Chapter 11 #3
“The animals and plants require attention seven days a week. We’re always grateful for volunteers to help with their care and feeding.
If you’re really up for chores in the wet lab, you’ll work under our volunteer coordinator, Mehar Basu.
During any shift, she might have you making vitamin burritos for sharks, shelling crab legs, logging aquarium nutrient levels, fin-tagging incoming animals, sanitizing seawater filters, or even making enrichment artifacts for MORI’s orphaned sea otter.
He’s a favorite. There’s plenty of hosing and mopping, too. ”
Isabel’s sandals slapped against the damp concrete floor.
Behind her, Wes’s treads squeaked.
If she requested more space, would he give it to her?
I’m going to stick close today.
She didn’t know, and she wasn’t eager to test that question in view of her new colleagues.
Not that the lab’s personnel were watching her with any special attention, however.
They were busy with their data and pipettes, or talking in acronyms between themselves.
She was much less interesting than the latest marine biology article in Nature magazine.
Good. But she also wasn’t keen to experiment with her own calm.
It was too important to her investigation that she presented as normal, as capable, as an asset to MORI, its researchers, and its creatures. Boring was a bonus.
I’m fine, which Wes had acknowledged.
That hadn’t changed his behavior: a shadow projecting over her shoulder, looming.
I am capable.
Why couldn’t he see that? Why couldn’t he see that she—
No, breathe.
Isabel uncurled her fingers and huffed out a breath through her nose.
She bent past a Caution stripe on the lab’s floor to admire a tray of bat rays sweeping in low, slow arcs over the tank’s substrate.
When one of the hunting specimens breached in excitement at the bubbly exhale of a clam buried in the silt beneath it, it thrashed its winged pectoral fins and whip-like stinger, likewise splashing water over the sides of its pool.
The deluge soaked her exposed feet—and the cold was shocking, distracting.
Disrupting.
She breathed again, and stepped back.
“I warned you about sandals in the lab,” Brianne said.
“Did the stinger get you?” from Wes.
“No.”
It could have.
So she exhaled like the clam, careful with her smile and very careful with her logic.
Wes was right to be concerned about danger at the institute.
Not from the docile bat rays, who only flourished their barbs in self-defense, but from the mammals.
From the people. Since he was right, she couldn’t be nettled by his breath on her neck when she craned for another glance at the cephalopod tank.
If there was no reason for her irritation, she could dismiss it.
I will.
Brianne continued to tour them through MORI’s wet lab, into the computer room, a glass-walled robotics wing, storage closets, conference rooms, and by office cubicles overflowing with coffee mugs and publication schedules—all without encountering a single Do Not Enter sign.
Except for the badged access restricting entry to MORI’s labs from the lobby, there were no locks on the institute’s interior doors.
“. . .then after you finish washing algae, delousing flounders, scrubbing out quarantine tanks, and mopping the floors, someone’s got to make the coffee. Sunday-afternoon shifts are generally sluggish, even at a twenty-four-seven facility.”
But when they passed by the Octopus bimaculoides tank again, where its thousands of paralarvae pulsed with the beat of each octopus’s three hearts, MORI’s cephalopod researcher tracked their group with a focus that was anything but drowsy.
Behind her goggles and data tablet, her gaze was narrow.
She was paying attention. She followed Isabel’s own stare to her aquarium, to its wet-dry filter and sump, to the zip ties securing its fluorescent light, to a drain gurgling in the floor nearby.
The moment that Isabel inched just half a step nearer to the glass, the scientist met her with crossed arms and a dark-eyed scowl.
“Where are you going?”
“Sorry, I was—”
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Let’s get your paperwork filed.” Brianne interposed herself between them and offered a sympathetic grimace to Isabel.
After she badged back into the lobby, then stamped Isabel’s documents and tucked them into a folder, she added in an undertone, “That’s Dominique—sorry, Dr. Dominique Solomon.
She pulls insane shifts. Always stays in the lab after the other research staff head home.
She barely ever leaves that tank. Snaps at anyone who gets close, too.
She won’t share what she’s working on, even when other people talk about their studies at lunch.
Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, but she’s rude to everyone.
It’s not personal. Most of the staff here are easygoing and nice.
There’s always one, though, isn’t there? One cold fish.”
Wes hummed in acknowledgment.
Was he agreeing with Brianne? Isabel couldn’t tell.
Regardless, disappointment twinged in her chest.
Cold fish.
The words hardly stung anymore, and the facilities manager hadn’t aimed them at her. Still: pulls insane shifts, stays in the lab after the other research staff head home, barely ever leaves that tank, snaps at anyone who gets close, won’t share what she’s working on.
Dr. Solomon—MORI’s brusque, exacting octopus researcher, defensive of her work and her subjects, off-putting to people—had undeniable potential to be a source of the bungalow two-spot’s injuries.
That did sting.
But, she reminded herself while she signed up for a week of morning volunteer shifts, synchronizing her schedule with Wes’s planned dives—it doesn’t matter.
Her feelings couldn’t be allowed to impede her goal.