Chapter 9
Isabel refused Wes’s assistance with the cooler. She heaved its precious, unwieldy, sloshing weight up the porch steps, and barely caught her breath at the stretch of his rash guard over his ribs when he reached for the key under the eaves. She shouldered past him into the living room.
Thunk.
The cooler landed on the credenza beside the television and the reef tank. Electronics wobbled. Water splashed. She didn’t grab a coaster or a towel. She didn’t check the stability of the aquarium. Instead, she carefully cracked open the cooler’s lid.
There she is: Octopus bimaculoides.
Floating near the surface of her itinerant tank, seven arms anchored to a rock purloined from Sandholdt Beach, the juvenile two-spot octopus returned Isabel’s stare with a prismatic eye.
Her blue spots were vivid against the russet-mottled amber of her skin, its texture rippling from sleek to bristling with papillae, before transmogrifying back to smoothness again.
Her eighth arm crept up the cooler’s plastic siding into the air.
You’re so beautiful. . .
Even in this strange new environment, the octopus hadn’t displayed any cryptic behaviors: camouflage.
Isabel frowned at the little creature while she removed the aquarium’s mesh covering.
She coaxed the octopus’s adventurous arm back to its stone and lifted her in cupped hands from the insulated container, settling her instead into the fifty-gallon reef tank with its oyster-and-coral occupants.
The two-spot slithered over to the oyster and immediately began to prod at its shell with questing suckers.
Another arm investigated the coral spires. A third looped around the pump nozzle.
Fortunately, the aquarium had been running clean for several hours.
It wasn’t ideal, though. The gravel bottom was no substitute for the benefits of live rock, and its protein skimmer had seen better days.
But the oyster had made rapid and substantial filtration inroads against the algal buildup in the water, and the tank had a functional fluorescent light.
This enclosure was also certainly safer for the octopus than swimming uncamouflaged in the open waters of Monterey Bay had been.
Everything in the ocean ate cephalopods: baleen whales, manta rays, petrels, morays, dolphins, otters, sea lions, and seals—while sharks, orcas, and sperm whales had even been documented attacking the giant Pacific species.
The two-spot snapped off a coral spire and poked the oyster harder.
“Rude.” Wes huffed with laughter. He squatted down to eye-level with the juvenile and the target of her teasing. His nose skimmed the glass, dried salt glittering in his eyelashes. “So, aside from a major attitude problem, what’s wrong with it?”
“Not it. Her. See the tip of her third arm?”
“There are a lot of arms in this tank, Isabel. Which one am I looking at?”
“The third arm counting from the right side of her head,” she told him. “The one that’s knotted in the coral? Its suckers extend all the way to the tip. It’s not a hectocotylus.”
“Bless you. What?”
“It’s not a modified mating arm,” she tried again. “There’s no male ligula—no groove to transfer sperm packets to a female during copulation.”
One of Wes’s eyebrows rose. He squinted at the coiling mass of suckers. “I’ll take your word for it. But what’s wrong with her?”
She answered with a different question. “Was the octopus from your swim on Saturday morning uncamouflaged?”
“Huh.” He cocked his head while the two-spot continued to explore her tank.
Her false eyespots—ocelli—were iridescent against the gravel and calcium carbonate spears.
Her skin dappled beneath the aquarium’s light, rubricating from a neutral russet to an interested red when she discovered that she could wiggle the pump nozzle in its socket.
“No, that one was behaving more normally. It was avoiding predators in the kelp, camouflaged like a gas float. I almost swam into it before I spotted its suckers.”
Suckers were the sole part of an octopus’s electric skin that couldn’t replicate environmental hues and textures.
“Then she isn’t representative of Monterey’s population.”
“No.”
Isabel joined him in squatting by the glass.
She watched the two-spot fiddle with the pump.
She’d need to stabilize the aquarium for its newest inhabitant, and soon.
Functional protein skimmer, powerhead for additional circulation, salt mix, dive weights, water parameters of 1.
026, pH of 8.2, 0 for nitrites and ammonia.
It would be expensive. The octopus gave another wiggle at the pump with an inquisitive arm. . .
An odd arm.
“This two-spot isn’t injured.” She began to track the creature’s movements more closely now, studying texture and mobility and grip strength.
“Do you see the disparity in the muscular development of her third, fourth, and fifth arms, though? Compared to the first, second, and sixth through eighth arms?”
“She’s lost multiple limbs?”
“At some point. They’re almost all fully regrown, and she’s moving and engaging capably with her environment.
She’s even creating hinge joints in her tentacles to crawl along the gravel.
She’s not suffering from lasting nerve damage.
I wouldn’t expect it, since cephalopods can regrow damaged or severed arms within two to four months.
When the California two-spot’s genome was first sequenced in the early twenty-first century, scientists discovered it could edit its own RNA to recode genes important to its nervous system. ”
“Like regrowing completely functional limbs?’
“Yes. But still—she’s not evincing any crypsis strategies. Camouflage. That’s not usual for a wild octopus.”
“Hmm. Maybe that biologist at MORI was researching this. Did she mention anything to you?”
“No. No one at the institute mentioned any strange behavioral patterns in the population here. This two-spot is older than the lab’s paralarvae.
It’s still true that she could’ve hatched in the institute, though.
She’s a juvenile, almost at sexual maturity.
There’s no possibility that she could’ve been born in the wild and survived so long in the ocean without any camouflage skills. But—”
“—but if she hatched at MORI,” Wes picked up her train of thought, “how the hell did she end up in Monterey Bay?”
The question bubbled between them, unanswerable while they observed the two-spot’s exploratory changes of hue and texture as she skylarked around the tank: red to mottled pink, calm white, piebald green, and back to studded russet, before exploding with vibrant blue.
How did she end up in the bay?
Maybe, also, why?
“She can modify the coloration of her body. That means the triple layers of her skin cells—the leucophores, iridophores, and chromatophores—are functioning, as well as her regrown arms. Look, she’s creating patterns.
Tessellating. See those blocks and stripes on her mantle, and the papillae she’s raised on her head?
But none of this is functional camouflage.
” Isabel frowned again at the octopus’s silk-smooth and dizzying display, the animal switching colors, patterns, and fibers in as little as seven-tenths of a second, almost faster than a human could blink.
“Maybe she thinks she’s in Santa Cruz. She’s trying out tie-dye.”
Tie-dye: that dress.
Distracting whispers of heat licked Isabel’s ears at an echo of Wes’s smile and his laughter, before she quickly and firmly redirected her attention back to the puzzle of this strange two-spot.
The octopus was ensconcing herself within the aquarium’s coral now, while still managing to prod the brainless (but seemingly resigned?) oyster from across the tank with a taunting arm. “Maybe.”
Wes rose off his heels to squint down through the water.
He checked the mess of tubing behind the aquarium.
“Could she have gotten loose from a home exhibit? She could be someone’s escaped pet.
She’s responsive to contact with people.
” Then he removed his dive watch—casually, sensibly—and dropped his hand into the tank near the two-spot’s calcium carbonate enclave.
Not sensibly.
Not what most people would deem sensible, anyhow.
The octopus—monster of the deep, kraken, nightmare—instantly latched onto his fingers.
Isabel stopped breathing.
How will Wes Monaghan react to her touch?
How would he respond to this strange, adhesive, grasping, tasting intelligence that so abruptly demanded a connection and tactile conversation with him?
Questing arms and dual bands of suckers engulfed his hand, looping around his wrist. If he hadn’t removed his watch, the octopus would have stolen it.
Deprived of those stimulating dials and textures, she crawled higher along his forearm, heaving at him with disproportionate strength, dragging him farther into the water with her. . .
And bent across the tank, with a venomous alien plastered to his body, circular bruises already rising on his skin under her grip? Wes was smiling.
He was smiling at the octopus.
“Persistent little thing, aren’t you?” He wriggled his fingers.
A curlicued dimple appeared in his cheek while he teased the undersides of two of her arms. Brilliant washes of crimson bloomed over her mantle in response.
Another row of suckers reached above the water to adhere to his elbow. She tugged, twisting him sideways.
Now he was grinning at Isabel, too.
Her own hand went into the tank.
The octopus’s reaction to her reappearance in the water was instantaneous.