Ahead, I see … nothing. The night stretches endlessly, a place where light and warmth never come. Out there, glaciers carve through the tundra and storms tear through everything. Storms and megafauna kill anyone who ventures past this mountain, if the cold and disorientation don’t take them first.
The police officers step forward in unison and shove me with one gloved hand each, until I fall face-over-legs into a cold so intense I feel as if my heart will stop.
* * *
The night side of the Old Mother bludgeons me, landing blows on my torso and legs, as I careen. I try to find a handhold, get my feet under me, but I overbalance again and again, until I stumble into a sheer drop, a smooth wall coated with ice that burns the remaining skin off my hands as I grope at it. I can’t see how far I’ve fallen, or what’s below me, or how to avoid getting dashed to pieces on the rocks.
I try to push myself away from the rock face with both elbows, twisting and groping at nothing but icy wind, and then I just fall through space.
I land on a layer of snow, hard enough to drive all the breath out of me, and gag on the frozen air that replaces it. My whole back and sides flare with agony, and for a moment I think I’ve broken something. But I force myself to rise onto one knee, spasming, and the worst of the pain seeps away.
I can’t even see the mountain that I just fell down. My fingers and toes go numb, and so does my face, and my lungs are bursting, and my stomach turns. The wind gets angrier, and its scream steals all other sound. All I can feel is a dark vortex inside me as I rise to my feet. I’ve only been in the night for a few eyeblinks, but it’s already killing me.
Everybody says that if you stare into this unseeable waste for too long, you’ll be struck with delirium. If you even survive. But I make myself face it. I stand, hugging myself, and walk into the churn of ice on the high winds, trying to grope my way forward without any sense of direction.
My body collides with something. I feel dense fur, over an even thicker carapace. A single warm tentacle brushes my face, and I realize I’m standing a few centimeters away from a full-sized crocodile.
Her giant front pincer is close enough to crush my head in one lazy motion. I hear a low sound under the wind’s endless chorus, and I’m sure this crocodile is opening her wide, round mouth full of sharp teeth to devour me, bones and all.
SOPHIE
{After}
I
Back in grammar school, they taught us all about crocodiles, and what to do if you ever meet one.
Don’t try to run, because you’re on their territory, and they can ensnare you in one of those long tentacles before your first stride. Plus they can clear vast distances with their powerful hind legs, each one the size of an adult human. And their strong forelegs can climb any surface and dig through almost any barrier.
You might be able to hide, because we don’t know how they sense their prey, since they can’t rely on vision or hearing in this pitch-dark wind. They may use scent, or maybe they can detect motion somehow. Nobody’s ever hidden from one, but you might be the first.
The only viable strategy is to attack. Crocodiles do have a few weaknesses that a human can exploit. They have soft spots on the underbelly, where the carapace doesn’t extend all the way around. I know where all their major organs are, because I watched Frank the butcher carve one up for some fancy banquet after a few hunters had gotten lucky, returning from the night in one piece and with fresh game.
But their main weakness, the easiest one to reach, is the exact center of the pincer that’s right in front of me, sticking out of the creature’s head. The impenetrable shell contains two knife-sharp claws, but at their midpoint is a forest of a hundred wriggling tongues, each one about the size of your little finger. If you manage to strike at the pincer’s heart, and hit those slimy appendages, then you might kill it in one stroke.
That pincer is so close I can feel one of its edges scrape my throat. It could slice my head off before I could react. I try to summon all my courage, brace my feet on the slippery ground to deliver one great blow to the warm spot at the pincer’s fulcrum. I can do this, I’m strong enough. I raise both fists.
Then I stop.
Because I feel warm breath coming from below the pincer, where the creature’s mouth is. And that part of me that always stands back and pulls everything apart, instead of just blurting out words, is asking: Why is a crocodile’s mouth so far away from all these tongues, anyway? She can’t possibly use them to taste anything or make any sounds. Why are they right at the center of this armored scissor, vulnerable yet shielded?
I lower my fists. Instead, I push my unprotected face forward, almost losing my balance in the dark. The pincer is all around my head and neck now, but it doesn’t close and kill me. Instead, this crocodile lets me press forward and push my frostburnt nose into the moist heat of her slimy warm grubs. They brush my face, and my head floods with urgent smells and disorienting sounds, a beautiful ugliness, too much to handle, like I’m out-of-my-head drunk with no up or down, nothing but a whirl of sensory overload.
I almost keel over, but somehow I stay upright until—
—I’m somewhere else. I’m way out in the middle of the night now, surrounded by huge sheets of ice on all sides. A mountain of ice and snow sidles past, along the horizon. We’re thousands of kilometers farther out than any human has gone in twenty-five generations, since we lost all our scoutships and all-terrain vehicles.
Somehow I can see in the dark now, except that I realize I’m not seeing at all. I’m using alien senses, and my mind is turning them into sight and sound.
I tear through the landscape so fast the wind can’t keep up. A sudden storm could rip me apart, the tundra could swallow me, but I don’t even care. My back legs push against the ground and the ice surrenders, while my smaller front legs rip into the slick surface, propelling me even faster and keeping my balance. I’m not running—this is something much better. I’ve never felt so much power in my body, and so many sensations flood into the ends of my two great tentacles as they taste the wind around me.
I want to laugh, and then I turn and see that four other crocodiles are running alongside me, grasping some spiky devices in their tentacles and guiding a sled full of some kind of precious metal. I feel a surge of pride, safety, happiness that they’re with me, and we’re going home.
Then we reach it: a huge structure in the shape of a rose with all its petals spread, a circle surrounded by elaborate crisscrossing arch shapes. Only the very top pokes above the surface, and the rest extends far below the ice, but still its beauty almost stops my heart. A glimmering city, many times larger than Xiosphant, that no human eyes have ever seen.
* * *
I must have blacked out, because I wake up and find the crocodile has swept me up in her tentacles and is using her front legs to brace me, while also climbing the sheer rock face that I fell down. I’m still frozen to the bone, but she has wrapped some kind of thick blanket around me that feels like something between moss and fungus. The fabric feels warm and dry, wound around my face with just enough slack to let me breathe. One tentacle covers my nose, and her cilia brush against my skin. I still can’t see anything, but I feel our rise in my inner ear, and even with the crocodile’s body shielding me I feel the bitter wind flow around me.
She deposits me at the same spot where the two officers pushed me over the edge. I’m on the ground before I even realize she’s laid me down, and I wriggle out of her covering only to be blinded by the faint light for a moment. The cops are long gone.
My rescuer is even bigger than the other crocodile I saw being butchered as a child—with a thick carapace and weathered skin on her legs and tentacles. There are two large indentations, one on either side of her head, which look like big sad eyes, but aren’t. Her round shell hunches as she shields herself from the sudden exposure to partial sunlight, which no crocodile can ever endure. Her pincer opens and closes, as if saying goodbye.
Before I can take a proper look, or try to communicate again, or do anything really, the crocodile has turned around, already disappearing back down the mountain.
* * *