Chapter 7
CAMILLE
I beat the detail’s SUV back to the facility and parked crooked, keys in my fist.
Inside, the team moved with the hush of a church. Our dolphin’s breaths still came too fast, but the numbers had edged in the right direction: fractional drop in lactate, color better. Not salvation. Not doom. The tightrope in between.
“Hold steady,” I told Becca, scanning the chart. “Half-bump fluids. Dim the lights.”
“Copy.” She hesitated. “You okay?”
“I will be,” I said, and wasn’t sure if I meant the dolphin or myself. “I’m going to check the pen nets and the dock line. Radio me if he dips.”
Outside, the creek lay flat as hammered metal. I ducked into the locker, ditched the Dominion Hall skirt for quick-dry shorts, and swapped flats for neoprene booties under hard-sole water shoes. I clipped the dive knife to my belt, hit the ladder, and slid in—the cold smacking me awake.
The current caught my calves first, then my thighs, a sly hand trying to turn me. A little stronger than forecast. I adjusted, palms skimming the piling, a small smile at the corner of my mouth because the ocean always did this—tested and teased, never content with the plan you brought her.
I pushed off toward the outer pen. A snag flashed—a twist of monofilament in the net seam. I went under, and the water took me in. Sound narrowed to heart and hush. Sight went soft at the edges. It felt like being held and warned in the same breath.
Halfway there, the current sharpened, grabbing me by the knees in a rip that wanted me angled wrong.
“Parallel, Camille,” I said into the bubbles.
I slid sideways, counted strokes, lungs pulling, heat building, and let the rip spend itself against my stubbornness. When the pressure eased, I surfaced, palm on the pen float, laughing once—short, bright, alive.
I hung there a beat, water lapping the insides of my thighs, the sun a warm hand on my throat. The ache that lived under my sternum shifted, became something I didn’t feel like naming in daylight. Last night flickered—breath in my ear, the way my body had answered before my mouth did.
I set my forehead to the float and let myself have thirty seconds that had nothing to do with science.
My free hand slid lower, only as far as necessary to quiet what the water and the memory had woken.
Not a finish. A tether. The heel of my palm pressed, a small, private relief.
My breath stuttered, then evened. I bit the inside of my lip and stared at the sky so I wouldn’t make a sound.
“Enough,” I told myself, because it was. I wasn’t here for fantasy. I was here to cut and mend.
I dove. The monofilament was a mean, invisible mess knotted into the seam.
I worked the blade low and careful, feeling the vibration travel up my forearm when the line parted.
A scrap of plastic flickered in the tangle.
I snagged it: a little rectangle stamped with a contractor’s name I didn’t like seeing this close to my animals.
I tucked it into my top, surfaced clean, and swam for the ladder.
By the time I climbed out, the breeze had picked up, skimming gooseflesh along my arms. My carefully knotted hair had slipped into a wet rope.
I popped it loose and squeezed water from the strands with both hands, laughing again, softer.
The good kind of tremble. I felt present—inside my body and inside the day.
On the dock, I propped a foot on the lower rung and set to work, muscle and mind back in their lanes. Knife away, tag on the planks, phone out.
I snapped a quick photo of the plastic rectangle with the contractor logo and time-stamped it. Then I forwarded to Pincense: This was tangled in our pen seam. Explain .
Three gray dots blinked, paused, blinked again, then vanished. Of course, they did.
“Dr. A!” Becca’s voice carried across the yard, bright with effort and the edge of adrenaline. She jogged down the dock, ponytail haloed with humidity, hydrophone case banging against her thigh. “You said call if he dipped, but … he didn’t. You need to see this, anyway.”
She skidded to a stop, breath coming fast. I took the recorder from her and scrolled.
Clean noise floor, wind, water, the gentle percussive of a distant motor—and there.
A rise: not ship bass, not weather. A narrow-band tonal ramp sawing up into a frequency that didn’t belong inside any pause box we’d been promised.
“What time?” I asked, though the screen said it plainly.
“Zero-eight-thirteen.” She swallowed. “Inside the corridor they gave us.”
I felt the universe settle around the sound the way it always did when a thing you feared decided to show you its face.
Heat climbed my throat, anger sharp and precise.
“Save the raw file to three drives,” I said.
“One with chain-of-custody to the minute. One offsite. One that lives on your person until I have you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
Her mouth quirked. “Yes, ma’am.”
I touched the edge of the recorder, gentle, like it might bruise.
The tonal sat there on the graph, ugly and elegant, a confession without a speaker.
The world around us carried on—boat masts pinging, flag snapping, the small noises a facility makes when it keeps doing the next right thing.
I breathed through my teeth and imagined pressing that sound against the neat little boxes on Pincense’s map until something finally tore.
“Dr. A?” Becca said, softer now. “The network line blew up five minutes ago—two separate calls, south of Folly. Possible strandings. Could be the same animal moving … but they sound like fresh reports.”
Of course, they did. The tonal in my hand, the rip still crawling the channel—it all wanted to be part of the same sentence.
“Okay,” I said, already moving. “Call Tamika. Split crews. You take the truck with the short sling and the umbrella. I’ll take the skiff with the quiet motor and meet you at the second site. Text me GPS pins when you have eyes.”
“Copy.” She didn’t move. “Dr. A?”
“Hm?”
Her gaze flicked to my wet tank, the way it clung, then to my face, earnest and worried. “You’re shaking.”
I looked down at my hands. Not tremor, not adrenaline. The after-echo of water and memory. I rinsed them in the creek, let the cool water bite. “That’s just the ocean,” I said, and gave her the smallest smile I had. “It likes to keep a piece.”
She grinned back, relief loosening her shoulders.
We split—her to the yard for the rescue kit, me down the dock to the skiff Atlas had quietly placed for us, motor muffled to a purr low enough not to matter to anything with a heartbeat. I tossed the lines, thumbed the starter, and pushed off, the hull slipping clean into the channel.
Below the planks, the hydrophone still recorded. In my pocket, the contractor tag warmed against my skin. In my head, a voice said Breathe , and I did.
I idled the skiff past the dock light and let the creek take me, the hull shivering under my knees. Atlas’s people had stocked her exactly the way I’d asked—throw bag, stretcher poles, spare towels, a quiet motor that purred instead of bragged. They’d done it fast, too. A small, neat promise kept.
Becca’s pins blinked onto my phone screen—first report at the Washout, already drawing a crowd; second at the north spit of Morris Island, boat access only. Good. Give me the one without a hundred hands.
I clipped the handset off the dash and thumbed the button.
The new channel label blinked back at me: 7–Delta, the one Ryker had promised in an hour and delivered in forty minutes.
“Seven-Delta from Allard,” I said. “Skiff outbound to Morris. Request perimeter on arrival—light touch, keep drones down.”
Static hissed; then his voice, dry as a good gin. “Copy, Doctor. Two plainclothes are staged east of the light. They’ll set a soft line and vanish.”
“Make them useful,” I said. “If I see a phone over my shoulder, I’ll use it as a doorstop.”
A beat that felt like a smile. “Understood.”
I set the radio back in its bracket and opened the throttle.
The marsh opened brown and gold on either side, spartina flaring in the early sun.
Wind climbed under my tank and dragged across skin still too aware after last night.
The boat cut a clean V toward the mouth of the harbor, gulls lifting lazy in our wake.
At the mouth, the ocean made her opinion known—bigger chop, a shoulder in the water that said push if you want, but you’ll ask me nicely first. “Please,” I said into the wind, and aimed for the long low smear of sand that was Morris at low tide.
At fifty yards out, I killed the engine and drifted the last stretch in silence.
The hull kissed sand with a soft, intimate scrape.
No tourists—just a pair of fishermen standing well back and a man with a tripod halfway down the beach.
Ten paces off my bow, two men pretended to argue about bait.
Atlas’s detail, right where they said they’d be.
They didn’t look at me. They didn’t have to.
The stranded animal lay in the swash. Small.
Blunt-headed. Skin the color of a storm.
Not a bottlenose—Kogia, I thought, even before the distinctive lower jaw eased my doubts.
Pygmy sperm whale. My stomach did that tight, awful thing it did when a brain already knew something a heart didn’t want to accept.
Kogia didn’t strand because they were clumsy.
They stranded because the world had gone wrong around them.
“Hey,” I said, sliding over the gunwale into water that took my thighs with gusto. “Stay with me.”
The fishermen edged back when I lifted a hand without looking.
Atlas’s guys drifted wider, quiet and sure, until the tripod guy saw his angle disappear.
His mouth went flat, but he stayed. Fine.
He could film what I wanted America to see—the towels, the patience, the way we asked for mercy with our hands.