The thaw comes early.

Though I’ve been held here for dreams upon dreams, I am not ready.

Shoals of us overwinter in the ice. As our bodies slow to quiescence, the ice resonates between us: signals that would be battered unintelligible by moving water. Our higher, individuating minds sleep; these thoughts flow like currents in the subconsciousness that remains. Whence do these thoughts arise? Where does this thinking go? None of us are ourselves in the freeze. We cease to be selves and become one dreaming Self.

When the thaw comes early, Self dissolves before selves wake. It is profoundly disturbing. But these things happen.

I drift like carrion until my waking will asserts itself, and I shake myself all over. A bountiful summer will follow the thaw; there’s much to be done. I gorge myself on shallow swimmers, then dive—I need to divest myself of the embryos I’ve gestated over winter, and I need to find deeper, larger life to consume. Winter is long, despite the early thaw, and I am ravenous.

• • • •

After feeding and spawning, the third great task is to make myself more than me, and so I go hunting.

This is the trick that sets us apart, this splicing into our bodies of whatever we find useful. The frills of this species hear better than my own neuromasts; the fins of that species are more brilliant than my own; it is always wise to take some spines off of that species there—

I open a gash along my side: bright pain, raw promise. With my jaw, I move the raw edge of a harvested fin to the wound. When the wound closes, this foreign matter will be more of me. I have a flowing fin-tail that sheds light—nothing like the Bright up above the thin air, but brilliant in the richness of the ocean—and over the winter, I finally achieved sensation to the very tips of its trailing length. I itch for more. If I don’t find more to integrate, I’ll start wanting to absorb the embryos of the coming season, and that makes one into disturbing company.

I’m searching for firefish among the carbonate colonies when Sesseteche finds me. Sesseteche is emself disturbing company, though not because ey has absorbed any embryos. I’d be surprised if ey’d ever formed any.

Sesseteche is an outsider. Ey is unknown. Ey does not wish to be known in the way we best know each other: Ey does not overwinter in the ice.

It is difficult not to freeze. It is not avoided by accident. One must either dive deeper than light or sanity, or travel to the Circle: that spot of the world directly beneath the Bright, where the world is always water even when the Bright pulls away. Older and larger things than us lurk in the deep, and all life that does not wish to freeze crowds itself into the Circle, so to survive the winter awake takes ferocity.

So. Ey is a ferocious kin, eir mind unknown to me. I bristle when ey comes near, and show my fangs and my spines, and keep other secrets folded against my long body.

Ey makes no answering threat. Only asks me if anything has come out of the long dreaming conference, and doesn’t heed the answer. Then, ey tells me a strange story of eir own.

Things live in the thin air above. Sometimes they dive into the living water, brief visits to snag a small life swimming close to the surface. Sesseteche has spent winter catching these, taking their sense organs. Ey has been gazing into the thin air and past it while eir sensible kin lay dreaming.

“There is another world,” ey tells me, “as thin to the air-dwellers as the thin air is to us.” This, ey learned by absorbing air-dwellers’ brains until eir body integrated even the knowledge within them. “Things move in that thin airlessness, and of late more has moved there than has ever been seen before.”

Ey says, ey needs a curious kin to go with em. To see something new in our world. I am the seventh kin ey has approached.

I am curious. I go with em.

• • • •

That summer, while I should be feeding and dancing and considering a new mate, I swim with Sesseteche away from the storm of life set free by the thaw, into colder and colder waters.

Sesseteche tells me strange tales of a place so far from the Circle that the Bright can no longer be seen, whether in the high shallows or the thin air. So far that the ice never thaws, even when the Bright draws closest. There is no way to get from the water to the thin air, there. Inasmuch as they are known to us, these places are proscribed; sometimes if we swim too far we can sense the slow dreaming presences of kin who have slept since ancient times, waiting a thaw that never comes.

“The air-dwellers don’t know or care about us,” Sesseteche says. “But they go over the ice. They can see to the top of the thin air, into the thinner-than-thin.” Their memories show how the great white Bright fades to blue at its edges, and how that blue fades to a black in which small pearlescent lights move in long processions—the lengths of freezes and thaws. This has ever been known to them up above.

But there is new confusion in the memories Sesseteche absorbed. It takes me time to digest.

Some new lights have moved swiftly of late. Some have come crashing through the thin air, into the ice, and vanished from the air-dwellers above. Surely they must have come into our territory below.

“Not like rainfall,” Sesseteche says. We know rainfall, although it has to be violent to catch our attention. “Or like birdflight.” Unlike anything ey, or the air-dwellers, has seen.

• • • •

We swim toward the icy, dreaming masses beyond the thaw.

We swim until the Bright is low and its light slants down and barely illuminates the high shallows. Then we dive deep, into water so cold it almost drives me to somnolence. Now there is ice above; there is no way to reach the thin air. We swim on.

Curious, I follow Sesseteche until something hits the ice and then the water, too large to be believed. We are both startled, and swim in a tight flurry of threat display until we realize nothing comes hunting us, but the water carries reports of other impacts, far away.

We go seeking.

And we find something that neither of us have ever seen, nor remembered from the shared dreams of winter.

A tunnel has melted through the thick crust of ice above: wide enough to slither up, if I wished to. Below, fixed buoyant in the middle depths, is something smoother and harder than tumbled rocks. It does not move when I nudge it.

It breathes. It draws water in, one unceasing in-breath, and lets it out again through a different gill, but the exhalation isn’t stale; instead, it is nourishing but shockingly warm. Warmer than the high shallows under the Bright, even at the heart of summer. I scent something inside: some warm, organic stuff I do not recognize, like an egg waiting to hatch. Is it waiting for the water to warm?

Rains of these have come down. Sesseteche’s air-dweller memory reminds me of the way we’ll take a broadback full of eggs—bitter, disgusting eggs—and rend it, and shake its eggs down over the burrows of scuttling graspers. The graspers dart from their burrows and seize the eggs. Then we seize the graspers. They are delicious.

But anything seeking warmth has long since swum to the Circle. It takes me time to realize: What I recognize isn’t the intention to lure, but the mark of intelligent action. But why send down these fixed and buoyant boulders which only warm the water?

I remember in my bones that the thaw came early.

• • • •

I don’t mate that summer. Neither Sesseteche nor I want the other’s embryos. I find little with which to decorate myself. I pass another warm boulder on my sojourn back to the thawed waters; Sesseteche swims on into the cold to seek answers there.

The Bright is drawing away by the time I return to the thaw, and I ready myself to curl in ice and sleep while Sesseteche goes eir solitary way. But what will my dreams tell my sleeping kin?

What will we wake to? A shoal of boulders, spilling life from the thinner-than-thin into the warmed water, just as I have deposited generations of offspring into the waters below?

I do not know. But I think I will see the day when the water has no freeze, and needs no thaw, and we will stay waking and solitary forever.