Chapter 05 #2
I would throw up my hands if they weren’t currently coveting the last of my brownie. “Don’t you like dessert?”
“I … well.” He shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t usually…”
“Do you want some of mine?”
His eyes swing up. The pause that follows is … surprised. Tinged with uncertainty. Heavier than the moment warrants.
“Thank you,” he replies, “but no.”
We return to our meals. The silence isn’t awkward, exactly, but it feels different.
Charged, somehow. I get the sense that whatever is said next could change the entire trajectory of our (admittedly shaky) relationship, but since I don’t want to bear the consequences of that responsibility, I dive into my tuna sandwich with vigor.
I’m polishing off the last bite when I feel a soft quiver. At first I think it’s me, like I’m shivering or something, but then it happens again, stronger this time. “Did you feel that?”
Lament is still picking at his bread. “Feel what?”
“I don’t know. An earthquake?”
“Purvuva is a stagnant lid planet.”
“Ah.”
He gives one of his sighs. “It doesn’t have tectonic plates.”
Of course he would know that. “So no earthquakes?”
“No. Although”—he squints into the distance—“I suppose seismic activity is still possible. You can have volcanism on stagnant lid planets if there’s enough heat and pressure, and carbon dioxide escapes from the planet’s core—”
The ground rumbles again, more violently this time.
“Okay.” I’m gripping the PPM box to my chest. “Tell me you felt that.”
Lament looks a little bloodless. “Yes.”
“You were saying something about carbon dioxide?”
“This … isn’t that.”
“Okay?”
I wait for him to explain what he’s thinking, but all he says is, “We should get to the caves.”
My blood is buzzing, my fingers straining toward my ray gun. In my head, I scroll through possibilities, but all my thoughts are nonsense. Ogres and dragons and trolls. Fairy-tale stuff. And yet, if it’s not an earthquake making the ground tremble, then what? What?
The wind bites at my skin, the last of the day’s sun stretching long on the horizon.
I grab the emergency pack, and Lament snags the useless radio, and together we hurry back toward the caves.
We’re halfway there when the earth gives a true quake, the ground rolling like someone’s shaking out a rug.
I stumble and catch my footing, glancing back just in time to see our spacecraft being sucked up by the earth.
It shifts, and heaves, and then it’s just—gone.
Like the sand opened its mouth and swallowed.
Lament shoves me. “Run.”
I run. My arms pump, my boots kicking up dirt.
Lament is right beside me, but I can’t tell if it’s him making that gasping sound or me.
The caves seem impossibly far away, and my thighs are on fire, and there’s sand in my mouth and in my eyes, and suddenly a shadow crosses my vision, revealing the towering dark body-double of a head and what appears to be a dozen waving tentacles.
My stomach seizes and my throat clicks and there is no way that shadow belongs to an actual giant octopus.
I look behind me.
It’s an actual, giant octopus.
Its head is a bulbous gray mass, its arms adorned with pulsing suckers.
It rears back to reveal a circular mouth lined with teeth spinning like razors on a power saw.
I hear Lament make a startled sound as the creature gives a screech, moving along the sand’s surface as if through water.
We keep running, but even if we make it to the caves in time, I can’t see how that’s going to help. That thing has arms.
I yank my ray gun from its holster, take aim, and pull the trigger.
The beam bursts from the barrel, striking the creature directly in its fleshy face. It gives another scream, but the shot doesn’t appear to penetrate the skin—it only aggravates the monster, which bears down on us with mindless menace.
“You can’t shoot a sand cephalopod with a ray gun,” Lament yells as we run. “They only absorb the beams.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“Everyone knows—”
He’s cut off midsentence as the creature smashes its two front limbs into the ground, creating a shock wave that makes my teeth snap together. I pitch forward, catch myself, keep going. “How do you kill it, then?”
“You can’t, you just have to—”
Another body slam, another shudder. It’s like being on a boat in a sea storm.
The ground lurches beneath our feet, creating a dizzying shift in equilibrium.
It’s all we can do to stay upright, so we give up trying to talk and put our energy into reaching the caves. Forty yards, then thirty, and then—
Lament is no longer beside me.
I swing around to see him stumbling under the latest shock wave, crashing to his knees. He hits the ground so hard he rolls. Behind Lament, the sand cephalopod makes a disturbing tut tutting noise that can only be a sound of pleasure, excited by the sudden proximity of its next meal.
The feeling starts at my toes and creeps upward, spreading through my chest, down my arms. My hands stop shaking.
My lungs open. The panic dissipates, and in its place there’s only lightness, certainty.
I scan the scene, calculating the monster’s speed, its trajectory, the distance between there and here.
Lament said sand cephalopods can’t be killed, but the first thing they teach you at the Academy is anything can be killed. You just have to figure out how.
Lament is trying to scramble back to his feet, but the cephalopod is closer now, vibrating the earth with such intensity the sand has essentially turned liquid.
Lament can’t get the leverage he needs to push himself upright.
He’s trapped, sinking fast, with only seconds to spare before the monster arrives to claim him.
His eyes flash to mine, and I can read the thoughts on his face, the terror and disbelief. “Hartman,” he croaks. “Go.”
But I don’t go. Because I remember, suddenly, a painted octopus on the wall of the children’s home, anatomically correct because Master Ira believed in knowledge as much as he believed in color.
He painted that octopus himself, mantle in the front, funnel on the side, liver and poison sac in the middle, and behind the eyes: the brain.
I lift my ray gun and stare down its sights.
It’s a tricky shot. Shooting too early means the angle will be wrong.
Too late, and I risk losing my chance altogether.
But this isn’t even what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about how good the gun feels in my hand.
How holding it makes me easy and focused and free.
I could do anything in this moment. Be anyone.
“Keller.” It’s the first time Lament has ever used my name. My mind snags on it like a fish on a line. “Run.”
The monster launches itself out of the earth and flies across the sky toward Lament, ready for the death strike. I catch a full glimpse of its giant, liquid eye. The iris is glowing blue.
I pull the trigger.
It’s a direct hit, unmitigated, elegant in its simplicity.
The creature doesn’t even wail. The ray beam connects with its eyeball and rockets straight through its nervous system.
The cephalopod instantly loses motor function, all systems dying even as it continues to sail through the air, forward momentum sending it right over Lament …
And down on top of me.