SHE WAS ON THE BEACH, just below one of the breakwaters. She lay on her side at the base of the angled wall of stone, among the jagged rocks that thrust up from the sand at this eroded edge of the inlet. Her face was slashed in a dozen places. Her scarred arms were covered in fresh wounds.

She looked crumpled, meaningless—like something that might never have been alive at all.

“I don’t understand,” Ha said. “I thought it was just a warning to us, the attack. Why would they do this? Why kill her?”

The rain came down fitfully, ribbons of cloud dumping it on them at intervals, the droplets hissing in the sand that soaked them up along with Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan’s blood.

Altantsetseg had wrapped herself in a black rain poncho, and was wearing her visored helmet again, its several screens floating in front of her gaze.

“I have a small camera here.” Altantsetseg gestured to the wall. “Passive storage. Disguised as a mussel. Playing back the feed, I see … she was done with her run. She was just walking down the beach. Collecting shells.”

Evrim was bent down over the body now.

They had lost a parent. Their only parent. Yes—scattered near the body were shells—spiral and pointed, striped. None of them seemed very special. Just shells.

“Collecting shells was one of her only hobbies,” Evrim said. “One that we shared. It helped us to think.”

Altantsetseg gestured. “She was at the base of the breakwater wall, and at that moment several of the octopuses came from the water. She never saw them. Two of them…” Altantsetseg paused, made a small motion with a finger, replaying something on one of the screens. “On camera, it looks like nothing at all. It couldn’t have taken more than three or four seconds. Like they walked over her, waving their arms a moment. And then they moved on, up the breakwater. I think she died very quickly.”

A matter of course. “They—most of them,” Evrim said, “don’t really see us. We’re nothing to them. An impediment to their movement, or something to be avoided. Something to be chased away. A source of pretty bone for writing on. They killed her simply because she was in the way.”

Evrim stood up, and stripped the robe from their body, covering Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan in its shroud. “But perhaps now at least one of them has seen one of us. The Shapesinger saw you, Ha. Maybe there is a bond now, between our two tribes. Between you and the Shapesinger. That is a beginning. And maybe it will be an end to this … indifference to one another.”

Maybe. But it was as if Evrim had already moved past the death of their only parent. Already speaking of new beginnings, with this body on the beach, still unburied. Ha could not. She looked down at the gold-shrouded shape among the stones.