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“Yes.” A softer color flushed his skin. “You won’t tell, will you?”
I gave him as gentle a smile as I was capable of. “What kind of uncle would I be, if I did?”
His gaze was wary, and I knew what he was thinking, even as he was able to keep it away from me: the same kind of uncle I’d been when I had left him.
But I couldn’t apologize for leaving without him thinking I’d pressed his mind—so instead, I did the next best thing. “I am tired now, Gerron. I have swum in from very far away. But we will fix the statue tomorrow morning before I go.”
“Together?” he asked, clarifying my offering.
“Yes,” I swore, and I felt his thrill of delight at the same time I felt his decision to quickly zip away before I could change my mind.
After he left, I made sure to close the door quickly to keep his secret. I brushed a hand through the forest of anemones on the wall, and a gentle glow struck up from wherever I had touched them, helping to illuminate the room.
Gerron had hidden the little army figurines Balesur and I had carved as children here. They were all pieces of stone or coral, carved and polished down to tentacled fighters, some with spears in their arms, others balanced on pieces of fortifications that they carried, and some with decorative necklaces, belts like mine, and crowns. A few of them were feminine, their forms more lithe than the rest, with longer lower tentacles, and none of the curling thoughtful ones our men had circling our jawline.
I remembered the rules—to roll dice well enough that you won the other player’s figurines. You would add those figurines to your own collection, winding their tentacles again and again, until all of yours were in a chain, and the loser was left with only one.
Gerron must’ve been playing against himself, because there was a nearly complete line of figurines in a neat half-circle, and one solo kraken in its center, which I picked up.
Once Gerron joined the ’qa, he’d never be alone again. He’d be part of the grand chain of kraken for however long he wanted to be—whereas I wanted no part of it.
I tucked the solo figurine into one of my belt’s pockets before I took it off. Gerron had had to guess my feelings the last time I’d gone, but once I’d left again, he read his game in here and know.
Then I hung my belt from an outcropping, and found the part of the wall I’d liked to sleep on in my youth. I wound my tentacles across familiar worn pieces of stone, until I was comfortably tucked against it.
I hadn’t lied to Gerron about that at least. I was exhausted, and I hoped to be asleep before the rest of my kind returned—but my mind had other ideas.
I couldn’t believe my brother had let the two-legged build anything in Kalesh, much less some kind of semi-permanent dwelling. He had to be right; the humans were up to something, but what on earth could they want down there, in the cold, deep dark?
Who would this human be that I was guarding—and why?
And, perhaps more importantly: from what?
I twisted, suddenly unable to find any position that felt right, and missed my window to sleep entirely, feeling all the krakens Sylinda had sent away slowly rejoining the local ’qa.
I closed down my thoughts to keep them to myself. The other krakens had no such compunction though. I could feel them without trying, each of them a bright pinprick of energy, living a life without shame, sharing trickles of everything on the ’qa, until there were so many of them it felt like I was swimming in a raging torrent.
At least none of them were thinking about me. Probably because Sylinda had threatened them when she’d sent them away.
But what was happening now was almost worse. One by one I felt certain krakens fade as they fell asleep, but some of them turned their attentions to other matters. I clenched my beak to brace as a pair that was particularly close to me shot one another messages.
“. . . do you know how beautiful you are?”
“You always say that!”
“Because it’s always true!”
They were laughing and happy—and while I was glad it wasn’t my brother and his wife, it was awful none the less.
“. . . come here!”
“Catch me!”
I lifted my hands up and pressed the heels of my palms against my broad eye sockets, in an effort to somehow physically block out what I otherwise could not, as the most intimate thoughts of even more of my kind leaked in.
“Let me lift you?—”
“. . . my arm is ready?—”
