How far will we have to go with this? September thought. I’ve only just made it back to seventeen years old—I don’t want to accidentally trip and fall and get up married.
The cuttlefish’s skin flushed pale, erasing the leaping neon children. Several images flickered by: a vermilion hand with a ring on the left finger, a coppery Fairy leaping over a broom, an azure arm with tattoos snaking around it. Weddings are nice.
Hugger-Muggery tapped her tentacles impatiently against the staghorn coral. “Get on with it! Poseidon save me from the slowness of hedgehogs. She came to get inked.”
September rolled her eyes. “For crying out loud, I’m not a hedgehog. That’s not even close!”
The Octopus Assassin squinted her bulging eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
The other flame-bright octopi released the Bathysphere from their snaking arms. Fizzwilliam floated free. September could feel his relief tingling in her hands and feet. Saturday kicked his long legs twice and drew up close. He put his cobalt hand on the glass of the Bathysphere.
“If she accepts you,” he said, “then the Sea accepts you, and you’ll be part of the family. Able to share all we have, so long as you share what you have. We make our lives into a potluck dinner—everyone brings their best with lots of pepper and no one goes hungry. Or lonely.”
September searched his eyes for a conspiratorial glint. Show me we’re only playing, she thought. Wink at me. Raise your eyebrow. Tug on your ear. But she could see only Saturday, as he always was, earnest as the North Star, without a lie in his bones. September winked. See? Reassure me. But he only pointed at a bronze shaving cup on Fizzwilliam’s control board. The bottom of it had a fine mesh. A handsome shave brush with a wooden handle and lionfish-spine bristles rested inside. September picked it up. She had seen her father shave many, many times. She knew how it was done. But she could not think what the purpose might be. She hadn’t any whiskers. And the lionfish spines looked quite poisonous, all striped like a copperhead snake. She sighed. In for a penny, in for a purple cuttlefish. Whatever’s gotten into Saturday, he would never do anything to hurt me. But as she reached for the brush, September remembered Saturday’s shadow, pushing her into the Sea of Forgetting, not sorry at all, watching her sink down into the black.
Just as she had watched her father do in the upstairs bathroom, September swirled and squooshed the brush in the cup. Father, are you all right without me there to record your temperature and read to you when your leg hurts? Oh, please be all right! A bright foam slushed up from the spines, the color of the inside of an avocado, if it had caught on fire. She looked at Saturday questioningly. He only nodded at her—and there it was. A little wink. A wink that said: We will trick our way to the finish line, octopus by octopus.
The foam smelled of hot, unripe fruit and sizzling seeds that would burn your tongue. Mercifully, Fizzwilliam’s fresh, soothing voice filled her ears, telling her not to be a Suspicious Sue, that everything that made a Bathysphere run was squeaky clean and pure as a bar of soap milled on a summer cloud. Lionfish spines are only venomous when they’re attached, the Bathysphere explained. They have to want to poison you. It’s the wanting that makes the poison.