We’re both going to die, and it’s my fault.
“I’m so sorry, little one,” she cried to the tiny golden creature clinging to her as though she still believed Carol could save her life. “I’m so sorry.”
The water rushed up to claim her.
But something else got her first.
4
Moss
The kraken watched the plane for so long that Moss began to hope he’d been wrong. Whoever was up there wasn’t the kraken’s prey. It hadn’t brought him here to kill.
Maybe it had never seen a plane before. He clung to the thought. His great-uncle had never been called from the deep to carry out his terrible duty. Nor any of his ancestors before him. If the kraken had never seen an airplane, maybe that was what compelled it to watch the lights blinking far above, the way little fishes swarmed towards the moon.
Then lightning jagged across the sky. Urgency flickered through the kraken’s dark thoughts. *There!*
He looked with it, listened with it to the ocean’s song, his heart filling with shards of ice as he found what it had seen.
A fleck of life, tumbling through the storm.
Far above, the plane faltered. But the kraken was fixated on the falling body.
*Ours!*
He was wrong. The kraken hadn’t watched the plane like moths watch the moon. He’d watched it like a cat at a mousehole. Waiting for something to devour.
And that tiny, falling body was its prey.
He couldn’t let that happen.
His octopus had always been under his control. This shape wasn’t so different. Moss gathered his will, reshaping his mind until the countless tentacles that sprang from the kraken’s bulk felt like his own limbs. He flexed them.
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
They werehislimbs. His tentacles, splayed out and reaching like the tendrils of an invasive weed, ready to catch and dig and tear. But he couldn’t control them.
It was like throwing himself against a concrete wall. A coffin enclosing him on all sides.
The figure was closer. But still too far away to touch. The kraken seethed towards it, stretching its tentacles far into the storm, but it would be precious seconds before the figure fell far enough to be caught. It struck out with its senses instead, calling on the ocean.
It wanted to taste its prey, but there was too much else around it. Gold flashed, a sizzle of fireworks and terror. And a darker, colder metal that tasted of earth and old blood. Lightning shattered over stained metal-feathered wings. Strange creatures wheeled around, screeched, and dived after the falling figure.
Rage boiled beneath the kraken’s hide. *Mine!*
The metal-tasting birds flocked to the falling body like gulls to a tasty morsel ripped from the ocean’s safety. *Mine,*the kraken repeated, its voice like the crack of mountains splitting, and tendrils made of magic and nightmares burst from it, reaching higher than its fleshy tentacles could.
One tendril caught the body and wrapped around it.
Around sweetness delicate as spring.
Aroundher.
A slender body soaked by the driving rain. Small. Helpless. But behind that small human form, a soul that called out to his own.
Moss’s heart froze. Of course he went to her like a moth to a flame. She was the sun, and he was helpless in the face of her fire.
