But their main weakness, the easiest one to reach, is the exact center of the pincer that’s right in front of me, sticking out of the creature’s head. The impenetrable shell contains two knife-sharp claws, but at their midpoint is a forest of a hundred wriggling tongues, each one about the size of your little finger. If you manage to strike at the pincer’s heart, and hit those slimy appendages, then you might kill it in one stroke.
That pincer is so close I can feel one of its edges scrape my throat. It could slice my head off before I could react. I try to summon all my courage, brace my feet on the slippery ground to deliver one great blow to the warm spot at the pincer’s fulcrum. I can do this, I’m strong enough. I raise both fists.
Then I stop.
Because I feel warm breath coming from below the pincer, where the creature’s mouth is. And that part of me that always stands back and pulls everything apart, instead of just blurting out words, is asking: Why is a crocodile’s mouth so far away from all these tongues, anyway? She can’t possibly use them to taste anything or make any sounds. Why are they right at the center of this armored scissor, vulnerable yet shielded?
I lower my fists. Instead, I push my unprotected face forward, almost losing my balance in the dark. The pincer is all around my head and neck now, but it doesn’t close and kill me. Instead, this crocodile lets me press forward and push my frostburnt nose into the moist heat of her slimy warm grubs. They brush my face, and my head floods with urgent smells and disorienting sounds, a beautiful ugliness, too much to handle, like I’m out-of-my-head drunk with no up or down, nothing but a whirl of sensory overload.
I almost keel over, but somehow I stay upright until—
—I’m somewhere else. I’m way out in the middle of the night now, surrounded by huge sheets of ice on all sides. A mountain of ice and snow sidles past, along the horizon. We’re thousands of kilometers farther out than any human has gone in twenty-five generations, since we lost all our scoutships and all-terrain vehicles.
Somehow I can see in the dark now, except that I realize I’m not seeing at all. I’m using alien senses, and my mind is turning them into sight and sound.
I tear through the landscape so fast the wind can’t keep up. A sudden storm could rip me apart, the tundra could swallow me, but I don’t even care. My back legs push against the ground and the ice surrenders, while my smaller front legs rip into the slick surface, propelling me even faster and keeping my balance. I’m not running—this is something much better. I’ve never felt so much power in my body, and so many sensations flood into the ends of my two great tentacles as they taste the wind around me.
I want to laugh, and then I turn and see that four other crocodiles are running alongside me, grasping some spiky devices in their tentacles and guiding a sled full of some kind of precious metal. I feel a surge of pride, safety, happiness that they’re with me, and we’re going home.
Then we reach it: a huge structure in the shape of a rose with all its petals spread, a circle surrounded by elaborate crisscrossing arch shapes. Only the very top pokes above the surface, and the rest extends far below the ice, but still its beauty almost stops my heart. A glimmering city, many times larger than Xiosphant, that no human eyes have ever seen.
I must have blacked out, because I wake up and find the crocodile has swept me up in her tentacles and is using her front legs to brace me, while also climbing the sheer rock face that I fell down. I’m still frozen to the bone, but she has wrapped some kind of thick blanket around me that feels like something between moss and fungus. The fabric feels warm and dry, wound around my face with just enough slack to let me breathe. One tentacle covers my nose, and her cilia brush against my skin. I still can’t see anything, but I feel our rise in my inner ear, and even with the crocodile’s body shielding me I feel the bitter wind flow around me.
She deposits me at the same spot where the two officers pushed me over the edge. I’m on the ground before I even realize she’s laid me down, and I wriggle out of her covering only to be blinded by the faint light for a moment. The cops are long gone.
My rescuer is even bigger than the other crocodile I saw being butchered as a child—with a thick carapace and weathered skin on her legs and tentacles. There are two large indentations, one on either side of her head, which look like big sad eyes, but aren’t. Her round shell hunches as she shields herself from the sudden exposure to partial sunlight, which no crocodile can ever endure. Her pincer opens and closes, as if saying goodbye.
Before I can take a proper look, or try to communicate again, or do anything really, the crocodile has turned around, already disappearing back down the mountain.
From up here, Xiosphant looks like a great oval, with a bite taken out of the right side. The farmwheels keep rotating, but all the buildings have sheer faces, so the whole city is asleep.
The part of town nearest me, the Warrens, is a heavy, colorless off-black with slate rooftops and tall white-brick rectangles, but the city picks up a glow as I look farther inward, toward the farmwheels and the main shopping district. The pall lifts slowly, until my gaze hits the center of town, where the great spire of the Council House and the golden domes of the Palace gleam under a silvery light. From there, the light blazes fiercer and fiercer, until you reach the day side of town, which hurts my eyes even from here. And beyond that, the rays of the sun just poke out from behind the Young Father, though I don’t look that far, for fear of hurting my eyes. Off to my right, outside the wall in the Northern Ranges, cattle jostle each other, surrounded by high fences. The outcroppings at the base of the Young Father have mining tunnels going into them, and a few craggy shells of old treasure meteors have come to rest farther north.
Life returns to my body with an itchy soreness. My hands and feet feel as vast as this mountain range, and the blood stings as it flows into them. Even once I can move, I want to stay on this plateau forever, just watching the city go through its never-ending cycle of waking and sleeping. Striving and dying. I can look down from my rocky perch and think: Fools.
A high-pressure cloud system scuds across our strip of twilight, too high and too dense to make out any individual clouds, and staring up at it will give you a headache every time.
The thought of going back home, after what just happened, shakes me, every capillary and every inch of skin. The first time I try to stand and make my descent, I imagine the police spotting me as soon as I get back inside the city, shouting from behind their helmets, and suddenly I can’t move or breathe, as if they already have me. They’ll catch me again, they’ll know I survived, maybe this time they’ll force me into the day instead.
But after a chain of breaths, I start talking sense into myself. Nobody knows you’re alive, I tell myself. They didn’t know you were alive before, and now they’re sure you’re not. That last thought makes me laugh out loud for some reason, and I pick myself up and force my frost-stung body to climb down to the outer wall of Xiosphant.
I walk around the wall for a lifetime before I find a weak spot that they only half repaired after the last rockfall. I pull loose stones away until there’s a crack big enough for me to force myself through.
The streets of Xiosphant always feel narrow: so crammed with people, carts, and a few lorries that you can’t get anywhere. But now, the empty streets yawn like chasms, and the whitestone slabs and cinderblock walls amplify every footstep. Boots play a brisk rhythm off in the distance, a Curfew Patrol coming my way, and I realize that I still have plenty of fear left in me. I breathe faster. They’ll find me, a feral creature wearing nothing but a mossy blanket and torn scraps of clothing, covered with cuts and dirt.