AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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.”
