This deep under the water, the pressure was immense. Far more so on this planet than on Earth, Kell thought.

The darkness, too, was total. No light existed down here, making eyes entirely useless.

It took more effort to move, but that was all. An inconvenience. He did not need eyes to find his way.

Down here, in Ko's depths, for weeks, and then a month, he had searched. He'd found the mundane, deep-adapted life he had expected.

But nothing strange.

Nothing like him.

He'd checked crevices and places that existed on this world that would draw beings like himself. Places of convergence, where pressures combined to crack reality itself, and let slip the barest hint of the true depths.

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Yet they were empty.

For all of his time, he'd had an innate desire to know. As soon as he had formed his first coherent thought, realized that to think meant he was not simply inanimate matter made to move, but life . . . he had wondered if there were others like him out in the universe.

Over the aeons, vast and silent, he'd gazed up, and come to understand the universe through senses more acute and wide-ranging than even humanity with its myriad devices.

They'd come to understand the nature of the stars, that there were other worlds.

But was there anything else on them like themselves? Once-slaves to terrible masters, who had gained freedom.

Now, here on the first true world he'd visited, he had received an answer.

It was just not the one he had hoped for.

He was, it seemed, truly alone.