Page 26 of The Captain
“Pretty much,” he said, already heading toward the bridge. “Don’t screw it up, Marine. She’s a lot, but I bet she’s worth it.”
He disappeared, leaving me with the bag and the hum of the engines. The coastline grew closer, Charleston’s skyline sharpening—palmettos, church steeples, the faint outline of Dominion Hall’s stone walls.
I wondered what Camille would think when I showed up, duffel in hand, like some errand boy for her cause. Would she laugh that throaty laugh? Or would she look at me like I was the enemy, another cog in the machine she was fighting? I didn’t know which would be worse.
TheEclipseslowed, easing toward the dock, the crew moving with that same silent precision. I gripped the duffel’s strap, my eyes on the shore. Marcus’s words about family echoed, mixing with the ache in my chest, the one that had followed me from Montana to every warzone I’d ever walked through.
Brothers take care of brothers, he’d said, but I didn’t know what that meant here. Not yet.
I thought about Camille again—her fire, her fight, the way she’d claimed me last night like it was her right. She wasn’t justa one-night lapse; she was a current, pulling me somewhere I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.
And Caleb—my brother, my blood, keeping secrets in a city I’d been dragged to without warning. I needed to call him, get answers, figure out what game these Dominion Hall guys were playing.
The yacht’s hull kissed the dock, a soft scrape of wealth against wood. I stepped off, duffel in hand.
Marcus called from the bridge, “Give her hell, Jacob! But, you know, politely!”
I raised a hand, not turning, my face still impassive. The harbor shimmered, the air thick with salt and possibility. Camille was out there, fighting her war, and now I was supposed to be her liaison.
Ally or enemy, I didn’t know yet. But I’d find out.
11
CAMILLE
By late afternoon, the day wore me like a wet shirt.
I went straight from my father’s office to the water, trading the smell of diesel and hot steel for iodine and rubber. The facility breathed around me, a body doing all the quiet things a body does to stay alive—air pumps, low voices, the soft slap of water in pens. My own body fell into the rhythm without being asked.
Our dolphin—juvenile bottlenose, we confirmed once we’d had a better look at his dentition and rostrum—held a line I could live with. Respiration was still high, but the spikes were less frantic, the lactate crept down like an apology. We’d run warm fluids through the peduncle catheter with a gentleness I didn’t always show people. I adjusted his sling, smoothed the towel over his dorsal where the sun wouldn’t find him, and counted breaths with my fingers on his skin until my pulse synced with his. I spoke to him in French because it made my mouth kinder than my mood.
Bottlenose were our regulars here. Kogia were the heartbreak cases.
Down the row, the Kogia lay in the quiet pen—a world where the lights stayed low and the sound behaved. She was smaller than the bottlenose and twice as haunted. Pygmy sperm whales never stranded for petty reasons. Her rate had come off the ceiling, pupils less fixed, but the cost was there in every breath—like she’d run a long way and couldn’t stop even after she fell. We’d kept her upright with the sling, kept her blowhole clean and high, kept everything slow. No heroics. Kogia don’t forgive heroics.
“Eight minutes,” Becca murmured at my shoulder, meaning since the last breath I’d been willing to call easy. She stood close enough to be useful, far enough to let me work—learning the dance.
Pride and fear were the twin streams running under every mentor’s ribs. I felt both and tried not to let either flood the room.
“Note the decrease,” I said. “Don’t celebrate it.”
She nodded and scribbled, hair stuck to her temple in damp golden strands. “The hydrophone copy’s on three drives,” she added quietly. “One on me, one in the lab safe, one in Miguel’s truck glovebox.”
“Good.” It came out like a blessing. “Chain-of-custody log?”
“Started and signed. You’re next.”
I signed without lifting my gaze from the pen. The raw file lived like a heartbeat in my head. My father’s words rode under it:a conclusion faster than the facts is a kind of superstition.
I hated that he was right. I loved that he was right.
Tamika slid up the aisle, already reading me. “False alarm stayed false,” she reported. “Tourists at the Washout got their drama fix from a pelican stealing a churro. We converted three of them into donors with a QR code and your ‘compliance isn’t mercy’ speech. I paraphrased.”
I huffed a laugh that was half sigh. “Good. Any word from Pincense?”
“PDF dump,” she said. “Half nouns missing, just like you predicted. But there’s enough to make a breadcrumb trail, and McGuire added a handwritten note: ‘Happy to walk you through what we can share in person.’ Her 1600 invite’s still on.”
McGuire’s note soothed a piece of me I hadn’t realized needed soothing. The 1600 pre-brief would be a call—uniforms and Dominion Hall voices on a speaker, not bodies in a room—and I’d have to say my careful words in a careful tone. I’d take it, because the animals needed me to. But right then, the only room I wanted was shallow water and breath.
