph asked. “Royce?”

“Your two-legged authority. Complete with the siren again,” Balesur said. “I believe he has questions about your last assignment.” He then looked to me. “But do not worry, Elle. If anyone tried to take you from my brother, we would meet them with the full power of the ocean.”

I calmed down some, as Ceph’s hands smoothed against me. “I can go alone, if you’d like.”

“No,” I said, settling. I didn’t want to think about being away from Cepharius’s side.

“All right, then,” Ceph said, giving his brother a nod. “Come with me, and I will teach you how to rise.”

IT TOOK the rest of the morning, and I still wasn’t good at it. The spaceship had given me the same kind of powers that Ceph had for accommodating pressure changes, but he’d been doing it instinctively his whole life, whereas I had to think about it.

It was like learning how to drive again, while feeling queasy.

“You are doing better than you think,” Ceph said, hovering beside me.

“You make it look so effortless,” I said with a frown, trying to concentrate on going up, but not too quickly.

“You will get there,” he promised.

“You look like a natural to me!” said a voice I hadn’t heard before on our ’qa—as someone who looked like a mermaid swam up. I’d seen pictures of them before but I’d never met one in real life—she was gorgeous.

“Siren,” she corrected me. “Mermaids are coastal.”

“You’re so pretty,” I thought out on the ’qa, and heard her laugh.

“I like her, Cepharius,” she told him. “My name is Omara,” she said, introducing herself.

“I’m Elle,” I said, even though I knew she could already get it from my mind.

“She also thinks I am pretty, just so you know,” Ceph said, putting an arm around me, and giving me a grin. “Her taste is suspect.”

I laughed—and then felt a new presence join us. I knew at once he was fully human.

“Doctor Kepzler?” he asked, too loud and very clumsily.

“Royce, of the Monster Security Agency,” Cepharius answered on my behalf. “She is safe. I have done my duty.”

“I see,” he said—as the siren in front of us blinked and her eyes went white.

“And I’m staying,” I added, because no one else had said it yet.

The siren’s eyes opened wide. “Cepharius . . . is all of this . . . true?” she asked—at the same time I could sense her going through our memories, all of the time since she’d seen Ceph last, both in his mind and mine, up until this morning.

“Is she not proof of it?” Cepharius asked, winding a few of his lower-arms around me protectively.

“Wow,” the man’s voice said with wonder. “That is . . . something else.”

I looked up with horror. I was only barely able to make out the shadow of a boat above us. Was he going to tell anyone?

“If you will give me a moment,” Omara said, disconnecting from our ’qa, while her eyes were still protected with white.

“What’s happening, Ceph?” I whispered to him.

“I am unsure,” he said. “All I know is that no force on earth can take you away from me—and no force from outer space, either.”

“All right,” the siren announced, rejoining us at the same time as the man’s mind did—this Royce, that Ceph already knew.

“I’m in a bit of a difficult situation up here, Cepharius. None of which is because of you—I see how things went down. You did the best you could, in an incredibly difficult situation.”

“Thank you,” Ceph said, while staying tense.

“But—Arcus Marlow wants to know how he spent his money. And it seems like everyone who could’ve told him that—or what happened to his spaceship—is dead. Except for you, Doctor Kepzler.”

I shied away further behind Ceph.

“Do not fear,” Omara said, putting a hand out to calm me. “We are decided.”

“We?” I asked.

“Yes,” the man responded. “But first off, are you absolutely certain you want to stay down there, Doctor?”

“Yes,” I answered instantly, and meant it with all of my heart.

“Because there’s not going to be any way to come back from this,” he went on, but the siren interrupted him.

“Get on with it, Royce. The girl knows what she wants,” she said, giving me a smile that revealed a row of sharp teeth.

“Okay. Here’s how this is going to go—it turns out you died down there, Doctor. And Cepharius. The both of you. It was an incredible tragedy.”

I frowned at Ceph, not entirely understanding.

“And what happens now is you swim away,” the siren said.

“But—he knows what happened,” I said. I remembered Donna’s warning about telepathic species—surely Arcus Marlow could hire some other similar monster to tease this Royce’s mind open and figure the truth out.

“Not for long,” Omara promised. “Because once you leave, I will erase his memory of this moment ever happening. He will be unable to tell anyone.”

I could feel Ceph’s astonishment at this. “He would allow you to do that?”

“Honestly, I could give a shit about you two, but not knowing will make my life easier, plus it’ll make her happy. For some reason Omara likes to believe in true love.” We both felt a wave of strong affection from the human above—but not for us, for the siren. “Just as long as you’re sure about this, Doctor. Because once I forget this conversation and Omara tells me that you died, I’m going to take it at face value. Your obituary will be posted before my ship even gets back.”

There was no point in hiding my elation. “Tell them I died doing what I loved,” I told him, and he laughed.

“Okay. Nice to meet you, and hope I never see you—either of you—again. Omara? Can you—” he went on.

Omara removed him from our ’qa, then took my hand in hers. “I would ask if you’re sure, but I already know,” she said, smiling, looking between the two of us. “I wish you both the best.

chapter 70

ELLE

CEPHARIUS AND I STAYED, waiting, until the boat drove off with the siren swimming after it, and we were alone again.

“And now you are mine,” Ceph intoned, looking down at me.

“Like I always have been. Ever since I met you,” I told him, beaming.

“You did fight it some.”

“Only a little,” I said, pinching my fingers together between us. “I mean, you can’t blame me for being scared.”

“I am rather large,” he said, with no attempt at hiding his thoughts of a double entendre.

“Yes, you are,” I agreed.

“But now you are mine,” he repeated. “For life.” He sank lower in the water column, and I moved to follow him, but he shook his head. “Stay there.”

“Okay?” I said, laughing. “What, I cancel my one ticket out of the ocean, and now you’re abandoning me?” I teased. But then I saw him going through the pockets on his belt. “Ceph?”

“I have seen this enough in your stories that I feel sure I know its meaning. And I do not wish to court you anymore—I want to pump you every night, possibly every morning, and many of the times in between.” He folded up his tentacles beneath himself and proffered out the ring I’d flung into the ocean. “We are mated, Elle, mind and body, but I have found that I like the idea of this custom, of giving you something to wear from me. So, my beautiful pearl and mate for life, Elle formerly of the Air, and now of the Sea, will you take this ring from me?”

I put my left hand out for him so that he could slide it onto the right finger—and I was shaking.

If I’d still been fully human, looking down at the depths below us, I’d have been horrified at the thought of the ring dropping into the blue, to be lost forever.

But I knew now even if I dropped it on accident—Ceph would go down and find it for me.

And I could follow him.

“Yes!” I cried out. “Absolutely!” I shouted on the ’qa, and he slid the ring home on my finger.

epilogue

cepharius

“IT IS SUCH A PITY,” Sylinda thought at me, and not for the first time.

“Keep that thought to yourself,” I told her. I had just returned to Thalassamur after running an important errand for my brother, communicating with a group of selkies about the pollution where they lived. Afterward, I’d hunted for my mate, only to find Sylinda watching her outside the hatchling school where Elle was telling stories.

She spent a lot of time with kraken elders all over the ocean, learning history, and making sure their stories weren’t lost to the ’qa when they passed, plus helping Balesur with any matters that had to do with humanity.

But when she wasn’t working, she would always come to the school, to tell them stories from land and from sea, that they might not be forgotten. The children loved her, and she loved them.

Gerron had recently joined the ’qa, and Sylinda was pregnant again, about to give birth to her and Balesur’s next child in its egg sac, where it would live for a month, as its small body acclimated from swimming inside the safety of its mother to the harsher conditions outside.

“It’s a girl,” Sylinda said, sensing my thoughts upon her pregnancy.

“How do you know?”

“I just do,” she said, smiling at me. “I was right with Gerron, wasn’t I?”

I squinted my eyes at her. “Yes, but the odds of you being right were fifty-fifty.”

Sylinda laughed. “I look forward to you being around for her, regardless.”

Gerron had eventually decided to forgive me. We’d fixed the broken statue, gone on to carve others together, and now he wanted my advice about courting—there was a girl he had his eye on, a day’s worth of lengths away. I told him I had no real advice on the matter, that I had only been lucky twice over, but seeing as I’d somehow found two mates, he wasn’t convinced.

And then Elle spotted me as I felt her on the ’qa.

“Ceph!” she shouted, waving goodbye to the children who were rapt, swimming over them in her much slower two-legged fashion to come and see me.

Her hair had gotten longer and now she often wore it in braids, to keep it out of hatchling tentacles, and I brought her mineralized sea flowers that she would wear in them—today she had six blue ones sewn in, three at each braid’s base. Sometimes she would wear a belt, but most often not, content to swim in her own skin, and her body had gained more muscle from constant use, but otherwise she was the same woman I’d fallen in love with inside of the habitat, possessed of a sharp mind, an occasionally sharp tongue, and somehow magically full of soft love for me.

This was what I couldn’t explain to Gerron. How I hadn’t found Elle, so much as I had let her find the kraken she made of me, bringing me out of the depths of my sorrow and back to my new and better life beside her.

“How was your trip?” she asked me, coming near.

“Long, and I missed you,” I said, because it was true. I wrapped my arms around her, so she could rest, carrying her back to our room at once, swimming down the halls with ease. “I would like to eat, and then I would very much like other things,” I thought out at her, winding a meaningful tentacle around her ankle.

“I don’t know about eating, Ceph.”

“All right, we will skip eating, then,” I said, sliding that same tentacle up.

“No—I mean—I don’t know,” she said curling against me, once we were safe in my room and the anemones were on. “I’ve been feeling really weird for the past few days.”

My mood changed immediately. “How?” As much as Elle belonged among us I was very aware that we weren’t equipped to handle any human-ish emergencies.

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It started before you left.”

“Last week?” I asked her, trying not to become upset.

“And this is why I didn’t want to say anything.”

“Ah, like the time you did not say anything when you were almost bitten by the sea snake,” I reminded her.

“I didn’t see it,” she said, crossing her arms, and projecting her frustration out at me. “I just don’t have words for it is all. Or I’d use them. Really.”

I bowed my head to hers, as I roved over her with my tentacles, feeling for any changes. “I am only so concerned because I love you so much.”

“I know,” she said, nodding against me, as I slipped a worried lower-arm between her legs.

All of the suckers there lit-up. Uncontrollably. The chromophores on any piece of me that touched her there went from a concerned orange to a deep, bioluminescent violet, like the anemones that lit my room, at once.

“Ceph?” she asked me.

“Be still, my pearl,” I asked her, not daring to move or hope.

“What’s happening?” she wondered, as my tentacles inspected her further, and every time I touched her between her legs—and got more of her juices on me—the more certain I became.

I had come home just in time.

I looked at her, nodding. “Relax. Breathe.”

The words had become our code for whenever we needed the other person to trust us, utterly, and as she did as she was told, I swept her into my arms and started jetting us away.

elle

“CEPH, WHAT’S GOING ON?”

I didn’t get any sense of danger from him—more of a restrained happiness—but we were moving very fast, and he was too busy concentrating on our path to slow down and explain.

“Really, Ceph, I mean it.”

“Just a little longer, pearl. We are almost there.”

I could see the large rock wall that protected Thalassamur’s eastern side looming. I had no idea how Ceph had managed to carry me so far, so fast—or why we were hurtling toward it at our current velocity.

“Ceph!” I said in protest, as he finally slowed. Another kraken neared us, holding a spear, joining our ’qa, but Ceph said nothing to him—he just presented him with a tentacle—and I realized it was glowing.

“The second to last one on the end,” the other kraken said, and Ceph was sprinting off again, making my braids whip out behind me—then we reached the entrance to a cave, and Ceph dove us inside.

It was darker here—but warmer than the rest of Thalassamur—and everything inside the cave was smooth, the floor, the ceiling, all of the walls, and most especially the bed-shaped dais in the center of it.

“You are going to have to trust me now, Elle,” Ceph said, setting me down on the ground, and then lowering himself to join me.

“I always do,” I said, nervously reaching for his hand. He took it, his larger fingers spreading mine wide, holding it tightly.

“I am going to put a child in you.”

My jaw dropped a little, and then I frowned at him. “And we had to come all the way out here to do it? I enjoy practicing as much as the next girl, Ceph—”

“No,” he said solemnly on our ’qa. “This time it will take.”

And before I could ask any other questions, I felt a wave of secondhand pleasure so hard from someone on the ’qa nearby it almost knocked me down. It made my knees weak, and heat dropped between my hips like a lead weight.

Ceph saw my reaction, and he nodded. “That is the feeling of some other kraken being bred. We sequester our mates here—true breeding sensations are too distracting to have on the ’qa all the time with the others. But that kraken will leave here with child, as will you, soon enough.”

I swallowed. I had heard him and others talk of the breeding caves before—I couldn’t believe I’d just assumed it was a metaphor. After all, we lived in a cave currently and—

“Do not panic, and do not fear,” he said, coming up to me, brushing the back of one of his hands across my cheek.

“You sound like the spaceship,” I said, catching his hand and keeping it against me. I could hardly believe what he was telling me, so I needed to hear it again. “Ceph, are you for real?”

“I am, little pearl,” he said, coming forward, and I felt a sensation of such pleasure and pride from him, it was irresistible—that, plus another wave of some other krakens’ pleasure on the ’qa, on the cave’s far side, and he made a sound at feeling it echo through me. “I should’ve told you about this place before, but I did not dare to dream I would get to come here again.”

And I realized the last time he had, had been with Cayoni. My heart hurt for him. “Sylinda’s going to call her girl Lena for me.”

“I am glad,” he said, coming up to let more of his tentacles brush against my skin. “I need to go now, though.”

“What?”

“I will be right back; I just need time to get provisions. Prepare yourself for my return,” he said, leaving the room—and rolling a door closed on me.

“Cepharius!” I shouted on the ’qa after him, but while I felt him, he did not respond, he was so concentrated on his task—whereas I was left here, in the dark.

I groaned, undoing one of the flowers he’d given me to wear. One for every year we’d been together. At least they let off some light. I set them down around the thing in the center of the room that looked like a . . . bed? And I knew if I let my mind go on the ’qa, it would be easy enough to feel other krakens using it as such.

I just didn’t want to be rude was all. I was barely used to letting people listen to me; I didn’t want to catch any others doing things, but then a fresh wave hit me like breaking surf, and without Ceph there to catch me, I fell to my knees, jaw dropped and panting. Whoever they were, they felt so shamelessly good. It wasn’t like watching porn; it was like feeling it secondhand.

I had no idea what position the other couple was in, or how long they’d been going at it, all I knew was that they were building toward a level of satisfaction I could only barely comprehend.

I stumbled around the rest of the cave, setting down my hair flowers, gaining enough ambient light to see by, when the next wave of pleasure struck me.

This one lingered so long it made my breeding hole squeeze in sympathy.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

This was really happening.

And while Ceph wasn’t here currently, seeing as I knew he’d come back, and from which direction . . .

I crawled onto the dais, put my head down on a folded forearm, spread my legs, keeping my hips high, and began to touch myself.

I was already so sensitive from the ambient sex, it would’ve been easy to go off—but I made myself wait.

I wanted Cepharius there.

I wanted him to breed me, just like we’d always dreamed.

And when I felt him rejoin the ’qa, speeding back to my side, I knew he wanted the exact same thing.

I sped my fingers up as the stone blocking the entrance to the cave rolled back—he saw me and was on me in an instant.

I felt his tentacles grab at my shoulders, and a second later his pumping arm was searching between my thighs, I could feel the heat of its tip a moment before it pushed in.

“Yes,” he growled, as he readily sank up to his all-important ring, which was good because I needed him there.

I’d been into him ever since I’d met him really, but I’d never ached for him this desperately before—like if he left me now I’d cry.

“It is the breeding on you,” he said, thudding home inside me. I moaned at feeling him land—him being inside me had never felt so right. And he made a low purr on the ’qa at feeling my thoughts. “Yes, this time,” he began, and I realized things were different for him too. “Oh, Elle,” he growled, relentlessly stroking, bringing his seed up, as the questing head of his pumping arm rubbed against the exact right space.

“Cepharius!” I howled, coming at once, my hips fighting him, sending my own wave of satisfaction tinged with need out to roil among the others.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said, groaning low. “Come hard for me, Elle, hold my arm tight,” he commanded.

I did—I was—but then I also collapsed, turning back to look at him in confusion.

“How come you didn’t come too?” I asked, as he pulled himself out of me.

“I wanted to relieve your pressure, before we talked some first.”

His pumping arm was brighter than the glowing flowers, and other parts of him were starting to light up. He darted back to the cave entrance to finish rolling the rock shut and trapping us in, then answered my question upon his return.

“The glow is from you. It’s how I knew you were ready. By the time you and I are done in here, all of me will shine.”

I laughed. Even though I’d spent so much time among his people, I was still learning things. “In that case,” I said, rising up on my knees quickly, stopping him from kneeling down—I ran a hand between my legs and then wrote my name across his heart, leaving a glowing E L L E behind.

“What is that?” he asked, looking down.

“My name,” I told him. With the ’qa, Krakens didn’t need to read.

“Ahh, little pearl,” he said quietly. “What an apt place for it.” He took my hand to keep it there.

“What did we need to talk about?” I asked.

I could feel him deciding how to explain. “Just—whatever happens—give yourself over to it fully, don’t be frightened. Your body will know what to do.”

I squinted at him. I could press against his mind and learn—or I could trust him and let it be.

“And also I need you to help me,” he went on. “Lie down?”

I did as I was told, knowing what was coming next at least. It never ceased to amaze me, the way such a large and fearsome kraken could be so tender and gentle between my legs.

He tucked my knees over his broad shoulders, lowered his mouth down, and all of the tentacles on his chin started pulling me open one second before his tongue licked against my clit.

“Why hello, little pearl of my little pearl,” he said on the ’qa, sounding amused—it was a part that krakens didn’t have, but that Ceph had learned to use deftly.

He was so good with it that it was cheating almost.

“I’m glad you think so,” he said, sucking on it with his lips.

“Shh,” I laughed, closing my eyes—and then neighbors in another cave started up; I could feel them. I groaned, at them, as Ceph shivered.

“That will be us in a moment,” he swore, and swung his pumping arm up into touching range, laying it on my belly. “Use your hands to help me bring up my seed?”

I reached down to his pumping arm’s ring, wrapped both my hands around it, and pulled up, listening to him groan in bliss.

“Oh yes, little pearl. Just like that. Faster.”

I began to—and then I pulled it higher on my chest, so that I could bow my head and lap at his slit. That made him pause in eating me, as he enjoyed the sensations of me probing against him with my nimble tongue.

“You please me so much, Elle,” he growled, and then grabbed one of my hands to pull it farther down. “Go lower. Pull harder. Please.”

I realized while doing so that he must have me mimicking some action female krakens knew to do instinctively—so I reached under his mantle, almost for his pumping arm’s base, where I couldn’t even manage to get both hands around him, but started pulling forward, doing the best I could.

It made him snarl, and he lifted his head up—the entire lower half of his face and his beard of tentacles was aglow. “Yes,” he said, as we were both rocked by a wave from another couple nearby. “Keep going. As tight as you can. Just—like that—I’m so full, Elle,” he gasped, and I sensed a certain anguish from him, that what I was doing to his pumping arm was keeping him on the edge between torture and delight. “Start lower again. Oh, my mate—you are going to make me breed you so well.” He groaned, and then dove between my thighs again, his efforts there redoubling.

I gave up on trying to use my mouth to play with him and concentrated instead on all the physical stimulation he seemed to need, listening to his near-constant sounds of pleasure, all the while being beaten by the waves of other krakens coming like ships against a rocky shore. Even if he hadn’t been licking me perfectly, just like that, I would’ve had a difficult time holding back.

“Ceph,” I said, winding my legs behind his broad shoulders—I was going to come so hard.

“You taste so ready, Elle. Let me check,” he said, and slid two of his thick fingers inside of me.

That was all I needed to set me off. I gasped and thrashed, and his mouth and hand followed me. He held me down with another arm across my hips, making intensely satisfied noises, until I’d reached the end, collapsed against the stone, breathing hard, while he was almost sidewise, with his swollen pumping arm trailing up my stomach and chest, stiff and full, its thick tip nudging beneath my chin.

He pulled his fingers out of me and held them up, showing me how I’d made him nearly incandescent. “Look how much you need me,” he said, his voice low in my mind. “And as for how much I need you,” he began, while arranging himself between my legs. “I will make it so you do not have to wonder.”

cepharius

I TOOK MYSELF IN HAND, using assorted tentacles to hold onto the edge of the stone Elle was lying on, while wrapping others around her to cushion her from my upcoming thrusts.

And the look she gave me, of trust and pleasure and delight, made my heart skip a beat.

She was ready, she was mine, and she wanted me to take her—I swiped my pumping arm through the delicate folds that protected her breeding hole, leaving a heavy trail of seed behind. She didn’t know it because she was human, but the process had already started. The traces of seed I’d left in her earlier were busily telling her womb to prepare—it was the reason my glow was shifting from blue to yellow. If any other krakens were to bear witness to our breeding, they would know what was happening immediately.

And speaking of—a wave hit both of us on the ’qa as another couple found pleasure nearby.

I closed my eyes, letting the sensation roll through me, and smiled at the thought of giving it back to them when I made Elle soar.

“Elle,” I said, planting a hand beside her face, as I bent over to look her in the eyes. “I love you.”

“I love you too—but I’d love you more inside me,” she said with a laugh. I pushed her open and began to sink in, making her hiss as her eyes rolled back. “Cepharius,” she said, groaning my name in a hungry voice.

“I know,” I said, slowly thrusting. “It is the breeding. This is how it feels, how you need to be for my seed to plant.”

She arched her hips to meet my arm more readily. “I feel so . . . good,” she told me, sounding mystified.

“And you will feel even better. You do not even know what pleasures are coming for you, my Elle,” I said, continuing to warm her up, watching and feeling her every move, holding my breath, waiting for the signs that she was ready.

“I don’t know how I could,” she said, rocking against me, her eyes half-lidded, stroking a hand across her stomach. “God, you’re so deep Ceph—but stay right there—oh—do that thing I like,” she said, and I did, rubbing just the tip of my pumping arm inside her in the way that made her feel good. “Uh-huh,” she agreed with me, lassoing her arms around my neck. “Fuck, Ceph—that always—” she started, and then another wave from another couple splashed in. “Oh my God.”

She went tense in my arms and then started shaking as the other couple’s pleasure stretched hers out, her hips thrashing—they knew what they wanted, and soon so would she.

“Ceph,” she gasped, coming out on her orgasm’s far side, giving me a disbelieving look.

“I am here,” I said, stroking her tenderly with my hands and tentacles, while leaving my pumping arm planted inside her. “You will feel overwhelmed soon, I think.”

She ran her own hands over herself as well, breathing hard. “I think so too,” she thought, swallowing. “But this will take?”

“It will, my pearl.” I wasn’t entirely sure what schedule my mate’s alien-magic-enhanced body was on, but I knew we wouldn’t leave the caves until we were certain—just like all the other krakens breeding currently.

I felt a couple’s growing pleasure stretch out on the ’qa and wind around us both, as Elle whined.

“Go with it, little pearl,” I said, starting to thrust more eagerly. “Give yourself over.”

She ran her hands up to her head and pushed her fingers into her hair, as a second breeding couple joined, then a third. “There’s so many of them,” she whispered.

“All of them here for the exact same thing,” I said, settling my hands around her waist, and wrapping a lower-arm around to place a sucker at her clit the way she liked. “Let us join them.”

elle

I HAD no idea what was happening really—all I knew was that I liked it.

Although liked wasn’t strong enough a word.

I needed it.

Voraciously.

I heard Cepharius chuckle on our ’qa. “Yes, you do, little pearl. Tell me how much you hunger for my seed.”

And while I might’ve otherwise rolled my eyes a bit—although when we were pumping I was generally a good sport—right now . . .

He wasn’t wrong.

Getting him to come inside me was all I could think about.

My hips shifted against his arm of their own accord, knowing what I needed, and wanting him to give it to me. “Fuck—yes—I need you.” I growled and sat up, lunging down between my own legs to grab his pumping arm again. I felt him shudder at my touch, and he sped up, as I pressed my fingers against its belly the way I knew he enjoyed.

I’d always liked his inky black cum in a theoretical sense, but right now something wild was flowing through me, some primal urge to get it in me—to just get pumped.

He made deep sounds of pleasure, which were echoed all around by the other krakens on the ‘qa, whose orgasms were building just as frantically as ours were.

“Oh my God, Ceph,” I hissed.

“I am yours, little pearl. Lie back,” Ceph commanded, and I did so, letting go of him and collapsing into the rest of his arms, feeling him spread my hips wide, the movement of the smooth undulating muscles of his mantle rubbing against the insides of my thighs, as he kept himself upright while madly thrusting.

But it wasn’t just him—it was every other kraken I could feel on the ’qa, all of them twined, filled, grasping and being grasped—

“Yes,” Ceph purred.

—in a tangle of adoration and pleasure all targeted at insemination, twenty breeding holes being pounded, including my own, and twenty pumping arms all aching for release—

“This is how it begins,” Ceph promised.

—and all I could do is whine as I wound up, my breeding hole grabbing Ceph’s arm tighter and tighter—

“Make me give everything to you,” he growled.

—and everything went white as he drove me to a peak of pleasure I’d never experienced before, like climbing to the top of a mountain and waiting to be pushed off, trembling with the urge to come and the need to hold it, until everyone in the caves was ready and—

“Cepharius!” I shouted, thrashing against him, my breeding hole clamping tight.

“Yes—yes—yes—” he said, in time with his thrusts, and I knew he was shoving me full.

I moaned, making absolutely animalistic noises on the ’qa, pumping and still getting pumped, and hearing other krakens making them back all around me. I would squeeze and then someone else would, and that would bring me off again. Cepharius would thrust, and that would make another kraken jet seed; it was like we were handing a lightning bolt around, which made sense, because Cepharius and one of each pair of kraken in every other cave was glowing.

I caught another wave and arched under Cepharius’s watchful eye.

“You take me so beautifully, Elle,” he groaned, giving me another load. The water around us was clouding with his seed, he’d filled me so full not even his ring could hold it back.

And then, ever so slowly, all of us came back to earth—or the bottom of the sea—drifting down in sated satisfaction.

“That was amazing,” I whispered, as Cepharius carefully lay me down on the stone dais without pulling out, and I felt his resounding pleasure at our activity—along with him looking forward to something I couldn’t quite tease out of his mind in my exhaustion.

“Oh, little pearl,” he said, brushing his lips against mine in a promise. “Just you wait.”

cepharius

WHEN I HAD RETURNED from gathering provisions to find her waiting for me, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from pumping her—but I also had not been prepared.

Now, however, I was, and she was making gloriously helpless sounds as I began to thrust again.

“Yes,” I agreed, arching over her body with my own. The longer we mated, the more of her was in the water for me, making me glow every place it touched, until I felt like I was surrounded with her—and when her greedy breeding hole took me to my ring again, I knew that it was time.

I reached down and disconnected the piece of me that was in her from the rest of my body, pinching it off, and leaving it inside her.

Her eyes widened in horror. “Ceph!”

“Shhh,” I told her, lashing her knees closed with a tentacle quickly. “It is from the olden times. When breeding was not safe. If two krakens were twined for days, both would be vulnerable. This way, only one is, and the other can protect its mate.”

“But—but,” she stammered, looking then at me, like I had betrayed her. “Days?”

I smoothed a hand through her hair, which was falling loose. “Days. But I brought us food, that’s why I left—I am not going anywhere.”

“I—just,” she started, and I sensed her confusion, and then she looked at me, her eyes growing wide. “Oh my God,” she said, putting a fist against her belly as she started to pant.

“Breathe. Relax,” I reminded her, as she curled up beneath me, crying out in both passion and surprise.

I felt another kraken’s pleasure release nearby as Elle brought them off—what a strong brood this would be.

“More explaining,” Elle demanded, when she could think next.

“Just because my pumping arm isn’t attached doesn’t mean it’s not still part of me,” I said, looping myself around her, putting my face near hers. “You need to come and pull out all my seed.”

I felt her astonishment fade into protest, and then her whole lithe little body was wracked with another orgasm. “So quickly, so fast. Maybe because you are small. Or maybe because I have left so much seed in you,” I thought, beaming with pride.

“I just—Ceph—oh my God,” she gasped, shuddering again.

“Yes, my pearl. You are so strong—relax. Breathe. Let the breeding take.” I stroked a hand across her belly, feeling the muscles there begin to tense.

Her jaw was dropped and her eyes were wide—but one of her hands met mine me to keep it there. “Keep holding me?” she said, her voice starting to rise.

“Always, little pearl, always.”

I WATCHED her orgasm for hours. Her eyes were rolled back in her head; she’d stopped making sense on the ’qa long ago, and if we had not been surrounded by water, I would’ve worried about her breathing.

As it was I wrapped myself around her, holding her, pulsing with her, rocking her, so she would know I was there, feeling me, even if she couldn’t see me or speak anymore.

I had no idea what was happening inside her small womb, but I imagined my seed there, as her pulses pulled it out of me, taking it deeply, holding it in herself until all of her was ready.

“Ceph?” she whispered on the ’qa, her writhing body finally settling.

“I am here,” I whispered back.

“I’m hungry,” she said, with a frown.

Such a good sign. It was hard to hide my elation. “Good. I will feed you,” I said, slowly letting her go.

She was still limp when I returned. “Open your mouth, my pearl,” I asked, and she did so, chewing slowly, coming back into her body bit by bit, but when she arrived she was angry at me.

“Cepharius, what was that?” she said, as I reached between her legs to pull my old pumping arm out to toss aside. It was only a third its prior size, she’d squeezed so much seed out of the thing.

“I would’ve warned you, I promise, if I had ever thought we would end up here,” I said.

“Are you injured?” she asked, suddenly panicked.

I laughed. “No. The opposite.” I took her hand and put it on my chest, where her name now was just a bright blur. “I have not felt this whole in a very long time.”

“But—your arm?” she asked nervously, looking for it.

“Is already growing back.” And I was hungry too—but she needed the energy more than I did.

Another wave from a different couple roiled in. Both of us held our breaths, riding it, and I cupped her face in my hand. “Do you know how loud you were, and what heights you drove others to on the ’qa?”

She shook her head against my palm.

“It was like my seed overwhelmed you, and you could not help yourself. You were so fierce, Elle.”

Her brow furrowed as I gave her another bite. “And we do this for days?”

“Or for however long it takes. Others will bring us food if we run out.”

I could feel her more scientific mind slowly taking over. “How do we know when to stop?”

“We just will.”

“And how do we know when to start again?” she asked, tilting her head.

“That I do know the answer to,” I promised her, pulling her close again. “Right now.”

elle

I LOST track of how many times I came. All I knew was that occasionally there’d be some moment of respite, when Ceph would feed me—which made him obscenely pleased for some reason—and then he’d take the old arm out and fuck me with a new one, until both of us came. Then he’d twist it off and I was trapped again, my eyes rolled back, my whole body pliant as I gave in—and once I stopped fighting them and being scared . . .

It was like riding a wave out in the open sea. I would come down, but not all the way, and soon enough I would be going up again, and other krakens all around would be going with me, I could feel all their bliss, everyone urging everyone else higher, until nothing mattered anymore, there was just being, and it was good. I couldn’t even remember what life before the caves was like, and Cepharius watched after me the entire time, holding me, stroking me, saying perfect things, how beautiful I was, how good a mother I would be, how utterly in love he was, how he couldn’t wait to meet our baby, and I was so exhausted and wrung out by what felt like fifty million orgasms that even if I’d had a splinter of resistance left, which I didn’t, I’d still have been forced to believe.

It was like I imagined it would be to join a cult . . . only to discover that their goddess was me.

“Ceph,” I whispered. There were new people on the ’qa next to us, some other couple had finished and been replaced, and I wondered if that would ever happen for us, or if we would just be trapped here in a haze of pleasure for the rest of our life.

“Are you still hungry?” he asked, offering another fresh leg of crab.

I shook my head and gave him a dazed smile. “Not for that,” I said, and he laughed, swinging his pumping arm up to meet me, asking for me to stroke him without words. I took him in hand and closed my eyes, letting myself rest before we rejoined the flow.

And that was when I felt it.

One second I was alone—as alone as I ever got to be on the ’qa—and then after that there was the feeling someone was with me.

Someone I hadn’t met yet, but who I couldn’t wait to see.

I sat up at once. Cepharius’s energy matched mine, holding me closer immediately.

“Yes?” he asked, and I could feel the ache and tension in his voice.

He wanted to know if I held the answer to all our dreams within me.

“I—I think so!” I said, squirming to throw my arms around his neck. “I can feel them, Ceph! Can you?”

He shook his head quickly. “No. I will not be able to feel their ’qa until I finally touch them, but—oh, Elle,” he said, and I could feel emotions far beyond the raw fucking we’d been doing surge through his body: care, love, protection, joy, and hope, most importantly.

Not that I would become with child—he’d been certain of that—but that he would be the father he’d always wanted to be.

“You will!” I exclaimed at him, as he picked me up so that his face was even with my stomach and started kissing my belly.

I’d spent my entire life researching histories, learning all I could about other people from the tiny scraps they’d left behind, but for the first time I knew what it felt like to be carrying a future.

I couldn’t help it, I started crying.

The second he tasted my tears in the water, Cepharius lowered me. He used to be afraid of them, because krakens didn’t cry, but now he knew better, and took my face in his hands to wipe them away with his thumbs as he gently smiled. “You have always carried oceans in you, Elle—but now you also hold our baby.”

Thanks so much for reading Guarded by the Kraken!

Guarded by the Nightmare, my next book in the Monster Security Agency Series releases in October 2024, and you can read it as I write it live on my Ream!

And don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to read a side story about how Royce and Omara first met and to see some art of Ceph and Elle!

Now, please keep reading for a sneak peak

at Guarded by the Nightmare! And don’t forget that Guarded by the Leshy and Guarded by the Vodnik are coming out!

sneak peek

“GUARDED BY THE NIGHTMARE”

NO ONE SURVIVES HIRING ME. NOT EVEN HER…

I’M A NIGHTMARE, a creature that feeds on fear, and I’m capable of boundless cruelty—which is why my services come at a steep price: the life of the person who hired me. As such, the only people who hire me on are those brought to me by fate, like Mina, a woman so desperate for revenge that she’s willing to spend her own life to get it.

I don’t usually care why I’m hired. Human affairs don’t matter to me. Food is food, and a job is a job.

Mina’s enemies will get what they deserve—and I’ll get what’s mine.

Her beating heart.

SYLAS

“It’s time.”

I erupted out of the ground in Royce’s office and planted my hourglass on his desk with bone-rattling force, so that both of us could watch the last of the red sand inside pour down.

His jaw clenched. He hated me, and with good reason. I’d killed his great-grandfather when I’d been bound to his line, and no matter how often he tried to rid himself of me, just like his father and his grandfather before him, he hadn’t managed it yet, and he never would.

I was a creature of shadow and fate, and every time the hourglass turned, it was time for me to get my due—and right now, there was someone coming to the Monster Security Agency who was meant for me.

Someone from whom I could feed.

Royce pushed himself away from his desk reluctantly. He’d said ‘no’ before, and he’d tried to refuse me, but that wasn’t how this worked. The curse that made me roam the earth feeding on fear and terror could not be denied, just delayed, for one hourglass’s worth of sand.

“Fuck you, Sylas.”

I laughed at his discomfiture. “Cursing won’t change anything. Does it even make you feel better, at this point?”

“Not really, no,” he confessed, taking a long inhale, and looking out the window beside him, as if he could see whoever was arriving, seventeen floors below.

“Who do you think it will be?” I asked conversationally. The opportunity to taunt him was too good to pass up. “Young, or old? Male, or female?” The smoke I was comprised of swirled around in eager anticipation.

A sheen of sweat broke out on his head, reflecting light as he shook it. “Whoever it is, I don’t want to meet them.”

The burden of knowing that horrible things were going to happen was too great for him to bear, but it didn’t bother me in the least. In almost every case people—usually men—would walk in and ask to hire a monster for an ‘assignment’. Sometimes they were cagey, sometimes not, and I would give Royce one thing, he never entertained them, nor tried to extort money from their insanity. The second they said anything about hurting other people, he—or a cadre of his employees—would escort them out the door.

And in those cases, released from my tether to his hourglass, I would follow them, silently, knowing that a great crime was going to be committed. I had followed cult leaders, mad bombers, and school shooters alike—and each time, I knew that somewhere inside the MSA building a frantic Royce Bannerman was making phone calls to lines that would suddenly not work, or getting through and shouting warnings that went unheeded.

His line was cursed, I supposed, much the same as I was—but I had accepted my fate long ago. I was well aware of my place in the world, and I didn’t fight it.

“I have no idea what my grandfather was thinking, when he tied you to that.” Royce pointed at the hourglass that we were both watching—the object I’d spent most of the past three generations trapped inside.

“Hmm. He was probably too busy planning your great-grandfather’s funeral to think much,” I said, letting a malevolent smile cross my shadowed face.

Royce made a pained, growling noise, from deep inside his chest. “You’re no better than a tick.”

I gave a dark and mocking laugh. “Really, Royce,” I chided. “Have you ever considered that I perform a needed function?”

The magical dark red sand inside the hourglass was thinner now and pouring out like blood.

“Which would be?” he asked, his tone arch.

“Maybe someone needs to feed on those emotions. Maybe if they were left alone, they would multiply endlessly, splashing out onto others.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? So you can sleep at night?”

“Oh, tsk, Royce. I don’t sleep. I only make others sleep—sleep, and dream of me.” The final few grains were rattling down. “Here it comes.”

The last one dropped—and Royce’s intercom went live. “Mr. Bannerman? There’s a potential client here to see you. I tried to tell them you weren’t in, but—”

I eyed Royce, watching him swallow and hate me with his full heart, a hate thick enough to eat. Then he reached out and hit the button. “Reception room three,” he told his assistant.

“Race you there,” I told him, snatching my hourglass up and sinking into the floor at once.

SYLAS

I was surprised to find a young woman sitting in the reception room several floors below, her hands primly nested on the table, her fingers wound as tightly as the braid her hair was in.

I watched her from the shadows—an easy task, because I was one—reading the solemn expression on her face and mentally tracing the line of her jaw.

She was pretty, but pale, like something left out in the sun too long, or something that had never even seen the sun before, her coloring made all the more stark by the rather severe high-collared black sweater she had on.

But none of that mattered, because I recognized what she was at once.

An actual client.

Oh, it had been so long—and it was going to break Royce’s heart.

I couldn’t wait.

And sure enough, he burst in breathing hard, having had to take the longer way down, with an accusatory finger out at the woman at the ready. “You need to leave here. Now.”

She stared at him with hollow eyes, betraying no emotion as she stood, and I wasn’t sure if that was idiocy or strength. “Why?”

“Because. We can’t help you. Whatever your problem is—”

“I can pay,” she said, standing. She offered her hand out in return, holding out a folded check.

He didn’t take it, but I did get to watch him comprehend the situation immediately. “We don’t want your money. It’s not safe for you here. You need to go—we don’t have anyone here that can help you—”

“On the contrary.” I disagreed with him, forming myself out of the shadows beneath the table, standing at its far end. I set the hourglass sideways and rolled it down, and all three of us listened to its metal spin across the wood, until it stopped in front of my new friend. “I think she’s here for me.”

Her brown eyes flickered from the hourglass to my face and figure. It amused me to wear a suit on these occasions—like Royce had on—and so I was ‘wearing’ one now, despite the omnipresent licks of shadows pulling at my edges, and that I often had instead of hair or hands. I was tall, because I controlled my height and I enjoyed looming, and the only light others could see on me, if fate had decreed they were meant to, was a slight glint inside my eyes.

She licked her lips, swallowed, and then found her strength. “I think I am.”

“No. No. Absolutely not.” Royce stormed over and made to pick the girl up, as if escorting her out of the building would cut the newly formed thread between she and I.

“What is your name?” she asked me, ignoring him.

“Sylas Vail, although I have many others,” I said, with a deep bow. “And if you will just suffer my hourglass to touch you, you will become my queen.”

“Until he kills you!” Royce said, like that ought to change her mind.

And it would’ve, if she were a normal woman, of course.

But something had driven her here, on this night, practically into my arms.

Because sometimes—very rarely—people did get to hire me.

And on those occasions I would get to not only follow them for a time, but do their bidding, and I would be permitted to not just feed on hate and terror, but allowed to cause it.

Personally.

Violently.

Up until their sand ran out and I finally slaughtered them.

Her gaze weighed me for a second more, then she picked up the hourglass at once.

PRE-ORDER GUARDED by the Nightmare today, or read it as I write it on Ream!

And make sure to check out all of the other Monster Security Agency books, in case you missed one!

Guarded by the Golem by Cara Wylde

Guarded by the Snake by Layla Fae

Guarded by the Spider by Cassie Alexander

Guarded by the Leshy by Cara Wylde

Guarded by the Vodnik by Layla Fae

Guarded by the Phantom by Layla Fae

Guarded by the Nightmare by Cassie Alexander

Guarded by the Reaper by Cara Wylde

also by cassie alexander

Check out cassiealexander.com for content & trigger warnings.

The Dark Ink Tattoo Series

Blood of the Pack

Blood at Dusk

Blood by Midnight

Blood by Moonlight

Blood at Dawn

Blood of the Dead

The Longest Night (Ream Subscribers Bonus Story)

Edie Spence Series

Nightshifted

Moonshifted

Shapeshifted

Deadshifted

Bloodshifted

Transformation Trilogy

Bend Her

Break Her

Make Her

Monster Security Agency Series

Guarded by the Spider

Guarded by the Kraken

Guarded by the Nightmare

Subway Silk (Short Story)

Harbor of Hearts (Short Story)

The Prince of the Other Worlds Series (Written with Kara Lockharte)

Dragon Called

Dragon Destined

Dragon Fated

Dragon Mated

Dragons Don’t Date (Short Story)

Bewitched (Bonus Story)

The Wardens of the Other Worlds Series

Dragon’s Captive

Wolf’s Princess

Wolf’s Rogue

Dragon’s Flame

Standalone Stories

AITA?

Her Ex-boyfriend’s Werewolf Lover

Her Future Vampire Lover

The House

Rough Ghost Lover

about the author

Cassie Alexander is a registered nurse and author. She’s written numerous paranormal romances, sometimes with her friend Kara Lockharte. She lives in the Bay Area with one husband, two cats, and one million succulents.

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