Page 17 of The Captain
“Dr. A?” Becca said, softer now. “The network line blew up five minutes ago—two separate calls, south of Folly. Possible strandings. Could be the same animal moving … but they sound like fresh reports.”
Of course, they did. The tonal in my hand, the rip still crawling the channel—it all wanted to be part of the same sentence.
“Okay,” I said, already moving. “Call Tamika. Split crews. You take the truck with the short sling and the umbrella. I’ll take the skiff with the quiet motor and meet you at the second site. Text me GPS pins when you have eyes.”
“Copy.” She didn’t move. “Dr. A?”
“Hm?”
Her gaze flicked to my wet tank, the way it clung, then to my face, earnest and worried. “You’re shaking.”
I looked down at my hands. Not tremor, not adrenaline. The after-echo of water and memory. I rinsed them in the creek, let the cool water bite. “That’s just the ocean,” I said, and gave her the smallest smile I had. “It likes to keep a piece.”
She grinned back, relief loosening her shoulders.
We split—her to the yard for the rescue kit, me down the dock to the skiff Atlas had quietly placed for us, motor muffledto a purr low enough not to matter to anything with a heartbeat. I tossed the lines, thumbed the starter, and pushed off, the hull slipping clean into the channel.
Below the planks, the hydrophone still recorded. In my pocket, the contractor tag warmed against my skin. In my head, a voice saidBreathe, and I did.
I idled the skiff past the dock light and let the creek take me, the hull shivering under my knees. Atlas’s people had stocked her exactly the way I’d asked—throw bag, stretcher poles, spare towels, a quiet motor that purred instead of bragged. They’d done it fast, too. A small, neat promise kept.
Becca’s pins blinked onto my phone screen—first report at the Washout, already drawing a crowd; second at the north spit of Morris Island, boat access only. Good. Give me the one without a hundred hands.
I clipped the handset off the dash and thumbed the button. The new channel label blinked back at me: 7–Delta, the one Ryker had promised in an hour and delivered in forty minutes. “Seven-Delta from Allard,” I said. “Skiff outbound to Morris. Request perimeter on arrival—light touch, keep drones down.”
Static hissed; then his voice, dry as a good gin. “Copy, Doctor. Two plainclothes are staged east of the light. They’ll set a soft line and vanish.”
“Make them useful,” I said. “If I see a phone over my shoulder, I’ll use it as a doorstop.”
A beat that felt like a smile. “Understood.”
I set the radio back in its bracket and opened the throttle. The marsh opened brown and gold on either side, spartina flaring in the early sun. Wind climbed under my tank and dragged across skin still too aware after last night. The boat cut a clean V toward the mouth of the harbor, gulls lifting lazy in our wake.
At the mouth, the ocean made her opinion known—bigger chop, a shoulder in the water that said push if you want, but you’ll ask me nicely first. “Please,” I said into the wind, and aimed for the long low smear of sand that was Morris at low tide.
At fifty yards out, I killed the engine and drifted the last stretch in silence. The hull kissed sand with a soft, intimate scrape. No tourists—just a pair of fishermen standing well back and a man with a tripod halfway down the beach. Ten paces off my bow, two men pretended to argue about bait. Atlas’s detail, right where they said they’d be. They didn’t look at me. They didn’t have to.
The stranded animal lay in the swash. Small. Blunt-headed. Skin the color of a storm. Not a bottlenose—Kogia, I thought, even before the distinctive lower jaw eased my doubts. Pygmy sperm whale. My stomach did that tight, awful thing it did when a brain already knew something a heart didn’t want to accept. Kogia didn’t strand because they were clumsy. They stranded because the world had gone wrong around them.
“Hey,” I said, sliding over the gunwale into water that took my thighs with gusto. “Stay with me.”
The fishermen edged back when I lifted a hand without looking. Atlas’s guys drifted wider, quiet and sure, until the tripod guy saw his angle disappear. His mouth went flat, but he stayed. Fine. He could film what I wanted America to see—the towels, the patience, the way we asked for mercy with our hands.
I waded in until the next wave broke against me and then knelt, feet sinking with a satisfaction that felt like a sigh. The whale’s eye was open and too still. I eased a wet towel over her back and spoke nonsense in French because the words that mattered were all numbers and there would be time for those later.
“Calm,” I said to myself as much as her. “Breathe. Breathe.”
My body did as it was told. Air in, out, long, deliberate. Jacob’s voice tried to lace through mine, low and impossible and useful. I let it. If I was going to be haunted, it might as well buy me oxygen.
I checked the belly for abrasions, the pectoral tone, the reflex at the lower jaw. Pup response was slow but there. Respiration rate too high. A bruise flowered along the flank where surf had rolled her wrong. Nothing obvious, but with Kogia, the damage liked to hide where you couldn’t touch it.
“Camille!” Tamika’s voice rode the wind from way down the beach, breathless and bright. She jogged toward us with an umbrella and a kit slung across her chest, cheeks flushed, hair escaping its braid. “Washout is holding—Becca’s a machine. This one’s small.”
“Kogia,” I said. “We keep her upright. Blowhole clear. No torque on the spine. We let the next wave do the lifting—we don’t.”
Tamika’s eyes went soft the way they did when the hard part finally had a shape. “Copy.”
We worked. Shade up. Towels. A quick check of the mouth. The whale shifted with a low, breathy sound. I ran two fingers just behind the eye and felt a muscle jump against my touch. Good.
