Octavia Girl Vol. 1
Chapter 9 - The Black Crown of the Octavian Diplomat

Sunlight spangled through heart-shaped leaves as Jenna lay on her back. The sky over her head was enormous and she felt small. With her head uncovered and her hair lying free without being pinned up to hide her secret, everything was out in the open. It was annoying to cover it all the time.

Grandfather came up to her and plopped his fedora on her face.

It was a dream.

He wasn’t really there.

When she moved the hat and looked for him, he was wading through the stream near his house in his bare feet.

Jenna knew all about dreams. If she dreamed of someone who was dead, she had to hide that she knew they were dead. She had to act like it was a normal day. She wasn’t really in a dream. She was really there. Grandfather was walking into the water and he was laughing at how cold the water was, but he didn’t say anything specific. Jenna had trained herself to never speak to him in a dream. If she said nothing, if she just looked at him, she could look at him longer. For that brief moment, she was home with him.

Bliss.

He turned to her with a twinkle in his eye. “This is it, princess,” he said.

“Don’t go.”

He was gone.

The pod rumbled under Jenna as they entered the atmosphere of Octavia Prime. She glanced at Armen. He was still unconscious.

“Sardius, is everything okay?” she asked.

“Yes. We’ll land in six minutes, and when I say ‘land’ I mean, we’ll plunge into the ocean.”

“Why haven’t I got any safety restraints on? Why isn’t there a seatbelt in this thing?”

“Adamis hate seatbelts a lot. They squash their digestive tracts and reproductive organs. There are other safety measures taken. Take a good breath in.”

Jenna did as she was told as the cabin abruptly changed and something like an airbag squashed her into her seat… and all the other seats. She couldn’t move at all with the giant balloon pinning her down, and for a few minutes, breathing was tricky, though not impossible. When the time of impact came, she felt a tremor through the craft. It was much worse than an airplane landing and her ears popped so badly, she thought they were bleeding.

Then the whole ship, not just her pod, felt like it was bobbing in the ocean current. At almost exactly the same time, the balloon deflated and returned to its compartment above the seats.

“Sardius, that landing hurt my ears. Talk to me.”

She heard something, but not words.

“I can’t hear.”

A second later, she felt a prick in the ear with Sardius’ pearl. “Is that better?”

“Yeah. Can you get my other ear too?”

“Sadly no, but you’ll be able to hear everything you need to hear through this ear. Favel is coming.”

The floor opened and using his tentacles, Favel heaved himself out of the water beneath and into the pod. “Why is Armen still asleep?”

“He had a mild allergic reaction to the sleeping agent,” Sardius explained, making use of a speaker in the pod. “Don’t worry, Jenna. When I realized what was happening, I got the pod to change the dosage and inject him with a tiny antihistamine. He’ll be fine... when he wakes up in a few hours.”

The idea of going through the next few hours without Armen was a massive relief. She smiled.

“Jenna, don’t forget to tell me how much you love me,” Sardius smirked.

“It’s got to go without saying,” she said with a wide grin plastered to her face.

Favel could not hide his disappointment. He slumped, then groaned a tinny sort of groan. “I don’t like this. Armen was supposed to be there with you for your first contact with the Octavians on Octavia Prime. He was supposed to be there to hold your hand when you went out to make your grand entrance and confront the berzerk hipposyphis. Having you go all alone when you’ve never seen a hipposyphis seems like a disaster in the making. I don’t like this.” He turned to her. “Jenna, you can’t cry and run away. You have to confront it. Show it your head and let it examine you, no matter how scary and strange it seems to you.”

“Can you go out with me?” she asked levelly.

“Me?” Favel balked. “You want me to go out with you?”

“Yeah. I’d rather have you than Armen.”

***

The truth was that Jenna didn’t need anyone to explain to her what she had to face. Favel piloted the pod to the place where the hipposyphis was ripping apart an Adamis settlement by the edge of the ocean. He put it down on the rocky beach, briefly checked on Armen, and opened the airlock. The wind hit them in a hot burst.

“I know you’re going to taste me and that’s weird for you, but would you hold my hand?” Jenna asked Favel.

He wrapped his tentacle around her hand twice and slid his whole body out of the pod onto the rocks. Jenna fumbled to follow him and managed not to fall on her face as Favel led her to the water’s edge. Together, they made their way through the surf.

Bits of debris were falling from the air as the enormous orange octopus ripped apart skyscrapers and let pieces of them fall like confetti around them.

“The people have been evacuated from the building, but he’s still destroying it because he’s enraged. It’s terrible when a powerful individual like him can’t think straight.”

“What do we do?”

“Scream,” Sardius said.

“You should scream,” Favel advised, unwittingly echoing Sardius. “He’ll hear you better than the octopi you have on earth. You don’t have to use words. He wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. Just scream and when he looks at you, pull your hair out of that bun and show him the top of your head.”

Jenna took a deep breath. She hadn’t known she would ever get to scream. It had felt like she would go her whole life not being able to let anything out. She took a deep breath in and prepared to let it all go.

She screamed and the sound was frightening at first.

She remembered how difficult it had been to hide what she hadn’t been able to share with anyone. How she had been different from everyone around her. How Lucy had been jealous and how futile that had always felt. Jenna couldn’t change a thing.

The skin on the hipposyphis went from smooth to millions of tiny ridges in the blink of an eye. It was more horrifying than when Favel pulled the same trick back at the hospital. Luckily, Jenna was supposed to scream so her terrified change in pitch didn’t alert anyone. She was still doing what she was supposed to do.

It turned an enormous eye toward Jenna.

“Ruin your bun,” Sardius wailed into her ear over her screaming. “Now!”

She pulled it free and felt the loose tendrils of her hair fall around her. The hipposyphis was moving quickly as it hurried to the beach. It climbed over buildings like that was what they were made for and dove into the ocean with all its tentacles behind it like eight tails on a shooting star.

Her voice lost intensity as it wasn’t possible for her to scream endlessly.

“Breathe,” Favel encouraged her. “He can’t hear you underwater anyway.”

She pulled a choking breath in as the orange skin of the hipposyphis appeared over the edge of the water.

It turned toward her and its enormous eye was watching her.

Jenna screamed again once she thought it could hear her. Once the hipposyhis’ eyes were both pointed at her, she dropped Favel’s hand, put out her arms, and stepped into the water to meet the Octavian in its ocean. It rushed to her. Her scream heightened in pitch. She should have been scared as it manipulated the water between them. The dark waves covered her up to her waist and then enveloped her up to her chin.

The hipposyphis got close and put its eye close to her as it examined it. Jenna stopped screaming. Instead, stood with her eyes wide until she started crying involuntarily. She didn’t run. She couldn’t run. She just let the tears fall down her cheeks and refused to blink on the closeup eye that was something she had to express benevolence toward even though she didn’t understand it. She had to trust something right now that she didn’t know, that she’d never seen before. Everything depended on it.

In the next second, a suction cup was over her head. It didn’t need to say what it wanted. That much was clear. The hipposyphis wasn’t sure if her crown was real.

It was going to find out.

In truth, the black crown was formed to look like an octopus’ beak. Like a crushed circle, with a point on each side, it sat on the top of her head.

In the next second, the suction cup came down on Jenna’s head and she was lifted off her feet as the hipposyphis tried to detach it. She had expected something like this. Half of her wanted it to come off. The other half wanted something she couldn’t yet identify.

It shook her mildly and Jenna hoped it wouldn’t pull harder. Just because it didn’t have a spine, that didn’t mean she didn’t have one, and hers could snap with one wrong jolt.

Finally, the Octavian was satisfied that her crown wouldn’t come off and it let her go. It set her down.

She fell backward into the water on her butt and palms, but she was able to hold her head above water.

Then she felt something on her chin. Something soft and warm and wet pushed her chin upward. She opened her eyes. The hipposyphis was wordlessly pleading for her to look it in the eyes.

She held its gaze for what felt like forever. It had weird eyes—huge eyes. Jenna tried to put the right expression on her face… whatever that was.

Finally, the hipposyphis was finished and slid back into the water.

Favel joined Jenna in the lapping tide and drones circled them, clicking off photos and filming Jenna as she fell back into the water. She was relieved, but she needed to hide her face. She had been naive enough to think that the three of them were completely alone until that moment.

_______________

Author's Notes: Thanks for reading! It's very interesting how stories slowly take shape. The original title for this book was October Soup. Then October Girl. Then Octavia Girl. Now it's hard to imagine that it was ever anything else. Please heart, comment, review, follow, and read more. I'm good at finishing stories and all the other stories on my profile are finished if you're looking for something to read that doesn't burn out halfway through. Enjoy!

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