The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

I

“Before we go on deck, I should make one thing clear,” Ray Wiley said. “We’re nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle.”

Trip opened his eyes. He had been sleeping comfortably in a haze of wine and good food, rocked by the minor expansions and contractions of the yacht’s hull, and for a moment, looking up at the darkened ceiling, he could not remember where he was. “What time is it?”

“Three in the morning.” Ray rose from the chair beside the bed. “We’re six hundred miles northeast of Antigua.”

As Trip sat up, Ray was already heading for the stateroom door. A graying beard, grown over the past year, had softened Ray’s famously intense features, but his blue eyes remained focused and bright, and they caught Trip’s attention at once. If nothing else, it was the first time he had ever been awakened by a billionaire. “Come on,” Ray said. “You’ll want your notebook and camera.”

At the mention of his notebook, Trip glanced automatically at the desk, where he had left his papers before going to bed. It did not look as if Ray had tried to read his notes, but even if he had, he would have found nothing objectionable. Trip’s private notebook, in which he recorded his real thoughts about the yacht’s voyage, was safely tucked into the waistband of his pajamas.

Trip climbed out of bed, pulling on his jeans and parka. Glancing at the berths on the opposite bulkhead, he saw that the men with whom he shared the cabin were gone. “Did Ellis and Gary—”

“They’re on deck,” Ray said. “Hurry up. You’ll understand when we get there.”

Trip slid on a pair of deck shoes and slung a camera around his neck. As he followed Ray to the salon, he became aware of a murmur beneath his feet, the barely perceptible vibration of the yacht’s engine, trembling in counterpoint to the waves outside. Upstairs, the lights in the salon had been turned down. As they headed for the companionway, Trip saw Stavros, the yacht’s captain and first engineer, seated at the internal steering station, his broad face underlit by the glowing console.

On the deck of the Lancet, the night was cold and windless. Two men in matching parkas were standing in the cockpit, looking into the void of the North Atlantic. One was Ellis Harvey, the yacht’s marine biologist, a headlamp illuminating his weathered, intelligent features; the other was Gary Baker, a postdoctoral student in microbiology, his pale face framed by glasses and a tidy goatee.

When Ellis saw Ray, he frowned. It was no secret that the two older scientists were not on the best of terms. “We’re going on a night dive,” Ellis said. “Do we need a third set of gear?”

“I’ll pass,” Trip said. He was not fond of the water. “What’s this all about?”

Gary pointed along the centerline of the sloop. “Dead ahead. You see it?”

Trip turned to look. For a long moment, he saw nothing but the ocean, visible only where it gave back the yacht’s rippling lights. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he noticed a brighter area of water. At first, he thought it was an optical illusion, an effort by his brain to insert something of visual interest into an otherwise featureless expanse. It was only the hard line of the stempost, silhouetted against the glow, that finally told him that it was real.

“Lights.” Trip glanced around at the others. “Something is glowing in the water.”

Ray seemed proud of the sight, as if he had personally conjured up the apparition for Trip’s benefit. “Gary saw it a few minutes ago, when he took over the night watch. We’re still trying to figure out what it is.”

“It’s too widespread to be artificial,” Ellis said. “It looks like a natural phenomenon. A luminescent microbe, perhaps—”

Trip was barely listening. In the absence of landmarks, it was hard to determine the distance of the light, which was faint and bluish green, but it seemed at least a mile away. It was neither constant nor uniform, but had patches of greater or lesser brightness, which flickered in a regular pattern. Initially, he thought that the twinkling was caused by the motion of the waves, but as they drew closer, he saw that the lights themselves were pulsing in unison. “It’s synchronized. Is that natural?”

“I don’t know,” Ray said. He grinned broadly. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

Trip heard a note of hunger in the billionaire’s voice. For the past two years, he knew, the Lancet, under Ray’s funding and guidance, had been using the latest technology to sample the incredible genetic diversity of life in the ocean, with the unspoken goal of finding genes and microbes with commercial potential. So far, the voyage had been relatively uneventful, but if the glow in the distance turned out to be an unknown form of microscopic life, it could prove to be very lucrative indeed.

When Trip tried to ask Ray about this, though, he received only a grunt in response, which was not surprising. It was no secret that Ray was having second thoughts about the article that Trip was here to write. In the three days since his arrival, Trip had already noticed a number of conflicts simmering beneath the surface of the voyage, and Ray, as if sensing this, had been avoiding him. At this rate, Trip thought, his week aboard the Lancet would end without so much as an interview.

The sloop pressed onward, the foam breaking in tendrils across its prow. Trip stood between Ray and Ellis, caught in their unfriendly silence, as Gary removed wetsuits and cylinders from a scuba locker, securing glow sticks to the tanks with zip ties. Before long, the yacht was at the edge of the illuminated region, the light visible in the water against the hull. When Ray used the cockpit phone to tell Stavros to cut the engines, the vibration beneath the deck ceased at once.

As the yacht drifted freely, surrounded on all sides by the glow, Trip got a better look at the light. At close range, it resolved itself into countless discrete nodules of brightness, seemingly without heat, but unmistakably alive.

Ellis leaned over the wire railing that encircled the deck. “Ray, this is no microbe.”

“Let’s get a closer look, then,” Ray said. As Trip began taking pictures, the two older men suited up for the dive, then climbed over the railing. As they slid into the water, Trip briefly saw them outlined against the glow, which illuminated them from underneath like a magic lantern. Within seconds, they were gone.

Gary was standing beside him. “If you like, you could try the observation chamber.”

“Good idea,” Trip said, lowering his camera. The chamber was contained in a false nose at the forefront of the yacht, two meters below the waterline. Going over to the entry tube, which was bolted to the stempost, Trip glanced back at Gary, who gave him a nod of encouragement, and climbed inside.

It was twenty feet down. When he reached the final rung, he found himself in a tiny room lined with a foam mattress, the ceiling too low to stand. It smelled of mildew and rust. He spread himself prone on the floor, his nose inches from the largest of five portholes, and looked out at the ocean.

It took him a while to understand what he was seeing. In the water outside, clusters of glowing particles were passing through the sea. There were dozens of such formations, some drifting at random, others bunching and splaying their radial arms to go sailing serenely past the windows.

Trip forgot about his camera, caught up in the strangeness of the sight. At first, he felt surrounded by otherworldly creatures, like something out of a dream. Only when one of the shapes drifted close by the nearest porthole, almost pressing itself against the glass, did he finally recognize it for what it was.

The sloop was surrounded by hundreds of octopuses. As his eyes grew used to the darkness, he saw that every octopus had two rows of luminous cells running along each of its eight arms. The light from each node, which was bluish green, was not strong, but taken together, they caused the water to be as brightly lit as a crowded highway on a winter’s night.

When fully extended, the octopuses were the size of bicycle wheels, their bodies pink, verging on coral. As Trip switched on his camera, gelatinous eyes peered through the water at his own face. He was about to snap a picture when he heard the clang of footsteps overhead. Someone was climbing down the ladder.

“Mind if I join you?” The voice took him by surprise. Turning, he saw a pair of feminine legs enter his field of vision. When the woman had descended all the way, he saw that it was Meg, the ship’s stewardess and deckhand.

“Not at all,” Trip said, unsure of how to react. Meg was trim but shapely, with short dark hair and a patrician nose. From the moment of their first meeting, she had struck him as the sort of young woman who is perfectly aware of the power that she possesses, as well as the fact that it will not last forever. Among other things, although the relationship was not openly acknowledged, everyone on the yacht knew that Meg spent most of her nights in Ray Wiley’s stateroom.

“I came to see what all the excitement was about,” Meg said, spreading herself across the mattress pad. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.” Trip turned back to the window. They lay side by side, not speaking, as the lights drifted past them in glowing bands. He gradually became aware that Meg’s leg was pressing pleasantly against his own.

A moment later, a diver appeared in the circle of sea disclosed by the largest porthole. It was Ray. As he passed the observation chamber, he turned toward the window, the beam of his flashlight slicing through the water. Through the mask, it was hard to see his face, but his eyes seemed fixed on theirs.

At his side, Trip felt Meg stiffen. Rolling onto her back, she took hold of the nearest rung and went up the ladder without a word. Trip did not move. He remained eye to eye with the diver on the other side of the window, the octopuses forgotten, until Ray finally turned and swam away.

The following morning, when Trip went on deck, he found Ray standing in the dive cockpit with Ellis and Gary. An awning had been erected over the aft deck, shielding it from the sun, but it was still hot enough for the men to strip down to shorts and sandals as they took a sample of seawater, a ritual performed once a day, every two hundred miles, as the Lancet circled the globe.

In the water around the yacht swam countless octopuses, their luminescence muted in the daylight. Ellis leaned over the railing. “What’s the line in Tennyson? Vast and unnumbered polypi—”

“Unnumbered and enormous polypi,” Trip said, glad to put his liberal education to some use. “Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.”

Taking a seat, he watched as a hinged arm with a pump on one end was lowered five feet below the surface. After the temperature and salinity had been recorded, fifty gallons of water were pumped into a plastic drum, passing through a series of increasingly fine filters. The process took about an hour. As they waited, Gary engaged in a friendly contest with Kiran, the yacht’s first mate, to see who would be first to catch an octopus. Gary had floated a baited trap out to sea on a cable, while Kiran, tan and muscular, was taking a more active approach, which he claimed to have learned in the Canary Islands. It involved a hooked rod and a red rag tied to a stick, and did not, at first glance, seem especially effective.

As Ellis and Ray stowed their equipment, they picked up the thread of what seemed to be an ongoing debate. “We need to stay here,” Ellis said. “If we leave now, we’ll be giving up the chance of a lifetime.”

“The chance of your lifetime, not mine,” Ray said, rinsing himself off in the cockpit shower. “We’re already running behind schedule. If we stay here much longer, we won’t make it to the Galapagos as planned.”

“Then we need to push back the deadline. This is a new species. Only one other variety of luminescent octopus has ever been described—”

“Take a specimen, then. I’ve already asked Kiran to put together a couple of tanks.”

“A few specimens won’t be enough,” Ellis argued. “We’re seeing extraordinary collective behaviors here. Octopuses aren’t supposed to travel in schools, and at this distance from shore, they live well below the waterline. Something is causing them to appear in groups on the surface. We need to find out why.”

Ray turned to Trip, the beads of water standing out on his face. “Are you getting all this? Ellis thinks that science can only take place in a bathysphere. He can’t accept that a new kind of octopus isn’t going to change the world.”

“It may not change the world,” Trip said carefully, “but it’s something that a lot of people would like to see.”

“I agree,” Ellis said. “If anything, it would enhance the reputation of this project.”

Ray shook his head, dislodging a cascade of drops. “You’re missing the point. In the sample of water we’ve taken today, we’re going to find a thousand new species of microbe, if not more.” He turned to Trip. “With every sample we analyze, we double the number of genes previously known from all species across the planet. It’s the first time that modern sequencing methods have been applied to an entire ecosystem. I don’t see how an octopus is any more important than this.”

“It isn’t a question of importance,” Ellis said impatiently. “It’s a question of—”

“Even now, nobody really knows what the ocean contains,” Ray continued, still looking at Trip. “Every milliliter of seawater contains a million bacteria and ten million viruses. Until I came along, nobody had tried to analyze the ocean with the same thoroughness that had been applied to the human genome. When we’re done, the results will be available to everyone, free of charge, with no strings attached. That, my friends, is what will enhance our reputation. Not a glowing octopus.”

He turned to look at Gary, who was seated on the transom, clutching the cable of his octopus trap. “As I see it, there are two approaches to science. You can lunge after something with a rag on a stick, like Kiran, or you can bait a trap and see what floats by. It’s less glamorous, maybe, but in the long run—”

Ray was interrupted by an excited shout. At the other end of the sloop, Kiran had caught an octopus on the end of his hook, and was lifting it carefully out of the water. As Kiran dropped the octopus into the bucket at his feet, Trip saw a handful of arms writhing uselessly in the open air.

Ellis turned to Ray. “What were you saying about the two approaches to science?”

Ray forced his face into a grin, then turned to the first mate. “Kiran, think you can catch a few more of these monsters?”

“Not a problem,” Kiran said, climbing into the cockpit. “How many do you want?”

“As many as you can get,” Ray said. “We’re having octopus for dinner tonight.”

An embarrassed silence ensued. Kiran gave them all an uneasy smile, then headed below. After a pause, Ray turned to Ellis. “All right. We’ll hold station for one more day. You should be satisfied with this.”

“Fine,” Ellis said, although he was obviously displeased. “I’ll do what I can.”

The two scientists went their separate ways. A few minutes later, when the filtering process was complete, Gary unscrewed a set of steel plates and used tweezers to fish out the filters inside. Each filter, the size of a vinyl record album, had been stained various shades of brown, as the microbes were captured in paper of decreasing porousness. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Gary said to Trip, sliding the filters into plastic bags. “Those two don’t always see eye to eye—”

“What about you?” Trip asked, helping him pack up the morning’s sample. “Do you think we should stay longer?”

Gary headed for the companionway. “Ray pays my salary, which doesn’t make me a disinterested observer. The fact is, I love both of those guys, but Ellis is just as ambitious as Ray is. He’s better at hiding it, that’s all.”

He disappeared down the stairs. As the day wore on, Trip caught occasional glimpses of Gary in the wet lab across from the salon. Through the laboratory window, Trip saw him sterilize a pair of shears with a blowtorch and slice each filter in two, one half to be frozen for later analysis, the other to be sequenced aboard the yacht itself. Aside from the time spent gathering each day’s water sample, Gary spent most of his time in the lab, dissolving the filters and analyzing the resultant genetic material, which meant that he was the only crew member without a tan.

Trip took a seat in the salon, where the captured octopus had been installed in a plastic tank. Since his arrival, he had been struck by the demands being made of the scientific team. Sequencing the genes of all the organisms in a random sample of seawater was an incredibly complicated process, akin to assembling a thousand jumbled jigsaw puzzles. Normally, most of the analysis would have taken place on shore, but Ray, hoping to save time, had insisted that it occur on the sloop itself. Several competing efforts to sequence marine ecosystems were currently underway, and Ray had become obsessed with concluding the project before the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, which was in less than three weeks.

Such urgency might have seemed strange, but as Trip reviewed his notes, he reflected that nothing less than Ray’s legacy was at stake. Despite the role that he had famously played in decoding the human genome, Ray remained a controversial figure, known more for his ruthlessness as a businessman than his scientific integrity. Now that money was no longer an issue, he had funded this mission in an attempt to refute his detractors, as well as to make his own case for a Nobel Prize. As a result, he had begun to push his scientific team to show greater progress, which, as far as Trip could tell, had only deepened the divisions within the crew.

Dinner that night was quietly tense. Dawn, the ship’s cook, an attractive woman with a blond ponytail, had prepared a ceviche, slowly simmering the octopus to soften it first. Although the flesh was tender, nobody could do more than pick at it, so the crew focused on the vegetable curry instead, which they washed down with plentiful wine and cold water. “You can judge a yacht by how the wine flows,” Ray said, his eyes red. “On the Calypso, Cousteau had a wine tank made of stainless steel. And how many bottles do we have?”

“Two hundred in the hold,” Dawn said, “and another fifty or sixty in the fridge.”

Trip poured himself another glass. Unlike some yachts, which had separate tables for guests and crew, everyone on the research sloop ate together, although this did nothing to lighten the mood. Ray, he noticed, treated everyone as his servant, even Stavros, who had been the yacht’s captain long before the billionaire had acquired it. When Ray asked him condescendingly to tell them the Greek word for octopus, the captain replied, “Octopous, of course. But to Hesiod, it was anosteos, or the boneless one. The boneless one gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home.”

“I didn’t know we had so many scholars on board,” Ray said. He eyed Trip over the rim of his glass. “I’m aware, by the way, that I’ve neglected to give you the interview I promised. Are you free tonight?”

Trip, who had nearly given up hope of such an invitation, was surprised at the sudden offer. “Of course. Maybe after dinner?”

“I need to take care of some business first, but if you want to drop by my cabin at ten, I can give you an hour of my time.” Ray’s bloodshot eyes flashed between Trip and Meg. “Unless you have other plans—”

Meg rose abruptly, clearing the dishes and carrying them into the galley. Ray, flushed from the wine, did not take his eyes from her face.

After dinner, the crew dispersed. Kiran headed up to the deck, joined a moment later by Dawn, ostensibly for the first watch, although a whiff of sweet smoke from the crew’s quarters made Trip guess that they had something else in mind. Around the yacht, the octopuses had resumed their nocturnal flickering. When the lights in the salon were turned down, the octopus in the tank started to glow as well.

Going into his cabin, Trip began to review his list of questions, glancing out the window at the show of lights. As he prepared, he began to feel strangely nervous. Looking at his hands, he noticed that he had been chewing his fingernails, which was something that he had not done in years.

When the time for the interview arrived, Trip rose from his chair, making sure that he had his notebook and audio recorder, and went into the hallway. The yacht was silent. Stavros sat in the salon, his back turned, laying out a game of solitaire. None of the other crew members was in sight.

Trip went to the door of Ray’s cabin, which was closed, and knocked lightly. “Ray?”

There was no answer. Looking down, Trip saw a line of light beneath the door. He knocked a second time, and when there was no response, he tried the knob, which turned easily.

After a moment’s hesitation, Trip pushed open the door and entered the stateroom. He had been here only once before, on the day that he had boarded the yacht, and had been duly impressed by its luxury.

Ray was seated at his work station, his back to the door. His head was bowed, as if he were looking intently at something on the desk. Trip came forward cautiously, afraid that he was intruding, and gingerly touched Ray’s shoulder with his fingertips. “Do you still want to talk?”

In response to the nudge, Ray swiveled around in his chair, although the motion was due solely to momentum. His eyes were open, and his head was tilted at an unnatural angle. A gash had parted the skin of his throat, the blood running down the front of his shirt and pooling on the floor below, where it blended with the burgundy rug. Trip was not a doctor, and had no firsthand experience of murder, but even at first glance, it was clear that Ray was quite dead.

II

The captain was the first to respond to his shouts of alarm. Stavros appeared in the stateroom door, his calmness oddly reassuring, and stopped. He looked at Trip, saying nothing, then turned to the body. Going up to the corpse, he placed his fingertips against its throat, almost in a parody of checking for a pulse, and examined the wound, which was clean and deep. After studying the gash for a moment, he shook his head. “It’s bad luck to have a dead man on board.”

Trip stared at the captain, wondering if he was joking. Instead of saying more, Stavros took the body beneath its arms and laid it on the floor, with Trip doing his best to help. As they moved the body, a fresh stream of blood trickled from its throat, swallowed up at once by the plush fibers of the carpet.

There was a gasp from the doorway. It was Meg. A second later, Gary appeared, still in his gloves and laboratory gown, his face pale with shock. Kiran and Dawn stood behind him, looking over his shoulder at the scene in the cabin. Their eyes were bloodshot. Last of all, Ellis pushed through the knot of bodies, his gaze fixed on the corpse on the ground.

“My God,” Ellis said, his voice nearly cracking. “Did anyone see what happened?”

No one replied. Through the windows, the octopus lights continued to flicker.

“I’ve been in the salon all night,” Stavros said at last. “I saw nobody enter or leave.”

“Someone must have been here,” Trip said. “Ray didn’t cut his own throat. If he did, where’s the knife?”

There was another silence, more suspicious now. Trip was studying the faces of the others, searching for signs of guilt, when his eye was caught by a trail of blood on the floor. It led from the desk to the far wall, where a door had been set into the bulkhead. “Where does this hatch go?”

“The deck,” Stavros said. He went to the hatch and opened it, touching only the edge of the knob. Beyond the door lay a narrow companionway. He went up, followed by Trip and Kiran, with the others remaining behind.

Outside, the air was cool and motionless, the ocean glowing with eerie light. In the dive cockpit, a constellation of blood was visible on the deck. A pool of pink water had collected beneath the showerhead, as if someone had paused to wash his or her hands before moving on. Stavros turned to Kiran. “You were supposed to be on watch. You didn’t see anything?”

Kiran looked embarrassed. “We were at the prow, looking at the lights. And we were, uh—”

“Yes, I know,” Stavros said, making a gesture of disgust. “A couple of potheads.”

They returned to the stateroom. In the cabin, someone had covered the body with a sheet, the crimson petals of blood already starting to soak through. Meg was seated on the bed, eyes wet, with Dawn’s arm around her shoulders.

In the corner, Ellis and Gary were talking in low tones. A second later, Ellis turned to the others, as if he had decided to assume control. “All right. Whoever did this needs to confess now.”

In the long pause that followed, volleys of glances were exchanged, but no one spoke. Eventually, one by one, they began to offer explanations for their whereabouts. It soon became clear that only Kiran and Dawn, who had been smoking up on the far end of the sloop, could verify their stories. While Trip had gone into his room after dinner, Gary had returned to the lab, and Ellis had been in the observation chamber belowdecks, taking notes on the octopus school. Stavros had been in the salon, facing away from the stateroom, while Meg had retired to her cabin to read.

Ellis turned to Trip. “You’re the one who found him. What were you doing here?”

“You heard what happened at dinner,” Trip said. “Ray offered me an interview.”

“Is that what you thought?” Ellis gave him a tight smile. “I happen to know that Ray was planning to tell you that he was withdrawing permission for the article. He told me so himself.”

Trip was astonished by the unspoken implication. “Why would he change his mind?”

Ellis looked at Meg, who was seated on the bed. “Who knows what he was thinking?”

Trip’s face grew red. “So what are you saying? He wouldn’t give me an interview, so I killed him?”

There was no response. After another moment, when it became clear that no confessions were forthcoming, they turned, almost with relief, to the business of dealing with the body. Ellis went into his cabin and returned with a medical kit, which he used to tape bags over Ray’s hands. When he was done, Stavros wrapped the corpse in a sheet and secured it neatly with nylon cord. Sealing off the stateroom, they carried the body into the galley, where Meg and Dawn had removed the bottles from the wine refrigerator, and laid it snugly inside.

As they were closing the galley door, Trip happened to glance at the rack above the sink, and saw that one of the knives was missing.

Once the body had been stowed, they returned to the salon to debate their next move. The first decision was easy. The Lancet, like many yachts, had a system of security cameras that was rarely used, and which they now agreed to turn on. There was also some discussion of sleeping arrangements. In the end, it was decided that the women would share one of the staterooms, Trip, Ellis, and Gary the other, and that the captain and first mate would each take a cabin for themselves.

Finally, they raised the issue of the voyage itself. “There’s no way out of it,” Stavros said. “We need to go back. If we make full speed, we can be at Antigua and Barbuda in three days.”

“We would have been done in a few more weeks,” Gary said bitterly. He looked around at the others. “I know we don’t have much of a choice, but after all this is done, I’m coming back to finish the project.”

No one spoke. In the tank, the octopus wound and unwound its arms, glowing softly, like an emblem of death from a medieval painting.

They all spent a restless night. The following morning, Trip was in the salon when he felt a soothing vibration well up through the floor. The engine had started. He was smiling at Meg and Dawn, who seemed equally relieved that they were on their way, when an alarm sounded from the cockpit. A second later, the wailing ceased, and the engine died as well.

Trip went up to the deck, where he found Stavros crouching over the hatch of the engine room, biting his lower lip. A sharp tang of scorched metal wafted up from the engine. “Overheated,” Stavros said tersely, in response to Trip’s question. “We’re taking care of it.”

Kiran, who was examining the engine, stuck his head and shoulders out of the darkened rectangle, a smudge of grease on his face. “It’s the alternator and pump. The belt’s torn to shreds. I’ll need to replace it.”

“How long will that take?” Trip asked, unsettled by the prospect of an engine failure. Although the sloop was perfectly capable of proceeding under sail, the last few days had been windless, and they were weeks away from shore.

Kiran wiped away the grease. “A couple of hours. We’ll need to hold station here.”

Word of their situation spread quickly. After learning what had happened, Ellis announced that he would spend the morning trying to capture a few more octopuses. While examining the octopus that had been caught the day before, he had noticed that one of its arms was missing, apparently severed. “We need a perfect specimen,” Ellis said, as if challenging the others to contradict him. “If we’re stuck here anyway, we may as well make the most of it.”

When no one objected, Ellis and Gary set to work. During the night, the yacht had drifted away from the octopus school, so they took the boat tender. Trip accepted an invitation to come along, glad for an excuse to get away from the yacht, and Meg agreed to join them as well.

They roared off in the tender, the water rising around them in a needlelike spray. The motor was too loud for conversation, but Trip kept a close watch on Meg, who had dark circles under her eyes.

When the tender neared the octopus school, which was visible in faint red patches through the water, Ellis cut the engine. “Gary and I will dive together. You two can wait here.”

Donning their equipment, the two scientists climbed onto the inflatable keel and slid overboard. Trip watched them descend, the sun beating down on the back of his neck, then turned to Meg. “How are you doing?”

“I’ll be all right,” Meg said. The brim of her hat left her face in shadow, but her voice, he noticed, was steady.

As they waited for the others to return, Meg began to take measurements of the water’s temperature and salinity, with Trip helping as best he could. As the minutes ticked by, he tried to steer the conversation toward the other members of the crew. “Ray didn’t seem like a guy who was easy to work with.”

Meg looked back at the yacht, which was holding station seven hundred yards away. “He was used to being right all the time. Ellis couldn’t deal with it. He also thought that he was going to have the chance to conduct his own research, but Ray worked him pretty hard.”

“Ellis seems to think that the octopus school is his last chance for a major discovery.”

“Yes, I know.” Meg hesitated, as if there were something else that she wanted to say. “There was a lot that Ellis didn’t understand. Ray drank too much, and sometimes, when we were alone, he would tell me things—”

Trip sensed that she was on the verge of revealing something important. “What is it?”

“Ray was withholding some of the team’s discoveries. You know how he insisted that Gary process the samples on board the yacht? It was so he could screen the results for genes with commercial potential. If you can find a microbe that makes it easier to produce ethanol, for example, or a luminous microbe like the one he was hoping to find the other night, it would be worth millions.”

“But the whole point of this project was to make the data freely available,” Trip said. “Every gene was going to be made public, right?”

“That’s what Ray claimed. It’s what allowed him to recruit people like Gary. If you ask Gary why he joined the project, he’ll say it was because he believed that genetic research should be as open as possible. But Ray was always driven by profit. He wasn’t about to change his ways.”

Trip could feel the elements of a story assembling themselves in his head. “You seem to know a lot about the science.”

“I spent a year in medical school before I dropped out. I couldn’t stand the dissections.” Meg glanced back at the sloop, which looked like a scale model in the sunlight. “I decided a long time ago that I was going to devote my life to pleasure, not death. For a while, I thought that marrying a rich man was the answer. That’s why I was involved with Ray. Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”

Trip went for the diplomatic response. “I had some idea of what was going on.”

“You and everyone else. I don’t mind. I knew he wasn’t going to marry me.” Meg turned back to Trip. “Maybe it’s better this way. If he’d held back results for commercial reasons, it would have come out sooner or later. Now, instead, he gets to be a martyr. In a way, I’m glad he’s dead.”

Trip tried to cut the tension. “You probably don’t want me writing about this, then.”

Meg didn’t respond. Something in her unsmiling face, which was still in shadow, sent a prickle of nervousness down his spine. Before either of them could speak again, Gary’s gloved hand emerged from the sea, clutching an octopus, which had wound itself around his upper arm. Ellis surfaced a second later, wetsuit glistening, holding an octopus of his own.

“Looks like they’ve got their prizes,” Meg said. She glanced at Trip’s hands. “You’ve been biting your nails. Are you nervous?”

When she looked back up at him, Trip held her gaze. “Not any more than you are.”

They helped Gary and Ellis onto the tender. As they headed back, the octopuses, each in its own bucket, writhed at their feet, curling into defensive balls whenever they were touched. Meg did not speak to Trip again.

When they returned to the sloop, it was already late in the afternoon. Trip was climbing into the dive cockpit when he heard shouts. At the entrance to the engine room, Stavros and Kiran were yelling at each other, and the captain had bitten his own lip out of agitation. “You stupid malaka,” Stavros said. “If we wind up stranded here, it’s all your fault—”

Kiran was equally furious. “Bhenchod, I’m not the one who sabotaged the engine.”

“Sabotage?” Trip looked between the two men. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s the fan belt,” Kiran said. “I tried to replace it, but it snapped whenever the engine engaged. When I looked closer, I found out why. The ball bearings in the pulley are damaged. And the package of extra bearings is missing from my spare parts kit. I took an inventory just last week, and it was definitely there. Which means that somebody stole it.”

“What about the engine?” Trip asked. “You really think that it was sabotaged?”

Stavros nodded, the blood shining on his lip. “Whoever did it will answer to me.”

“In any case, we’ll find a workaround,” Kiran said, speaking more calmly than before. “I can cannibalize parts from another pulley. But it means we won’t be leaving until tomorrow at the earliest.”

This announcement cast a pall over the rest of the day. As Stavros and Kiran worked on the engine, Gary prepared a tank for the octopus he had caught, installing it next to the first one, while Ellis took his own specimen into the lab for closer examination. The two octopuses in the salon took no visible interest in each other, glowing gently in their separate containers as evening fell.

When it was time for dinner, Gary proposed that they eat on deck, which would put some distance between themselves and the body in the galley. Outside, the lights in the water were brighter than ever. As they ate around a folding table, bundled up in parkas and gloves, Gary raised the question that they had all been avoiding. “When this is over, how many of you are coming back?”

When no one answered, Gary took a sip from his water glass. “I know it’s hard to talk about this, but back on shore, we aren’t going to have another quiet moment. We need to discuss this now.”

“We all know that you want to respect Ray’s wishes,” Stavros finally said, a red scab on his lower lip. “As for me, I go with the Lancet. Her destination makes no difference to me.”

“Or me,” Kiran said. “Not everyone here feels the same loyalty to Ray that you do.”

“This isn’t about loyalty,” Gary said. “It’s about seeing that important work isn’t lost. We’ve made significant discoveries here, and we need to make sure that they’re released to the public.”

Trip glanced at Meg, who did not look back. “I’ve only been here for a few days, but I know something about situations like this,” Trip said, not sure if his opinion counted. “Your first obligation is to the living.”

Ellis grunted. “Personally, if Ray were able to speak his mind, I don’t think he’d care either way. Now that he’s dead, he can’t profit from any of it. They don’t award the Nobel Prize posthumously.”

After a prolonged silence, Dawn, who had tucked her hair up into a baseball cap, tried to change the subject. “I’ve been watching these octopus lights for days now, and I have no idea what they mean. What are they?”

Ellis shifted easily into professorial mode. “It could be a way of coordinating group activities, like mating. Or some kind of hunting strategy. Most people don’t appreciate how intelligent octopuses are. They have big brains with folded lobes, the largest of any invertebrate, and show signs of memory and learning.” He looked thoughtfully at the lights. “Of course, they only live for three or four years. If they had a longer lifespan, who knows what they might be capable of doing?”

The crew fell into silence. As they looked out at the water, Kiran played with his cigarette lighter, its nervous flame mirroring the lights in the sea, which seemed unfathomably ancient. Trip, thinking of corpse lights in a graveyard, was reminded of a passage from Coleridge: They moved in tracks of shining white, and when they reared, the elfish light fell off in hoary flakes—

After a moment, Meg cleared the table and took the dishes below. The others were talking and drinking, the mood finally beginning to lighten, when they heard a scream and a crash from the salon.

In an instant, they were out of their chairs. They found Meg standing in the salon, a pile of broken dishes at her feet. She was staring at the two tanks that had been set up in one corner. Her face had lost most of its color.

“Look,” Meg said, pointing toward the tanks with a trembling finger. “Look at this.”

Trip followed her gesture with his eyes. The last time he had bothered to look, each of the tanks had held a single octopus. Now the nearest tank was empty, and in the other, the water was clouded by a blue fog.

When the haze cleared, he felt a wave of nausea. One of the octopuses had killed the other. The survivor’s color had deepened to crimson, while the remains of its neighbor were shriveled and gray. Billows of octopus blood had polluted the water, and a foamy scum had gathered on the surface.

A second later, Trip realized what else was happening, and felt a cold hand take hold of his insides.

The surviving octopus was eating its companion. As he watched, the octopus used its beak to amputate one of its victim’s arms at the base. Wrapping its mouth around the severed arm, it devoured it, the arm disappearing inch by inch into its chitinous maw. The octopus twitched, its arms jerking in brief convulsions as it swallowed its fierce meal, its eyes hooded and glazed.

Ellis looked accusingly at the others. “Who put the octopuses into the same tank?”

“I don’t think anyone did this,” Stavros said. “It must have escaped on its own.”

“That’s impossible,” Kiran said. He went over to the empty tank. Both tanks had been made from plastic buckets, the lids secured so that a narrow gap remained above the rim, allowing air to circulate. The gap, which was less than an inch wide, seemed much too small for an octopus to pass through.

As the surviving octopus finished eating one arm and began to snip off another, it occurred to Trip that there was an easy way to resolve the question. “The security cameras. We switched them on last night.”

“Let’s take a look,” Ellis said. Going into the library, he returned a minute later with a videotape. A television was mounted to one wall of the salon. Ellis inserted the tape into the video player and pressed the rewind button. As he did, Trip noticed that his knuckles were badly bruised.

Before he could ask about this, an image of the salon appeared on the television set. The videotape opened with footage that had been taken only a few moments ago, of the entire crew standing around the tanks. As the tape rewound, the crew went up the steps, walking backwards, except for Meg, who stayed behind. The broken dishes on the floor flew back into her arms and reassembled themselves, and then she, too, was gone. The tanks alone remained onscreen.

As the video rolled back, the predatory octopus appeared to regurgitate its victim’s arms and refasten them. An instant later, both octopuses were alive, struggling in the tank, and then—

“I don’t believe it,” Trip said, his eyes wide. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

Ellis remained silent, although he did not look away from the screen. He rewound the tape to the point where the octopuses were back in their separate tanks, then allowed the action to play out normally.

For a few seconds, the octopuses floated in their tanks as before. Then the nearest octopus, one of the specimens that Ellis and Gary had captured earlier that day, extended one arm after another to the rim of its own bucket, until the tips of four arms protruded slightly through the narrow gap.

Nothing else happened for a long moment—and then the octopus began to squeeze its entire body through. Watching it was like witnessing a baffling optical illusion. First one arm was threaded through the gap and down the outside of the tank. Three other arms followed. The octopus flattened itself, the edge of its mantle passing through, followed by its head, which grew pancaked, like a balloon that was only halfway inflated, as the octopus pulled itself the rest of the way out. Then it was on the countertop and slithering toward the other tank.

The octopus moved quickly, gathering and splaying its arms as it crawled across the counter. Its color deepened from pink to red. As it approached, the second octopus, still inside its tank, grew pale, its normally smooth skin becoming rough and pebbled. When the first octopus reached the tank, it hooked the end of one arm over the rim, compressing its body until it was flat enough to slip through the gap, which was narrower than a letterbox. Within seconds, it had entered the second tank.

The struggle did not last for long. There was an entanglement of arms and beaks, the water growing blue with blood. Trip was unable to see how one octopus killed the other, but the thought of what was happening there made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

In less than a minute, it was over, and one octopus lay dead at the bottom of the tank. The survivor drifted in the bloody water, its arms coiling and uncoiling. Then, inevitably, it began to feed.

III

“I don’t believe it,” Trip said again. Looking away from the carnage onscreen, he saw sickened expressions on the faces around him. As if following a common impulse, the crew turned from the television to look at the tanks, and experienced a collective shudder. The remaining octopus had abandoned its meal and was pressing its head against the wall of its tank, watching them, or so it seemed, with its gelatinous eyes. The nodules on its arms were glowing brightly.

Lowering his gaze, Trip saw something that should have been obvious before. Streaks of moisture were visible on the countertop between the two tanks, marks from where the octopus had dragged itself across the intervening space. Something in the nearly invisible trail, which was rapidly drying out, made what they had just witnessed seem even more hideous.

Ellis was the first to regain some semblance of composure. “I should have been more careful. Octopuses are notorious for squeezing through tight spaces. The hardest part of the body is the beak, and the rest is highly compressible. If a gap is wide enough for the beak to pass through—”

Kiran stared at him. “You’re saying that this isn’t strange? I’m sorry, but I’m a little freaked out by this.”

“I’m not saying that this wasn’t unusual,” Ellis said. “I’m only saying that it can be explained. As for the cannibalism, I have no professional opinion. The important thing is that we fix the tanks.”

Using a hooked rod, which he held at arm’s length, Kiran transferred the surviving octopus to its old tank. The octopus seemed sated, its eyes filmy and glazed, as it slid, twitching slightly, into the water. Kiran fastened a rectangle of wire mesh across the top of the bucket, so that the gap between lid and rim was sealed off, then did the same to the octopus in the wet lab next door. There seemed to be no way that either octopus could escape again.

Even after these precautions had been taken, an aura of uneasiness lingered over the yacht. An hour later, when Trip went to bed, it was a long time before he fell asleep, and when he did, he was troubled by nightmares. In one dream, he was seated at the desk in his cabin, the door closed. As he reviewed his notes, oblivious to the danger, an octopus squeezed beneath the door, slithered across the carpet, climbed his chair, and touched the back of his neck with one clammy arm. Before he could react, the octopus pressed its parrotlike beak against his throat, and then—

Trip awoke, the sheets twisted like tentacles around his legs. It was still dark outside. As he tried to remember what had awakened him, he looked at his hands, which were visible in the faint light from the octopus school, and was shocked by the sight. His fingernails and cuticles were ragged, and a sour taste in his mouth told him that he had been chewing his nails in his sleep.

He was studying the damage that he had done, noticing that his fingers were bleeding in a few places, when he remembered what had pulled him from sleep in the first place. It had been a scream.

As he sat up in bed, he found that he could hear voices coming from the stateroom across the hall. Trip pulled on his shoes and went quietly into the corridor, taking care not to disturb Ellis and Gary, who were asleep. Through the door of the adjoining cabin, he heard voices. He knocked. “Is everything okay?”

The voices ceased at once. After a moment, he heard the shuffle of footsteps, and the door opened a crack. “It’s all right,” Meg said softly, peering through the gap. “Go back to bed.”

“It isn’t all right,” Dawn said, appearing behind Meg. “Tell her this needs to stop.”

“What needs to stop?” Trip asked. As he spoke, he saw a line of blood trickling down the crook of Meg’s arm. Impulsively, he came forward, pushing the door open. The two women fell back. “What happened?”

“It’s nothing.” Meg’s voice was nearly a mumble. “It isn’t any of your business—”

“Don’t give me that,” Dawn said, seizing Meg’s wrist in one hand. “Look at this.”

Trip saw a series of gashes running along Meg’s inside elbow. The cuts were parallel and shallow, and while none had grazed a major vessel, they were bleeding freely. “Did someone attack you?”

“Nobody attacked her,” Dawn said, her voice on edge. “She did this to herself.”

Trip turned to Meg, whose face was closed off with embarrassment. “Is that true?”

Meg yanked her arm away from Dawn, sending droplets of blood to the floor. “It’s no big deal. Sometimes I cut myself when I’m stressed. I’ve done it since I was a teenager. It’s never deep enough to be dangerous. I don’t see why you’re making a federal case out of this—”

Trip noticed a knife on the bedside table, its blade smeared with blood. “Did you take this from the kitchen?”

Meg sighed. “I was going to replace it. I never meant to use it on anyone but myself.”

“I don’t care about the knife,” Dawn said. “We’ve been friends a long time. I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this from me—”

The women resumed their argument. Trip was about to slip away when he remembered the medical kit that Ellis had used to bag Ray’s hands. “Hold on,” Trip said. “We need to do something about those cuts.”

He went back to his cabin, where the others were still asleep, and found the medical kit among Ellis’s things. When he returned to the other stateroom, Dawn seemed calmer, and Meg was cupping a hand casually beneath her elbow, catching the blood in the hollow of her palm.

Opening the medical kit, Trip took out a roll of tape and a gauze pad. He was about to close the kit again when he saw something tucked beneath the dressings. He reached inside. Fishing the object out, he found that it was a pack of ball bearings, the package cool and heavy in his hand.

“From the spare parts kit,” Trip said. He looked at the others. “Do you think—”

He broke off. The women were looking at the door, their expressions wary. Trip saw that a shadow had fallen across the floor. Rising to his feet, he found himself facing a solitary figure in the doorway.

“That’s my medical kit,” Ellis said, his voice calm. “What are you doing with it?”

“A minor emergency, but everything should be fine.” Trip held up the package of ball bearings. “What the hell are these?”

Ellis regarded the package. “I stole them from the spare parts kit. I was fairly sure that what I had done to the engine would keep us here another day, but I wanted to be on the safe side—”

“You sabotaged the engine,” Trip said. He had already forgotten about Meg. “Why?”

Ellis gave him a look of contempt. “You know why. I wanted to keep the yacht here a day or two longer. There was no way to make Ray listen to reason, so I took things into my own hands.”

“By attacking my ship?” It was Stavros. He was standing in the doorway, drawn by the noise, with Gary watching from over one shoulder. “We could have been stranded here for weeks—”

“You don’t understand,” Ellis said. Going to the window, he thrust his finger toward the octopus lights. “Ray was rushing ahead to meet a meaningless deadline. I wanted to document a natural phenomenon that might never be seen again. I don’t have to defend the choice I made.”

Gary pushed past the captain. “Are you listening to yourself? You’re worse than Ray. You only cared about your own career, even if it threatened everything we were doing here. Did you kill Ray, too?”

“I didn’t kill Ray,” Ellis said fiercely. “I can’t believe you’re accusing me of this—”

Without warning, Ellis punched the wall of the stateroom, hard, so that the bulkhead rang with the blow. As the others fell back, he punched it again. Before anyone else could speak, Kiran appeared, breathless, at the stateroom door.

“I don’t know what the commotion is about, but you need to break it up,” Kiran said. “There’s something you all need to see.”

They went into the salon, where the lights had been turned up. Kiran pointed toward the tank that housed the octopus. “Look—”

Staring at what was there, Trip felt his anger dissolve into a sickening sense of horror. When they had caught this octopus the day before, they had made sure that all of its arms were intact. Now two of its arms were missing, leaving only a pair of stumps behind. The water was full of blood, but the severed arms were gone. Trip had no desire to find out what had become of them, but it was already too late.

The octopus was eating itself. As Trip watched, the octopus bent one of its remaining arms until the base was pressed against its gaping mouth. With a snip of its beak, it severed the arm, which fell away in a cloud of blood. Without a pause, the octopus swam after it, positioning itself so that one end of the amputated arm was in its mouth, and began to devour it like a length of spaghetti. Trip found himself remembering the line from Hesiod that Stavros had quoted: The boneless one gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home.

Ellis and Gary were looking at each other, their heated exchange apparently forgotten. “Autophagy,” Ellis said.

Gary nodded, although he was visibly repulsed by the sight. “I should have known. Let me check the other specimen.”

“Hold on a second,” Trip said to Ellis. “You’re saying you’ve seen this before?”

“Not exactly, but I’ve heard of it,” Ellis said. “Octopuses are occasionally known to cannibalize themselves. It’s called autophagy. Nobody knows what causes it, but it seems to involve a viral infection of the nervous system. It’s a disease. When you have several octopuses in a single tank, if one starts to eat itself, the others will follow. Death ensues within days.”

Gary returned to the salon. “The third octopus looks fine. It was never in contact with this specimen, so maybe—”

Ellis shook his head. “If we’re dealing with infectious autophagy, it may have spread to the entire school. For all we know, this is what brought them to the surface. The lights are coordinating their behavior. It’s a mass suicide.”

Although his voice remained calm, Ellis was clearly upset. He thrust his bleeding knuckles into his mouth. Trip looked at him, then looked back at the maddened octopus, which had finished eating its own arm. Finally, he looked at his own hands, and felt the last piece fall into place.

“We need to discuss something right now,” Trip said to the others. “Where’s Meg?”

Meg was brought from the stateroom, a fresh bandage on her inside elbow. The crew sat around the table in the salon, looking at Trip. Through the windows, the lights seemed to press against the yacht on all sides.

Trip laid his hands on the table, showing them to the others. “You see this? I’ve been biting my nails for the past couple of days. It’s something I haven’t done in years, but ever since we entered this part of the ocean, I’ve been gnawing them like a maniac. Why? I’m not sure, but I can guess.”

Before anyone else could speak, Trip turned to Ellis. “A moment ago, you punched the wall so hard that your knuckles started to bleed. Is this something that you normally do?”

If Ellis saw where this was going, he was not inclined to play along. “I was upset. I don’t think it means anything.”

“But it wasn’t the first time you’ve done it. I saw the bruises on your hands. This is part of a larger pattern of behavior, and it’s been happening to all of us.” Trip turned to Meg. “Meg, you felt the urge to cut yourself. Stavros, I saw you bite your lip until it drew blood.”

Gary was looking at him with open skepticism. “What exactly are you trying to say?”

“We’re being affected by something in the environment,” Trip said. “This octopus is eating itself for the same reason. Meg, you were a medical student. Have you ever seen a disease that could cause behavior like this?”

“Not firsthand,” Meg said slowly. “But infections of the nervous system can result in psychotic or suicidal behavior. Genetic disorders can also lead to violence. Children bite off their lips and fingers, or attack those around them as a form of displacement. In the end, they need to be physically restrained.”

“A form of displacement,” Trip said, underlining the phrase. “What does that mean?”

“They feel driven to destroy their own bodies, so they redirect their aggression toward others. The violence is often concentrated on their family and friends, which may be another way of hurting themselves.”

“What about murder?” Trip asked. “Could this displacement go far enough so that the person was forced to kill?”

“It’s possible,” Meg said. “In theory, it could lead to murder by someone who was not in control of his actions.”

“Like the octopus,” Trip said. “It climbed out of its tank to kill its neighbor, but as soon as it ran out of victims, it turned on itself. And if this disease is affecting the entire school, we’re right in the middle of it. It’s like Ray said. Every drop of seawater contains millions of viruses. If this is a disease, it must be transmitted in the sea. And where do we get our drinking water?”

“The watermaker,” Stavros said. “It purifies seawater, but won’t screen out viruses.”

“We have an emergency cache of water in drums,” Kiran said. “It’s designed to sustain the crew for two weeks. We might even be able to modify our sampling system to purify water for drinking—”

“But if we’re already infected, fixing the water supply won’t be enough,” Trip said. He turned to Ellis. “The octopus in the wet lab hasn’t displayed any symptoms. Can you think of any reason why?”

Ellis thought for a moment. “This afternoon, I wanted to examine it more closely, so I anesthetized it with magnesium chloride. It’s a standard anesthetic for cephalopods. In humans, it’s a nervous system depressant that blocks neuromuscular transmissions. And if you’re right, and this impulse to hurt ourselves is a sort of seizure, something like magnesium may inhibit the reaction.”

“It’s possible,” Meg said excitedly. “And we have a lot of magnesium salts on board. Maybe we can use it as a temporary treatment—”

Gary seemed unconvinced. “I still don’t buy it. Even if you’re right about the virus, it’s hard to believe that it could affect humans and octopuses in the same way. Besides, we’ve all been drinking the same water, and I’m fine. And you haven’t mentioned Kiran or Dawn at all.”

“That’s because he never asked,” Dawn said quietly. As the rest of the crew watched, she removed her cap and shook loose her hair. Tilting her head to one side, she pointed to an area of her scalp not far from the crown. A patch of hair, less than half an inch in diameter, was missing.

“I chew my hair and swallow it,” Dawn said, sounding embarrassed. “Trichophagia. A bad habit. I haven’t done it since I was a girl, but last night, it started up again, just before we found Ray.”

Trip turned to Kiran. He found that his heart was pounding. “What about you?”

Without speaking, Kiran yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing his forearm. The marks of several recent burns were visible against his dark skin. In a few places, they had begun to blister.

“I’ve been burning myself with my lighter,” Kiran said flatly. “I didn’t know why.”

The crew looked at the burns for a long moment. Then, as if the same thought had occurred to everyone at once, their eyes turned to Gary.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Gary said. “I haven’t felt at all out of the ordinary.”

Trip was about to reply when he noticed something strange. Although the salon was comfortably warm, Gary was wearing a pair of gloves. When he thought back to it now, Trip couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Gary without them. In Ray’s stateroom, Gary had been wearing his lab gloves and smock. He had spent most of the following day in the water, wearing scuba gloves, and had suggested that they eat dinner on deck, forcing all of them to bundle up. Trip cleared his throat. “Gary, would you mind taking off your gloves?”

Gary only glared at him. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. This is totally crazy.”

“It doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me,” Kiran said. “Why don’t you want to take them off?”

Gary opened his mouth, as if to respond. Then, in a movement that caught all of them off guard, he was up and on his feet. Before he could get far, Kiran tackled him, pinning his arms behind his back. There was a brief struggle, punctuated by curses on both sides, before Gary finally surrendered.

“Let’s have a look,” Ellis said. Going forward, he took hold of Gary’s left arm. Trip seized the cuff of the glove, yanking it off, then paused. Gary’s fingers were unblemished and clean.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” Gary said. “Do we need to go through this a second time?”

Trip glanced at the others. Ellis and Kiran had lost some of their certainty, but they shifted their grip on Gary, thrusting his right arm forward. Trip seized his wrist, took hold of the remaining glove, and gave it a good tug.

As soon as the glove was off, it fell, forgotten, to the floor. Gary closed his eyes.

His fingertips were missing. All of the nails were gone, torn or gnawed away, and the first joint of his index finger had been bitten off completely, the wounds cauterized to stop the bleeding.

At the sight of the ravaged hand, Ellis released Gary’s arm, his face gray. Looking at those burnt stumps, Trip remembered the blowtorch that Gary used to sterilize his shears, and realized what should have been obvious long ago. Gary had spent the previous day in the lab, working with samples that had been taken from the water, cutting up the filters, processing them with enzymes. Whatever was in the ocean would have been concentrated by the filtration process.

And if there was a pathogen in the water, Gary had received by far the greatest dose.

“I’m sorry,” Gary said, addressing no one in particular. “I really can’t help myself.”

His ruined hand went for his pocket. There was a flash of silver, and an instant later, blood was streaming from Ellis’s throat.

Gary pulled out the shears, their blades streaked with crimson, and let them drop. As Ellis fell to his knees, Gary broke loose and dashed for the companionway. Trip ran after him, the other men following close behind, as Meg screamed for Dawn to bring the medical kit. As he left the salon, Trip had just enough time to notice that the octopus was lying, dead, at the bottom of its tank.

Outside, a stinging rain had begun to fall. Around the boat, the lights from the octopus school were shining even more brightly than before. In their cold luminescence, Trip saw someone moving at the stern of the yacht. He turned to see Gary standing in the dive cockpit, a harpoon gun clutched in his good hand.

“Don’t come any closer,” Gary said, his voice breaking. “If you do, I’ll put a harpoon through your heart. I like you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do it. It may even make it easier.”

“I know,” Trip said, the rain trickling down his face. “I won’t take it personally.”

“Speak for yourself,” Kiran said. He was standing next to Trip, ready to spring, but for the moment, he held back. Stavros took up a position nearby. They stood in silence, watching and waiting in the rain.

“I never wanted this to happen,” Gary said at last. “I killed Ray, but I had no choice.”

“I believe you,” Trip said, knowing that the longer they kept Gary talking, the better their chances of taking him by surprise. “If you hurt him, it was because you didn’t want to hurt yourself.”

Gary shook his head. “I was angry with him, too. He was holding back our most crucial findings. Did you know this? I realized it when I saw the first paper he published. I’d been in the lab since day one, and knew exactly what we’d found. Ray was selfish. Like Ellis. Like me.”

The hand with the harpoon gun fell slightly. Trip felt Kiran tense up at his side, but Gary, sensing this as well, raised the gun again. “You weren’t selfish,” Trip said. “You wanted to do what was right.”

“Did I?” Gary asked. “The other day, when I heard Ray talking about how he was going to make his research freely available, I couldn’t take it anymore. As I worked in the lab, I got madder and madder. I didn’t know where the anger was coming from. I thought about killing myself, cutting my own throat, just so I wouldn’t be a party to this web of lies—”

“It wasn’t about you,” Trip said. “It was in the water. It had nothing to do with Ray.”

“But the betrayal was real. After dinner, I tried to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. I saw myself doing horrible things, like tearing off my fingers. So I came up here to be alone. I was thinking about throwing myself overboard, just to stop the noise in my head, when Ray appeared.”

His eyes grew clouded. “Ray was here to look at the lights, but when he saw me, we started to talk. I wanted to speak to him privately, so we went down the hatchway to his cabin. I confronted him about the missing results. He denied it at first, then threatened to take me off the project if I refused to go along, I wanted to kill myself, and then I wanted to kill him, too—”

Without lowering the harpoon gun, Gary picked up a dive belt and looped it over his body. He did the same with a second belt, one across each shoulder, so that they crossed his chest like a pair of bandoliers. “I didn’t even know I had the shears in my pocket. All I could think of were the lights in the sea. When he was dead, I went to the dive cockpit to wash up, then headed back to the lab. Nobody saw me, but while I was waiting for you to find the body, I chewed off the ends of my fingers.”

Gary’s face was obscured by the rain. “So I was the most selfish of all. I killed Ray so that I wouldn’t hurt myself. Now I’ve done the same to Ellis.” He swallowed hard. “It’s time to do something selfless for a change.”

He tossed the harpoon gun aside. Before anyone else could move, Gary climbed over the railing of the yacht, the dive belts looped across both his shoulders, and leapt into the ocean.

Trip and the others ran to the railing. Gary was already gone, the weight of the dive belts dragging him below the surface, the sea closing rapidly over his head. Trip stared at the water for a long time, his eyes smarting from the rain, but Gary did not appear again. All around the ship, the ghostly lights continued to fluoresce, the octopus school glowing as it had done for millions of years, casting its cold radiance across the unmarked shroud of the sea.

On a trellised arcade at Holbertson Hospital, a yellow wall gave back the sun’s rays. Trip sat in a wickerwork chair under a ceiling fan, hands folded, looking out at the garden. He was thinking of nothing in particular.

A chair beside him creaked as someone sat down. It was Meg. “How are you doing?”

Trip considered the question. Looking at his hands, he noted with some satisfaction that his fingers were healing, although the nails were still torn. “I’m all right. What about you?”

“I thought I’d pay a visit to our friend in the next ward. Want to come along?”

Trip only rose in reply. As they walked along the arcade, they passed a pair of nurses wearing white surgical masks. At their approach, the nurses inclined their heads politely, but kept their distance.

They had arrived in Antigua two days ago. With the yacht repaired, the journey had taken three days, with frequent breaks to keep the engine from overheating. Purified water and magnesium salts had kept their destructive impulses at bay, but it was unclear what the lasting effects would be.

As they walked, Meg said softly, “You know, when I close my eyes, I still see them.”

Trip knew what she meant. Whenever his own eyes were closed, he saw the octopus lights blinking softly in the darkness. The pattern had been permanently branded onto his subconscious, broadcasting a message that would always be there. Magnesium controlled the urge, but did not eliminate it entirely.

And he was not the only one. Meg’s elbow, he saw, had been freshly bandaged.

They reached a room in the adjoining ward. Inside, Ellis was seated in bed, his notes spread across his lap. His throat was swathed in gauze. The shears had missed his carotid artery by only a few millimeters.

As they entered, Ellis looked up. When they asked him how he was doing, he studied his own hands before speaking. The bruises on his knuckles had faded. “I’m well enough, I suppose.”

Looking at the notes on the bedspread, Trip recognized the pictures and sketches that he had taken of the octopus school. “I hope you aren’t having second thoughts about your decision.”

Ellis made a dismissive gesture. When the yacht was a few miles from shore, he had taken the bucket with the last remaining octopus and tipped it overboard, watching as it slid under the glassy surface. Even if they took precautions to avoid infection, the risk of contagion had been too great.

“It’s a big ocean,” Ellis said now, his voice a whisper. “There are other discoveries to be made. And as you said, our first responsibility is to the living. Although the dead deserve our respect as well.”

Trip merely nodded. After another minute of small talk, he left the others alone, sensing that they wanted to speak privately. As he headed for the door, he caught Meg’s eye. She smiled at him, a trace of sadness still visible in her face, then turned back to the man in the hospital bed.

Outside, on the covered walk, the sun was setting, its last rays shining through the trellis. As Trip headed down the arcade, the slats of the trellis alternately hid and revealed the sunset, reminding him, briefly, of the lights that he had seen in the sea. He had almost reached the end of the walkway when he realized that his left hand was creeping toward his lips.

Trip halted. Up ahead, the garden was only a few steps away. With an effort, he lowered his hand, his gaze fixed on the tips of his fingers. He waited for the impulse to fade, as it always did. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, it passed. He exhaled. Then, stuffing his hands in his pockets, he headed for the garden, keeping his eyes turned away from the light.