It's easier when she stops struggling. Eventually she even allows it to pull her away from the bright lights, back towards the place she belongs. She makes sounds, strange and familiar; the reptile listens at first, but they make its head hurt. After a while she stops. Silently, the reptile draws her through sightless nightscapes.

Dim light dawns ahead. And sound; faint at first, but growing. A soft whine. Gurgles. And something else, a pinging noise— metallic, Broca murmurs, although it doesn't know what that means.

A copper beacon glares out from the darkness ahead — too coarse, too steady, far brighter than the bioluminescent embers that usually light the way. It turns the rest of the world stark black. The reptile usually avoids this place. But this is where she comes from. This is safety for her, even though to the reptile, it represents something completely—

From the cortex, a shiver of remembrance.

The beacon shines down from several meters above the sea bed. At closer range it resolves into a string of smaller lights stretched in an arc, like photophores on the flank of some enormous fish.

Broca sends down more noise: Sodium floods.

Something huge looms behind those lights, bloating gray against black. It hangs above the sea bed like a great smooth boulder, impossibly buoyant, encircled by lights at its equator. Striated filaments connect it to the bottom.

And something else, smaller but even more painfully bright, is coming down out of the sky.

"ThisisCSSForcipigeroutofAstoriaAnybodyhome?"

The reptile shoots back into the darkness, mud billowing behind it. It retreats a good twenty meters before a dim realization sinks in.

Broca's area knows those sounds. It doesn't understand them — Broca's never much good at anything but mimicry — but it's heard something like them before. The reptile feels an unaccustomed twitch. It's been a long time since curiosity was any use.

It turns and faces back from whence it fled. Distance has smeared the lights into a diffuse, dull glow. She's back there somewhere, unprotected.

It edges back towards the beacon. One light divides again into many; that dim, ominous outline still lurks behind them. And the thing from the sky is settling down on top of it, making noises at once frightening and familiar.

She floats in the light, waiting. Dedicated, afraid, the reptile comes to her.

"Heylook." The reptile flinches, but holds its ground this time. "Ididn'tmeentoostartlyou, butnobodysanseringinside. Imsupposdtopickyouguysup."

She glides up towards the thing from the sky, comes to rest in front of the shiny round part on its front. The reptile can't see what she's doing there. Hesitantly, its eyes aching with the unaccustomed brightness, it starts after her.

But she turns and meets it, coming back. She reaches out, guides it down along the bulging surface, past the lights that ring its middle (too bright, too bright), down towards—

Broca's Area is gibbering nonstop, eeeebbeeebeebebeebe beebe, and now there's something else, too, something inside the reptile, stirring. Instinct. Feeling. Not so much memory as reflex—