Outside the glowing neon-green entrance of Papa Gu’s Ultra-Scrub Spa, eleven colossal Astral Void Whales were having the time of their lives. Inside the fifty-mile porcelain canyon, clouds of warm peppermint-and-sulfur suds billowed up to the top of the containment curtain. Meanwhile, Ten thousand plush Iron-Wood rollers hummed in a deep, rhythmic bass note, massaging sixty-mile backs and scrubbing decades of space-dust from translucent starlight fins.
Yet a quarter-mile outside the entrance arch, the twelfth member of the pod. A fifty-mile-long juvenile calf who was still considered a toddler by Void Whale standards—backed away with its tail-fin tucked tightly under its belly. Every time the high-pressure brass nozzles hissed inside the wash tunnel, the calf let out a high, flute-like whimper and hid its eyes behind its pectoral flippers.
Meanwhile, four hundred jagged black Blood-Barnacles clustered around its chin and ear-ridges pulsed aggressively, biting deeper into its tender silver skin to keep it from following its mother into the soap.
“It’s too scared of the big spinning rollers,” Su Nuannuan said, pressing her nose against the forward observation glass as she held up her pink magnifying glass. “Look at its ears, Papa! Every time the wax-sprayer goes whoosh, it flinches!”
