Page 68 of Sucker For You

Yes.

He had. Once, and that was enough.

Grinning, he snapped his mask over his nose, kicked on his fins in the sand, powered up his Nikon, and waded out into the surf.

Isabel’s arms and shoulders ached. Her neck had stiffened. Sweat matted her hair under her baseball cap. In their elbow-length rubber gloves, her fingers were cramped. Her jeans were wet with splashing water and flecks of effluvia. There was a dent in her left boot, from where a bucket of sardines had skidded off a workbench and crashed down on it; the metal toe-cap and the balled-up sock she’d fitted inside had saved her from injury. Nearing the end of her shift in the lab after four hours of dicing fish, ray, eel, and otter food under the volunteer coordinator’sinstruction, checking filters for the seawater supply entering and exiting the facility, fin-tagging an incoming batch of surfperch, sterilizing quarantine enclosures, and endless rounds of mopping the floors—she was smiling. She would gladly have signed on for another rotation.

The lab’s practical, focused staff striving to fulfill MORI’s mission were. . .nice.

Being here felt. . .good.

No one demanded small talk. The other volunteers (retirees and summer student interns) and the institute’s researchers were all too deep in their special interests, microscopes, or tanks to require anything from her except her hands.

Conversation was to the point.

“Bury the mollusks in the bat-ray tray at least three inches into the sand,” Mehar Basu had told her, pen poised over a clipboard. “The rays like to hunt at feeding time.”

She did.

Check.

“Good.” Next, Mehar had directed her to a prep table beside a pink-haired woman in her seventies, who was wielding a hatchet above a mass of mackerel. The retiree greeted them with an enthusiastic wave of her blade and a grin, though was apparently too breathless from her whacking at the fish to engage in longform talk. “See the size of the chunks that Sabrina’s chopping up? These are for the leopard sharks. One of our juveniles is recovering from a fishhook injury in her jaw.”

“—poor—baby,” from Sabrina, tutting and dicing. She elbowed a second hatchet toward Isabel.

Slice, went the blade through Isabel’s own pile of fish.

“Good,” again.

At eleven o’clock she’d just finished making the sharks’ industrial-grade sashimi, when: “Wet spill by the jellies! Can someone get a mop?”

Swish,swish.

“There’s whale-blow offshore. Orcas!” A student volunteer, Jiang, stuck his head inside from MORI’s deck overlooking the bay. His glasses were fogged with moisture and excitement. “A small migratory pod, about a hundred yards past the otter raft in the kelp.”

Most of the lab rushed toward the exterior doors, keen to spot this routine but still thrilling passage of a pack of sea wolves through Monterey’s waters. The chattering tide of scientists swept Isabel out into the sea air with it. Someone fiddled with the dials on a telescope fixed to the salt-rusted walkway railing. Another volunteer passed around a pair of binoculars.

“It’s three females and a calf. The calf’s only about a month old, but it’s already got dorsal scarring.”

“Shark attack?”

“The shark probably regrets it. Remember the orca that killed a white shark off the coast of South Africa, just to eat its liver? Imagine what would happen if a female’s defending her calf.”

The binoculars came around to her (“You’re the new volunteer? Welcome to MORI! Let me show you the trick to getting these ancient things to focus. . .”) and Isabel successfully located the calf and its scars. Then she tilted the dual magnified lenses back toward the shore.Closer, scanning through the kelp forest. But no humanoid seals breached the water. Wes and his camera were likely submerged. He’d stay under for longer than she could claim the binoculars, so she passed them on, before extracting her phone from her pocket. She retreated from the group to shield her screen while she typed.

Isabel Wright

A pod of orcas is passing through the canyon. They’re ninety meters beyond the kelp.

She didn’t warn him to be careful. There were no documented attacks of wild orcas on humans in the open ocean. The apex predators weren’t cruel or vindictive without biological cause.

Unlike whoever was secretly experimenting on octopuses at MORI.

She edged back into the lab. Weaving between biofarm tanks and trays of kelp starts beginning their growth in sunlight by the windows, she scanned a maze of abandoned research stations. Which of the scientists exclaiming over the calf’s injuries outside had sliced off their octopus’s arms? Which of them had hurt her?

She sent another message to Wes.

Isabel