Rose thanks me, and with one tentacle she holds up her own present for me. It’s a ball of dark green spikes with bright blue tips, connected to a long yellow-white stalk. The spikes are each as long as my ring finger, and they quiver in the wind. The frosty stem burns the skin off my fingers. I take a piece of cloth from my pocket, so I can hold it.
I stare for ages before I realize: it’s a flower. Some kind of hardy plant that grows out there in the night and exists without sunlight, maybe even without liquid water. It can’t use photosynthesis, so how does it live? The spikes catch the twilight and seem to glisten, the greens and blues seeming more vivid and delicate the longer I stare. There’s no way this flower will survive the trip back to Xiosphant, so I just commit it to memory while Rose rests next to me.
“I’m actually feeling kind of happy,” I say to Rose without taking my eye off the rippling blue-green petals. “I don’t know if I ought to be. I can’t stand to wonder what Bianca’s doing right now. But meanwhile, I have a new family, and we’re helping people. I’m doing work that I enjoy, and I can see the results. My life feels wrong, but good. Maybe that’s the best I can do.”
Rose just tilts her head toward me, like she wants to understand. The flower is already wilting. The cloth I’m pinching around the stem is soggy. The spikes droop, but as they do, they reveal an underseam of brilliant orange.
“I wish I could have talked to my mother about her paintings,” I say. “I never even knew she painted.”
Rose is holding her pincer open, ready for me to go inside again. I try not to drop the flower as I lean toward her. I’ve found that it’s easier to do this from a kneeling position, when Rose is hunkered down, than standing up. I’m still thinking about Bianca, and my mother, and the impermanence of the flower in my hand, when my face and neck make contact with the slimy tendrils, and—
—I’m out in the ice. This is the part where usually Rose shows me some aspect of the crocodiles’ society, like how they built that huge city by mining deep caverns and tempering metal in the heat of a volcano, and by growing other structures organically. Sometimes she shows me some engineering feat that would make the professors at the Gymnasium sick with envy, but then it’s tinged with a sadness, a worry, that I don’t understand.
This time, though, I don’t see other crocodiles, deep furnaces, or soaring girders. I see a young human, dying in the snow.
(This is the second time I’ve seen how I look to someone else lately, and this time I almost don’t recognize myself. To Rose’s senses, I’m a pile of hot meat, giving off fear chemicals and making vibrations in the chill air. A jittering, stumbling human, smaller than most, with upper limbs closed in on themselves. The most unusual thing about me, to Rose, is that there’s only one of me.)
I hesitate, because the smart thing in this situation would be to leave this creature to die. But something makes me stop and examine closer. We have plenty of experience with human fight-or-flight behavior, including the usual stances and the chemicals that humans give off. And this one tastes different on the wind: like some mixture of defiance and tenderness.
So instead, I approach the shivering, mewling human and embrace her. For a moment, she seems about to lash out and try to attack my tendrils, and maybe I’ll be a dead fool. But no, she moves into my embrace, and I give her one short memory, with a simple message: We have our own city. We can work together—
—I think that’s it, Rose has shown me everything she’s going to, but the memory shifts, and—
—I’m standing with a group of other crocodiles, and we’re watching one of our friends bleeding from a spear that juts out from under her carapace. She’s surrounded by humans who carry explosives and weapons that could tear through us. My stomachs grind and every heart in my body beats against its cavity with the need to help my friend, but the other crocodiles cross their tentacles in my path. It’s too late for her. I break down, venting a noxious cloud of misery and grief, as the humans lash my friend with cords. They drag her, still flailing, up the mountain toward the punishing glare—
—Rose lets me go. I’m already on my knees, but I sink further, and double over, sick to my stomach. My face is moist from the secretions on Rose’s tendrils, which create an afterimage when I breathe deeply. I’m hyperventilating, which makes Rose’s memories flicker in and out of my head.
“Why don’t you just hate us?” I stammer. “Why don’t you want to kill us?”
Rose just pulls away slowly, and pulls herself up on her hind legs.
“I know you could. I’ve seen enough of your geoengineering by now. You could bring rocks and ice down on our city, and we’d never even know what happened.” I take a deep breath and rise up on one knee, swaying. “I’m… I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your friend.”
I’ve never eaten crocodile meat. Few people have, it’s a huge delicacy. But I’ve seen the hunting parties leaving town before, young people full of loud songs and swagger, and I watched Frank take one apart with knives and spikes. Something rotten settles in my guts and I have to hug my knees. “That was evil. And I wish there was something more I could do.”
The ice flower is a dark smudge on the ground.
Rose can sense my distress, like before, and maybe she understands I’m expressing remorse. She comes back again, and opens her pincer one more time. I rise up and bring my face in, and I get a single impression of a block of glossy orange metal. Copper. I feel its cool weight on my hand. She pulls away again.
“Okay,” I say, still unsteady on my feet, still heartsick. “I’ll get you some copper.”
Rose turns and clambers over the edge, back toward the night, her front legs picking at the rocks so she doesn’t overbalance. A moment later, she’s gone, and I turn back to stare at the complacent city, washed in its usual gradient. The farmwheels and tar rooftops shine like new.
I think about how in the world I can score some copper, and then it hits me: I’ll need to go back to the temperate zone, the home of all my fear and regret. For a moment, I’m sure I’ll die—that if I go anywhere near the Gymnasium, people will see me, they’ll shout, the cops will arrive, and this time—
Then I breathe and remind myself, You’re in control. You’re stronger than those monsters. I pick myself up and hurry back to town before they ring the last curfew bell, running down the slope so fast I nearly kick myself as I skid and spill onto the ground.
mouth
Mouth and Bianca took a walk on the edge of the slaughterhouse district, where livestock raised outside Xiosphant came in to be butchered, on lorries or in long trains of wide-eyed cows and fidgeting goats. These buildings clustered near the city wall, on the side facing the Northern Ranges, and they made a crisp profile of clay-brick gables and steeples against the wall’s edge. Mouth had only eaten meat occasionally in Xiosphant, but she did appreciate the leather.
Since they were out in the open, walking along a wide slate-paved road with the indentations of countless lorry wheels, they spoke in whispers, and only discussed politics obliquely. Still, Mouth welcomed a meeting someplace besides the oatmeal restaurant.
“When they took Sophie, I lost all my dumb illusions about how the world works,” Bianca said. “I had all these lofty theories about culture, and internalized mechanisms of control, but I hadn’t ever faced up to how much the world runs on crude, mindless violence until it was right in front of me.”