Ben moved faster than I expected, which was saying something. He came from behind the door, a blur of navy shirt and latex-gloved hands and caught Mark by the biceps. Mark struggled, but Ben had the leverage, and in one expert motion, he jabbed the syringe into the soft inside of Mark’s forearm.
It was not the kind of drug that knocked you out right away. It paralyzed, locking the skeletal muscles in place, but left the brain outside the blood-brain barrier untouched. I saw the recognition on Mark’s face as the first wave of paralysis hit—the jaw slackening, the whites of his eyes showing stark against the panic blooming there.
“You’ll be able to hear me, Mark,” I said, moving into his field of vision. I took his glasses off, folded them, set them gently on the counter next to the quarantine tank. “This is a neuromuscular blocking agent. In about thirty seconds, you’ll be unable to move. In about two minutes, you’ll be completely paralyzed. But you will feel everything. You’ll be aware of everything. Isn’t that exciting?”
He tried to lurch, but his legs gave out as the nerves in his thighs went dead. Ben caught him before he could crumple to the floor, eased him down with a gruff sort of care, and arranged him so the paralysis would set in with the minimum chance of skull fracture or embarrassing loss of urine. Even in the final moments of its victim, Ben’s professionalism was absolute.
I crouched next to Mark, watching the diaphragm fight for one, two, three more breaths before the involuntary spasms set in. The muscles of the chest hitched, a grotesque choreography, then stilled. His tongue lolled, eyes bugging from the effort to scream.
“Good,” I said, patting his shoulder. “You’re acclimating well. This is what researchers call ‘lock-in syndrome,’” I explained, tapping two fingers lightly on his forehead. “Unlike true brain death, you’ll be able to process everything right up until the last synaptic flicker. Some researchers think the subject’s awareness is actually heightened in this state. Every tick of the clock, every shift of light, every thrum of your pulse… and I imagine each microgram of pain, too.”
Mark’s gaze darted around in panic.
“Now, I want you to know, this isn’t personal. You could have minded your own business. You could have let Cove just have his opportunity. But you had to chase, didn’t you? You couldn’t leave it alone. I do respect that—‘the pursuit of knowledge at all costs’—but you understand, Mark, that you are now a specimen. That’s all.”
His head rolled to the side; the only movement left to him before the real fun started. He would sense every word, every gesture, every spike of my attention—and he would remember it, if only for the few hours of consciousness I gifted him.
I leaned in close, lips almost brushing the shell of his ear. “Now, you have a few options to choose from. The Hydrophis cyanocinctus—blue-banded sea krait—has a venom ten times more potent than a cobra. Human fatalities from sea snakes are rare, but that’s mainly because they only become aggressive if threatened. An unknown human disrupting the peace of their tank would definitely be considered a threat, I think. Still, in this case, you’d probably die from respiratory failure, not their venom. It typically takes a few hours to become fatal, and you most certainly do not have that much time left.”
He blinked, once, slow as syrup. I took it for assent.
“Or perhaps you’d enjoy the Chironex fleckeri,” I continued, savoring the syllables. “The infamous box jelly, as I’m sure you know. Its venom acts within minutes, and if you’re lucky, your heart stops before your nervous system realizes what’s happening. If you’re less lucky, the pain is so excruciating that even seasoned ER physicians have described grown men begging for bullets. I’ll admit, part of me is curious to see which you would be—not that you’ll be able to beg, of course.”
“There’s a third option,” I added. “Callorhinchus milii, the ghost shark. Not a true shark, but a member of the chimaeras. They have a venomous spine, rare for a chondrichthyan, but I’ve been told the pain is like being filleted with a hot wire. Whilethe literature is limited, there have been accounts of its victims’ amputating limbs in order to escape from the pain. It most likely wouldn’t kill you, unless you have a heart attack from the pain itself.”
Mark’s eyes, which had begun to glaze in self-pity, snapped into sharp, terrified focus again.
I straightened, brushed the dust from Mark’s shoulder with the edge of my cuff and smiled.
“If you had to choose, Mark, how would you prefer to go? Sea snake, jelly, or a nice neat row of ghost shark stings? Maybe one in each limb, to keep it fair, or would you rather I just snap your neck when I get bored?” I watched the war in his eyes, the animal scrabble for a line out—a denial, a protest, some last-minute bargain—but his body, hollowed out by the paralysis, could only drool and sag.
I turned to Ben, who admittedly looked fed up with me. He’d told me before that the way I become so animated when I’m about to kill is something deserving of a horror movie.
“Stay with him,” I instructed Ben. “If he goes into arrest, you know what to do. I need to go have a discussion with Cove.”
26
Cove
I was supposed to be using my break to nap before the afternoon tank checks, but I’d never learned how to rest the right way. Instead, I let the hours pass in a kind of trance, watching the old BBC nature documentaries I’d grown up with, the ones with the grainy footage and the mid-Atlantic narrators who made even the most graphic violence of the animal kingdom sound like a bedtime story. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes and listened, I could almost convince myself I was a kid again, back in California, the damp night air coming in off the bay, and absolutely nothing about my life was strange or dangerous.
A soft knock broke the spell.
I muted the TV and waited. Tobias didn’t bother with the usual “may I come in?”—he just opened the door and stepped inside, moving with that predatory grace he reserved for the times he wanted something from me.
He sat on the edge of my bed, close enough that his thigh brushed mine. “Did I interrupt?”
“No.” My voice was hoarse. I cleared my throat. “Just watching TV.”
He looked at the screen, registering the footage in a heartbeat. “You always did like the cephalopods best.”
I nodded.
Tobias smiled, and for a second, I saw the man I’d first met at the public aquarium, the one who’d asked more questions than he answered and seemed to swallow every detail whole. “How are you feeling today?”
I shrugged. “Fine. Just a little tired.”
He reached over and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead, a gesture that made me lean into his touch. “You’ve been so good lately,” he said, voice calm and coaxing. “So perfect. I hope you know how proud of you I am.”
