The creature was extremely relieved. She would’ve sung a song sooner, if she’d only known. Fewer silbercows came to stare at her after that. Mostly it was just the four. And that was better. But it was still too many. One of them had the pucker of a long scar on his shoulder, and a very stiff and achy flipper, from the massacre. The second had deep scratches on her side and the third was missing part of her tail fin. The fourth silbercow seemed strong in body, but there was something wrong in his eyes, and he never talked. She liked that one best, because he never talked. He even brought her a ring that had slipped from the finger of a drowning human they’d saved. It was gold with inset gray stones. The creature wore it on the tip of one of her tentacles. Often, when she was alone, she stretched her tentacle up and watched the ring glimmer with shifting light as the water around it moved. It made her very happy.

But she was rarely alone now, not with these four visiting her constantly.

There were strange sounds in the ocean now too sometimes. They were faint and very far away, like a distant whisper, making her think she was imagining things; but then the floor under her body would shake with the smallest rumble, and she would know. Something loud was happening, somewhere in the ocean. Something new.

She asked the silbercows about the noises once. But they got so quiet and serious, they said Yes and We know and We’ll tell you. Then they started to show her pictures that she badly did not want to see, pictures of coral and seahorses and silbercows suddenly torn apart, so that she cried out, Never mind.

But you should know, they said.

No. I don’t want to. I’m not interested. I don’t care, she said, and when they kept trying to tell her, she began to sing. Her singing made them dart back. When she got to the end of the song and they gathered around her again slowly, they no longer tried to show her those terrible pictures.

You are definitely not the Keeper, they said, which pleased her.

I told you I wasn’t, she said.

But just because they agreed now that she wasn’t the Keeper, it didn’t mean they understood who she was. In fact, they seemed to spend a lot of time trying to decide amongst themselves who she was. It made her anxious about what they would decide. She wished she knew how to make them go away, and stay away.

—

One day, the silbercows asked permission to look closer at her treasures.

You can look at them, she said, obscurely nervous. But you can’t have them.