Chapter 5
Arms piled with discounted vegetables, she followed Wes to the Jeep.
If Isabel didn’t know what came next, he certainly seemed to; he strode ahead with his own bags and a plan.
He shuffled aside a pair of hiking boots to load their groceries into the vehicle’s rear seats.
When he’d coaxed the engine to life, cued up a natural history audiobook, and rolled out onto Broadway Avenue, he navigated toward the Pacific Coast Highway.
Grit skittered over the windshield and drifts of fog feathered across the Jeep’s headlights as they passed a sign for Fort Ord Dunes State Park.
They curved inland through pine-fringed agricultural fields and farm stands, before returning to chain-link fences denoting private waterfront property on Sandholdt Road and a parking lot adjoining a low, rambling building of wind-burned metal and glass that perched over a sand spit.
Its rows of windows facing the sea were streaked with moisture.
Stainless-steel steps marked by gull guano led down from a wraparound walkway to the beach.
“Where—”
“Moss Landing.” Wes pulled the parking brake and pointed to the building’s entry doors, which were guarded by surfsmoothed boulders and a propeller sculpture. “MORI.”
The Monterey Oceanic Research Institute.
Her stomach pinched. Anxiety? Excitement? Maybe both. She gripped her seat belt. “What about the perishables?”
“Are you worried about vegetables right now?”
She wasn’t.
“Or are you worried you might stop worrying for a moment and enjoy yourself?”
She had no answer for that.
“Come on.”
Wes elbowed his driver door closed and strode off toward the institute.
A breeze tugged his thin cotton shirt against his shoulders, articulating shadows of ink.
Isabel crossed into the building’s lobby after him just in time to hear his greeting to a woman flanked by a computer monitor and a massive Stanley cup at the reception desk, her blonde hair twisted back with a claw clip and her nails tipped in a French manicure.
He identified himself as MORI’s hired wildlife photographer.
“This is Isabel Wright, my biology consultant.”
At that, she stopped. “I. . . I’m just—”
“—interested in touring the facilities before I start my dives on Monday.” His smile was wide and easy. “Maybe we could review a map of the sites where I should focus my shots. I’ll be in the kelp forests, but isn’t there an octopus garden near one of the canyon’s hydrothermal springs?”
“I’m not really a tour guide.” The woman tapped her badge: Brianne Nichols, Facilities Manager. “And it’s a Saturday.”
“But if you’re managing facilities, you must know all the secrets here.
” His smile intensified. “We’re not tourists.
We’re not going to poke around and damage any of your expensive equipment.
We’ll be quick, too. We’ll get in and out, and send you back to whatever you’re doing behind that computer screen. Let me guess: Solitaire?”
“The last of my onboarding paperwork. I’m temping while the full-time manager is on paternity leave.
” Brianne shrugged in acquiescence to his charm, however.
Maybe to prevent him from poking his head around for a better glimpse at her boxy monitor, too?
She checked his ID. Then she collected her water bottle, motioned them past her desk, and scanned her badge at a door with a rubber weather stop that led from MORI’s public reception area, down a short concrete hallway, into the wet-lab facilities.
Wes moved over the antiseptic entry behind her—and just avoided running into a stainless-steel cart piled high with tanks ready for transportation.
A spot-fin porcupinefish puffed out in surprise, spines piercing its bubble curtain.
Isabel likewise barely avoided running into Wes.
Again.
“It’s cramped in here, even with the weekend’s skeleton crew,” Brianne told them over her shoulder. “The director—Dr. Kaplan-Horner—is angling for a grant to expand the building’s old footprint and update some equipment, but bureaucracy’s slow.”
“Funding’s always rough for infrastructure and administrative stuff.
” Wes edged through the laboratory maze, angling his own shoulders to avoid knocking into any other tanks or the intricate lighting and seawater supply systems. “MORI’s research budget isn’t exactly shoestring, though. To my benefit.”
“True.” Brianne pointed out a plaque perched on a rust-speckled cabinet, which listed beside a bench topped with fire extinguishers and tubes of squid paste.
It commemorated the institute’s founding mission.
“MORI’s a fusion of the science, engineering, and infrastructure required to build new tools for studying ocean health and ecosystems. When possible, our scientists evaluate marine animals and plants in their natural habitats. ”
Around them, fin-tagged fish and invertebrates like nudibranchs and sea stars basked under streams of bubbles emitted from the pumps in their mounted or free-standing tanks.
These aquariums weren’t natural habitats.
But the glass was uniformly clean. The air smelled of sanitizing chemicals, not the sour odor of stressed anemones.
“The institute is tackling climate change and ocean acidification. Plus, a robot evolution in oceanology. That’s in a separate wing of the lab, adjacent to the computer banks.
” Brianne drew their attention to a whiteboard crammed with research schedules and chore checklists.
“There’s a study about the knock-on effects from MORI’s two underwater preserves in the bay, too. ”
“I read about them in my briefing packet.” Wes tapped his phone. “Most of the area’s bull-kelp restoration got its first toehold—root holdfast?—in those preserves. Is the deep-sea octopus garden located in one of the parks?”
“The pearl-octopus nursery? The location’s apparently classified.” Brianne pushed a wobbling stool under a table, before shrugging again and warning them, “Watch your step. The floor’s slick by the drains. Someone’s always dumping fish guts.”
“It’s classified? Seriously.”
“Well, she might know more.”
She was a biologist in knee-high muck boots, who ignored both their approach and the noises of a volunteer de-veining shrimp on a nearby workbench.
The woman crouched beside a rectangular hundred-gallon tank clamped to a gurney alongside a series of aquariums housing juvenile California market squid.
She squinted at a thermometer measuring temperature (an optimal eighteen degrees Celsius) and a submerged pH reader (indicating an alkaline eight-point-four), while adjusting a lighting dial to bathe her water with a red crepuscular glow.
For a moment her nose touched the glass with the intensity of her attention.
Then she nodded and sat back on her heels, her waist-length braid swinging.
She logged the readings about her subjects’ environment on a tablet.
With that regulated pH, temperature, and lighting?
Cephalopods.
A sign drooping from a magnet on the glass read: “Octopus bimaculoides (hatching tank).”
MORI was attempting the difficult feat of lab-raising two-spot paralarvae.
Apparently, the effort had been successful; a laminated label numbered the days since hatching: 26.
There were octopuses here.
Isabel moved past Wes and the facilities manager, toward the researcher and her tank.
She scanned the day count and the dim water.
A few remaining egg casings were tethered to the aquarium’s mesh lid and around its ecosystem of living rock, and transparent cephalopod paralarvae no larger than grains of rice drifted in sporadic bursts of bubbles.
Those bubbles were likely meant to simulate the siphoning jets of a female octopus caring for her eggs.
They also mimicked hydrothermal springs, like the ones in the canyon.
Her inhale was sharp, loud, excited. “Impressive.”
“What?” The biologist turned, and frowned.
Obviously, Isabel had disturbed the woman’s focus and her work.
“Sorry.” She should have kept quiet and retreated.
Instead, she tucked her hair behind her ears and leaned closer, watching miniscule suckers brush against glass and rock with weightless curiosity.
Her words kept coming. “This is a well-designed research environment. It’s clearly taken the octopuses’ physical and psychological needs into account.
What are your thoughts on the National Institutes of Health’s proposal about granting experimental protections to, and establishing baseline lab conditions for, all members of the Cephalopoda class? ”
“What?” again. The biologist’s frown sank toward a level equal with the Mariana Trench.
“Canada has a law like this, but the United States doesn’t, even with the scale of its laboratory industry. The NIH proposes—”
“I know what the Cephalopod Sentience and Welfare Act proposes.” The woman’s voice was cold. Cold was fine. With her scowl, maneuvering her crossed arms between Isabel and the octopuses, it also verged on hostile.
That was understandable.
Minimizing a need to conceal her surprise and irritation whenever colleagues interrupted her work had been one of several reasons why Isabel had eagerly taken night shifts at the Seattle Aquarium.
After sneaking a last look at the tank and nodding at the frowning scientist, she returned to Wes and the facilities manager with a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth.
“I thought you’d like it here.” Wes grinned outright.
Brianne said, “You mentioned a Canadian lab law. Are you—”
Wes cut her off. Still smiling, he pointed at a map of the bay’s canyon tacked above a tank of deep-sea corals. “So: topography. Any areas of special interest? Or species? There’s a list in my assignment brief, but that’s just paper. What I want to know is: what’s really out there in the water?”
“Oh. Probably otters?” Brianne turned to him and shrugged.