Chapter 16
The parking-lot asphalt pitched under Isabel’s feet.
Her stomach knotted with nausea. Her heartbeat rattled in her skull and static misted her vision; she clenched her chipped nails into her palms. But the pain wasn’t enough to steady her, to quell her tremors as she shook her head at Sabrina’s concerned calling of her name, then walked to meet Wes by his Jeep.
Not a migraine. Not this time.
Rage.
“Isabel—”
Again, she shook her head. She buckled her seat belt with hands that didn’t belong to her.
She stared down at her wet-speckled jeans while he loaded his photography gear into the rear seats and spun out onto the highway.
They passed the dilapidated fishery buildings on Sandholdt Road with their fences and tire tracks—where right now an octopus might be under a needle or a scalpel.
But she didn’t scream. She bit her lips. She kept silent.
“Buttercup?”
She didn’t trust herself to answer or even glance away from her knees. Not when she knew he’d ram his fender straight through BioPulse’s Private Property signs if she asked him to, would stride right into whatever half-cocked lab the corporation had running behind its chain-link, would—
No.
That approach wasn’t logical. If she spoke, her words wouldn’t be, either.
Breathe. Be calm. Not reckless. Not angry.
Not out loud.
This rage was a reckless thing, however, explosive and writhing at the edges of her tongue and her control.
She couldn’t fold it away. Not this. She couldn’t rationalize it into something small and mute that she could stuff down her throat.
Not when the fury was boiling in her mouth.
She needed to submerge herself in water, to slow her racing heart and thoughts with cold.
Instead, she was sitting here, dry and hot in the sun-warmed Jeep through their thirty-minute drive to the bungalow, shaking and so, so—
“Isabel,” a second time.
Her name wasn’t a question now. Wes unfastened her seat belt at the curb.
His callused palm was almost cool against the skin of her forearm when he drew her through the living room to the tank.
He dropped his equipment duffel. Dive weights scattered.
He plunged her hand into the aquarium. She gasped, shocked into stillness.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “Thalassa’s here. She’s safe. With you. Right?”
Was she?
Focus on what you can see, smell, touch. . .
Yes: despite everything she’d learned today at MORI, when her knuckles brushed through halimeda sprouts and coral, the intelligent, custard-like softness of a cephalopod arm brushed back.
“With us,” he said.
A sucker folded around the end of her thumb.
Stirred from a doze in her cradle of calcium carbonate, the octopus released a shrimp tail and drifted out into the center of the aquarium.
Her mantle flushed a dusty, patchy pink.
A clouded eye tilted up at Isabel’s face.
Another sucker followed, prying with gentle but persistent curiosity at her fist, vaguely interested about what she might be concealing inside it.
Anger.
Grief.
The two-spot teased open her hand and tasted the ugly indentions of her nails—then funneled a blast of cleansing bubbles at her palm.
They tickled. Isabel choked. A second effervescent stream followed, and another row of suckers.
Her swallow was thick and hot and rough, but she managed to struggle through an exhale as the flexible cups continued to pluck at her.
They forbade her to retreat into another fist. Breathe.
Instead, the juvenile’s touch leached up dainty little bruises across the back of her hand.
So Isabel concentrated on the suction, the texture, the now.
Just breathe. . . Slowly, very slowly, within the chill submersion of the tank, her heat began to leach away, too.
One minute of octopus time, then five.
Ten.
Only breathing, until the warmth was gone.
Eleven minutes by the bungalow’s clocktopus. . . and she was just cold.
Cold and hollow.
But safe.
She swallowed a second time and withdrew her hand.
“Welcome back to the surface, Buttercup.” Wes handed her a dishcloth. “Now, what’s on your mind?”
“I was. . .”
What was on her mind?
“I’ve been thinking about my clinical trial at the Medical Center in San Francisco,” she said.
“I knew the Ceretobicin pills would’ve been subjected to animal testing before the first phase of human trials.
It’s standard procedure. I read about preliminary evidence of the medication’s efficacy in my intake paperwork, too.
Ceretobicin had been tested successfully on rhesus monkeys. ”
“They can get migraines?”
“Yes. But primates have extensive laboratory protections. The trial methods would’ve been humane.
Cephalopods don’t have those protections—or any protections at all.
That’s why the Cephalopod Sentience and Welfare Act is so important.
If it passes, they’ll receive a right to compassionate treatment. ”
“Your medication wasn’t tested on octopuses.”
“No.” She twisted at the towel. “But Chase has been promoting trials for BioPulse’s newest experimental drug.
It stimulates targeted areas of the brain’s motor cortex to reverse loss of muscle control from stroke, multiple sclerosis, tumors, alcoholism, nerve damage, or even low vitamin levels.
Octopuses are ideal test subjects for it.
Eight arms where nerve damage or other traumas can be induced, followed by an injection—and then researchers’ observation about whether complete muscle control returns.
Cephalopods can regenerate severed limbs with full functionality.
They can be tested through multiple traumas and multiple failures of the drug cocktail, through multiple amputations and more attempts, until a dosage and chemical combination works—”
“—which it seems like it does.” Wes tugged the towel away. He redirected Isabel’s attention to the tank, to their two-spot with her curious tentacles and her mischievous mind; her suckers were fiddling with the pump nozzle and a fresh shrimp he’d offered. “Look at her.”
“Yes.”
The Hydromotinzate did work. The octopus was mobile, her regenerated arms unimpaired and grasping her meal.
. . except that even while they watched, one whitening limb released its prawn.
The crustacean swirled to the gravel bottom of the aquarium and settled beside an uneaten sea snail.
Drifting back into her coral and halimeda, the two-spot left it there.
Cephalopods could be fussy eaters, suspicious of unfamiliar food.
Their octopus liked shrimp, though.
Had the fisherman hauled in a bad catch?
It was possible. However, the creature evinced no interest in Isabel’s reconstructed pill-bottle puzzle, either.
When she dropped the enrichment artifact into the tank and pointed it out to the octopus, the two-spot’s dominant eye acknowledged it.
But the bottle remained floating at the surface, untouched. And those white splotches on her skin?
“How long has she had these?”
Wes squatted beside the aquarium. He frowned. “A few days?”
Two or three days was a significant length of time for an animal whose journey from paralarva to death spanned no more than two years. Even the giant Pacific octopus rarely lived past five.
“It won’t be a problem for very long,” Brianne had said on her call.
The operative had waved away concerns about BioPulse’s escaped cephalopod. Isabel had assumed she’d meant that a research octopus wouldn’t survive outside the lab. Ignorant of camouflage techniques, the two-spot would be easy prey for sharks, rays, gulls, or sea lions.
But what if Brianne had meant something else?
Disinterest in food. Dull, slow color changes. White blotches. Reclusive behavior. . .
And the implications—the meaning of those observations—hit her with a sudden tidal force.
No! No—
She thrust her hand back into the water, newly desperate for the octopus to engage with her, to pick up the shrimp, to shift hue in pleasure or fright, to react somehow—to do anything at all.
Nothing.
She slapped the surface. She splashed herself, their Santa Cruz caricature, and the zebra rug.
“Buttercup—”
No, no, no—and then, equally abruptly: no use.
Be calm.
She exhaled once, twice, against the resurgent heat on her tongue, until she could locate her cool and dispassionate facts.
Yes, calm. Then she told Wes, “Brianne wasn’t worried about an escaped octopus surviving to incriminate BioPulse.
Not because it couldn’t camouflage. But because the chemical cocktail that reverses the test subjects’ loss of muscle control has a side effect. A neural one.”
“A side—What is it? How can you tell?”
“This California two-spot octopus is a juvenile,” she said.
Very, very calm. “Look at her today, though. The patches on her skin. Her sluggish color and pattern changes, and their lack of vibrancy. Her lapse in eating. Her general enervation—the hours she spends inactive in the coral. She’s responsive for only minutes at a time now.
To her environment, to her food, to me. These symptoms—they’re markers of cephalopod senescence.
It’s similar to human dementia. Shrinking neurons and slowed nerve-pulse transmission.
BioPulse’s Hydromotinzate likely did stimulate muscle control over her arms after the researchers damaged them, injected her with the drug to gauge her neural recovery, then amputated her limbs and repeated the experiment.
But it’s also caused cognitive impairment. ”
“Brain damage.”
“The corporation knows this. That’s why her escape is notable, but not an emergency. She. . . s-she’s already dying.”
“Those fuckers,” in a low voice.