If Marina hadn’t told him, Rio would have completely missed it. Just a splash, gone before he had time to wonder what it was. It happened so quickly he hadn’t even managed to get his phone out, let alone take pictures to send to his mom.

“Was it the whale’s tail making that splash?”

“No!” Marina giggled. “It’s their breath!”

“Their breath?”

“Whales are more like humans than we think,” she explained. “They need air just like us, and unless they regularly come up to the surface to breathe, they drown. So that plume of water you saw is actually the whale breathing out through its blowholes.”

Rio had never stopped to imagine how a whale breathed before. Or even what a whale’s breathing looked like. But then again, his old life hadn’t been spent under the dazzling Californian light with the sound of the ocean in his dreams.

After twenty more minutes, in which Marina had spotted one more whale—a humpback apparently—Rio had failed to see any. Worse, his arms had started to ache from holding the binoculars. Marina was right. Whale watching, he was quickly discovering, was a lot harder than it looked.

“Here.” She rummaged in her pockets, pulling out a nail file, some gum, a pen, and then her binoculars—which were a third the size of Rio’s. “You can have these, if you want.”

“Are you sure?”

Marina glanced at his binoculars and grimaced. “Yours must be at least a million years old! Anyway, I’ve got another pair at home.”

As he put them in his pocket, Rio’s fingers touched the edge of his mom’s picture, and he pulled it out lest the binoculars squash it.

“What is that?” Marina asked curiously. “It must be very important to you if you carry it around with you all the time.”

Rio cradled the drawing protectively against his chest. “It’s a whale,” he answered, omitting the fact that his mother had drawn it.

She nodded, not in the way that some people nod when they aren’t really listening. But as if she knew there was something else he wasn’t telling her. He braced himself for the inevitable questions, but instead Marina just smiled.

“Can I look?”

He paused a fraction of a second before handing it over. What harm was there to let her? Besides, if he could show anyone a picture of a whale, it would be this girl.

Marina took the sketch and spread it out in her hands.

“Oh!” she exclaimed with a start. “It’s White Beak.”

12

The Spyhopper

Rio’s jaw dropped wide open. “You know White Beak?” he asked in disbelief. He had hardly dared to believe the whale would still be alive, let alone that other people might actually know of it. “B-b-but how?!”

“Come with me,” Marina said, handing back the picture with a wide grin, “and I’ll show you.”

Before Rio could answer, she led him toward the center of the harbor, where boats of all sizes were moored up to wooden jetties—sailing boats with masts that creaked and sighed in the wind, fishing boats with lobster pots stacked high on decks stinking of fish, sleek cruisers with flowery names, and boats that had been battered at sea and looked like relics from a bygone era.