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“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?—”
