AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I could sense what she got of me through her tactimetal suit.
It wasn’t much—but it was better than the glass was.
“Teach me how to get better at going through your memories? And maybe carry me to the ship, because you’re faster?”
I picked her up in my arms to do so at once. “Going through my memories should be easy. Everything inside my mind is real. Yours—” I clicked my beak, and she laughed.
“It’s hard though, Ceph. I don’t have frames of reference for a lot of your life. Like you sleep sideways, on purpose.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No, it’s just—I’ve never slept sideways before in my life. Or eaten live fish, or”—her mind raced off, zipping through a hundred things she’d never done before like thrown a well-weighted spear, wrestled with a friend, talked to sirens—“Oh my gosh, Ceph, is your brother really a king?”
“Ugh,” I said, setting her down in front of the spaceship. “Yes. But don’t remind me.”
The first thing she did was go over to where the symbols were, and point at the one I’d seen last night. “It is you!” she exclaimed, but then frowned and started thinking. “But how does it know we were together?”
“I am uncertain.” I felt motion in the water though, and knew to shield myself and her half-a-second before the lights turned on again.
This time we both got to watch the gantry come down.
“Are you still decided?” I asked her, even though I could already feel the answer in her heart.
“Yes,” she said—so I picked her up and carried her.
The inside of the spaceship was as we’d left it—except now there weren’t any floating corpses, and there was a new opening along one wall, apparently leading to a second glowing room.
“What happened to the bodies?” Elle wondered.
I’d had a chance to do more research in her mind on her white blood cells the night before. “Did it eat them?”
She gave me a look inside her helmet. “There’d be easier ways to get nutrition down here than waiting for humans in pressure suits to show up.”
I made a scoffing sound. “Maybe it has limited locomotion.”
She went up on her tiptoes, kicked up to float alongside me, and then ever so carefully tapped her helmet against my cheek. “That was a kiss,” she explained. “And we’re going down that hall.”
“Goddammit,” I thought at her, repeating back her favorite curse word, and felt her laugh as I began to follow.
We only made it halfway down the hall though, until her forward progress was thwarted.
She’d reached the end of her umbilical cable.
I sensed a surge of disappointment, as she looked behind herself. “No. It’s too soon—I can’t believe they didn’t make these longer!”
All I could feel was a vast sense of relief. Finally this madness would be through, and my mate would be safe, inside the habitat, where she belonged.
Her disappointment lingered, however, so sharp that it began to pain me.
“I will go ahead and look for you. But only this once.”
“No!” She grabbed for my hand again.
“Why not?” I asked, but then felt it from her. “So you admit that it’s dangerous!”
She made a face at me inside her helmet. “Of course it could be. But also, I can’t lose you.” She put a fist to her stomach. “I get that now.”
“So you know how hard these past few days have been for me.”
