Devilfish Annotated Read-Along · Chapter 25

End Notes

1. 1
   An octopus doesn’t just change color, it changes color in waves—rippling bands of pigment that travel down the length of an arm. Here’s something that I didn’t actually learn until after I wrote this book: In 2015, researchers at UC Santa Barbara demonstrated that octopus skin contains the same light-detecting machinery as octopus eyes—rhodopsin and the associated phototransduction genes—and that a patch of skin removed from the animal entirely will still expand its chromatophores in response to light. The skin sees. Not metaphorically. So while Declan is looking at Elliot in the sunlight and Elliot has his eyes squeezed shut against it, Elliot's new skin is, in some limited and completely real sense, looking back. Read in context ↩
2. 2
   The giant Pacific octopus, the species I had in the back of my mind for all of this, does have two rows of suckers per arm. Each arm has approximately 280 suckers, so roughly 2,240 on the whole animal. Elliot has six limbs, so do the math and appreciate what Declan has volunteered for. 🐙
   
   Each sucker has two parts: the infundibulum, the grooved outer disc that makes the seal, and the acetabulum, the chamber behind it that does the pulling. The muscles lower the pressure inside, and the seal holds without the octopus having to keep spending energy on it. Each one is independently controlled, and the big ones near the base can hold something like thirty-five pounds on their own. I want to stress that I researched all of this for entirely legitimate structural reasons and then I wrote this scene. Read in context ↩
3. 3
   Water is a terrible lubricant. It thins out anything you'd want to use and washes it away, which is why sex in a bathtub is a good deal less appealing in practice than in theory. I had written myself into a scene that takes place entirely in a tide pool, and I needed a solution that wasn't "and then they got out and went inside," because getting out and going inside would have wrecked everything Declan is trying to do in this chapter.
   
   So I gave the octopians their own lubricant. Did I borrow that idea from the omegaverse? Yes. Yes, I did. Read in context ↩
4. 4
   Declan came down to this cove to have a difficult conversation and he brought oil, which tells you something about the man's approach to planning. Read in context ↩
5. 5
   Go back and read the first sentence of Chapter 23. Declan and Nance are in the library at three in the morning, heads together over a stack of books and papers, and Elliot walks straight past them and up to bed without asking a single question about what they're doing.
   
   This is what they were doing. Declan spent the night working out the rules of what's happening to Elliot, which is why he arrives at this cove already knowing about the tide, and why he can say it's time with confidence while Elliot has no idea what he's talking about. Elliot never asks. He's too busy being a tragedy. Declan investigating on his own and then quietly steering the outcome without explaining himself is the single most consistent thing he does in this book, and it started back in Chapter 14 with the almanacs. Read in context ↩
6. 6
   An octopus arm is a muscular hydrostat—the same structural principle as an elephant's trunk or your own tongue. It has no bone and no fluid-filled cavity to push against; it works by staying a constant volume and rearranging its muscle. Squeeze it narrower and it lengthens. Contract the long fibers and it shortens. Fire the oblique ones and it twists. It can do all of that at any point along its length, in any direction, without needing anything rigid to lever against.
   
   Which means that if I wrote Elliot doing the ordinary in-and-out, I'd be wasting him. Human sex is built around a skeleton and hinges. Elliot doesn't have either anymore—at least, not down there—and once I understood what a hydrostat actually does, the scene rewrote itself: he doesn't stroke, he undulates, and everything else he's got wrapped around Declan does the same thing at the same time. Read in context ↩
7. 7
   Elliot knows what the tide is doing without looking at it, and I based that on other marine animals that run on a circatidal clock—an internal rhythm of roughly twelve hours and twenty-five minutes, matching the interval between tides. It's been documented in crustaceans, molluscs, an acoel worm, even a mangrove cricket, and the crucial finding is that it's endogenous: take the animal into a laboratory with no waves, no pressure changes, no moonlight, nothing, and it keeps tidal time anyway. The clock is inside it.
   
   So Elliot isn't reading the water. He's checking the time. Read in context ↩
8. 8
   I wanted the shifting to run on rules a nineteenth-century person could actually work out with a pencil, a tide table, and a nautical almanac—no incantations, no mystic bargains, nothing that requires believing in anything. I’d already put in all the supermoon research into the book, the moon greatly impacts the tides on planet Earth, and a body that answers to the tide is only a slight exaggeration of animals that genuinely do. Tying it to Elliot’s…ahem…release as well was the other half: Elliot has spent the entire book trying to control everything through sheer clenched will, and the rule of his new form is that it lets go when he does. He's been doing the exact opposite of what works since…forever. Read in context ↩
9. 9
   Declan spends this entire chapter asking to look at Elliot—show me, let me see, I want to see all of you—and then, at the one moment he knows Elliot would find it unbearable to watch, he turns around and studies his own bootlaces. Read in context ↩
10. 10
    I put this here on purpose, and it's meant to catch slightly in the throat. These two grew up in the same house. Declan was the older stepbrother who’s bed Elliot crawled in at two in the morning, and there is a version of this story where that history makes what's happening between them impossible to write. I decided it does the opposite. Declan has seen Elliot frightened and small before, has seen it repeatedly, and has never once thought less of him for it. That's precisely why Elliot can survive being seen in this cove. The groundwork was laid years before the book started. Read in context ↩
11. 11
    And there's the loop closed. Back in Chapter 23, Elliot stood on a rocky beach looking at red starfish on the rocks and could only see the welts he'd left on Declan's legs—evidence of damage, proof of what he was. Two chapters later he's crouched in front of those same marks with permission to touch them, and the thing they turn out to be evidence of is that Declan wants him. Read in context ↩
12. 12
    Declan Fitzgerald: sound tactical judgment, poor follow-through. In his defense, that's the first time in weeks that Elliot has smiled at him like that. Read in context ↩