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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.
