There were a million places to hide here. Anyone coming from the beach would be at the hotel long before someone saw them. Ha found herself thankful for Altantsetseg’s patrolling machines.

As if she had heard, Altantsetseg hissed, “Robot would not allow bulldozing of shitpile ambush points near hotel. Now maybe think again. Or too late for us.”

But the motion sensors and the infrared did little good as a guard against a cold-blooded creature whose entire existence was spent fooling motion sensors—the living motion sensors of the sea, predator and prey evolved to quicksilver reaction. If it wanted to eat, it had to fool those deadliest of motion sensors every moment, finding angles of attack, beating systems designed to thwart it. Shifting its shape and gait. Becoming all the things around it, one after another.

Ha remembered a research film she had seen, of an octopus hunting a crab in an underwater area just offshore. The area was at the edge of a coral reef, where it broke up into stone and stretches of open water along the sea bottom. The octopus, coming for the crab from the open area on the sand, had, in a space of no more than thirty meters, become sand, a drifting piece of seaweed, a stone, a darting fish, a group of barnacles, and a stack of coral.

The crab became lunch.

Those skills—the hunting skills necessary to find nutrients in that world beneath the waves—were nothing compared to what it took to stay alive. The octopus was a soft, shell-less packet of easily digestible protein in a hungry world. It survived that world by its wits and the protean fluidity of its form. It lived through trickery, concealment, and guile. It lived through creativity.

Everything around Ha crawled and shifted, about to lunge or slip away.

They moved out of the false jungle, down steps cut into an angled erosion wall, and onto the beach.

The beach, too, was mostly man-made. Before, there had been nothing but stones here, filling the shoreline of a small half-moon inlet swept constantly by wind. The developers had built breakwaters to extend the edges of the inlet, trying to protect it from the constant hammering of wind and tide on this side of the island, bringing in truckload after truckload of sand to make it conform to a tourist’s idea of what an island beach should be. But wind still raked the fake bay. Soon enough, without seasonal replacement, the sand would be carried away by tide and wave, and the beach would be a stony shore again.

Their headlamps played across the sand and sometimes threw one of their shadows out in front of them, huge and monstrous.