Free The Missing One by Lucy Atkins

one routine, Bella had to open her jaws to allow the trainer to brush her teeth with a giant toothbrush. Thecrowd whooped and yelled. Some schoolkids threw popcorn. The male had been trained to drink what seemed to be the contents of a giant can of gasoline, then swim the perimeter making the sound of an outboard motor. After that Elena stayed away when the whales were performing.
    Between shows, the two whales would move in slow circles around their cramped tank. Sometimes when she passed she’d find them just floating there, completely motionless, staring at the glass sides. The head trainer, Dan, said they were sleeping, but maybe he was just trying to make himself feel better because they both knew that orcas in the wild swim for miles while they sleep. They shut down half their brain at a time. They don’t hang in the water.
    She’d seen sleeping killer whales in the wild once – a few summers ago, up in Puget Sound, she was on a field trip with some other students, monitoring Chinook levels, when they spotted a pod out to sea. Twenty or more whales were lined up in sleeping formation, moving eerily across the horizon, surfacing to breathe – a tiny pause – then submerging for a long time.
    In the wild, an orca will swim up to a hundred miles a day; here at Sea Park they could only move in tight circles. Out in the ocean, they’d dive hundreds of feet to the sea bed; here, they’d hit the bottom at thirty feet. They lived, essentially, in a bathtub.
    She noticed one day that the male’s dorsal fin was beginning to collapse. Dan said it was nothing to worry about – it happened to captive males, he said, it definitely wasn’t a sign of ill health.
    She had somehow managed to get past all this when it came to the Bottlenose family. They seemed active and healthy and she couldn’t spend her time feeling bad for them. She’d had to shove these thoughts out of her head because she had work to do, and she knew she was lucky to have unfettered access. As she monitored their play patterns and the language of their play, she’d grown used to their environment – mostly she managed not to think about the life they could have had outside it. The dolphins seemed to have adapted to captivity. It was possible that they didn’t remember the wild or what it felt like to skim through the waves like the pods she sometimes saw down on the beach. She felt attached to the Bottlenose family, but distanced from them at the same time. They were what they should be: research subjects of whom she’d grown fond.
    But the killer whales were different. They sat like capital letters in black and white, quietly making their point.
    Perhaps because she wasn’t studying them, she didn’t manage the same scientific detachment. She couldn’t avoid them either – she had to pass their tank every night to get out of the park. Sometimes, she would catch the eye of the big female, and she had an uncomfortable feeling that the whale knew all about her. She dismissed this as tiredness – the hollow feeling you get at the end of a long day, when you are alone in a public place that has emptied out for the night.
    One day she noticed that the male had scabs across his back, and the skin, which should be glossy black, was peeling and mottled. His dorsal had collapsed fully now, and hung limp, like the tail of a dejected dog.
    Each night, as she passed their tank to let herself out of the lush tropical park, she would feel their silent longing settle on her like a cloak. She felt as if they were asking her for something, quietly and insistently. She could not shake off the guilt.

Chapter three
    I can’t sleep, every part of my body is jangling and my head pulses with the effort of containing all the thoughts that I can’t allow myself to think. The flight is almost empty so we have a whole row of seats just for the two of us. Finn has finally fallen