The water and air temperatures rose some after we left Isla Guadelupe for waters further south where Blue would give birth to her pups. I could feel anticipation building in her as her sides continued to swell like a balloon. She took us into the shallow waters near Isla Cedros with a single minded instinct. We said our goodbyes on the way to the birthing waters, both of us knowing that Blue would have to leave as soon as the pups were out of her or run the risk of eating them. Instincts drive white sharks in may things and cannibalism is one of them.

From the rocky ocean bottom to the shores of Isla Cedros, I found things to add to my collection of goods, making sure to dry everything before putting into my nearly full dry bag. More clothing, a couple pairs of shoes including some tennis shoes that fit well and some flipflops that were tolerable. Though the toe thing- how do people tolerate that, it feels so weird. Most of my time on land I wore the tennis shoes.

The sky was lit with stars that looked close enough to touch when Blue went into labor. I felt her snarl in pain as she shuddered from dorsal fin to snout and back. From hearing women in labor over the guards’ TV sessions and what I’d seen in educational videos shown to me by the researchers, it would be a long, drawn out process.

It wasn’t. They just wiggled out on their own really and Blue swam off on her own to seas beyond the warm birthing waters. She’d said it would be fast but I was still surprised. I sent her with my well wishes and love before turning to the four lives that were now entwined with mine.

There were three males and a female, and she was easily bigger than her brothers. Like her mother, she scoffed at the idea of staying with me and took off on her own almost as soon as she was free. I later called her Rogue after one of the comic book characters I’d seen because of a white slash across her caudal fin.

Her brothers swam around each other then around me, their instincts and minds clearly puzzled by a voice they’d heard through the last months of their development. I coaxed them to me with chunks of fish and soft touches. The three boys chose to stay with me, and I was confronted with a quandary.

What did I call them? Blue had a name when I met her and Rogue’s seemed obvious but these other pups’ did not. I didn’t even have a name myself, more a designation for that matter. But names came to me over the next couple days for the pups.

The eldest of the three had a starburst of spots on his caudel fin, so I named him Star. The younger two were nearly identical on their coloration. The only difference was an almost helix like pattern on the youngest’s fin, so he became Helix and the middle pup I named Malcom. The guards had liked a show with a middle kid bearing that name, and as the pups didn’t care, it worked.

We hunted together, the three of them plus me taking down larger prey than any than they could have alone. Their sister came around occasionally to help but only if the pay off was worth it.

Like the grouper that lunged at Helix as we passed by a reef, scaring him and filling me with anger from tendril to toes. It proved to be a fatal error on the groupers part. That grouper, a good ten feet and the largest I’ve seen before or since, probably didn’t plan to eat my pup, but that wasn’t the point.

No one, not man nor beast nor fish, messes with my pups.

I whirled in the water and wrapped a tendril around the grouper’s right pectoral fin. At my direction, Helix got away from the head while Malcom attacked the other pectoral fin. Blood began to cloud the water as I braced my feet against the now thrashing grouper and began to pull. It tasted like iron across my tongue and gills. Yes, I can taste what I’m breathing twice, can’t you?

Helix circled around and began to bite at the grouper’s underbelly as Star slammed into the grouper’s left gills, knocking the wind out of the much larger fish. It managed to shake us off and tried to swim away.

Rogue had other plans.

She came up from below and slammed her smaller body into the groupers tenderized belly and bit down. Her thrashing pulled out a semicircle of skin and the rest of began round two of our attacks. I wrapped tendrils around the body and shredded the groupers fins as the boys took turns with their sister at hitting the belly again and again. A fish without fins cannot swim. A fish without guts can’t either.

Soon the grouper floated limp in the water, his entrails streaming out. I kept the pups from the sides as I carved filets from the fish for myself which they didn’t mind. It had been a female grouper and the nutrient rich eggs she was full of were a delight to the young sharks. A few older shark pups tried to bully mine out of their feeding rotations but a sharp smack with my tendril kept them far enough away for us to eat our fill.

Rogue took off again after eating her fill, full of satisfaction. The boys and I left the still substantial carcass for others to scavenge from and swam back to the small bay on the island where I’d left my gear.

It was a rocky place with a few clumps of scrub brush and hills rising sharply from the water in most places. There was a larger island to the west where fishermen and their families spent the fishing months but no one was on the smaller one. My pups lazed in the bay, drifting among the kelp beds and staying away from the various seals and sea lions that lived on the wider beaches of both islands. I’d heard on a nature show that some type of seal was endangered, and we didn’t take prey from those populations if I could avoid it. Kids had to eat but we only took seals if they were injured or weak.

The pups may not be ecologically minded, but I was discovering that I was. And those were safer kills for the most part. And before someone asks, no, I don’t use the spear guns on animals. That wouldn’t be… fair? Ethical? Whatever, I don’t do it. On humans though, that’s another topic entirely.

I understand that mankind has a relationship with the sea. Some do everything they can to save it, even if that puts them into legal troubles.

Others do all they can to exploit, damage, maim and destroy it for profit. It rarely seems to put them into legal troubles.

We’d find this out as we moved further south, hunting near the costal shallows and further out to sea as was available. The instincts of the pups were driving them south, around the tip of Baja and into the Sea of Cortez. There were more humans there. The chance of interaction was going to increase and I knew it. I also knew that I had no idea how to properly interact with humans so that would have to change. There was a form of protection to being in Mexico since the company was banned from the country by both the cartels and the government. They’d fucked up that badly.

Around the tip of Baja is where I found my tablet that I’m using to write this. I’d gone ashore one evening, wearing a swimsuit I’d slipped into off shore and I pulled my tennis shoes once I was out of the surf. A bag was left in the sands but it had no identification and the tablet looked new. I quickly opened it, saw it was connected to hotel’s Wi-Fi and also had no identification stored on it. Checking the security and about menus let me see it was only a few days out of the box and didn’t have a missing alert set up. I slipped it into a messenger bag I’d found weeks ago alongside my dry bag.

After making sure my backpack was secure and my tendrils hidden within (which isn’t pleasant but better than causing massive freak ups among the humans), I followed signs up the beach to the hotel. There was some kind of party going on, rainbow lights lit the sands I walked over to get to the hotel.

I acted as if I was supposed to be there, just like every other person dancing in the dark. I made my way around the party and inside to the main desk and was far from the only damp person inside. I asked if anyone was missing a tablet and the woman at the desk laughed.

“These kids have so much money they don’t care,” she said, dark eyes flashing. “And if there’s no names or anything logged on, we can’t track it. Congratulations, you now have a tablet.”

This sentiment was echoed by multiple other employees and a few of the guests who overheard me asking. I eventually gave up asking and accepted the orphaned tablet was now mine. I sat down at a table in the café, made sure they would take American currency and ordered a burger with fries. You’d be surprised how much money one finds in lost wallets, on its own and once, loaded into a sunken cooler. That money let me blend in better and I spent my time waiting by resetting the tablet. I signed up for an email account, set up a tumblr at the recommendation of a waitress and started writing down my story. The first chapters were rough to write. And I admit I held a lot back.

I could have gone into my childhood at the hands of scientists more interested in what I was than who I was. I could go into detail about guards who tortured other inhabitants but left me alone because of who my maternal unit was.

But I don’t want to give them power over me. There are better things to focus on in life and I want to live mine.

The juicy burger was such a sharp contrast from fish, kelp, abalone and crustaceans that I leaned back and sighed happily. The waitress saw me and her lips curved in a smile. I guess she told the kitchen, because I could feel them watching me as I finished everything on the plate except a sprig of parsley. They even sent out more fries and a slice of something the waitress said was cheesecake. I’d never had it before and it tasted nothing like cheese but if that’s what they called that rich cool creaming amazement on a plate, so be it. I left a couple twenty dollar bills on the table and stashed the tablet inside the dry bag in my messenger bag. Part of me felt itchy, like I would have to run even though nothing around me seemed threatening and I knew the pups were safe in a nearby trench, snoozing away as they digested our latest catch.

My tendrils were cramped and I hit one of the bathrooms to let them out, stretching them within the confines of the rather elaborate bathroom. I folded them away into the backpack around the messenger bag, using a Velcro tab I’d put into both sides of the backpack’s back. In front of the mirror I ran a hand through my ebony braids, the overhead lights making the green undertones appear stronger. My skin was darkly tanned from weeks (months?) at sea and my eyes, a peridot green, were bright against it.

I added a pair of shorts and a near backless shirt over my now dry swimsuit. Half the guests I saw were wearing tiny swimsuits and the other half were fully clothed so I didn’t fret over my state of dress. What I was wearing would also be safe to swim in if I had to make a break for it.

The sound of the music drew me back outside. I wasn’t used to music beyond classical recordings so the live thumping beat of what I would later learn was a house mix drew me like a moth to light. I moved to the sea side edge of the crowd, just in case. It wasn’t paranoia if someone might really be out to get you.

The music thrums through my body as I move, hips shaking in a shimmy I didn’t know I had in me. It took more focus than I like to admit keeping my tendrils in my backpack, though I’d look this music up later so I could dance on the island away from humans after downloading it.

For now though, I let the music sweep me up, eyes half closed as I felt the base thrum through my body, lips upcurved in a smile of joy.

Then she was there, moving up to me as I danced on the outskirts of the party. Dark eyes flashed in the strobing rainbow lights, her hair in a responsive ponytail high on her head. A delicate hand was held out to me and I startled to a stop.

“Dance with me,” she said in California tinged English and laughed. “You’re so beautiful, the way you move.”

“I don’t know how to dance with someone else,” I admitted, head tilted to the side as I looked her up and down. My eyes fell on her lips when she spoke next.

“I’ll teach you.”

And she did.