“’One who was born by the ocean or has associated with it cannot ever be quite content away from it for very long,’” I read out loud, translating the words into Spanish as I went. The old hardback book felt strange in my hands after spending most of my life with tablets. I looked up from it to Maria’s face. We were discussing essay ideas on her current book-report assignment. “What does that mean?”

“I think he said something similar about Oklahoma in that documentary,” Maria mused. The teen looked out across the water as we slowly chugged north and shrugged. “The sea, it gets into your veins. It owns you. I’ve never lived near the water before coming to you guys but now I feel it everywhere here. I didn’t like visiting the Estelle home because it’s so far from the water. I missed the sea.”

“Very good,” I said, brushing a stray strand of hair back. “Some things, like the sea or the open sky of the central plains, get into your blood. We internalize a piece of that place because it resonates with our soul.”

The back and forth went on for a while longer as she built her essay lay out. From there she’d flesh it out into sentences and paragraphs, then the full paper. The teaching material had given some other essay-crafting method that made no sense to me, so we went with my way. She’d passed her last evaluation testing, so we were on the right track. Peter had been amused the first time we brought out her schoolwork, but I’d sharply reminded him that this wasn’t a pleasure cruise, she had to keep up on her work or she went home. To a probably disappointed Annabella. No one wanted that.

A chirp from my watch ended the conversation as she happily packed away her books and pencils. Maria stowed everything in a dry bag and carried it below deck to the shelf under her birth. I heard the sliding door click back into place before standing up myself. I gave a large stretch, wishing it could be a full one, but my tendrils were stuck in a backpack as it was a bright sunny day on a busy sea.

I joined Peter up at the wheel of the 36’ boat and looked out over the sea. My blood ran hot when I saw fisherman using gill nets. Those damn things were a menace to anything that swam in the sea from a tiny ray to the largest humpback whale. I must have growled out loud because Peter laid a hand on my shoulder.

“I know, Gwen, but we aren’t here to revise the fishing industry down here,” he told me and looked at a map. “Plus, this area is rated as sustainable to fish this year, so they’re in the right spot.”

I saw the lifeless body of a shark pup tossed overboard, an accidental death due to the nets and looked back at Peter. “Think that shark pup thought he was ‘sustainable?’”

“No, he probably didn’t,” Peter answered quietly. “Their families have to eat, too, Gwen. If you take the only legal place to fish away, they’ll do it illegally elsewhere.”

“There are better ways,” I growled and threw up my hands. “It’s not the fishing I hate, it’s the indiscriminate gill nets. Those things kill everything. Not just eating fish.”

“You’ll get your chance to destroy more of the nets,” Peter told me. “It’s part of why I brought you, remember? In addition to the count, there’s a nice bounty on ghost nets- i.e. lost ones.”

“Or ones with owners who are lost,” I added. “Hopefully we’ll break even on the gas after our net finding proceeds.”

“I’m not worried about money,” he said. “I’m making enough from the contract to cover things.”

“I’m not worried about money, exactly,” I said. I hadn’t told him that I was a fair hand at finding sealed coolers that were used in money laundering by the cartels. I can only imagine how furious men had to be to go to a GPS point expecting money or drugs and found only rocks. Because of this, I was far from broke. I even paid taxes on my findings, claiming them as salvaged equipment that I sold. “But I’d rather do my part so there’s money at the end to put into Maria’s pay- she’s got to save up for college. She may start a year or two later than her age mates, but…”

“Can’t be a lawyer if you don’t go to school,” she finished for me, joining us. “And I want to help so I can earn a check at the end of this. I want to protect women and children like I was. That means I’m a lawyer or a social worker and lawyers are more powerful.”

She wanted to be strong enough to help herself and others, understandable goals given her lack of power as a child into her teenage years. It made me pull her into a hug. My voice was just loud enough to be heard over the engines. “You’re going to be a great help to many, no matter what you choose to do.”

She leaned into me for a moment before pulling away. “That’s the plan. What’s our ETA to the vaquita territories? I watched that documentary you sent me, some of the subtitles were wrong. But it was good in a tragic way.”

“Excellent, I thought it was a good look into what we’ll be stepping into,” I said, glad I’d assigned it. “We’re about a day out. When we stop this afternoon, I want you suited up to freedive with me for supper.”

“Sweet,” she said, darting off to get ready. Even though it was only 1300 and we probably had a couple hours until Peter found a good place to moor us for the night. But any excuse to hit the water with me made her happy. We were working on her freediving so she could pull nets with Veronica and I. Veronica was busy with her research (fair enough) and I couldn’t get her out often enough to help me pull up nets. I had to have someone on the dive boat to grab the lines I brought up and to steady the pully system on my little boat. We’d rigged out a similar system for Peter’s boat and needed to test it once we got into our project zone. It was “illegal” and “unethical” to pull up gill nets outside of sanctuaries. Or so I’m told.

We dove for our supper, ate it under a fading sun and watched the stars go by as Peter fired up the engines and started us northward again. We were due into port at 9 am for a meeting with local Navy officials. I wasn’t looking forward to that, meant I was going to have to bind my tendrils around me and that was worse than a backpack. But it would pass most security checks. I’d back out of the meeting if I had to let someone touch me but I doubted it would be that intense.

I was both wrong and right. I had to let them search my laptop bag and walk through a metal detector. No pat downs after passing the second metal detector though. There had been civilian harassment of the naval forces, two marines had been killed out here and the powers that be were obviously on edge.

Maria and I stayed behind Peter, very much the young research assistants. She actually looked older than I did due to being willing to wear makeup. I hate the stuff, though after getting carded while she walked in after Peter with a smile made me threaten to stick her in a barrel in dive sign. One of the two Naval Infantrymen guarding the building busted out laughing at the sign. He was still chuckling when he handed my ID back to me and told me to follow Peter and our liaison.

They tossed out names, babbled back and forth about the local dangers, requirements, and so forth while Maria and I (mostly me) set up their access to my tracking program. It currently showed a whole lot of nothing but that would change. It was similar to the one that Veronica and Mauricio used to track sharks further south but included categories for net locations and boat sightings. It would be interesting to see what data could be collected from the program once things started rolling.

The military tried to stick us with an on-board liaison but both Peter and I vetoed that. He played the “I’m a big alpha male, we got this card.” The powers that be didn’t seem too keen on it but there was little they could do. There were boats out on the water that had Naval attaches in them and were still attacked. It wouldn’t protect us and would stop me from doing my own work freely. Peter was lucky in that regard; he could hide among humans better. But I could breath underwater and talk to its residents, which seemed a fair trade off to me.

I vetoed it after Maria glanced around the room and flinched. She was doing better around stranger men but neither of us liked the idea of a strange person around when we slept. Her reaction told me Maria would find it traumatic so I backed Peter up.

The general in charge grumbled and bitched a bit but as we were civilian contractors with our own boat, there was little he could do. It was a two-hour meeting in total to do something that could have been done in twenty minutes with a email for data explanation.

When we made it out of there, the late afternoon sun was still bright, the sea air full of life and the docks seemed abandoned as we walked back out to the Sulaco. Yes, Peter named his boat the Sulaco and then launched us into a movie marathon night when both Maria and I looked at him like he’d grown a dick on his forehead for demanding to know how we missed the reference. My man loved his 80’s-90’s horror movies. And after watching them, I had a deep appreciation for Ridley Scott’s work myself.

Peter and I were walking hand in hand as Maria cheerfully danced in front of us before stopping suddenly. She tilted her head to one side and then another before kneeling on the dock and leaning over the edge of the wooden structure.

“What are you doing?”

“Do you hear it,” she asked, looking back and forth in the shadows. “I hear something.”

Another stray, I wondered before kneeling to join her in looking. Peter looked around the nearly deserted dock before giving a short bark. The sound was distorted by his human throat, but I guess the animal Maria had heard understood it well enough.

From the shadows came more yelping barks, a distress signal if ever there was one. Peter had to lay a hand on Maria’s shoulder to keep her from diving in. I shucked off my shoes, tossed them onto the Sulaco and handed my messenger bag to Peter. Throwing that would be unwise.

“I’ll get it, Maria,” I said and leapt off the dock. The water felt slick with oil from boats, grime for trash and the smell was unpleasant this close. Making a face, I turned toward the dock, feeling the currents pushing me around. “Peter- call it again. I can’t see it.”

He gave a series of short coughing barks and they were answered from deep under the dock. Wishing I could hold my nose, I swam into the shadows. The stench was worse, but I could hear the animal. I tracked the critter by sound, eyes nearly useless as I was shoved into one pillar after another. I’d be covered with bruises by the end of this, I groaned.

A few moments later, I saw a flash of red, a black darker than the darkness around it and the whites of scared eyes. Shuddering, I pushed aside a clump of decaying something to get to a cooler that was caught under the dock. I pulled the cooler free and after looking around, pulled it to the climb out steps on the Sulaco. Free of the dock’s shadows, I gave a holler for Peter and Maria to come to our boat and looked into the cooler.

A pink tongue licked the water from my cheek as I leaned into the cooler to see a small quadruped with no fur. He was so filthy I couldn’t tell what his actual color would be. My voice was loud as I called out. “I think it’s a puppy. Yo, Peter, a hand here.”

“You have extras,” he said, stepping onto the pull up, hands grabbing onto the cooler’s brim. We held it stable as Maria leaned over to pull the small creature out and onto the deck of the boat.

I would have stuck my tongue out but I what I could see of my skin had a coating that I didn’t want to think about. Instead, I smacked his butt as he climbed back aboard but stayed on the climb up. “I’m going to need you to take us out of the harbor so I can clean off. This stuff is foul.”

“So is he,” Maria said, cuddling the filthy thing to her chest. The puppy seemed delighted to be there, licking her throat and hands. “Do we have enough in the water stores to clean him up?”

“We’ll be in harbor frequently, of course we can,” Peter said, laying a hand on the puppy. His eyes flashed with the light of distant stars for a second and the pup started at him, ears forward. The two seemed to commune for a moment before Pete let out a growl. “He isn’t the right colors, so they just threw him into the water. He’s lucky to be alive.”

“And safely aboard the Sulaco.”

“I’ll call him Jonesy,” Maria announced, wrinkling her nose. “First order of business, a bath and then food.”

I got a mental image of her washing him up in the galley sink before saying, “Take him into the head and wash him up in there. Use the dish soap from the galley, it won’t hurt him.”

“What about you,” Peter asked as Maria walked off, cooing to the beast in her arms.

“If you can get us out of the harbor, I’ll wash off the majority of this crap in open water,” I said. “I don’t want to track harbor water all over the deck. I’m on the verge of throwing up as is.”

“Fair enough,” Peter said with a smirk as he climbed up to the wheel. “You stink.”

“Thanks,” I grumped, pulling my legs up to sit tailor style as he slowly piloted us out of the harbor and away from the humans. A thought struck me and I turned to yell back up to our sweet talking captain. “Can dogs eat fish? Like little baby dogs? If not, what do we feed Jonesy?”

“He’ll do fine on fish and beef for tonight,” Peter said after we got out of the harbor. He cut engines about a mile out from and tossed me my spear fishing rig. “We’ll head in after dawn to get some dog food and a collar. Grab him, and us, something fresh for dinner, if you please.”

I shrugged off my backpack, strapped on my game bag, and took my loaded spear gun from his hands. I was grateful for velvety darkness that enveloped us in the open water, far off ships’ lights twinkling stars on the water. My shorts and shirt were tossed onto the deck before I dove into the sea. The water was cool and clean as I dived down, vivid in the voices of the local animals. I heard the distant clicks of some distant cetacean, but I wasn’t quite sure which kind. I swirled in the water, the higher salinity scouring the dock’s filth from my flesh and hair as I dove deeper, lungs clearing to allow the clean water to sluice across my gills as I made for the bottom.

I didn’t speak to the local animals as I hunted, it seemed unfair. I did note the presence of a variety of sharks and rays, various fish. I avoided the ones I knew to be endangered and took only fish with stable populations. And a couple of spiny lobsters finished my haul. I returned to the boat, knowing this would be the last peaceful dive I would make for a while. If disrupting poachers was going to cost me my peaceful dives, I would make their pocketbooks bleed all the while.

Girl’s got to have balance in her life, right?