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“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.”
