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“What is it?” I could sense the panic radiating off of him, but he wouldn’t give me any insight.
“We are leaving,” he announced, and took a stroke forward.
“Why?” I asked—then a blinding amount of lights turned on.
I screamed and threw an arm up, right before my helmet adjusted its tint. “Oh my God?—”
“We are leaving. Don’t look.”
But it was too late—I’d already seen it.
The ship lit up behind us like a convenience store appearing out of nowhere beside the highway on a hot desert night. “Oh my God, Ceph. That’s a motherfucking gantry.”
The spaceship had opened for us.
“You didn’t see that,” Ceph said, telling me to lie to myself.
I fought him. “Ceph! What is wrong!” He was impossible to peel off of me—he was letting me win, so his suckers didn’t hurt my suit, but there was physically too much of him to gain any traction. “What is happening?”
“We need to go back is all.”
“If you take me back to the station, I’ll only walk out of it again!” I shouted at him with my mind.
“Then I will close the door behind you when I drop you off!” His thoughts were a low growl.
“Why?” I pleaded. “What did you see?” And then realized I only had one card left to play—and it was true. “You’re hurting me!”
That finally made him pause.
“Stop this!” I said, wrestling parts of him back. “You’re scaring me—and I don’t like whatever the fuck it is you’re doing right now, making all the decisions for me. You either tell me what you saw, or you put me the fuck down and let me go back there.”
I sensed his frustration and fear rushing up, and his mind slammed into mine. “THERE ARE DEAD HUMANS IN THERE WITH SUITS THAT LOOK LIKE YOURS!”
I cried out, the full force of his mind sending me reeling, making a migraine blossom so hard and fast I saw flashes of jumping lights like fireflies.
“My pearl!” Ceph shouted, taking us immediately down to the ocean floor, smoothing his hands against my helmet, trying to reach me. “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to—I never would have. You were right to deny me?—”
Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I panted in agony. I lay in his lap, mainly because I was unwilling to move and risk making all the contents of the snow globe inside my head shake up again.
“You were scared,” I said, when I could speak. It wasn’t a question—just a statement of fact. “But that was a little disproportionate, don’t you think?”
I stared up into his large black eyes that weren’t circles—they were closer to squares. He’d shut himself down almost entirely, and I could only barely feel him.
“Ceph—I’m not Cayoni.”
“No, you are not, Elle of the Air,” he said, after a very long while. “But you feel the same to me.”
And for the first time his mind opened up for mine, entirely uncontrolled. I was bombarded by chaotic images from what I assumed was his past, fragments of thoughts, little blips of his history, too quickly for me to hold onto, although I saw other krakens, a mighty battle, and Cayoni, the prior love of his life—and I saw her like he did, like I was a kraken, and I had to say he was right, she was pretty—then peace with the manatyls, if not solace, up until the day he met me.
And.
Then.
“Stop—stop—I understand. And if you make me throw up in this helmet, I’m going to be pissed.” His memory of bonding with me was just as traumatic in its own way as my memory of mine was, and being caught in a loop of drowning and suffocating, one after the other—it felt a lot like being in love.
Which I realized he was.
With me.
