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“I hear you,” he said, just as solemnly back. “Give me five minutes to prepare, and then tell them I’ve returned.”
chapter 57
CEPHARIUS
I had three of the amphibious rifles strapped across my back, the alien’s home under one arm, and the creature itself still swimming beside me. It taken the form of a hatchling again.
“Do not do that. Please,” I thought out at it, and it changed back into the furry larval form it had had earlier, when Elle had been holding it, so I knew it understood me. “Are you fully sapient? Or are you too young?” I pushed my thoughts at it, but only got a pleasant blankness in return. “Because I need you to wait here.”
We were within viewing distance of the habitat’s dock, and I would trade the two-legged man the child’s habitat instead, since the child did not seem to need it.
I swam forward—and it followed me.
I shook my head gravely. “That is not allowed, little one. Wait here,” I sent to it—only to have it follow me a second time.
“No,” I explained, setting the tube it had lived in down. Perhaps it was only following the tube? I moved forward, and it trailed after me. “Do not,” I said again, gently, this time capturing the creature in my hands.
It changed to a kraken child instantaneously, and I did not care how clear Elle’s reasoning had been—I knew I was not hallucinating. It may not have been a kraken child, but it felt like one to me. It had the weight of one—I had held Gerron often enough when he was a hatchling—and I could feel it curling its tentacles around my fingers.
Nothing about the experience I was having was pretend.
“I need you to be safe, little one. And I am not moving toward safety. But I am doing this for your people. Please wait here for me.”
I kept my thoughts separate and precise and finally the alien creature let go of me and jetted into the dark—I felt its departure with profound regret.
“I will be back,” I promised it, and then picked up the box it’d come in and swam swiftly in.
chapter 58
ELLE
Hargrave’s men had been so interested in what Cepharius would return with that they didn’t even realize Donna was missing—they must have assumed she was taking the world’s longest shower.
Whereas I found myself goosestepped down the hall, with a soldier’s arm tucked under my chin, and his gun with its frangible bullets shoving into my kidney.
Hargrave set us up at the back of the dock room, me by his side, with an array of his people standing in front of us in a line.
“Tell your kraken not to try anything,” Hargrave told me, as I made a face at him.
“He can see all this,” I snapped, before I was jerked up onto my toes. “Ceph?” I thought out for him.
“I am here, my pearl. Tell me how to proceed.”
I took a look at all the soldiers with their guns out. “Don’t come too close.” Then I spoke again. “He’s ready. He has—” And I paused, to find out what Cepharius was even going to trade with. “A piece of the ship,” I said, hoping that it would take the soldiers a bit to find out Ceph was carrying an empty box.
“Have him throw it in.”
Where was Donna?
Not in a lifeboat ascending to the surface, I hoped.
Ceph hurled the hexagonal box through the water’s square, where the men made a show of carefully retracting it while staying out of his tentacle range.
“Tell us how it works,” Hargrave demanded.
I thought of a lie quickly. “It’s a power crystal. It contains part of the ship’s energy.”
And as if to refute me, Donna came into the room, to throw something the size of a backpack like a discus into the water. “It’s the spare battery!” she shouted as a soldier hip-checked her and sent her sprawling.
