Page 77 of The Captain
Screens went black in a polite cascade. The room shrank. The gray suit lifted a hand and the sailors moved the way men move when they’ve practiced clearing people out without calling it that.
“This is my facility,” I said, and my voice came out too calm, which is how I knew I was in trouble.
“Operational control has shifted,” the suit replied, the kind of phrase that doesn’t bruise because it never gets close enough to touch you. “We need the room.”
McGuire stepped in front of me a half-inch, a palm out at no one in particular. “Doc stays on standby,” she said. “On campus.”
Standby. Campus. Words that let men feel like they were handing you something while they took the thing you actually wanted.
I could have fought harder. I have a whole drawer full of sharp. But Jacob’s last syllable was still vibrating in me and I knew if I opened my mouth to use a knife, a sob might fall out instead.
“Fine,” I said. “You know where to find me when you remember whose house you’re in.”
The gray suit blinked like I was weather. Langford didn’t meet my eyes. McGuire did. There was apology in hers and something that wasn’t apology at all. It looked like a promise she hated owing.
I backed out before anyone could watch my face break. The hallway’s concrete was cool through my soles. I told myself to keep moving. I told myself to find the thing that had saved me every time before: work.
The pen aisle was its own country. Light slanted. Pumps hummed like distant bees. Water ticked against rubber, that small, patient sound that has carried me through nights I don’t wish on people I love.
“Numbers?” I heard myself ask before I rounded the post.
“Stable on the calf,” Becca said, not turning because she knows that saying a thing without looking up can keep a fragile truth from shattering. “Breaths forty-four, even. She took fluids. The bottlenose is at twenty-two a minute, every third with a catch.”
Miguel stood hip-deep in the big pen, hands on the sling line, posture like a prayer. Tamika leaned on the rail, radio tilted away from her mouth, head cocked. She was listening for me.
“Doctor?” she said, voice low.
I gave them a nod that was supposed to mean I’m fine. It meant I’m vertical.
The quiet room smelled like water, iodine, canvas, exhaustion. The little Kogia blinked her coin-dark eye like she was deciding if we were still the same people who had promised her morning after morning that our hands could be trusted.
“Bonjour, petite,” I said, voice gone thready. “C’est moi.”
I slid two fingers to that soft spot behind her eye and laid my palm along her flank. Warm under the film of salt. That piece of her lifted when the breath chose her, and something inside me unclenched half a finger’s width. My body does this trade automatically now—your lungs move, my shoulders drop. It’s a ridiculous economy. It’s the only one that’s ever made sense to me.
“Count,” Tamika said from the doorway, like she was giving me a job that was actually a life raft. “Out loud.”
“One,” I said, on the exhale. “Two.” I used the numbers like stones across a river. “Three.”
Jacob’s voice had been stripped to the muscle when it hit my headset.Blue-Three on hull. I’d known that version of him for a short time, and I’d recognize it across the ocean.
If I lost him, I would never forgive the ocean for taking something I offered it delicate. More dangerous—I would never forgive myself for asking.
I tucked the blanket higher at the Kogia’s pectoral, checked the rim of her blowhole for grit, flicked away one stubborn grain that wanted to be a problem. “Good girl,” I murmured. “Tu respires. That’s your whole job.”
Footsteps. The sound my father makes when he’s trying not to be heavy. He didn’t come in. He stood just outside the threshold and let the doorframe take his lean.
“Ma fille,” he said.
“Je sais,” I said without turning. Because I did. He’s lived long enough to understand there are rooms where even the best men can’t carry anything for you.
The calf’s chest rose. Fell. Rose.
I breathed with her because that has worked for everything that has ever mattered to me. I let the numbers pool and sort themselves. When I got to ten, I started again.
Somewhere on the other side of concrete and command, men were making decisions too fast and too quietly. A machine I didn’t consent to had to be convinced to release the body I would like to keep. The thought lit up a narrow corridor of rage in me, bright enough to see by.
“Tamika,” I said, still not turning, “if the Navy tries to move gear into this room, you will set them on fire.”
