“There are babies,” said Angel. “They want to come closer, but their moms are saying no. Their moms know the boat is unnatural and shouldn’t be here, but they’re mostly curious, not mad or anything.”

Paul looked at Angel. “Do you like making up stories about things you see?” He sounded friendly, not trying to be insulting.

Angel gazed at him seriously. “I’m not making things up. Uh-oh.” She turned quickly, and two seconds later, another whale suddenly breached even closer to us, leaping almost entirely out of the water and then crashing down. It looked so, so fun.

“He was showing off,” Angel told me. “Like a teenager.”

“Are we missing something here?” Melanie asked. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not just a weird little kid,” Angel told Paul, whose eyes widened. “Well, actually, I guess I am a weird little kid, but not in the way you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking —,” Paul began, but Angel shook her head.

“My file should have told you,” she explained. “I can hear what people are thinking.”

I decided not to mention that often she could also control what people were thinking.

Angel patted her pocket of poker winnings regretfully, as if realizing she wouldn’t be able to pull that again on this crew. “Not just people, but most animals too. I heard the whales thinking and came up to see them.”

Paul and Melanie were at a loss for words.

Get used to it, I thought.

Chapter 38

38

IT WAS HARD HAVING to stay on the Wendy K., taking three days to get from Argentina to Antarctica, when we could have flown it in about five hours. We did go for nice, long flights a couple of times a day. The air was cold, but no colder than it was at 25,000 feet, which was well below freezing. We found out that frigid air didn’t bother us as long as we were moving, but standing around on the ship’s deck got pretty uncomfortable.

Total broke down and consented to wear a small down dog coat. Akila had worn it as a puppy. During a record-setting cold spell, when it was, like, eighty below zero.

“Land ahoy!” Gazzy shouted from five hundred feet in the air. He pointed into the distance, where I could see a white island sticking up out of the ocean.

Michael Papa squinted at the horizon. “It should be visible pretty soon,” he said. “The air is so clear here that we get great visibility.”

“It’s visible now,” I told him. “We have really good eyesight. Like hawks.”

He nodded, digesting this, and again I saw the look of almost envy that I’d seen on all these scientists’ faces from time to time. No one had ever been truly envious of our abilities before, and it was a cool feeling. The bird kid version of being a football captain or homecoming queen. Sort of.