“Don’t sum it up.” Kamran was wearing his peach sweatpants, which Ha particularly hated, and a ratty T-shirt. But at least he was at home: she could glimpse, at the hazy edge of the projection cast by the terminal’s oculus, the familiar shape of a kitchen chair. “Just walk me through what you saw.”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I’m not up late—I’m up early. Being productive. You’re the one who’s up late. Now lay it out for me, so you can go to sleep.”

“Okay. You could make out the outline of the wreck, lying on its port side, once the submersible got close enough. You could see schools of fish swirling in the haze, and the darkness of the hatch. Evrim tells me it’s the hatch into the area of the ship where a man was killed…”

“Stick to what you saw. Don’t go into details other people passed on to you.”

“Right. As the submersible passed through the hatch into that darker space, it switched on a brighter flood. For a second the floodlight overwhelmed the camera. Everything turned white. Then it recovered. And that was when I saw it for the first time. The interior of that compartment was crusted over with growth—budding coral, shellfish—and against that background it was hard to make it out, but I saw it move. The octopus. It had been almost perfectly camouflaged. Then it shifted. When it did, it darkened. It retained the wall’s pattern but darkened its skin. Like a blush of anger. I’ve seen that darkening so many times before in the octopuses I’ve observed—I knew what it was right away: irritation.

“The submersible started to turn to the right, panning to get a better shot of the space. As it turned, the octopus detached itself from the wall and moved to the right as well. The submersible started to pan left. And then there it was, two meters from the submersible. It was in the full ‘Nosferatu’ pose—standing tall, on the bulkhead of the ship, with its mantle up vertically above its head, arms and web spread. The threat pose. But usually they are dark in this pose. This one wasn’t: it was almost white. And it was big. It was hard to get an exact sense of scale, but it was at least as tall as a person, when elongated. Taller.”

“What you saw. Concentrate on that.”

“Right. So—it began to make passing cloud patterns. They were recognizably the ones an octopus would normally use to startle prey—to get it to make an incautious move—but they were altered. I remember thinking, I knew it—I had predicted that this is exactly the function the octopus would exapt to communicate with: this prey-startling device that wasn’t essential to survival. Remember? I said—”