Several of her arms were torn away. One feeding tentacle drifted limp in the weak current.

The rocks here formed a loose circle, like a broken castle keep. Overhangs called to mind shattered tower floors. Crevices were archers’ slits. Ha saw three more cuttlefish, under a terrace of stone. They, too, had lost much of their skin, and all were missing arms. They floated, cephalopod specters, sickly-pearl, watching. Fans of dull red and brown crisscrossed the skin left on them, a map of dead connections.

Then the first cuttlefish Ha had seen swam down to the eggs. Her ripped fins were weak. She swam like a ghost ship tiding into dock under torn sails. As Ha watched, the cuttlefish stroked an egg with one intact arm. Patches on her skin glowed a weak yellow. The movement and the color seemed to take an extraordinary effort.

Inside the egg, a dim light flickered in answer.

The cuttlefish began to rise now. Ha swam up with it. As they overtook the other three, hovering under their outcropping of stone, Ha felt something pass between them: a slight shiver. Of recognition? Of acknowledgment? Of goodbye? The female cuttlefish spiraled up through the water column, releasing ink in sputtering contrails like smoke from the engines of a crashing plane—a plane that rose instead of falling.

She and Ha broke the surface together, into the world of explosive sunlight, of chaotic sound and churn.

Though the cuttlefish was motionless and Ha knew she was dead, she swam to her and held her, took off a glove and stroked her battered head, its torn appendages.

Above, seagulls gyred and screamed, waiting for Ha to abandon the meal they had spotted. Ha swam toward her dive boat, cradling the cuttlefish like a drowned child.

Ha woke up with her face streaked with tears, as she always did.

This vision she had in her sleep was both dream and memory. It was impossible for her to tell which elements were which anymore. She had been there, in that place, in real life. But the ink had been thicker, hadn’t it? Ink like a curtain that had battered her back. She had been to that place of solitude, seen the three senescent cuttlefish drifting, monklike, under the shattered eaves of their castle. But the eggs had not glowed. That was not possible. And there had been no dying female, drifting to the surface like a downed plane.

Her mind returned, again and again, to her memories of that place. And every time her mind returned to it, the scene changed. Was it becoming corrupted in the remembering, moving further away from the truth with each successive iteration? Or was it, in fact, approaching the truth a little more each time?

“You are crying. Did you have the dream again?”