Page 16 of The Captain
My head was a storm of questions—Camille, the Navy, this place, these men—but for now, I’d go along. I’d watch. I’d learn. And when the time came, I’d decide what to do with the answers.
The yacht’s engine purred, the dock creaking under our steps. The harbor shimmered, and somewhere out there, Camille was fighting her war. I didn’t know where I fit in hers, or in this place, but I’d find out. One way or another.
7
CAMILLE
Ibeat the detail’s SUV back to the facility and parked crooked, keys in my fist.
Inside, the team moved with the hush of a church. Our dolphin’s breaths still came too fast, but the numbers had edged in the right direction: fractional drop in lactate, color better. Not salvation. Not doom. The tightrope in between.
“Hold steady,” I told Becca, scanning the chart. “Half-bump fluids. Dim the lights.”
“Copy.” She hesitated. “You okay?”
“I will be,” I said, and wasn’t sure if I meant the dolphin or myself. “I’m going to check the pen nets and the dock line. Radio me if he dips.”
Outside, the creek lay flat as hammered metal. I ducked into the locker, ditched the Dominion Hall skirt for quick-dry shorts, and swapped flats for neoprene booties under hard-sole water shoes. I clipped the dive knife to my belt, hit the ladder, and slid in—the cold smacking me awake.
The current caught my calves first, then my thighs, a sly hand trying to turn me. A little stronger than forecast. I adjusted,palms skimming the piling, a small smile at the corner of my mouth because the ocean always did this—tested and teased, never content with the plan you brought her.
I pushed off toward the outer pen. A snag flashed—a twist of monofilament in the net seam. I went under, and the water took me in. Sound narrowed to heart and hush. Sight went soft at the edges. It felt like being held and warned in the same breath.
Halfway there, the current sharpened, grabbing me by the knees in a rip that wanted me angled wrong.
“Parallel, Camille,” I said into the bubbles.
I slid sideways, counted strokes, lungs pulling, heat building, and let the rip spend itself against my stubbornness. When the pressure eased, I surfaced, palm on the pen float, laughing once—short, bright, alive.
I hung there a beat, water lapping the insides of my thighs, the sun a warm hand on my throat. The ache that lived under my sternum shifted, became something I didn’t feel like naming in daylight. Last night flickered—breath in my ear, the way my body had answered before my mouth did.
I set my forehead to the float and let myself have thirty seconds that had nothing to do with science. My free hand slid lower, only as far as necessary to quiet what the water and the memory had woken. Not a finish. A tether. The heel of my palm pressed, a small, private relief. My breath stuttered, then evened. I bit the inside of my lip and stared at the sky so I wouldn’t make a sound.
“Enough,” I told myself, because it was. I wasn’t here for fantasy. I was here to cut and mend.
I dove. The monofilament was a mean, invisible mess knotted into the seam. I worked the blade low and careful, feeling the vibration travel up my forearm when the line parted. A scrap of plastic flickered in the tangle. I snagged it: a little rectangle stamped with a contractor’s name I didn’t like seeingthis close to my animals. I tucked it into my top, surfaced clean, and swam for the ladder.
By the time I climbed out, the breeze had picked up, skimming gooseflesh along my arms. My carefully knotted hair had slipped into a wet rope. I popped it loose and squeezed water from the strands with both hands, laughing again, softer. The good kind of tremble. I felt present—inside my body and inside the day.
On the dock, I propped a foot on the lower rung and set to work, muscle and mind back in their lanes. Knife away, tag on the planks, phone out.
I snapped a quick photo of the plastic rectangle with the contractor logo and time-stamped it. Then I forwarded to Pincense:This was tangled in our pen seam. Explain.
Three gray dots blinked, paused, blinked again, then vanished. Of course, they did.
“Dr. A!” Becca’s voice carried across the yard, bright with effort and the edge of adrenaline. She jogged down the dock, ponytail haloed with humidity, hydrophone case banging against her thigh. “You said call if he dipped, but … he didn’t. You need to see this, anyway.”
She skidded to a stop, breath coming fast. I took the recorder from her and scrolled. Clean noise floor, wind, water, the gentle percussive of a distant motor—and there. A rise: not ship bass, not weather. A narrow-band tonal ramp sawing up into a frequency that didn’t belong inside any pause box we’d been promised.
“What time?” I asked, though the screen said it plainly.
“Zero-eight-thirteen.” She swallowed. “Inside the corridor they gave us.”
I felt the universe settle around the sound the way it always did when a thing you feared decided to show you its face. Heat climbed my throat, anger sharp and precise. “Save the raw file tothree drives,” I said. “One with chain-of-custody to the minute. One offsite. One that lives on your person until I have you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
Her mouth quirked. “Yes, ma’am.”
I touched the edge of the recorder, gentle, like it might bruise. The tonal sat there on the graph, ugly and elegant, a confession without a speaker. The world around us carried on—boat masts pinging, flag snapping, the small noises a facility makes when it keeps doing the next right thing. I breathed through my teeth and imagined pressing that sound against the neat little boxes on Pincense’s map until something finally tore.
