'You mean closer together?'
'A lot closer together, Bryn.'
His hand reached her shoulders and began a slow descent.
'According to Crispin,' Liala continued. 'When the reptiles evolved into mammals and their brains got bigger, the new bits got added around the middle, like the outer layers of an onion. They are the parts that make us clever but the bit in the middle didn't go away. When we get close it's like we are reptiles again.'
'Lucky reptiles ...'
Their lips met. Liala cursed the guardians for what they had done to Peter and Crispin and wondered why she had escaped the surgeon's knife. People weren't machines. They were living breathing animals. It was their emotions that made them different from machines and they should be respected.
For a while time stood still. Then the vibrator on her dolphin tablet kicked in. She tried to ignore it. The dolphins could sense when she was getting passionate with Bryn and that made them jealous. They thought they owned her. They had to learn that they didn't. She had a life of her own and they weren't going to get in the way.
'What's buzzing?'
Bryn's hand was distracted.
Liala pushed it back.
'My dolphin tablet ... ignore it.'
'Something might be wrong.'
'I said ignore it, Bryn.'
'We can't do that, Liala.'
'Oh. Very well.'
Liala reached for the tablet. She expected to see dolphin faces when she opened it. They would be lined up, one beside the other, staring at her with pleading eyes, begging her to stop what she was doing.
Instead, she saw a confusion of images, piling up on each other as individual dolphins screamed their message. And it was frightening. She had never seen anything like it before. Orcas were scary but the monster staring at her from the tablet was truly awesome.
***
Day dawned and revealed a uniformly grey sky. The wind had died down and the white caps had gone from the waves. Liala thrust her hands into the folds of her padded jacket. The temperature hovered above freezing and everything was damp. She knew she must keep up her spirits but it was hard.
They had spent a restless night, pacing the deck, taking turns to keep watch. The sea was alive with menace. At one point the dolphins were so scared they had to be lifted up on deck. The entire team of eight young females was taken from the water and set down amongst Crispin's research equipment.
Orcas were part of the problem. Bryn shot one. That frightened the rest away but the monster hung around. It seemed to regard them as its personal property. That was intimidating. Orcas rip their prey to pieces and eat it in chunks. The monster was so big it could devour you in one big slurp.