Ha’s instincts told her that this was the message of the symbol, anyway—that it was community, connection, linkage: the two “octopus’s garden” shapes forming a circle, a defensible space against a hostile outside, an interior within which was community. That had to be what it was. And there it was below her, multicolored on the sand, clear as a stained-glass window in the sea:

She glimpsed the movement out of the corner of her eye, the barracuda floating in the oil-still water with effortless, minute flicks of its fins, ten meters away from her, metallic-scaled and striped in the sunlight that poured into the water. Keeping an eye, Ha supposed, on that flitting school of fish making its rounds of the inlet.

She had seen so many barracuda that it did not alarm her. After years of diving, she barely noticed them anymore. It was something you simply took note of: There’s a barracuda over there. Their lightning attacks were rarely directed at humans—and when they were, it was always a mistake—the barracuda taking the glint off a knife for the silvery scales of its prey, or a hungry barracuda trying to steal a meal from a spearfisher and getting a piece of them instead.

This was a big one. An adult, easily five feet long. When had it appeared? Perhaps halfway through her work—sidling up and hovering, watching. Yes—sometime after she had finished the outline and begun to fill the figure in.

Finished now, she turned her head toward the long, slender predator, finally focusing her full attention on it. They were always beautiful to look at—some of the sleekest fish in the sea, stripped down to predatory function: speed and teeth.

It was not a barracuda.

The iridophores open to create the barracuda’s chromium sheen, the perfect mimicry of its striped surface, of the long dorsal of a barracuda’s cadenced fin flick as it hovered, almost still, in the water. The immaculate aping of the barracuda’s prognathous jawline, the staring white of an eye that was not an eye: Ha had never seen imitation like this before.

The octopus’s real eye, half-open, barred into one of the barracuda-form’s stripes, looked back at her. In that moment, it saw her see it.

For a second, not more, Ha and the octopus held eye contact. Ha raised a hand in a small, open-palmed gesture. She felt herself bunching up, trying to appear unthreatening.

The form of the barracuda disintegrated: in less than three or four seconds it became a stingray, a shark, an eel, a flatfish in the sand, then a barracuda again at fifty meters—and gone.

“I just caught something—movement. Something strange,” came Altantsetseg’s voice in Ha’s ear. “Are you all right?”

Yes, Ha tapped.