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 shapeof 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.
Marisol
Iwant to be clear about something: I had thought this through.
That morning on the dock, while Maro untied the rope and I stepped carefully into a boat that could charitably be described as cozy, I had run the full process.You are getting in a small boat with a kraken to look at sea caves. You have decided this is fine. You are doing it.I arrived at yes. I got in the boat.
What I had failed to adequately prepare for was theboat.
It was small. I want to be specific about how small: when he sat down across from me and picked up the oars, his knees were approximately six inches from mine. He rowed and his arms came forward, came back, and I was directly across from all of it in a boat the size of a large dining table with nowhere to look that wasn't him.
The cliff face was on our left. I was looking at the cliff face. The cliff face was doing its very best.
