Page 99 of Sucker For You

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?Idid. . . 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 trialshadstarted. . . 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. . . Ihatethat.”

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’swildlife 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.