Chapter 11
CAMILLE
B y late afternoon, the day wore me like a wet shirt.
I went straight from my father’s office to the water, trading the smell of diesel and hot steel for iodine and rubber.
The facility breathed around me, a body doing all the quiet things a body does to stay alive—air pumps, low voices, the soft slap of water in pens.
My own body fell into the rhythm without being asked.
Our dolphin—juvenile bottlenose, we confirmed once we’d had a better look at his dentition and rostrum—held a line I could live with.
Respiration was still high, but the spikes were less frantic, the lactate crept down like an apology.
We’d run warm fluids through the peduncle catheter with a gentleness I didn’t always show people.
I adjusted his sling, smoothed the towel over his dorsal where the sun wouldn’t find him, and counted breaths with my fingers on his skin until my pulse synced with his.
I spoke to him in French because it made my mouth kinder than my mood.
Bottlenose were our regulars here. Kogia were the heartbreak cases.
Down the row, the Kogia lay in the quiet pen—a world where the lights stayed low and the sound behaved.
She was smaller than the bottlenose and twice as haunted.
Pygmy sperm whales never stranded for petty reasons.
Her rate had come off the ceiling, pupils less fixed, but the cost was there in every breath—like she’d run a long way and couldn’t stop even after she fell.
We’d kept her upright with the sling, kept her blowhole clean and high, kept everything slow.
No heroics. Kogia don’t forgive heroics.
“Eight minutes,” Becca murmured at my shoulder, meaning since the last breath I’d been willing to call easy. She stood close enough to be useful, far enough to let me work—learning the dance.
Pride and fear were the twin streams running under every mentor’s ribs. I felt both and tried not to let either flood the room.
“Note the decrease,” I said. “Don’t celebrate it.”
She nodded and scribbled, hair stuck to her temple in damp golden strands. “The hydrophone copy’s on three drives,” she added quietly. “One on me, one in the lab safe, one in Miguel’s truck glovebox.”
“Good.” It came out like a blessing. “Chain-of-custody log?”
“Started and signed. You’re next.”
I signed without lifting my gaze from the pen. The raw file lived like a heartbeat in my head. My father’s words rode under it: a conclusion faster than the facts is a kind of superstition .
I hated that he was right. I loved that he was right.
Tamika slid up the aisle, already reading me. “False alarm stayed false,” she reported. “Tourists at the Washout got their drama fix from a pelican stealing a churro. We converted three of them into donors with a QR code and your ‘compliance isn’t mercy’ speech. I paraphrased.”
I huffed a laugh that was half sigh. “Good. Any word from Pincense?”
“PDF dump,” she said. “Half nouns missing, just like you predicted. But there’s enough to make a breadcrumb trail, and McGuire added a handwritten note: ‘Happy to walk you through what we can share in person.’ Her 1600 invite’s still on.”
McGuire’s note soothed a piece of me I hadn’t realized needed soothing.
The 1600 pre-brief would be a call—uniforms and Dominion Hall voices on a speaker, not bodies in a room—and I’d have to say my careful words in a careful tone.
I’d take it, because the animals needed me to.
But right then, the only room I wanted was shallow water and breath.
I moved between the pens until the light changed and the facility took on that bruised-gold glow that turned everyone soft around the edges.
We cycled fluids, checked eyes, kept the world from being too much.
Miguel installed a shade rig over the Kogia’s pen.
Becca’s timer chimed steady as a metronome.
Tamika walked the perimeter the way only someone who had chased crowds off a beach could—friendly, unyielding.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I realized I was starving.
“Eat,” Miguel said, pressing a protein bar into my palm. “You get worse when you’re empty.”
I bit off a corner and chewed without tasting. “Be honest,” I said. “Am I impossible today?”
“You’re always impossible,” he said dryly. “That’s why we like you. Today you’re just louder.”
I let that sit, and it didn’t cut the way I thought it might. Loud meant I was still here.
Miguel, Tamika, and now Becca were more than just colleagues. They were my friends.
At 1600 I ducked into the back office, put McGuire on speaker for ten surgical minutes, logged our tonal, and pressed her—politely—for permit numbers and corridors.
When the call was done, I sent the updated chart to the network, texted McGuire a short list of follow-ups I intended to ask whether she liked it or not, and scrolled my own phone like a woman trying not to look for what she didn’t have.
No number. No text. No man.
I hadn’t asked Jacob for his number. He hadn’t asked me for mine. The way we’d taken each other last night didn’t feel like something that required the economy of digits.
I probably wouldn’t have called, even if I could. That didn’t stop me from wanting the option.
“Dr. A.” Becca again. “Tamika says if you don’t go off campus for an hour, she’s going to mutiny.”
“I don’t have an hour,” I said on reflex, the same way I always did.
“You do,” Tamika said from the doorway, one shoulder on the frame. “Because we’re about to make you—and we’re coming, too. Night crew just clocked in, intake’s covered, and hydrophones are logging. The animals are watched.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Then let me convince you,” she said, unbothered. “Salty Mike’s. One hour. Beer and bar food.”
I opened my mouth to protest. Before I could, Miguel tightened the last clip on the shade rig and cut in. “Come with us, Doc. Monitors are set. If anything blips, they’ll ping.”
It wasn’t the word so much as the voice—steady.
“Fine,” I said, and the room exhaled. “One hour. If the Kogia dips?—”
“Night crew calls, we bolt,” Becca said, already grabbing her bag. “We know.”
“And if the Navy calls?—”
Tamika’s smile sharpened. “Night crew will tell them the doctor is otherwise engaged, and that you’ll call them back in thirty minutes.”
“Twenty,” I said, because I couldn’t help myself.
“Twenty-five,” she bargained. “Come on, Camille. Before you realize you’re human and have feelings about it.”
I rinsed my hands, ran a towel over my face, and looked in the small mirror we kept by the sink. I swapped my damp tank for a clean one, tugged on shorts and boots that had come honest by their scuffs. I told myself I looked like a woman going out for a beer on a weeknight.
Atlas’s detail sat where Ryker had promised—ten paces beyond the gate, eyes on the world and not on me. The smallest acknowledgment: a nod. I gave them one back and pretended it made me irritated instead of relieved.
When we arrived, the marina smelled like fried things and tide. Salty Mike’s deck caught the last of the sun. The neon buzzed. The “Open” sign was still the same stubborn red I’d walked under last night when I’d decided to let the ocean crawl into bed with me in the shape of a man.
“Look at you,” Tamika said when we reached the top of the steps, grinning. “You look like a woman who could teach a lesson without raising her voice.”
“Then let’s not make me,” I said with a laugh.
We found a high-top near the rail where the river put on a show—shrimp boats idling home, gulls organizing their petty little coup on the pilings.
The four of us fit around the scarred wood like pieces that had been cut to measure.
A waitress took our order without asking for IDs because she’d seen all of our faces too often to bother with a ritual.
“Hushpuppies, basket,” Tamika said. “Extra honey butter.”
“And a pitcher of the coldest thing that isn’t sweet tea,” Miguel added.
“And water,” Becca said, earnest, because she knew me.
“And water,” I echoed.
I should have asked for a grilled something and a pile of greens. Real food. Not another night of salt and adrenaline, pretending to be dinner. Tomorrow, I told myself, I’d pack fruit, hard-boiled eggs, something that grew in dirt. Tonight I’d, at least, drink the damn water.
When the drinks landed, I wrapped my palm around the sweating glass and let the cool bite into the tenderness at the base of my thumb.
I took a long swallow. The first pull of cheap beer is always better than it deserves to be—bubbles too eager, bitterness uncomplicated.
The second is worse. I liked the first enough to risk the second.
“You going to tell us what your father said?” Tamika asked, not really a question.
“He told me to stop being certain faster than the facts,” I said, to the river. “He told me he came to America because the Navy paid him on time. He told me the line between a clean research fairing and a dirty secret is money and tension.”
Miguel lifted his glass. “To fathers who are right in ways that make us mad.”
We clinked. I didn’t look up, because sometimes friendship was easier to manage if you pretended it was just gravity doing the work.
“So, what’s the play?” Becca asked. “If we don’t assume guilt?”
“We follow the paper,” I said. “And we keep our thumb on Pincense’s promise about private permits until he either gives me a number I can strangle or a name I can bless. We keep working the animals. We make the Navy fix what they can fix. We make the other people tell us what they’re hiding.”
“And Dominion Hall?” Tamika asked casually. “The brothers?”
“They gave me what I asked for,” I said, careful. “A boat that doesn’t brag. A radio channel that doesn’t jam. Bodies who can move a stretcher without needing to be thanked. I don’t have to like the way money looks to appreciate what it can buy when it behaves.”
Miguel’s mouth twitched. “That sounded almost like a compliment.”