The pool is twelve feet across at its widest and will not exist by morning.

  He has known this since before he settled his weight onto the flat rock beside it. He has known the precise moment the first wave will cross the lip, the temperature of the water when it does, the direction each creature will scatter or fail to scatter. He has known for some time which ones will not make it back.

  He settled anyway.

  The Atlantic light is doing what Atlantic light does at this hour, going gold and then going gone, the kind of leaving that takes its time about it. The pool catches the last of it and holds it briefly, a small bright thing refusing the dark for as long as physics allows.

  A hermit crab drags its borrowed shell across the far edge with the absolute commitment of a creature that has never once considered that its shell is not its own. A cluster of anemones opens and closes in the current with the patience of something that has no concept of hurry and is correct not to. Three small fish move in the tight formation that small fish have moved in since before there were eyes to watch them, the same pattern, the same instinct, the world entire.

  Quetzal watches.

  His chest glows soft beneath chocolate feathers, white-gold and steady, and the pool does not know what sits beside it.

  Then the octopus moves.

  It had been the rock. Not hiding behind the rock, not tucked under the rock, simply the rock itself, mottled and still and patient in the way only something with eight independent minds can manage patience. It flows now from the far wall toward the center, color shifting as it goes, and Quetzal notes with the particular attention he reserves for things that interest him that it has been watching him since he arrived.

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  It stops in the center of the pool.

  Extends one arm toward the surface.

  And reaches.

  The telepathic frequency is old. Older than the language it carries. It comes from a concavity Quetzal has visited, waters he has swum, a world that sent its children here by accident and never sent for them again. The signal is faint from eleven millennia of broadcasting into silence, worn thin at the edges, but the shape of it is unmistakable.

  Is anyone there.

  Not words. Older than words. The frequency of a mind that has been asking the question since before there were words for asking.

  Quetzal is still for a long moment.

  The hermit crab continues its crossing. The anemones open and close. The three fish turn in their ancient formation.

  Then he huffs once, low and warm, and lets his chest glow answer first, white-gold brightening just enough that the surface of the pool catches it and carries it down.

  "I have been where you came from," he rasps, voice soft as the last light. "It was beautiful."

  The octopus is still for longer than stillness usually lasts.

  Then it does something Quetzal has not seen in eleven millennia of tide pools and borrowed shells and small fish turning in the dark.

  It changes color not for camouflage and not for warning.

  It changes color the way a face changes when something long given up on arrives anyway. Waves of pale gold moving outward from its center, arms spreading slow, the whole animal become briefly luminous in the failing light.

  They stay like that, the old duck and the stranded mind, while the Atlantic gold goes and the dark comes and the tide begins its patient return.

  Quetzal knows exactly when the first wave will cross the lip.

  He does not move until it does.