Chapter 17
Her phone remained dark on the coffee table for one minute, then five. Isabel stared at the screen or maybe nothing at all, unmoving, unthawing while the bungalow’s clock ticked. Her fingers were frigid.
Wes waited.
But no one could outlast her patience. Certainly not him. So after a quarter-hour of calcifying quiet, he cleared his throat. “How do you think that went?”
She blinked. A single audible inhale jerked her chest.
He pressed his advantage and her clawed hand. “How do you feel?”
“I. . .” She glanced down at their fingers, at his purpling nails and her own ashen knuckles. She released him. “I—I’m sorry, and. . . all right? I think.”
“Yeah?”
One finger traced his wrist, where a crescent of half-moon indentations mottled his tan. Though she grimaced, at least she didn’t apologize again. Instead, she nodded. “Thank you for being with me. By myself, I don’t know if I could’ve. . .”
“You would’ve been just fine, Buttercup. You didn’t need me here.”
She didn’t.
Isabel didn’t need him—not for this fight.
She was capable and clever, and she’d trapped that asshole into an admission of guilt (well, almost an admission) with nothing but her smart, incisive silence.
Wes’s smile curdled as he massaged sensation back into his hand, however.
If he was being honest, the small, shameful truth was that even though he was proud she didn’t need him or anyone else right now, because she had herself and that was more than enough. . . he wanted her to need him.
Which was fucked up.
Then again, was it wrong to want Isabel’s flinty, stormy, lovely lightning eyes to see and value him for more than his current transactional function as a visa guarantee?
Not that he minded being an asset. He didn’t.
Not for her. But after last night, floating in the glittering waves with her mouth slanted in a whisper of warmth and wanting against his, her body pliant in his arms?
Maybe it was all right to want that.
“That’s true,” she told him. “I didn’t need you here. But I’m glad you were.”
Maybe it was all right to smile at her like he’d swallowed the sun.
She didn’t glance away. A dimple curved in her cheek. Her lips were rosy with biting, slightly parted—and for a moment, notwithstanding what they’d learned and endured today, the world was golden.
If he kissed her right now. . .
But then Thalassa undulated out from her coral with an abrupt burst of energy; Isabel’s attention darted toward the tank. She crossed to the aquarium, crouching beside the glass with a smile of her own. Almost instantly, though, her chin hitched. “Look—oh. Oh, no.”
“What’s wrong?” He followed her.
“She’s siphoning at her shrimp. She’s clearing its leftovers away from her den. She. . . she’s treating her food like debris.”
Senescent octopuses often starved to death.
“Damn.”
“Yes.” Reflected in the tank’s glass, a dangerous brightness gathered at the edges of Isabel’s gaze. “I—I don’t know what to do.”
Except that she did.
“Yes, you do,” Wes promised her. “And I want you to tell me. Tell me how we’re going to deal out justice for Thalassa.
Tell me how we’re going to investigate MORI’s facilities manager, plus Chase fucking Meyer’s pharma-fucking-ceutical company.
How are we going to serve them what they’ve got coming? Serve it hot.”
“I should’ve recorded his call.” Her fingers twisted.
“I didn’t capture what he said about BioPulse’s cephalopod research practices—though he didn’t actually mention the octopuses, did he?
I did. . . He didn’t. Even if I’d recorded the conversation, however, even if he’d been explicit about BioPulse’s methods, it wouldn’t have mattered.
The corporation’s practices are immoral.
Chase is also correct that they aren’t illegal.
The Cephalopod Sentience and Welfare Act hasn’t passed yet, and no human subjects have suffered brain damage from the Hydromotinzate. ”
“I know.”
Isabel shifted the aquarium’s dive weights and retrieved Thalassa’s discarded shrimp.
“If clinical trials had started. . . But they haven’t, so there’s no argument to be made for gross negligence.
” She inched the crustacean closer to a drifting tentacle, teasing it against the octopus’s lax suckers.
“Anyhow, humans might not display the same cognitive damage that octopuses do. There’s a substantial risk of side effects, of course—but nothing certain.
Cephalopod brains are very different from ours.
Our last common ancestor lived over seven million years ago. ”
“Seriously?”
“The marine flatworm,” with a nod and another tease of the tentacle.
Did Thalassa’s sucker flex? Yes. The shrimp was in her grasp, as was Isabel’s hand.
Slowly, another arm extended, then a third, coiling between Isabel’s fingers, into her palm.
She stroked her thumb over the two-spot’s speckled mantle.
“The sole legal case I can make is that Brianne is stealing juvenile cephalopods from the Monterey Oceanic Research Institute. I. . . I hate that.”
She was right.
It was wrong.
“I hate. . .” Now Isabel’s voice and her silvery eyelashes quivered. “I h-hate that it’s too late to matter for her, too. The pace of her neurological impairment is accelerating.”
If several of the octopus’s arms were coiled in her palm, suckers skimming the healed mark on her fourth finger, another tentacle trailed limp and lumpy. It bumped through the gravel at the bottom of the tank, senseless.
Thud, thud.
Wes felt the weight of those impacts in his stomach, heavier than lead.
Isabel’s shoulders slumped. “She’ll be gone before we vacate the bungalow.”
Again, she was likely right.
But—she was also right about the facilities manager’s thefts from MORI.
Brianne hadn’t been as cagey with her words as Chase.
Wes squashed his own hot helix of anger and grief before he did something very stupid and probably illegal, and reminded her of that.
“What you heard her planning isn’t just theft.
It’s wildlife trafficking. That’s a serious crime.
We can stop it, too. We can stop BioPulse from experimenting on any new MORI octopuses—and we will.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what benefits that muscle-control drug hypothetically has for people.
It’s like an Ursula K. Le Guin short story that Erin sent to me once: ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’. ”
“What?”
“The suffering of even one creature to promote the happiness of all others is morally indefensible.”
“Yes, but. . .” Withdrawing her hand from the tank, Isabel gripped her opposite elbow with wet fingers, swaying, shaking her head in evident frustration.
“I didn’t record Brianne’s conversation, either.
I didn’t know what she’d say. What she’d expose in that call.
I know what I heard, but I don’t have proof.
If I file a report, no one has any obligation to believe me.
I’m a volunteer. I don’t have credentials.
And migraines can cause aura hallucinations, so I’m not a reliable witness.
I don’t have credibility and I don’t have—”
You have me.
He didn’t say that. Whatever she was wrestling with, pacing the zebra rug, it wasn’t about him.
Instead, he told her, “I believe you. What you heard. What you know. Whatever you want to do with that information, I’m here.”
No one except Wes might believe her.
Even if he was only here for a little while longer, though, only until his five-week stint with MORI was over and he sailed away to the Revillagigedo Islands in Mexico or Indonesia’s Lembeh Strait, he was with her right now—his belief and his serious shadow at her side in a shaft of stained-glass light streaming through the bungalow windows.
Maybe that was enough. For her courage with Chase, and her courage tomorrow.
Maybe she could make it enough: his belief, and this brief time when he was hers.
Almost mine.
It would have to be enough.
“Thank you,” she told him, for all he’d said and all that she hadn’t.
He nodded. Then he headed for the kitchen, returning with microwaved leftovers from his dinner at Osteria Al Mare split between two bowls.
He took his usual seat on the couch and jabbed a fork into his noodles.
“Right: besides this veggie lasagna, what options are on the table for telling MORI about Brianne’s octopus trafficking? ”
“If I’d just recorded her call. . .” She poked through roasted bell peppers and zucchini, and swirled them in a puddle of marinara sauce.
When she shrugged, her stiff muscles twinged.
Too much tension, too much anxious feeling.
She’d made no apologies to Chase today, however—though she also hadn’t officially canceled their wedding.
But there had been more important things to discuss.
And again: no apologies.
That was something. Something good.
“Yeah. But there’s no point in crying over spilled—uh, nurse shark milk.” Wes extracted a sprig of parsley from his teeth, before pulling a face at her. “Sorry. Too much of a stretch?”
“Yes.” Still, a little of the strain eased from her neck.
“That’s fair.” He stabbed a mushroom. “How about talking to the volunteer coordinator, Mehar? Or another researcher? Even Dr. Solomon.”
She’d engaged in successful scientific conversation with some of the volunteers and a few scientists, yes.
(Not Dr. Solomon, of course.) MORI’s people were friendly.
She wasn’t such a cold fish there in the wet lab.
Or at least she wasn’t the only one; no one minded when she enthused about shark teeth or octopus gardens.
But this discussion that Wes proposed? It wouldn’t be a simple question of where to find the Epsom salts used to treat fish constipation.
This would be an accusation against one of MORI’s own. . .