Chapter 14

The most bizarre thing about morphing is how quickly you get used to it. I've been an owl many times over, and it's become almost second nature. Like anything else, I guess, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. But we only had so many morphs, so maybe it's too soon to make broad statements like that. I could turn into a raven just as easily as the owl. It was our first bird morph and something of our go-to flying morph when we could actually be out during the day. We picked up the owl simply for the bump in night vision. I could become a raccoon if I wanted to, but the only time I had was when we had done morph practice in the woods. I wasn't part of the mission that needed it, I was actually just focused on learning how to morph clothes. I'd been lucky enough to morph straight out of my underwear and I'd had to demorph and get dressed behind the privacy curtain we'd improvised out of an old tarp. The same tarp that was now draped over the tent. Instead of morphing a raccoon and breaking into Chapman's office, I'd been that damn cat. I could become Melissa's cat anytime I wanted, and I'd already done that more times than I really wanted to.

I had two other morphs, and neither of them were associated with good memories. I could morph a bull grizzly if I had to, but I've only ever morphed the bear twice. It was powerful, but the sense of invulnerability was misleading. I had almost died, so it wasn't something I saw as being an easy morph. To pull off a morph, you have to concentrate, and the bear wasn't something I wanted to do on a regular basis. It definitely wasn't second nature.

And the only other animal I could become was a flying squirrel. It was the smallest thing Cassie had had in her barn at the time. Agile, a good climber, and it could see in the dark, we picked it because it could fit into tight spaces. It became an escape morph, and in that regard, it had done what we'd needed it to do. But I would be almost as apprehensive morphing the flying squirrel again as I was morphing the stingray.

And technically, I could morph Kimberly Chapman and Elfangor, but those fall into the hell no category.

The first time morphing is always the most difficult. There are things about becoming an animal that are sometimes shocking and unpredictable. Part and parcel to the animal's anatomy is sensory input that is often times much different than what we experience as humans. For example, it goes without saying that owls can see in the dark, but they also don't see color that well. That's true of the raccoon and the squirrel, too. And I learned that ravens can see ultraviolet, which is unbelievably cool, but also disorienting as hell at first.

But nothing any of us had morphed to this point had gills.

Actually, Jake was the only one of us that had morphed anything cold-blooded before, and we were going a long way back the evolutionary tree with this ray.

Tobias was actually the first one to start the change. I watched as he lost all his hair. Then his skin darkened and paled at the same time. From his nose all the way up his head, his skin turned black. But his mouth, jaw, and his front turned milk-white. Which in the moonlight wasn't a far stretch for Tobias. He was always a little pale and gaunt, and really he looked like a vampire out of a Stephanie Meyer book at times. With his face in monochrome, though, he looked like Batman for a minute.

Then, things got stranger.

His face melted into a shapeless mass. Rays, like sharks, are cartilaginous fish. That means they don't really have bones the same way we do. So his nose, his cheekbones, that stuff all softened and flattened. His neck vanished as the tissue of his shoulders turned into a web all the way up to his face. His eyes wandered to the outside of his head, toward the ears he no longer had, then pushed outward, protruding from the rest of his face. Where his ears used to be, a specialized gill opening - called a spiracle, I'd learned in the car - opened in his head.

He started shrinking rapidly, from over five foot tall down to about my mid-thigh. His arms became almost fetal stubs before they completely fused and spread out like a cape. His torso collapsed like pancake, and before he lost the ability to stand, all of us were treated to the sight of gill openings appearing in his ribcage. He gasped soundlessly as he realized his lungs were gone, and with a graceless splash, his legs finally withered away and he fell forward into the water.

The wingtips extended out to their full length, and the last thing to change was the tail. The whiplike appendage shot out behind him and flicked back and forth before the venomous spines emerged.

Start to finish, it had maybe taken about five minutes. We could each of us morph from human to bird in about half or a third of that time. That's what I mean about repeat morphs. Maybe it's because the mental image of the morph is clearer after the first time being the animal, maybe it's just not as scary. Or maybe the Escafil technology remembers the difference in genetic structure and so the pathways from human to animal become easier. Who knows?

Aximili might, actually.

We watched Tobias swim around in circles, his wing-like fins draping over the surface of the sand like a living blanket.

"Tobias?" I asked, loud as I dared. "Can you hear us?"

No answer.

Cassie put a hand in the water and splashed back and forth. "Tobias," she whispered loudly.

The ray swam up to her hand, then let her fingers glide past his skin. ‹Okay, I can't really hear you guys underwater. I mean, I can hear you, but I can't really make out what you're saying. So just listen for now. The good news is that the ray doesn't have a ton of panic instincts. The bad news, there's a point mid-morph where you won't be able to breathe at all. Just push through it and get in the water as soon as possible.›

I took a breath, and sighed. I waded out into the water, about knee-deep. That seemed deep enough. It was cold enough on my calves, and I didn't want to lose my legs in waist-deep water. I focused on the smell of the water, the sand beneath my toes, on the sounds of the waves, and I tried to form the memory in my head of the ray at the touch pool.

I saw the external changes when Tobias had done this, but I could feel the internal changes now. I didn't notice on him how the jaw rearranged itself. I didn't notice his teeth melting together. Finally, I reached the point he had warned us. My lungs tightened and I knew this was my last breath of fresh air till we were done. The claustrophobia kicked in, and I had to keep a lid on it. I knew I could hold my breath for more than a minute. The changes had stopped when my concentration had broken, but they resumed, and I pushed forward. My first breath through my gills was a bizarre sensation to say the very least. The best way I can describe it is like drinking cold water, the sensation of it flowing down the back of your throat. It's like that, but it never stops.

And truth be told, it was only cold for a little bit. The warmth of my mammalian human body faded quickly, and actually not fast enough. As I became cold-blooded, the ray was uncomfortable with blood as warm as it was. I wondered how hot the water would need to be for a ray to have a body temp near human levels. But heat left my body quickly, and I was surprising comfortable in the cold water.

Eyesight was a weird thing for the ray. I could see decently well, actually. Especially in the shallows, I could see distances well enough, and at any rate, I could see better in the water than a human could without goggles. I didn't necessarily have fantastic vision, though, and as I swam around, getting used to the ray's senses and instincts, I realized I was much more interested in the smell of the water and the electrical receptors that lined the bottom of my wings and around my mouth. Rays found food like a metal detector found an old coin in the sand, and really the eyes seemed more for minding my surroundings. I noted the other black shapes in water, decided they weren't anything that was going to eat me, and I swam on.

Bat rays fly underwater. I used my wings exactly the same way an owl would, and for as massively different as it was to be underwater, breathing through my gills, it only took a few minutes to get used to it.

‹This isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be,› Cassie said.

‹We haven't gone into deeper waters yet,› I pointed out.

‹Oh, thanks for that, Rae,› she said.

‹Any time, sweetie.›

‹Seriously, guys,› Jake said. ‹We've gotta get this done. Keep your eyes out for shadows.›

‹If you get bit, morph,› I said.

‹Right, what she said,› Jake agreed.

We only needed to swim a half mile down, and that was nothing to us. I could see the growth on the wharf pilings, the barnacles, the mussels, and what I assumed had to be sponges. I had just learned what the hell a tunicate was, both from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Blue Planetepisode I'd watched in the car. They're just type of marine invertebrate, kind of like a coral polyp, but not really. The group includes sea squirts and sea tulips. As if anyone but a marine biologist would need to know that. But I saw a number of them as well on the pilings and on the rocks that lined the seabed. I could only really make out detail in things close by. Marine plants drifted in the current. Most of what I could see was just silhouettes in the dark and if not for the moonlight filtering through the surface, I'm not sure what I'd be able to see. As it was, it felt like we were in a pet store after hours.

We only saw a few fish swimming through. That wasn't surprising. This was feeding time for most of the sharks that live in our waters. Threshers and leopard sharks, mostly, but white sharks do occasionally make the news in the area. I wasn't worried about that though. When we actually made it to the Farallon Islands, that's when I'd worry about sharks. A far more pressing concern was the intrusive instinct to scan for clams or crabs. That and Marco couldn't resist narrating everything.

Seriously, while I can rag on the boy all day, Marco can be funny at times. And maybe he was just trying to diffuse some of the tension we were all feeling. So he did his very best Blue Planet narration… if that documentary had been narrated by Christian Bale. In his Batman voice.

We made it a little more than halfway before we saw the first sea lion. Seeing it in water, it looked far more dangerous than they had on land from behind chain-link fencing. I've seen them before, obviously. And I knew exactly how agile they could be in the water. A sea lion could turn on a dime underwater, and they were agile enough to dodge great whites if they could see them coming. Till now, I'd always seen them as playful animals. And while I knew they were towards the top of the food chain - minus orcas and sharks - now that I was a ray, I actually saw them as killers.

The sea lion wasn't hunting, though. It swam past us and I saw the dark shape contrasted against the surface. I could hear the splash in surround sound as the sea lion hopped out of the water. The ray felt sounds in the water the way I could feel heavy bass in my feet in the car, and it was a very tactile form of hearing.

Swimming toward the surface, I realized that we had come to the part of the wharf where the sea lions were sleeping. It was obvious that not all of them were asleep, but for the most part, the took no notice of us as we swam past.

‹Now what?› Marco asked.

‹I was thinking the same thing,› I said.

The most dangerous part here was that we needed to be human in order to acquire the sea lions, and none of us were completely sure how that would go. The water here was deep enough that morphing to human posed a real risk of drowning. I could morph back near the surface, but any way the change occurred, I was sure that I would sink somewhat before I had enough of my arms and legs to actually swim. Then, from there, I'd have to get out of the water and touch an animal that could bite through an ocean sunfish. Sometimes, looking up things online is a bad idea.

‹Hmm,› Cassie said. ‹This seemed really straightforward in my head.›

‹Ha,› I said. ‹The straightforward part was they were going to try to eat us.› As soon as I said it, I realized that was still our best bet here. We needed something to get their attention, and something to keep the one we acquired occupied while we touched it. ‹Wait,› I said, ‹I have an idea.›

Flapping my pectoral fins, I skimmed the ocean floor. I noticed the silhouettes of the other bat rays above me. ‹Care to share your idea?› Jake asked.

‹Simple,› I said. ‹Bait.›

‹I thought we were the bait,› Tobias said.

‹Well, if the sea lions aren't in the water, that's not going to help,› I said.

‹Okay, so we're going to catch a fish or something?› Tobias asked.

‹That's the plan.›

The others soon joined me in searching the ocean floor. Between the rocks and the growth of the wharf pilings, finding bare sand became a bit of a challenge. As we went deeper, there was less light and I relied more and more on a weird sense of touch in the water. As I approached the rocks, for example, it was like I could feel the change in water pressure. I can't really describe it. But I realized that I could swim easily in water with limited visibility.

Again, we didn't find a lot of fish. They were either in deeper water or they were hiding better than we could find them. Bat rays aren't fish-eaters. So it should come as no real surprise that I found a large lobster before I found any kind of fish. The lobster was a cantankerous son of a bitch, I'll give him that, but there wasn't much the crustacean could do to a bat ray. Catching a lobster was an interesting experience. I just opened my mouth and even I was shocked at the vacuum pressure. I sucked a whole lobster into my crushing tooth plates, and since the lobster was kind of perpendicular to me, I ended up with its back in my jaws. In that position, there wasn't much it could do with its massive pincers. I had to bite back on the ray's natural instinct to eat the thing.

‹Okay,› I said. ‹I have a lobster.›

‹Damn,› Marco said. ‹Twenty minutes at the beach and we have a lobster dinner. Anyone else want to do this again? Drop a basket or something and fill it with lobsters?›

‹I for one, have no intention of morphing out of my lungs again,› Cassie said.

‹Guys, this thing is really trying to get out of my mouth. At least one of you needs to demorph.›

Marco was by far the best swimmer among us, so he got the fun job of demorphing first. He had three bat rays nearby. Their job was to keep him near the surface to the extent that three bat rays could help. Once he got to his full human weight, he'd be beyond their ability to offer support, but we figured he'd be able to tread water by then, anyway.

Morphing back to human, he obviously wanted to stay close to the surface as much as possible. And our apprehension about the switch from gills back to lungs was in fact a valid concern. But morphing back to human was always easier than morphing to animal, and it only took about half as long for Marco to get all the way back to his human body. It seemed his lungs came back about a minute or so into the morph, based on the way he forced himself upward. Jake, Cassie, and Tobias offered life support, helping him stay near the surface, but really he didn't need it.

My plan had been to swim up to him and hand him the now-dead lobster, which he would then hold while the rest of us demorphed. Of course, the part we hadn't counted on was that the splashing caused by Marco demorphing, combined with three bat rays near the surface, had aroused the sea lions' curiosity.

We didn't have any time to react. From the first splash - and there were multiple splashes - to the time I heard Cassie scream took less than half a minute.

The sea lion bit into her right wing and blood trailed into the ocean around us. It took a full bite out of her wing with no effort at all.

‹Cassie!› Jake roared.

‹Demorph!› Tobias shouted.

The sea lion swam off with Cassie, and all of us swam after. Most of the sea lions had apparently either been startled or simply curious, but I was aware others were following us. Actually, in retrospect, I think Cassie's attacker was worried he was going to have to share his meal. If there hadn't been other sea lions in the area, he may have actually just eaten Cassie where he found her. Marco was doing a full breaststroke above us, but a human trying to follow a sea lion or a school of rays is just an exercise in futility. And the sound of his swimming just made it difficult to keep track of the other sea lions in the water around us.

Cassie was easy to find, but only because as bat rays, we could smell her blood in the water.

‹Cassie?!› Jake shouted. ‹Can you hear us?›

We found out that the reason Cassie wasn't answering us was because she was already demorphing. The sea lion was gone. Apparently, when the bat ray in your mouth doubles and size and grows legs, it's best to maybe find something else to eat. That didn't mean it wouldn't circle back. Or that the other lions would leave us alone.

Jake and Tobias swam up to her, Marco finally caught up to us, and it was right then that I realized I was still holding the damn lobster in my mouth. Once Cassie was back to human, we got shit into high gear.

It wasn't safe to stay in morph at this point, and I'd known something like this could happen, but my premonition didn't preclude panic.

Jake was next to demorph, and no one questioned that. His girlfriend had almost been eaten. But the second Jake was treading water and Marco was free to let go of Cassie, I realized I needed to let go of the lobster if I was going to demorph.

Tobias, however, wasn't a strong swimmer, and he didn't want to demorph till he was somewhere he could get out of the water. I was the only one left with thought-speech capability, so if I didn't talk him into demorphing, no one else would. But I was as worried about Cassie as anyone, and I didn't have the strength of mind to argue with Tobias. He knew the risks involved in staying in morph. If he was more afraid of drowning than he was a sea lion attack, then there wasn't much I could say to change his mind. So Tobias took the lobster.

The change back to human from a gill-breather is weird. A factor I hadn't really counted on is that I grew considerably before I lost my gills, and maybe that added more oxygen to my blood. No idea, really. But there was a massive pressure pushing in on my chest as my gills vanished and the minute it took to grow lungs was impossibly uncomfortable. I gasped forcefully as I broke the surface. My skin gradually returned to normal, and when my hair cascaded out behind me, I knew I was fully human.

And I was freezing.

Cassie was understandably freaked out, but she was completely uninjured once she was back to human. The cold became our first and most immediate problem. It was hard to swim back to the wharf, even though the sea lion had only taken Cassie maybe thirty yards. Swimming in cold water is dangerous, and I knew then that there was no way in hell I was overstating the value of wetsuits.

By the time we got close again, my fingers and toes hurt and the sea lions were agitated. Humans are not graceful swimmers. I remember reading something - or maybe it was something on Animal Planet - that humans are actually like the only ape that swims at all. But because we generally swim at the surface of the water, our style of swimming is very splashy, and the sea lions knew we were coming well in advance.

They did better with this, though. The Santa Cruz Wharf is a massive tourist trap. I mean, it's a cool place to go, but for the most part, it's just restaurants, souvenir shops, and boat tours. I think there's a dive shop there too, but besides Dolphin - a restaurant my dad likes for it's blackened swordfish - we don't really go there. But people do go to the Wharf, and the sea lions are a lot more used to humans swimming than they are to bat rays morphing into humans.

Jake pulled himself up out of the water and onto one of the wooden platform slats beneath the Wharf. All of us were beyond caring by that point, and the shining eyes of some twenty or thirty sea lions looked at us in the dark. The nearest one wasn't afraid at all, and I heard him barking at us. Jake reached down and helped pull Cassie out. Then Marco. Tobias swam past and I felt the wet velvet texture of his skin on my thigh as he past. I wiggled my fingers back and forth, gesturing to him. And seconds later, I was handing a lobster to Jake.

It was a good sized lobster, maybe ten inches long. And once Jake had it, Marco pulled me up onto the wooden beam. Tobias finally demorphed, and I moved down the beam to give him more room. Five teenagers sat hip to hip on a beam among two dozen curious sea lions. It sounds cool, but it wasn't. It was dark and creepy under the Wharf, I had seaweed in my hair, my eyes stung from saltwater, I was dripping wet and even though I was finally out of the cold water, the summer breeze did little to warm me. And on top of all of it, sitting on the wooden beam in nothing but my swimsuit, I was certain I was going to end up with a splinter in my ass.

Jake held up the lobster, hoping against hope that one of the animals would want it. I don't know if sea lions even eat lobsters. Jake tore off a claw. He cut his hand on the shell, but numbed by the cold and completely out of fucks to give, he didn't care. I have to reiterate that it is very illegal to feed a wild sea lion in California. Not like jaywalking illegal, or no parking illegal, or any of those odd, made-up municipal fines, but federal statute violation illegal. But again, no fucks left to give, and I doubt the sea lion was going to rat us out. Jake broke off a section of leg and tossed it to the nearest sea lion. The lion caught it effortlessly, and whether lobsters are something they usually eat or not, this one seemed to like it. The lion barked again, and Jake tossed another piece of lobster at it. But then when it barked again, Jake refused to give it anything else.

The lion didn't like this game at all.

When the lobster tidbits stopped, the sea lion ambled along its own wood beam, then with a nimble grace I wouldn't have believed for such a large animal, it maneuvered around a wharf piling till it was on the beam in front of us. It was close enough that when it barked, I could smell its fishy breath. Jake tossed it the full claw, and I could hear those powerful jaws crack the lobster shell like it was nothing.

He tore off the other claw and held it up in the moonlight so the sea lion could see it, but he didn't throw it. He handed the rest of the lobster to Cassie, and I'm not sure if she even registered that she was holding it, she was so tired and freaked out.

"Guys," he said casually. "Stay here, but be ready."

"Wait, what?" I asked.

That's when Jake jumped into the water.