Chapter 18 #3
“Maybe not. Your medical condition came up in your check, though. I reviewed your records with the company.” Another nasty laugh. “Migraines can cause hallucinations. You’re taking one of our experimental drugs, which can have side effects. Brain damage—”
“Then you’re aware that some of BioPulse’s drugs have cognitive impairment as a side effect? Definitely the Hydromotinzate. The company’s aware, and it’s still preparing for human clinical trials. That’s interesting,” stated very coolly.
“No.” If Isabel was cool, however, the operative was ice-cold. “It isn’t interesting. It’s nothing. You have no proof. That thing you fished out of the bay will be dead in a few days—if it isn’t already—and I’ll deny everything. It’s your word against mine. Who’s going to believe you?”
“Believe me?” Isabel’s tiny smile was diamond-bright and hard. Shaking her head, she extracted her phone from her pocket. “I don’t need anyone to just believe me. Not when I do have proof.”
Audio Recording
“You sneaky, lying bitch—”
Brianne grabbed at the device. But Isabel dodged out of the woman’s reach, fast and fearless—practised—as she stepped past the Caution striping by the shark tank.
Wes’s thumb switched on his flash even faster.
When he depressed his Nikon’s shutter-release button, capturing the BioPulse operative in her attempt to snatch and destroy Isabel’s evidence, he aimed his lens straight through the institute’s windows.
Click. Blinding light erupted against the glass.
Cursing, Brianne skidded on the concrete and fumbled her attack.
She collided with the tank’s knee-high concrete barrier, disoriented as angry, prismatic sunspots exploded across her corneas.
Isabel smiled wider through the blaze. “Did I mention that there’s a marine—”
“What the fuck—”
“—photographer outside? He’s documented everything.”
“You—”
But: “Excuse me.” Dr. Solomon strode back into the wet lab now. Mouth creased with irritation, she wove past the quarantine biofarm and advanced on Isabel and Brianne. “Dr. Mather wasn’t on the front line. There was no call waiting for me from her, or from anyone else. So why did you—oh.”
A sharp breath. She stopped.
She saw: Isabel with her phone, the BioPulse operative with her Stanley cup.
A pause, even sharper.
Then: “No. . . no, why are you—either of you—near my tank? I didn’t give permission.”
“It was her!” With impressive speed, Brianne thrust an accusatory hand at Isabel. “She was—”
“I didn’t—”
Except the operative’s extended hand was also the one holding her water bottle.
That same bottle was unscrewing its own lid.
A moment later, a hydrostatic arm ringed with suckers extruded from beneath the cap.
Moist skin mottled pink with excitement, a young two-spot octopus tasted the air and the steel of its carrier.
It waved.
“You.” Dr. Solomon’s laser focus swiveled away from the tentacle and back to the facilities manager. “You?”
“I—”
“I’d observed occasional decreases in my population over the past three months of hatchings,” she said.
She took a frowning step closer to Brianne’s Stanley cup.
“The data hadn’t tallied. Paralarvae and juveniles don’t cannibalize each other like mating adult octopuses do.
So I didn’t understand why—but rogue cannibal behavior wasn’t really manifesting at all.
No, because you. . . you’ve been extracting Octopus bimaculoides from my—their—tank.
You’ve been harassing them, removing them from their environment and the lab, to—”
“—fuck.”
Again, Brianne lunged. This time her dash took her away from the leopard sharks, back past the octopus aquarium. Abandoning her attempt to grab Isabel’s phone, she rushed instead for the exit to MORI’s balcony and the beach, sprinting toward BioPulse’s Private Property signs.
Could Wes intercept her once she left the building?
Maybe.
He never got the chance.
Because all at once, and despite having only four arms between them, Isabel and Dr. Solomon moved together in an abrupt, wordless, and graceful concert that would have made an octopus proud.
Isabel snatched up a mop listing against a prep table nearby.
She swung it hard to catch Brianne across the shins, just as Dr. Solomon shoved a tub of squid burritos off that same bench, scattering a slippery wreckage across the floor.
“Fuck!”
MORI’s erstwhile facilities manager went down with a splat.
The Stanley cup rolled from her grip. Dr. Solomon retrieved it.
Scowling at the operative groaning on the concrete, she removed the container’s lid, gently twitched the ticklish temptation of her braid to coax the octopus out into her palm, and released the juvenile into its tank.
Then she planted a boot between Brianne’s shoulders.
She told Isabel, “Good work. Thank you. And. . . sorry for the—mess.”
It could have been an apology for other things, too.
Isabel hefted her mop, smiling. “I’m not sorry at all.”
“No.” Dr. Solomon’s frown cracked by a quarter-inch.
Click, went Wes’s Nikon.
Leaving the BioPulse operative prone beneath Dr. Solomon’s heel with her cursing mouth coated in squid slime, Isabel summoned Sabrina away from lunch on the balcony to complete a new high-priority volunteer task: call the police.
Then she went down the risers to the beach.
MORI’s director and the authorities would arrive soon to deal with Brianne Nichols; if BioPulse’s cephalopod experiments weren’t illegal yet, wildlife trafficking was.
Much as she would have liked to witness the other woman’s arrest, and even though she could claim both the legal and moral high ground, it wasn’t smart to involve herself with the law.
Not when September was halfway finished, and the thirtieth was fast approaching.
Not when she and Wes had to schedule their interview with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services soon.
Not when a flag on her visa application indicating even an innocuous encounter with the police could mean months of bureaucratic delay for her Green Card.
So she left the operative under capable watch, and climbed into Baby.
“You were incredible.” The Jeep’s engine turned over. Wes’s fingers threaded with hers and his knuckles nudged at the gear shift. His wide, crooked smile cut sideways when he added, “Incredible and terrifying, and just. . . Damn, thank you for sharing the moment with me. Your moment.”
My moment.
It was good. Satisfying and affirming.
It also wasn’t enough.
“I liked feeling that way. Powerful,” she told him. “But Brianne is one cog in the BioPulse gears. I’m not finished yet.”
“I know.” Baby’s tires skidded through sand and caught traction on the road’s asphalt.
The Monterey Oceanic Research Institute shrank behind them.
If his smile remained and his thumb massaged her palm while he steered them onto the highway, however, Wes shook his head.
He blew out a breath that blurred his rearview mirror.
“You’re right. But just this once I wish you weren’t.
I wish we could take the win and call it a day.
We can’t, though. You’re always right, Isabel Wright. This isn’t over.”
“No.”
“When you mentioned the BioPulse drains to Brianne, I remembered something about the two bait balls I’d spotted near MORI,” he went on.
“I never saw live fish in them. Just grease and guts and scales. I figured the predators had been faster on the scene than I was. But when you talked about the drains? I realized: there never were any bait balls. What I saw were BioPulse’s waste pipes emptying into the water.
The company must be dumping organic and industrial material straight into Monterey Bay.
” He pushed Baby’s gear shift up a notch.
A muscle began to work in his jaw, threatening his smile now.
“That could be more legal leverage for forcing BioPulse to change its practices. But with the damage the corporation’s already done? It’s bad.”
“Right.” She tasted blood.
Copper, salt, fury.
BioPulse Pharmaceuticals, which made Ceretobicin and her own life bearable, wasn’t just immoral. It was evil.
What did that make her: its beneficiary?
She chewed on her tongue while Monterey’s agricultural fields and windy dunes slid past, while Wes braked outside the bungalow, while she shucked off her boots next to his duffel at the door and went to the reef tank.
She tossed her phone onto the credenza beside their heart-eyed caricature and sank a hand into the water.
Anger or tears itched under her eyelids.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
The octopus floated near the aquarium’s sand-and-gravel bottom.
Her dominant eye was foggy, her dexterous arms unresponsive to Isabel and Wes’s coaxing.
No movement, no texture, no color. Her mantle was pale as pearl and lumpish, like old cottage cheese.
No more conscious than a jellyfish, she simply drifted.
“She’s. . .” Lines bracketed Wes’s mouth. Not from laughter. No jokes.
“I know.”
His thumb brushed hers through the halimeda. Their fingers threaded together again. Isabel held tight against the pain and the rage, anchoring herself to him, with him.
Don’t scream.
Don’t cry.
Just breathe. . . breathe—
Until a sudden glow of digital illumination brightened near the tank; on her discarded screen, a muted call was ringing:
Incoming Call: Dr. Chase Meyer Jr.
“Fuck him,” Wes grated out.
She agreed. But she reached for her phone.
“For her,” she told Wes. For the sake of the precious, sentient creature under her protection, she’d answer this call.
She’d speak to this man again, when all she wanted was his silence in her life.
She’d do it because of his possible influence with BioPulse Pharmaceuticals.
Isabel stroked a final finger over the octopus to steel herself. She unlocked her screen.
“Chase.”
“Bella? Babe!”
“I’m here, yes.”
Then: silence.