“Wheel,” Brother Tinpan admonished gently.
The cuttlefish wriggled and writhed. “Wheel? Oh, which one is that—no, I know it, just give me a moment. Ah-ha! ‘I go round in circles, but always straight ahead. I never complain, no matter where I am led.’ Well, that’s not very nice, is it, Tinny? He means to tell me you’d prefer I get my inks going and quit talking about myself so much, but you’ve got the kind of stubborn manners that won’t let you tell me to stuff my own tentacles in my mouth and jump off the continental shelf. You’re such a cynic, Tinpan! Trying to saw my audience in half and make them disappear. Fine. I’ll make her the greatest wife ever to trod the aisles. But you have to listen to my new jokes for a full hour tonight. Not a minute less! And if you complain, the hour starts over again!”
“I think you’re tops. Honest! A-list material,” September said slyly, though she meant it, really. You can be sly and sincere at the same time, though it takes practice and if you’re not careful, you will throw out your back. “A one-cuttlefish show not to be missed. It’s only that we’re running a race, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s happening on land, or to whom! It took some time to get here. I’ve an awful worry in my stomach that it’s all slipping by up there.”
“I understand completely,” said Sepia Siphuncle. “The curtain goes up on time, whether you turn up or not. The show must go on. Even if the show is mostly a chase scene. Pull up your sleeve and give me your flipper, pretty penguin. Left or right, doesn’t matter. Whichever one you like best.”
September held out her left arm. She’d never given any thought to liking one more than the other. But she wrote with her left hand and used left-handed scissors and strummed her aunt Margaret’s funny old mandolin with her left hand, so it seemed to her that her left arm liked her best. The sleek seal-suit the emerald-colored smoking jacket and the Watchful Dress had made together parted along an invisible seam. The cuttlefish wrapped her tentacles around September’s fingers, then her wrist, then swallowed her all the way up to the forearm. It didn’t hurt—Sepia’s suckers rested on her bare skin like kisses. Her glitter-ringed eyes locked on to September’s, deep within her diving mask, black into copper, cephalopod into primate, W into O, sea into land.
September felt something hot and thick running up her arm. I’m bleeding, she thought frantically. She’s bitten me and I’m bleeding! Oh, it’s so much! I can’t live without that much blood! But she didn’t feel woozy or weak. In fact, she felt strong, really fantastically strong, as though her left arm could battle a hundred Octopus Assassins before her right had even woken up in the morning. She tried to lean back carefully and get a look at what Sepia had done to her. The way she felt just then, she thought that if she raised her arm up, she’d just lift the whole huge cuttlefish up over her head.
Rivers of black ink began to creep out of Sepia’s mouth onto September’s skin. Not the usual flat sort of black that comes in a paint can, or even the rich, bottomless, gorgeous sort of black that the sea knows how to make in the moonless Winter. This was cuttleblack, traced in speckles of electric blue and green like Sepia’s W-shaped eyes, stippled all through with feverish, dancing drops of gold. Five bands of ink wound around one another like serpents in love, chasing one another, but slowly, deliberately, up September’s arm, past her elbow, surging for the shoulder. They made graceful, curving lunar patterns on her skin. The patterns seemed to move the longer she watched them—now like waves, now like briars, now like stars parading down the streets of the sky. They weren’t the same as Saturday’s lovely tattoos that she had spent so many days memorizing. These were her own, but they would look very pretty next to his. September thought them so beautiful that she didn’t think about whether or not they were permanent and she’d be stuck this way and have to explain it to most everyone she met until much later. Sepia Siphuncle, star of stage and reef, let September go. Her left arm looked like a map of heaven.
“Fire!” screamed Brother Tinpan. “Fire! Fire!”
Saffron ripples of irritation flowed up and down the cuttlefish’s body. “Can’t you let me take my bow at the end of a performance without making it all about you, you, you?” She sighed. “The penguin was about to give me my review! I need it! I’m starving for it! I don’t even know that one. You’ve never yelled ‘Fire!’ before.”
Hugger-Muggery, who had fumed in silence all this while, snapped to attention, her tentacles locking into position as straight and tense as an arrowhead. “‘I am always hungry, I must always be fed. The finger I touch will soon turn red.’ Someone is coming! Arm the alarums! Assassins, to me!”