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Ceph stared at the symbol.
“What is it?” I asked him. I’d normally hesitate to ascribe a personality or motive to a structure, but...“It’s like it wants us to see this, right?”
“I’ll be back,” Ceph announced, and then started swimming to my left and disappeared.
I didn’t know what to do, so I stepped forward and touched the wall again, like I probably shouldn’t have, especially now that I knew that it could kill ROVs. But while the symbols around my contact reacted with their colorful splashes, nothing bad happened to me.
It took forever for Ceph to return, and when he did, his mood was somber.
“Where did you go?” The only reason I hadn’t been panicking was because I could feel him. I was more angry at having been abandoned.
He pointed three symbols back. “The circle was two. Then it became one. And now it’s two again, Elle.”
“Two eggs, two spaceships,” I said with a shrug.
“No,” he said. “That circle is me.” He gestured with his other arm and half of his tentacles. “For some reason this entire spaceship is covered with the story of my life.”
I made a face at him. “I refuse to believe that.”
“It doesn’t matter—it’s true,” he said, and picked me up without asking.
“Ceph!” I shouted at him, struggling—until he pulled to a stop in front of a particular portion of the wall.
“Look here, Elle. I counted back—this is three lunar years and thirty-one days ago. The same day Cayoni and our egg died. There were three circles conjoined before that—but then I became one circle again.”
“So there’s been one symbol a day? For your entire life?” I asked, my voice arching as my thoughts did. “Why are so many of the days the same?”
“You underestimate how boring my life was before your arrival,” he said with a snort. “These strokes could be the manatyls I was guarding. I moved as they did, keeping them safe on their route to their breeding grounds.” He pointed out hashmarks near his circle with the tip of a tentacle, that sometimes rotated around the circle’s sides. “But I went back before that for long enough, tracing memorable events—meeting Cayoni, going out hunting, and twice off to war—it’s accurate. To the day.”
I stared at the wall in even more confusion. “Even if I grant you that—why?”
He shook his head. “I do not know. You are the thinker between us,” he said, taking us both down to the ground again.
“And you’re absolutely sure no one has had a thought about this on the ’qa before?”
“Even more now than I was; something this strange would resonate with us for a very long time.” His resolve was firm—and then he tensed, his attention on something behind me. He flowed over to me, faster than I could see, dragging me and my cable back in a blur of his tentacles.
“Ceph?” I whispered into his mind.
“Turn off your lights,” he commanded, and I did so at once. “There was movement in the water, up ahead,” he explained, moving to press me between him in the wall. “But it has stopped now.”
Had Mr. Marlow sent down another ROV?
Ceph crouched against me, pulling me down. “I am going to go look. You stay here, but do not move, my pearl. Many things in the deep cannot see, but they will sense motion.”
The thought of losing him panicked me, and I grabbed his arm. “I can’t have anything happen to you.”
“Nothing will. Not now, not ever,” he said, and pulled away.
He’d left me right beside the wall—and now none of the symbols were glowing, and I was afraid to tap them.
If Ceph was right about the spaceship, and it was trying to communicate with him—and I had no reason to doubt it, Cepharius was as smart as he was handsome—then what did that mean?
I bit my lip inside my helmet, and I couldn’t come up with any answers.
“Ceph?” I whispered on the ’qa, wanting his mind to touch mine.
He was back less than thirty seconds after. “You need to go back.” He picked me up without asking and began jetting us away—I could feel my umbilical cable dragging behind me like an errant piece of yarn.
