How are we supposed to hear them?—Tibbet asked.

She said—Install a microphone.

(Into her mind came the memory of a cop who used to visit the Tampa club where she’d worked. One day when he reached for his wallet, she’d spotted his shoulder holster, but she had guessed his profession long before that from his short hair and the way he strode into a room, scanning the crowd, his eyes ready for anything. He was not a large man, but he was strung tight as a bow. She’d touched him once on the shoulder to hand him his drink and he jerked around, his face blank and cold, and very ready.

This man, she realized, was who she was imitating.)

She said in a clipped voice—Then you could record the sounds. Tally them and analyze them.

(Imitating the cop, she could move and talk in a different way. She could issue commands.)

From his expression, she could see Tibbet liked this idea.

(At the club, the cop would knock back drink after drink, watching the women in their costumes. The women stayed as far as they could from him.)

She added—Sometimes the sounds get really high-pitched, then disappear.

Blum asked Tibbet—What’s their vocal range?

(When the cop twisted to look at someone, his head turned as smoothly and mechanically as a tank turret.)

She turned to look at Blum in the same way.

Each of the men reacted differently to this change in her behavior. Blum seemed amused, an interested smile on his face. Tibbet seemed confused. Eh had his eyes narrowed, his cigarette motionless in his hand, nonplussed.

Tibbet said—I don’t know their range.

Blum asked—Is there a microphone that can record high-pitched sounds?

Tibbet stated—You just play the sound back slower. Then you can hear it.

Blum nodded and told Eh to find some sort of underwater recording system. Tibbet and Eh didn’t like that she was suggesting ideas for them to enact. They looked from her to Blum and then back.

The recording system would arrive within the week. The microphone needed a small cage to protect it from the dolphins. It would take a while for Eh to connect it with speakers in the house so they could hear the sounds as they were recorded. In the end, installed, it cost about the same as a used car.

From then on, each time she went into the building, she would hear the clicks and squeals of the dolphins, as though the animals were caught in the building somewhere, searching for a way out.

* * *

Within a day of the gate being propped up permanently with the large rock, Mother was moving around and eating again. She spent a lot of her time on the surface, playing with seaweed or some other prop, while she studied the humans as they moved around the lagoon. If any of them engaged in an action she found interesting, she’d cock her head at an angle where both her eyes could focus on the action, while she idly mouthed the seaweed. Her whole body concentrated. Years later, when Cora saw Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, playing with his baseball and watching the guards, she thought of Mother and her seaweed.