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“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I could only barely feel his presence in my mind now, and I knew that he’d withdrawn to lick his wounds.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.
