Chapter 4
Maro
The ink response had happened.
I was in the deep channel with the water closing over me cold and correct, the surface already distant and that was the thing I could not settle.
I had been in these waters since before this island had a name.
I did not move without deciding. I did not do anything before deciding.
I was built for the ocean's kind of knowing: deep, unhurried, moving over centuries the way a current moved over rock.
Patience was not something I practiced. It was what I was made of.
And yet…
I had stood on the black sand beach and a human woman had touched a tentacle with her fingertips, curious as a child at a tide pool, and I had gone completely still, and I had not decided any of it.
I dove. I went as deep as the channel allowed, until the pressure was the right kind of pressure and the cold was total and there was nothing above me but dark fathoms of water and nothing below me but older, darker stone.
This had always been enough. The deep did not ask anything of me.
It simply was, and I simply was, and that was sufficient.
I surfaced at the reef because I had run out of water.
The three children from La Boca were on their float.
They were always on their float. Three summers I had been finding Theo and Petra and Bastien on this same configuration of plastic and rope, and three summers I had told them the current shifted at four and they should be ashore before it did, and three summers they had received this information with the patient tolerance of children who had grown up knowing what I was and had therefore long since decided I was not particularly interesting. On most days this suited me.
"You were on the beach this morning," Eleven year old Theo said. "With the tourist lady."
"I was surfing."
"You were also talking to the tourist lady."
"She waved at us from the terrace," Bastien said. Seven years old, built entirely from momentum. "This morning. And then she did this—" He cupped his hand over his eyes and peered outward, exaggerated, scanning. "Like she was looking for something."
Theo and Bastien looked at me. The afternoon sun was bright on the water. Something in my chest was doing the thing it had been doing since the beach, the directional pull of it, and I was in the water up to my collarbones and the children were waiting.
"The current shifts at four," I said.
"We know," Theo said.
"Go home before the tide comes in, little ones."
They went. Unhurried, accomplished, having done what they came to do. Bastien looked back once and did the peering gesture again, and laughed, and turned away.
I stayed at the reef until the current shifted.
***
I came back to the beach because the swell needed checking.
She was at the waterline. Shoes off, feet in the black sand, face turned toward the water the way she kept turning toward it.
Tina's drink was going warm in her hand.
The late light doing what it did at this hour, going gold and then amber and then the color that had no name except late, and her dark hair had finished its argument with the humidity and was curling soft against her neck, and I sat down near her and something in me that had been cold for a long time felt the warmth of her like a current differential, involuntary, the way the deep water always moved toward the warm.
I did not address it this time. It would have returned regardless.
My tentacles settled into the sand and began to drift toward her, slow and without my permission, the way they had been doing since the beach, and I let them go a few inches and then stopped them and they started again and I understood this was not going to resolve.
"I was wondering if you'd come back," she said. She didn't look over.
"I was checking the swell."
"Sure," she said, and looked back at the water.
The light moved. A pelican crossed low over the cove.
She set her empty glass in the sand and her hands came to rest in her lap, open, loose, the particular quality of hands that were not waiting for anything.
I felt the warmth of her from here, two feet away in the cooling air, and it was the same warmth that was still in the tip of that tentacle, and it had nothing to do with temperature.
"What are you?" she asked without fear.
"A kraken," I said.
She was quiet. I had said this to humans before, across centuries, and I knew that they all had different ways of managing their shock. She didn’t seem phased.
"How old?" she asked.
"I don't know exactly."
"How do you not know exactly?"
"Time moves differently in deep water," I said. "The counting becomes imprecise. I was here when it came up from the water. I watched it cool."
She looked at me with the whole weight of her attention, warm and direct and without agenda — and the mate pull tightened in my chest, a full-fathom pressure of it, and my tentacles moved in the sand, and she said:
"Is that why the surf break is so good?"
Two hundred years since the last human who hadn't been afraid of me. I had been ready for fear, had my whole self braced for the shape of it. I had not been ready for that.
"Yes," I said.
She nodded slowly. "That makes sense," she said — the same tone she'd used for the ferry, for the wrong dock, for the blue-skinned thing waxing a surfboard on the black sand.
"Tell me about when it came up," she said. "The island."
So I did.
The words came differently than they would have if I had decided to speak.
She asked about the first plants and I told her — pioneer species, the slow patient work of moss on bare rock, the centuries it took for stone to become soil.
She asked about the first people and I told her that too, the long-boat people who had read stars I could still find as they had been then, who had fished with methods I had watched develop across generations.
She asked if the island had had different names and I listed them, and she repeated two of them quietly, feeling for the shape of the sounds, and I watched her mouth and forgot what I had been saying.
"Did you ever talk to them?" she asked. "The early people."
"Rarely. They knew I was here. They left things on the rocks."
"But you watched out for them."
Not a question. I looked at her. "Yes," I said.
She was quiet, looking at the water. Then: "Did you ever want to leave?"
"No," I said. "This water is mine. I am part of this place the way it is part of me. There is no version of me that is not here."
"I've never felt that way about a place," she said. Not sad. Just true.
"You might," I said.
She tipped her head back to look at the sky, where stars were beginning to twinkle.
"The long-boat people used those to navigate," I said.
I pointed. She leaned toward me to follow the line of my arm and her shoulder came against mine and her face tilted up alongside mine and she was close — the warmth of her against my arm, her hair at my jaw, the specific gravity of her — and the tentacles moved in the sand and the pull in my chest was a full tide of it, and I looked at the stars and told her what they had meant to people who were dust now, and she listened to every word.