Chapter 14 #3
Monday: she didn’t reach for him, didn’t bury her nose in the warm hollow of his throat, didn’t sigh into the solidity of his arms.
Tuesday: another volunteer shift at the institute, learning to drive MORI’s ATV and assessing her options for sneaking into the computer wing—while aware that Adrian Monaghan had just flown into San Francisco.
Her time in the wet lab was slipping by like sand.
The Monaghans’ meeting in Santa Cruz was fast approaching.
But even with the days ticking away—ticking on toward September twenty-sixth, too—she kept counting the hours until she stepped into MORI each morning.
She relished the dissolution of her fears into her work.
The lab’s blades and teeth and stingers and slick floors left no room for lapsed attention or shaky hands.
She had to be careful, had to be dexterous.
Focused, especially when rolling up squid burritos for MORI’s sharks with Sabrina and Jiang.
“Some species replace more than thirty thousand individual teeth over their lifespans.” Jiang pushed at his glasses with a gloved wrist, studying his squid. “That’s what they told us in biology class last year. Did you know that?”
“And they have four different varieties,” she answered, nodding. She knotted floss around her vitamin-delivery packet. “Including nonfunctional teeth for basking and whale sharks.”
“Those big softies are plankton feeders,” from Sabrina.
“Yes.”
“So weird,” Jiang added with admiration. To Isabel, “Nice knots.”
She evaluated her mess of squid on the prep bench and started assembling another burrito. Her knots were nice. “Thank you.”
These narrow, targeted conversations were satisfactory.
Later that morning, so was the arrival of a pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins in the bay. The announcement interrupted her break with the volunteers and drew MORI’s personnel out to the sea-view deck. Binoculars materialized. Likewise, sunscreen.
“Coming, Isabel?”
She hesitated. “I. . .”
“Whatever it is, don’t take too long.” Mehar cast a glance over her shoulder as she moved toward the audience already oooh-ing on the deck. “There must be tuna out there today. The pod’s started a stampede!”
Then: click, went MORI’s exterior door, closing.
Isabel was alone in the lab.
Dr. Solomon had taken one of her infrequent days off; no one was watching the computer wing.
Now was her chance.
She moved so fast that her chunky, dented boots barely had an opportunity to squeak against the floor: out of the break room (which doubled as a storage space, with cleaning supplies stacked beside coffee grounds), past an industrial refrigerator, swerving around a puddle under a seawater pipe, skirting a bench topped by ancient, doorstopper microscopes—to the tech lab.
Despite its Keep Out warning sign, the door wasn’t locked.
No badge scanner, no deadbolt. Yes, the weather stripping on the threshold snagged at the treads on her boots when she moved from the clean laboratory environment into an ordinary office space.
That was the only resistance she met, however.
The entry latch depressed under her hand.
She stepped forward, and the door shuffled shut behind her.
Then she was inside the computer room.
Which was. . . just as she’d remembered it from her tour through MORI’s facilities with Brianne: windowless, fluorescent lights humming above kiosks of boxy monitors from the aughts, their keyboards hidden beneath stacks of budget papers or water-stained reports.
A few faded XKCD and Dilbert comic strips were tacked above a water cooler.
No vivisection tables. No scalpels.
But it also wasn’t deserted.
An office chair rasped across the industrial carpet at one of the kiosks; someone pushed away from their screen, yawned, stretched, shuffled out into the corridor between the computer banks—and bumped sideways into the water cooler with a wet, surprised thump.
“Shit!” A man in a Jira Tickets or It Didn’t Happen shirt bobbled a coffee mug.
He blinked and squinted at Isabel where she stood near the door, as if refocusing or scaling up his vision after too much time with pixels.
Should she retreat? Maybe, but then he continued, “Sorry, I didn’t know anyone else was in here.
Didn’t mean to swear at you. Uh, did—did you forget your login password, or something? ”
What?
“. . . no?”
“Right. Okay. Sorry, it’s just. . . hardly anyone ever comes in unless they’ve warned me ahead of time. That way, I can get the dinosaur servers up and connected with MORI’s research database. You’re actually the first person in here this week.”
“There’s a Keep Out notice on the door.”
“What? Shit. Sorry. Again. That’s still there?” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “I finished our system upgrade yesterday. I just posted the sign so no one would breathe on the tech until my updates were done. You look at these computers wrong, they crash. Right?”
She nodded, as if she agreed.
“Anyway, how can I help? The printer?”
She didn’t need the printer. And there were no octopuses in the MORI’s computer wing.
Isabel grabbed a random pile of documents filed on a nearby chair: graphs from an acoustic community ecology study, apparently. “This?”
He shrugged. “Can you take down the sign on your way out?”
She nodded again, and retreated back into the wet lab.
MORI’s personnel were still out on the deck watching stampeding dolphins. Her investigation into the tech department had taken no more than five minutes. Now she had her answer about the Keep Out sign, crumpled in her hand.
Which was good.
Less good was this: she was no closer to uncovering the institute’s secret cephalopod experiments than she’d been in her first volunteer shift.
Not that there weren’t fascinating studies occurring at MORI.
There were. The graphs on acoustic ecology she’d picked up in the computer lab identified animals at various ocean depths, and matched their oral signatures by species.
There was research on the life pace of deep-water creatures, aiming to understand their recovery rates and resilience; remote-operated vehicular investigations concerning hadal sponge communities; and surveys on how and why animals manipulated bioluminescence.
Not to mention the millions of data points generated by the researchers’ care, feeding, and observation of the lab organisms. There were no locked doors, however.
No scalpels. No hacksaws. There were syringes, but the majority were for administering veterinary shots to eels with bacterial infections—or, more charmingly, feeding formula to the otter pup.
No restricted rooms flashed klaxons and warnings for trespassers to beware.
Wes would say that her Keep Out sign had been a red herring.
A fish, he would have laughed.
She didn’t.
Despite the lack of klaxons, she was wary: of MORI and her failures here—and, outside the lab, wary of straying beyond the questions on her napkin list.
Wary of herself.
Stashing her ecology graphs on a bench of microscopes, Isabel grabbed a mop and began to swab down the lab’s squidsplattered floor.
Imagining Wes and his laughter had already heated her cheeks with shame, so why not add exertion and frustration to the mix, by scrubbing fiercely at a cluster of entrails?
She shouldn’t have revealed so much to him on Friday.
Swish, rinse.
She shouldn’t.
Except that he’d been disparaging his intelligence, dismissing his value and his goodness—and she’d been unable to choke back her protests into the lonely safety of silence.
She’d lost her fight to swallow the rest of it, too: all those cheap, sordid facts about herself.
Very real and very grubby facts, not just cold fish jabs that he could somehow transform from her hurt to his admiration. So she’d told him everything.
(Almost everything.)
She wrung out her mop and selected a squeegee, scraping its edge over the guts stuck on a drain. MORI filtered its laboratory runoff before the water rejoined Monterey Bay. Not all institutes were so fastidious.
Rasp, scrape.
The effluvia came free. It speckled her boots.
Despite what she’d so foolishly told him, he hadn’t recoiled in disgust.
Scrape, swish.
Had she wanted him to reject her?
Child exhibits attachment issues.
The Canadian government had provided Isabel with a copy of her file after she’d been discharged from the care system. Its charts and notes had contained a clinical dissection of her body and her brain; she’d agreed with most of the analysis:
Female neonatal infant (called “Isabel Wright” by retrieval staff) recovered from safe haven box at Vancouver General Hospital. Infant presents no physical trauma, but is reactive to touch.
Child exhibits attachment issues and lacks meaningful connection with peers.
. . . excels academically but struggles socially.
. . . described by caregivers as—
The squeegee skidded out of her grip.
Maybe she should have pushed Wes away harder. A repulsed distance (his boat sailing off past the horizon) would have kept their arrangement clean. She would have been safe. Alone, and safe.
Yes, she should have been more brutal with herself.
With him.
He’d labored over transcripts of their legal forms all weekend and on Monday night, after his video call with his family—Erin had encouraged them to stay at the bungalow through next weekend, at least—while cursing and laughing.
He still talked confidently about Isabel meeting his siblings, clearly happy at the thought of them together as he detailed the perils of boardwalk hot sauces, roller coasters, and carnival games.
How could she explain that she shouldn’t join him in Santa Cruz after all?
That it would be better if she stayed behind?
How could she disappoint Wes like that?
That was the problem, however: eventually, she would disappoint him.
She always did.