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And then I inhaled when I peeled myself away from him, like he was the air I breathed, and I didn’t breathe again until my helmet was on, and I was coughing up the strange water I’d been swimming in as my suit repressurized.
chapter 50
CEPHARIUS
I was mystified that the spaceship had gotten me to see something that wasn’t there. “The hatchling felt very real to me.”
“Me too,” Elle said. I was holding her in my arms, while I used my tentacles to loop up her now-healed cable as we traveled across the ocean floor. She was just as hurt as I was, I could feel it.
“How did you know?” I asked her.
She thought for a bit. “Do you all have alcohol down here? Or something like it? Other ways to get high?” she asked, and presented me with some of her own memories.
I was even more concerned. “Hallucinations are a part of two-legged life?”
“Not all the time,” she said. “Just—sometimes. Yeah.”
I shook my head. “I would not be cut out for living above the sea,” I said, and I felt her smile.
“Don’t worry. Your tentacles are too sexy. I’m not going to Little Mermaid you.”
I didn’t know what she meant—and the thoughts and visions inside her head confused me. I didn’t want to press; communicating with the ship had hurt her mind. I wanted her to rest, but I knew she wouldn’t until our charge was through.
What would happen then, though?
“Well, for one thing, I think I’ll be out of a job,” she said, answering my thoughts. I’d forgotten how close a mating bond would be. “But we’ll figure something out, won’t we?”
I paused, setting her down just on our side of the privacy line, knowing that once we crossed it, her communications with the habitat would return.
“Yes. Somehow.” There were the pressurized tanks my brother and I had been put in when we’d been ambassadors...
Elle saw the vision of these in my mind and reacted with appropriate horror. “I’m not keeping you in my living room like some kind of Bond villain!” I had no idea what that meant, either, but I understood her sentiment. “One problem at a time, okay? Let’s get Snout home, and then I’ll worry about the rest of my life, with you,” she said, threading her fingers through mine, and even though it wasn’t her skin, just her suit, I liked feeling them there.
And I knew what she intimately both tasted and felt like, thanks to the spaceship.
What a strange gift this entire mission had become.
Then I was confused. “Did he tell you that was his name?”
She peered out of the corner of her helmet at me. She looked tired, her wet hair was clinging to her face inside her helmet, one of her eyes was bloodshot, and she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “Yes,” she said, beaming.
“He did not,” I protested, comfortably wound up in her mind now, just how I wanted to be for the rest of my life. “Elle of the Air, are you trying to lie to me?” I teased, and she grinned.
“How do you know he’s a he, hmmmm? Sexist much?” she thought back at me, laughing—and then we were both interrupted by her reality.
“Diver?” The intercom inside her helmet turned on. “Oh my God, Elle.” It was the voice of the other woman inside the habitat. “Are you alive?”
Elle blinked quickly, before answering. “I’m a little afraid if I try to make a joke about being a ghost right now you’ll cut my gas line. But—goddammit—it’s so tempting.”
“Shut the front door!” the woman on the other end whispered.
“Why is the front door open?” I wondered at Elle, at the same time as she made a “wooooooo” noise for her friend for some unknown reason on the far side of the line.
We heard the woman screech, and then the line went quiet again.
“I think she abandoned me?” Elle guessed aloud after another twenty seconds—but her cable began reeling in.
“In that case...” I gathered her up and jetted her forward, setting her down right in front of the water wall, where she turned to me, putting one hand on my chest, and the other on my cheek, for all the cameras attached to her helmet to see.
