39. Cyro, Kalith, & Vantor #3
“Are you sure we should not at least check on the ranch before exiting the atmosphere?” I asked, hope shining dimly across my body.
I crossed my human arms, fingers phasing in and out of reality, giving glimpses of the tentacle, showing the texture of my true skin.
It was harder to keep my hybrid form firmly in place when emotions railed against me.
Cyro’s skin rippled with conflicted emotions—lavender lightening to smoky gray as he internally struggled.
Three of his tentacles lifted, tips scraping down his rounded head, a gesture that signified deep contemplation in our species.
“No, we cannot go back. If we do—” He abruptly stopped speaking, any lingering color bleeding away from his skin.
What was he going to say when he abruptly stopped? Possibilities raced through my brain.
If we do, we may not leave?
If we do, we may fail our planet?
If we do, we might kidnap Tammy and take her with us, proving all those alien abduction fictions true?
“Even though she told me trash pandas are not pets, she did not discourage my attachment to Hoover,” Vantor spoke again, his voice taking on a distant quality. His words, once again, felt out of the blue.
“If she were here, she’d make some nonsensical joke about attachments and a Hoover going hand-in-hand,” I quipped, a sadness unlike I’d ever felt settling into my three hearts, making them beat sluggishly.
“That she would,” Vantor agreed with me. “Though, I do understand her jokes about the vacuum now. She explained them in great detail after I battled with her Hoover a second time. The vacuum, not the raccoon.”
I didn’t point out that his explanation was unnecessary. Tammy’s Hoover was a loud, engineering curiosity she’d refused to let me dismantle.
“She loves Artie. It was easy to see.” Cyro’s voice was no longer neutral.
It gurgled and shook. “And the elderly equine returned her affection. Always waiting on her patiently, not caring if she brought carrots or sugar cubes. Sassafras and Mystery were focused on themselves, then each other. But Artie and Tammy shared a special bond.”
I found myself nodding, my shortest tentacle curling protectively against my chest. “Did you know she found yarn in that cavity above the ceiling in the house? Colored string. Brown, yellow, green. She was knitting something, but she wouldn’t tell me what.
Before our departure, I snuck a peek. An odd sweater, too small for a human body. I believe it is for Manji.”
“Or Hoover,” Vantor countered.
“Maybe for Hoover,” I agreed, smiling at my crew brother.
The shared memories floated in the waters between us like physical things, carrying their own bioluminescence that brightened the shadows and lightened the heaviness we felt.
For the first time since our departure, we were acknowledging what we had left behind. Not just a planet, not just specimens for study, but connections. Relationships. A life none of us had expected to find or to cherish.
An indicator beeped. I looked over, finding a row of three, telltale green lights. “We have reached the pressure safe zone. The internal water levels will begin to decrease.”
“I’ll check the samples to ensure the system is keeping their individual containment parameters steady.
” Cyro turned to the research station, tentacles tapping furiously, as if he needed to put all his effort into this minor task so he could stop focusing on Earth and Tammy and the horses.
And everything we all were longing for. “Containment parameters are holding,” he reported, his voice steadier than I expected. “Preservation not compromised.”
What he didn’t say—what he didn’t need to say as our eyes met in silent understanding—was that no preservation protocol could maintain what truly mattered.
The memory of Tammy’s laughter would fade. The specific shade of her fire-kissed hair would become harder to recall. The animals would forget us, and the warmth of belonging we had found at Sunflower Hills would cool with distance and time.
We were fulfilling our mission. We were saving our world. We were doing exactly what we had sworn to do when we embarked on this journey.
And in succeeding, we had never felt like greater failures.
VANTOR
The command center fell into silence as the water purged from inside the ship, returning to where it belonged.
Returning… to where it belonged. Which was what we were on the path to doing. So why did it feel so wrong? Why did our home world not call to me?
Maybe it was because even as a young one, unable to leave the many waters, I longed for the surface. And when I was finally able to surface, I saw the sky and longed for the stars. I’d poured myself into being the best security specialist G.E.F. had to offer. To what end?
To get me off planet.
To reach those stars I longed for.
To, I realized now, find her.
The quiet that filled the ship in place of the saltwater was charged with tension, regret, confusion.
I watched as Cyro’s human fingers tapped an irregular pattern against the edge of his console, while his tentacles hung listlessly down his back.
He looked unmoored. Cyro, who was always confident even when he should not be, looked like a lost youngling at the bottom of a dark ocean.
His normally impeccable facade had cracked, revealing the emotional turbulence beneath.
My security training had taught me to recognize the subtle signs of a coming avalanche—the small shifts that preceded massive change.
This moment felt like the first tremor before everything would slide inexorably into motion.
The only question was, which of us would be the catalyst? Which of us would break first?
I was on the edge.
Ready to leap.
The water levels were lowering. The saltwater splashed against my shoulders as I shifted uncomfortably, wondering what I should do, what I should say.
Then Cyro turned from his station, abandoning all pretense of monitoring the samples. His human disguise flickered, eyes drifting, nose drooping, neck gathering in folds.
“I cannot stop thinking about her,” he said, the words emerging with such force that I knew he had been containing them for as long as I’d been containing my own need for our fire-haired Omega.
His grayed skin flushed with bright purple.
“About Tammy. About the ranch. About the peculiar sense of peace which I experienced while conducting what should have been mundane tasks like feeding horses, repairing fences, observing the night sky without quantitative instruments.”
Peace. Cyro was not one to put stock in such a pedantic concept. Yet, peace was the word he chose. And I felt that to the center of my body, to where my hearts beat, to where Tammy had planted herself.
Cyro’s tentacles natural body revealed itself now, his human form dissolving as he surrendered to his true nature.
Patterns of light danced across his skin—not the controlled, deliberate signals of our formal communication system, but the instinctive expression of emotions too powerful to contain.
The tentacles he’d kept in his hybrid form, recently lifeless, rose into the air and rippled.
We all followed suit, embracing our natural state, as if that would force us to accept leaving Earth.
“I have visited countless worlds in my pursuit of knowledge and answers,” he continued, his voice carrying that liquid quality that emerged when his speech organs reverted to their natural state.
“I have cataloged thousands of species, analyzed countless environments, and I have never felt that I belonged anywhere but in our research facilities at home. Until Sunflower Hills.”
The raw honesty in his admission broke the last of my own control.
The rigidity I’d maintained throughout my career softened.
All my life, I’d hid behind security protocol, staying on my guard, never fully trusting any being on my home world or on strange worlds.
Professional distance was safer than confronting the hollowness that had taken root in my central cavity, keeping me at tentacles’ length from real connection.
Oh, I’d learned to enjoy Kalith’s company on missions.
I’d learned to tolerate, and even respect, Cyro’s keen mind and ego.
But it was only on this mission, after so many missions with the duo, that I had found within them a family.
When we went back home, diving into waters and culture of our people, would we drift apart? Without Tammy tying us together, would we lose this brotherhood?
“The first time I reached the surface,” I found myself saying, “when I was barely mature enough for independent swimming, I breached our world’s ocean and saw the stars directly, without the distortion of water.
That moment created a question without words, a yearning without direction.
” My tentacles shifted, curling inward in the gesture that signified deep vulnerability in our species.
“At the ranch, watching the Kansas sunset with Hoover on my shoulder and Tammy beside me, I found the answer to that question.”
Kalith lifted his smallest tentacle out of the water, which was now waist high. His gaze dropped, eyes clamping on the shorter appendage. He stared at it with obvious distaste before shaking himself. His expression softened.
“Earth’s primitive technology is fascinating,” he said, his voice barely a whisper but gaining strength with each word.
“The simplicity of their mechanical solutions and the ingenuity born from resource limitations are things that I could spend lifetimes studying. The challenge of improving their systems calls to me.” He paused, his chromatophores pulsing with warm browns and muted oranges.
“But that’s not why I want to return. I want to return because Tammy looked at this—” he extended his shorter tentacle, “—and saw not dysfunction but uniqueness. Not deficiency but difference.”