After about an hour, one of the creatures approached them. It reached out a tentacle and touched the healer’s hand.

“Ugh, gross!”

The creature withdrew.

Zion made a disapproving sound. “Be nice to them, dumbass.”

“Easy for you to say.” Sanchez wiped her hand on her pants. “It touched me, not you.”

Williams slowly held his hand out to the animal, which had bunched itself up defensively.

“Peace, little one.”

Tentatively, it touched his hand. When Williams didn’t react, it coiled a tentacle around his wrist and began moving up.

“Oh my god, you’ve got to be kidding,” Sanchez said.

“Shhhhh.”

“Fuck off, Zion.”

Ghosteater thought the soft creatures recognized him as a predator, so he lay still and said nothing. The human females’ bickering annoyed him. Perhaps he could eat one of them. It depended on how powerful Cordus actually was and how much he would mind losing a lesser minion.

Williams had the soft creature in the crook of his arm and was explaining to it that they were there to find one of their people and bring her home.

“Do you really think it can understand you?” Zion said.

The man shrugged. “Dunno.”

After another half an hour, Williams shifted the animal onto a tree and gave the order to proceed. The soft creatures didn’t react as the group got up and moved out.

Half an hour later, they found a place where the she-pup had paused.

“I think she stopped here a while,” Zion said.

“She slept,” Ghosteater said. “Then she went on.”

“Goddamn it,” Williams said.

“What?” said Sanchez.

“She should’ve stayed put.”

“She was probably trying to find help.”

“There’s no help, here.”

“How do you know?”

“Just do.” He looked around. “This is an isolate.”

Ghosteater looked up the trail, impatient with the humans’ conversation and the slowness of their travel. He could cover this terrain ten times faster than they could.

As they moved out, the females fell back to sniping at each other. He had spent too long alone to tolerate such annoyances.

“Tracker, I will find her. Follow my trail.”

Not waiting for a response, he trotted away through the trees, picking up speed in increments when the soft creatures didn’t react. Soon he was racing through the forest, leaping pools and fallen logs with ease. In ten minutes, he found the place where one of the creatures had befriended the she-pup. Ten minutes later, he reached the place she’d stopped for the night and noted that the creatures had fed her. Then he ran on through the dim forest.

Chapter 21

On my fifth day in Octoworld, as I’d started to think of it, I finally reached the summit. I didn’t realize it at first. There was no pointy top where I could stand and survey the land for miles around, just a gradual flattening out of the terrain.