Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Fieldwork has a way of stripping you bare. You stop pretending you’re in control. You get wet, sunburnt, mosquito-bitten—and more alive than you’ve ever been in a lecture hall.
That’s exactly what the last four days have felt like.
After the fever dream that was my solo day with Holden at Cormorant Bay, we actually got to do what we came here for: collect data, run transects, lose feeling in our legs after three hours in a wetsuit, and remember—painfully—that the ocean doesn’t care about our schedules, no matter how nicely formatted the dive plan is.
Our first dive reflected that.
Technically, everyone followed protocol.
No one touched wildlife. No one interfered outright.
But excitement has its own way of breaking formation.
People drifted. Heads snapped toward movement.
Buoyancy control became… aspirational. At one point, Mateo very nearly abandoned the concept of group cohesion altogether in favor of attempting to befriend a reef shark, which Holden did not find as charming as Mateo did.
By the time we surfaced, Holden was livid—the kind of quiet, glacial anger that doesn’t yell, but cuts sharper than a raised voice ever could.
“To study a species found nowhere else is to bear witness to a miracle so specific it almost feels fictional,” he said, peeling his wetsuit halfway down and tossing his mask into the boat with a sharp flick.
“I get it—you’re thrilled. But this isn’t fiction.
It’s evolution. It’s isolation. It’s millennia of pressure and adaptation.
And right now, you’re wasting time. Which in fieldwork is just a nicer word for failure. ”
That was followed by a five-minute lecture on the cost of fieldwork—logistical, financial, ethical.
On how these dives are possible because of grant money and permits and favors pulled by researchers whose names we probably shouldn’t tarnish by behaving like wide-eyed tourists.
That this isn’t a vacation, it’s a privilege.
I’d like to think I was one of the few who kept my head underwater for the right reasons—focused, methodical, remembering that we weren’t just here to see things, we were here to record them.
To observe and analyze and contribute. It helps, I suppose, that I already had my private audience with marine life and Holden in a wetsuit, which did wonders for tempering the rush of novelty.
Still, I understood the frustration. Field science requires a strange blend of precision and surrender—you follow protocols, but you can’t control the ocean.
And when you’re in a place like the Galápagos, where every second underwater might show you something that hasn’t even been documented yet, focus isn’t just important—it’s an obligation.
So yes, Holden was furious. And yes, some of us probably deserved it. But beneath the bluntness and academic perfectionism, I think what really got to him was how easily people forgot where we are.
It’s a living system with rules older than our careers. It’s protected for a reason. It’s sacred to science in the most unromantic way possible: because it’s rare, and vulnerable, and we don’t get infinite chances to do this right. And he treats it that way.
The next day, and the one after that, went smoother. The equipment held its temper. The data was clean. No one tried to hand-feed a moray eel. We were, miraculously, doing what we came here to do—document, observe, gather, contribute.
Each evening, we shuffle back to camp like a pack of soggy academics, half of us buzzing with excitement, the other half too tired to speak in full sentences.
Dinner’s always something hot and simple, eaten with sunburnt faces and wind-tangled hair under the hum of the shared tent lights.
Then we disappear, one by one, into the cabins—lights out before the stars even finish showing up.
Holden never walks back with me. Most nights, by the time I open the cabin door, he’s still out by the gear tent or half-buried in a conversation with one of the guides. When I wake, he’s already gone, his bunk neatly made like he never slept at all.
Maybe it’s professionalism. Maybe it’s him trying to give me space in the most respectful, surgically careful way.
But the truth is, it feels like distance for distance’s sake.
Like he’s trying to unmake the intimacy we found between tidepools and sea lions.
Like pretending it didn’t happen is easier than figuring out what it meant.
It stings. Quietly, and in all the ways I don’t let show. Because I thought that maybe—just maybe—we’d found some sort of middle ground. Something unsaid but shared. Something real. But now, I’m not even sure he remembers it the same way I do.
And worse—I’m scared he does.
The one thing saving me from the echo chamber of my own brain—and the uncooperative blood-pumping organ currently staging a coup in the name of Holden Wilkes—is, unsurprisingly, the science.
For nearly a decade now, I’ve structured my life around anything that thrives in 35 PSU, and waking up here, on this island, knowing I’m about to plunge into the waters Darwin once stared into with equal reverence, makes something electric crackle in my veins.
Yes, Holden is inescapable. His body—annoyingly sculpted, always tanned, wetsuit-clad or otherwise—has this terrible habit of appearing exactly where my eyes happen to be.
But still. It’s easier to focus here. Easier than in class, where proximity feels like punishment and the pressure to pretend is just as suffocating as the unspoken things between us.
Today is no exception. We spend the morning back at Devil’s Crown—the same dive site we’ve been working for the past few days—finishing the last of our sampling before we move on to another location.
The name makes sense once you see it. Devil’s Crown is the half-drowned skeleton of an old volcanic crater, its jagged basalt points rising and sinking in a rough circle like the remains of some dark, broken crown.
It’s beautiful, but not forgiving. The edges drop off sharply, and the current pushes through the gaps with enough force to make the whole place feel alive and slightly irritated about our presence.
And today, it most definitely was.
A few of us made it through the morning dive unscathed, but others weren’t so lucky.
The current shifted quickly—nothing dangerous, not technically—but enough to make buoyancy a joke and orientation a nightmare.
By the time we surfaced, at least half the group looked like they’d been put through a spin cycle.
So we dropped them back off at camp, where they can run data and drink electrolytes in peace, while the rest of us head back out for one final round of samples.
Everyone on this trip is certified. But there’s a difference between being certified and being comfortable. And the Crown doesn’t really care which one you are.
I’m finishing off my lunch on the boat—a container of grilled chicken and seasoned rice and peas, still warm from the sun—my legs swinging off the edge, toes grazing the surface of the Pacific, when one of the dive assistants walks over.
“Excuse me, miss,” he says, his accent a smooth drawl that makes the word miss sound oddly elegant. “I’ll just take your tank and gear. Make sure it’s ready for the next dive.”
I nod with a mouthful of rice and shrug the pack off my shoulders. He gives me a quick smile before heading to the front of the boat to check it over.
Tristan—the seafloor composition guy whose name I finally stopped mixing up with Tyson—plops down beside me with his own Tupperware and a very serious expression.
“You know,” he says, pointing his fork at my feet, “you’re basically offering your toes up like a sampler plate. A shark’s gonna come by and take one off.”
I blink at him. “What kind of shark are we talking about here?”
“I dunno. Tiger shark?” he says, like he’s tossing out options from a menu.
“In open water, maybe. Not here.” I gesture vaguely toward the crown of black volcanic rock in front of us. “This close to the structure, you’re more likely to get nipped by an angry damselfish guarding its algae garden than anything with real teeth.”
“But tiger sharks are possible here, right?”
“In theory, yeah. But unless I’ve got a fish carcass tied to my ankle, I think my toes are safe.”
He nods thoughtfully, squinting at the water like he expects to see a dorsal fin rise from it. “Still. You’re not even a little bit nervous?”
I shrug. “Once you learn something’s behavior, it’s hard to be scared of it. I think, for the most part, we tend to fear the things we can’t understand."
He pauses, fork mid-air. “That was weirdly profound.”
I grin. “Thanks. I’ll be here all week.”
He taps his chin. “Okay, real question: if you had to lose a toe, which one would it be?”
I laugh. “What is wrong with you?”
“I’m just saying. You’ve got ten. One of them has to go.”
I glance down, wiggling my toes as if they’re auditioning for survival. “The second one, maybe. The index toe. Least useful. Big toe’s critical for balance. Pinky’s got stabilizing function. The middle ones are just… filler.”
“Strong logic,” he says, nodding solemnly.
At the front of the boat, the dive assistant is chatting with another student, one hand on my tank, the other gesturing mid-story. I’m watching him absentmindedly, but my mind is still halfway underwater.
It’s funny. We’re trained not to anthropomorphize marine species—don’t touch, don’t interfere, don’t assign emotion where instinct lives.
But it’s hard not to feel the pull of the water as something more than physical.
Down there, everything makes sense. Cause and effect.
Adaptation and survival. Out here, with dangling feet and hypothetical toe loss, it all feels just a little more precarious.