Page 1 of The Captain
1
CAMILLE
The tide lapped at my calves, warm and insistent, as if it meant to pull me farther out than I was willing to go.
My rubber boots filled with seawater, anyway, a pointless effort at staying dry, but I didn’t care. I had bigger things to worry about than sand in my socks.
The dolphin lay just ahead, half-submerged in the foam line, its slick gray skin glinting under the early-morning sun. Young—maybe two years, no older than three. Still small enough that I could cradle its head if I needed to, but big enough that the wrong kind of stress would kill it before rescue transport even arrived.
“Easy, sweetheart,” I whispered, my accent still thick after all these years. France lingered on my tongue, vowels lilting in ways Charleston never quite managed to erase. “Stay with me.”
The animal’s sides rose and fell too fast. Panic. Disorientation. I knew the signs.
Behind me, a handful of onlookers gathered at the edge of the dunes, phones raised, their chatter a grating soundtrack. I didn’t turn. I’d learned long ago that you can’t stop peoplefrom gawking, only from interfering. My job wasn’t to manage their spectacle—it was to keep this dolphin breathing until the stranding network truck arrived.
I adjusted the damp towel I’d draped over its back to keep the skin from burning. The dolphin twitched, spraying me with a weak puff of brine through its blowhole. My shirt clung instantly, transparent, nipples peaking against the wet fabric. I cursed under my breath. Fieldwork was never glamorous, but somehow the ocean always found ways to strip me bare.
“Camille! You need hands?” Becca Clarke’s voice carried on the wind, bright and breathless. She was my newest intern—sharp mind, long legs, always running late.
“Gloves first,” I called without looking up. “And saline. Eyes every two minutes.”
I slid my palm lower along the dolphin’s flank, feeling for tone, for the subtle, trembling resilience that meant the body hadn’t given up yet. Warmth bled into my skin—alive, alive, alive—and the tight coil in my chest loosened by a hair.
A wave sloshed over my knees, then my thighs. Sand sucked at my heels. The sea had a way of making everything intimate. It licked and pressed and insisted. It coated you in salt until even the inside of your mouth tasted like a kiss you couldn’t get rid of.
Becca splashed to my side, cheeks flushed, blonde ponytail dark with spray. She knelt and fumbled with the bottle. “Sorry, there was a crowd by the access path.”
“We’ll deal with that later.” I took the bottle and blinked saline across the dolphin’s eye, careful, steady. “For now, we keep him calm.”
“What do you think caused it?” she asked. “Boat strike?”
“Not this one.” The skin was clean. No prop gouges, no sharp trauma. “Acoustic disorientation is my bet.”
Becca grimaced. “Sonar?”
“Don’t say it like a question,” I murmured. A gull wheeled overhead and screamed. “Say it like an indictment.”
She swallowed. “Sonar.”
I let the word settle in my bones.
A man from the dune line shouted, “Shouldn’t you push it back in the water?” Another chimed in, “It’s drowning out here!”
I didn’t turn. “He’s not drowning,” I said, loud enough to carry, soft enough to soothe the animal beneath my hands. “He’s a mammal. He breathes air. If we push him out while he’s disoriented, he’ll panic and aspirate seawater. Or beach again, harder.” I stroked the smooth skin behind the pectoral fin. The dolphin’s heartbeat thrummed against my palm, desperate and electric. “Help is on the way.”
“Ma’am, do you have a permit to touch it?” someone else hollered, faux-concern wrapped in the nasally tone of a man who wanted to be right more than kind.
I finally glanced up, lips tight. “Yes.”
Becca snorted, then smoothed her face when I cut her a look. Her hands moved with more confidence now, saline, towel, whisper, repeat. She kept her voice low and sweet, the way I taught her, and it calmed the tiny muscles around the dolphin’s eye.
“Transport is ten out,” she said, checking the text that buzzed in her pocket. “Traffic at the Folly bridge.”
I exhaled through my nose. Ten minutes was fine—an eternity, but fine. “When they get here, we’ll roll him on the stretcher from the surf side. Minimal torsion. I want a blood gas and a quick stat lactate before they move.”
“Copy.”
I could feel the stare from the dunes, the collective attention that prickled across skin like sunburn. People loved a rescue if it fit in a vertical video with a hopeful soundtrack. They didn’t love the parts where, days later, the animal turned septic and slippedaway while you were changing out a catheter. They didn’t love the necropsy, how you cut and measured and weighed and traced insult through tissue with your gloved fingers, cataloging the way a human agenda could echo in an animal’s bones.
