It was raining harder. Without the whine of the transport and the thickness of its armor drowning out the sound, Ha could hear the wind hissing in the palms, the croaks and cries of animals in the island dark, the waves on a beach out of sight beneath the hotel’s terrace—all of it washed in the rain’s static.

They quick-walked, bent over to minimize the drops slashing into their faces. There were a few lights on in the hotel, on this side, on the ground and second floors. A broken cement urn propped open a glass lobby door.

Inside, Altantsetseg led Ha through the deserted lobby. Moldering chairs stacked on tables, damp overstuffed divans clustered in long-silent conversation circles. A few tables stood in a cleared space in the center of the room. Gear cases were scattered around them, a field kitchen, a coffee machine. Electronics. A bit of habitation in the cavernous hall of synthetic marble.

Ha’s room was on the floor above. It was a king suite that smelled of damp and disuse but was clean. Altantsetseg dropped Ha’s bags inside the door and left.

Ha had been longing for hours now for a shower. Instead, she collapsed on the bed, not bothering to undress first. Someone, at least, had put clean sheets on it.

She dreamed of the cuttlefish again.

Chapter 3

At times, when a cephalopod is resting, its skin will flow through color and textural displays that appear unconscious—as if the electrochemical flux of its thoughts were projected onto its surface. In this state it is truly like a mind floating, unsheathed by flesh, in the open ocean.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

3

IN THE DREAM, Ha never saw the cuttlefish as they were in their prime—bright and luminous, streaked with kaleidoscopic color change, arranging their arms in semaphores of threat or curiosity. No. In the dream she descended, caged in the white noise of her respirator. Down into water clouded calcitic-gray. Down into water hazed with ink, defiled with drifting webs of darkness. Down to a silt bottom strewn with stones.

Cuttlefish eggs were scattered in the fissures of the rocks. The young inside the eggs glowed, wisps of light trapped behind the membranes of their shells.

The eggs should not have been left exposed like this in the silt: cuttlefish hung their precious eggs from the underside of rocks, in protected places. Something here had gone horribly wrong.

A giant female cuttlefish drifted above the eggs, guarding them. Ha had not seen her at first in the water curtained with ink and silt. Ha jerked back, startled, but the cuttlefish did not respond. It floated there, facing Ha but not seeing her.

The cuttlefish was dying. Her body was white, patched in places with a leprous rust. Without her skin’s healthy dance of pattern and color, she looked naked and vulnerable.