Page 27 of Guarded By the Kraken

“Have your two-legged kind truly been to other planets?” Cepharius asked, from his unseen spot to my side.

“I thought you weren’t listening?”

“I apologize. The bonding is fresh, and your mind is very loud.”

There was no point in being mad at him. “Do you know what the moon is?” I asked, while thinking strongly of every photograph of an astronaut and moon-walking I’d ever seen, probably including some TV shows.

“I have eyes, Elle of the Air. And my kind rise to the surface, occasionally.” I could feel his mind pressing against mine. It was a pleasurable sensation, like when someone brushed your hair. “May I...look?” he asked, and I realized he was asking permission to search through my thoughts for more.

“No.” I tried to shake my head inside the helmet but it was hard.

“As you wish,” he said, the sensation of his nearness fading again.

“It’s nothing personal,” I said, not wanting to affront him—and maybe because I liked when he was near. English tea sets, Elle. “Because—how would you know? The difference between a photograph I saw in a class, versus a story I’d seen on television?”

“Television?” he asked, and then pressed, again. This time I didn’t fight him. “Ah. One of your many attempts to replicate the ’qa.”

“Something like that,” I said. “But those are stories—although sometimes we watch the news on television, which is actually the truth...depending on the channel?”

I felt his amusement at my inability to account for my kind. “I agree, it would be difficult for me. But you can always choose what it is you wish to show me, and tell me whether or not it is true.” The rock I was supposed to turn at loomed. “Will your cable be safe against this stone?” he asked. I saw some of his tentacles reach out and grasp it, and this time I didn’t panic. They were long and thick, the diameter of my wrist, until they trailed off into delicate finger-like seeking tips.

“Yes,” I thought at him intentionally, though I didn’t really know.

“And now you are seeing if it’s possible to lie to me,” he said—and at that very second, his tentacles became the color of the stone he held, almost impossible to see.

I swallowed. “I was curious about it, yes.”

“You could try to, Elle of the Air,” he said, and his tentacles flashed bright blue, then faded to ominous black, before he pulled them out of my helmet-limited vision. “Things that you think of as true, I would assume to be so, even though you could be factually incorrect. I only have your mind to go on. So you could tell me made-up stories from your television and your news—but what would that gain you, down here?”

I inspected the area on the ground that the umbilical cable keeping me alive would rub against—and it appeared that something else had recently taken that path before. There was an inch deep, four-inch-wide groove seemingly carved around it. Due to the presence of an undersea current, swishing around the base of the rock? I scuffed my toe into the ground, sending up a cloud of silt, but it only went up and then drifted back down.

Someone else had been here before, dragging their umbilical cable behind them.

Maybe I should’ve checked my suit over for blonde hairs.

“Is there a reason you’ve stopped, diver?” Marcus asked on the intercom.

“No,” I answered.

I felt Cepharius give a thoughtful rumble. “Now, that was a lie,” he said.

I thought back to him. “Yes.”

chapter 14

CEPHARIUS

I was not okay with Elle’s cable.

It looked like one of the cables we let two-legged run across the bottom of the sea, only I knew it housed everything that kept her safe—and there was no way I was going to let it chafe against the bottom of that stone.

I picked it up once she was past me and let it flow through my much smoother hand instead.

If I had my way, she wouldn’t even have been out here at all.

I would rather torture myself and only ever see her again through the windows of her station, knowing she was safe, then have her out here in the water beside me. I knew how dangerous the deep was, and while her outfit seemed well-made, I knew firsthand how many two-legged skeletons littered the bottom of the sea.

Elle walked out ahead without knowing I’d stayed back, as I felt my anger and concern at the situation rising, and I tried to fight it logically.

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