—What killed him then?

He shrugged. She loved a gesture like this, so clear and grounding.—As far as I can tell, he took one last breath and didn’t breathe again.

She waited.

—With dolphins, they need to will themselves to breathe. It’s not automatic, like with us. If they don’t breathe for long enough, they go unconscious. After that, of course, they can’t will themselves to breathe.

The way he said these words, with a certain weight, she heard he was saying something more.

She asked tentatively—Could it be he was too skinny and just ran out of energy?

The vet shook his head no.—He wasn’t that skinny.

She looked at the water.—Could it be that he just decided not to breathe anymore?

He inhaled and held up his hands.

She asked—Have you seen another dolphin die this way?

He nodded.

Here—she asked, a feeling in her gut.—At this center?

—Yes.

—They’ve had other dolphins?

He nodded—Oh yes.

She liked that he was not wordy.—Do captive dolphins die this way often?

—I asked Marine World. They said it happened sometimes at night when everyone is gone. A perfectly healthy animal. In the morning, it will just be there, dead.

She imagined the dolphin in the darkest part of the night, in a concrete pool, in captivity, deciding not to breathe anymore. Inhaling its last breath.

—It occurs mostly with dolphins who are left alone in their pools, without others.

They sat there quietly, thinking about this.

Kat surfaced near them, and the vet blinked at the incisions on Kat’s head.

* * *

Without Bernie, there was such an emptiness. Mother and Kat were left in the lagoon, Junior in the homearium. Cora felt the weight of keeping the remaining ones alive.

She spent more time at night reading the men’s books, learning their vocab. She worked harder with Junior, striving for progress, needing to impress Blum. She needed all the power she could get.

TWENTY-FIVE
Homearium, Days 4–7

After Bernie’s death, she made sure to spend at least an hour each morning with Kat and Mother in the lagoon, feeding them and playing with them and checking in on them. Tibbet noticed this and began to come down to the lagoon when she was there. He needed her help with his experiment about their ability to communicate about the matching shapes.

She was the only one the dolphins allowed in the water, and so she would wade out to the collapsible pen and call one of the dolphins inside it. Frequently Kat was the one who responded. She tended to follow Cora most places, curious. In the opaque pen, with her back to Mother, Cora would show Kat, for instance, the striped triangle, and Tibbet would watch by the dock to see if Mother then tapped the matching triangle.

Each time Cora helped Tibbet, she required that he step into the water just a little deeper than the day before. She wanted him at some point to be able to run this experiment on his own or with Eh. The first day he stood with just his feet in the water, and the dolphins did not clap their teeth at him for doing so. While he was in the water, he was generally busy taking notes. Focused on the work this way, he looked less threatening. He didn’t move around a lot or stare at them for an extended period of time.