Rose raises her head up over the cliff, tentacles and front legs straining. She finally gets her whole body up in front of me, and I see the soft, tawny hide around her front legs. I hand her the pitiful amount of copper and tin I’ve scrounged this time, and she studies it with the cilia on the end of one tentacle, then puts it away on her back.
“I’m sorry, I need your help again. I don’t know what to do. My friend is in trouble. I know your people have amazing technology. You showed it to me. But do you have any weapons? Weapons? Something to protect a person from getting hurt.”
Rose bows her head, big indentations on top narrowing, like she’s frowning or sad. She raises a tentacle to touch me, and I let her brush against my face and feel my pulse through my neck. She wants to understand, and not just because I brought her copper.
I push my face toward her tendrils. “I’m scared. Please understand that I’m scared. I’m still scared from the way I almost died, back when you saved me, and now I’m scared that something will happen to Bianca. She’s everything to me. Can you feel my fear? Can you at least understand the feeling, even if you get nothing else?”
Rose seems to nod, or maybe it’s just my imagination. She reaches into her own wool-covered carapace, searches, and pulls something out, holding it in a knot of her tentacles. The size and shape of a starfruit, the object has five spines, going off in different directions. I almost try to bite into it, but I look closer and realize it’s made of some metallic alloy, with flecks of a crystal or mineral, like quartz. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen, but I can tell that somebody designed these diamond shapes and the complex way they intersect.
Still, this device is just as confusing to me as my clock was to Rose, and I hold it up to the twilight, squinting.
Rose lets me fumble for a moment, then finds another, identical metal-and-crystal starfruit. She twists one of the diamond-shaped segments around, so it’s at a strange angle to the others, and the one in my hand vibrates, giving off a faint rumbling sound.
“Wow. What did you—” I grapple with my own device for a few moments before I manage to turn one of the slices, and a similar growl comes out of Rose’s device. So it’s like an old-style phone, or the telex machines in Xiosphant. And maybe you can use one of these to find the other? Rose helps me to rearrange the diamond slices until the device forms a circle. I snap it around my right wrist: a spiky bangle.
I stare at this device, snug against the base of my thumb. These creatures must have invented it over a long time, as they found materials under the ice, dug up metal and rocks and studied what they did and how they worked, and put them together. It’s not like almost all our technology in Xiosphant, which people invented millions of kilometers away on Earth, dozens of generations ago, and we’re just trying to keep it all working.
Rose comes closer, slow and careful, and puts her claw around my face and neck again. I always have to make a conscious effort not to pull away as these tongues affix themselves to my skin, but it gets easier each time—
—A crocodile built a flying machine and soared over the flaming glaciers, shielded against the sun, but still cowering a little under its rays. Crocodiles stood on great soaring platforms, making a study of the atmosphere. The sky on fire, gouts of flame roaring into the ice. A team of crocodiles journeyed to the very end of the world, going inside a mountain with smoke pouring out of it. The sky turning and reversing, turning and reversing, clouds doing a strange dance. None of this stuff makes any sense to me, until I form those images into a story: the sky was on fire, when the world was young, and we risked everything to find a solution.
Then I sense the weight of the bracelet that just closed around my own wrist, only it hangs on the tentacle of an elder crocodile who travels across a shale landscape dotted with frost in a carriage that is half rock, half flesh. She may not make it back home before she dies, she feels weary in her clicking joints, and a sense of fallowness leaches into her core when she thinks of being away from her extended family. But the bracelet grunts in answer to her lonesomeness, and it connects her to all the explorers and scientists—the menders—who had flown above an icefield painted with flames—
—Rose pulls away, and I touch the bracelet, which now seems an emblem as well as a device.
“Thank you.” I put my arms around her, as gentle as I can. “I wish I could tell you… I don’t really have a family anymore, but I’m going to feel like you’re with me, wherever I go, as long as I wear this. No matter how far into the light I travel. And I need to stop calling your people crocodiles, because that’s just a dumb name that humans decided to call you.”
I look at Rose, and at last I don’t see her body only in terms of sheer power. I was taught to see her as a great destroyer, and in my fear I had wanted to keep seeing her that way—so I could identify with her, and feel powerful by association. Her front legs move like great pistons, but they’re also supple, made for exploring tricky spots. Her tentacles swirl and grip like serpents, but their cilia are exquisite, sensitive, delicate.
I remember a word that came to me, during the last thing she shared: “menders.”
“My ancestors should have tried to call you what you called yourselves,” I say aloud. Rose cants her pincer a little, as though she’s listening in her own way. “You think of yourselves as menders, as builders, as explorers. There’s no one word for all those things in Xiosphanti, but the old language, Noölang, had one: Gelet. It’s like architect, and traveler, and five other things, all in one. So… I’m going to start calling your people the Gelet.”
Then I remember about Bianca, and turn to rush back to the city. “Thank you,” I say again. “I hope I do something to deserve this.” Rose is already halfway off the plateau, her massive frame clambering back down into the dark.
When I pull myself through the hole in the fence and get back inside the city, I hear the clatter of all the people trying to finish their business before shutters-up. Parents hustle their children, or try to do one last odd job to score infrastructure chits, med-creds, or water tokens. The repair crews apply their last bits of sealant to the cracked walkways. I haven’t carried a timepiece since I gave mine away to Rose, but I can tell you what the clock says just by the scents of cooking, cleaning, or brewing of hot drinks. The laundry steam, the long line at the bakery, fathers carrying their children home from school. You can’t fight Circadianism, because it’s soaked into our pores.
Jeremy finds me sitting on the steps leading to the Parlour’s lacquer door, staring at my new bracelet. My face must diagram all the suffering in my heart, the way I’m seeing Bianca’s death more vividly than my own feet under their tiny skirt, just as the crocodile visions—the Gelet visions—always seem realer than real. Being ashamed of fear doesn’t make me less afraid.
“I’ve tried to cut off my old life,” I whisper. “But I have a friend from school, and she’s trusting someone that she shouldn’t. She’s going to throw her life away. I’m scared to face her, and everyone at school will lose their minds if they see me.”
Jeremy sits next to me and breathes, deliberate and even, as if I’m a client and he wants to steal away my awareness that time is flowing. He doesn’t have that easy look on his face, though.
“You can’t hide from the people you care about. A love that hides is already halfway to becoming regret.” I have a feeling he’s quoting one of the books we were supposed to memorize, but I don’t care.