Marina wrinkled her brow before sweeping her hand out. “You swear on the ocean? You swear you can hear them?”

He nodded. “Ocean’s promise!”

“Okay, what about now, then?” she said. “Can you hear one now?”

Rio closed his eyes. He concentrated hard, trying to block out the sound of the water thwacking against the hull, the conversation of the other passengers, even the intensity of Marina’s gaze, which he could feel on his face.

At first, he heard nothing, and a tiny seed of doubt crept in. Maybe he’d been wrong? But then, a tiny click. Faint but definitely there. A gurgle. Another click. Now he just had to figure out the direction.

“Eleven o’clock,” he said decisively.

Marina swung herself around and stared at the horizon with such ferocious intensity that Rio shivered. The ocean remained calm and flat. He gulped. Come on. He couldn’t be wrong. Still nothing.

And then . . . a plume of water shooting high in the sky.

Marina spun back around, regarding Rio with a mixture of awe and wonder. “You really can hear them!”

22

Invitation

The rest of that boat trip, Marina and Rio had fun experimenting. What was the sound really like? Could he try and describe it to her? How close did the whale need to be in order for him to hear it? Marina even made diagrams in her notebook to show the approximate distances.

“This is us on the boat,” she explained. “And the farthest whale was over here, which is about one hundred yards I would guess.”

“I only heard that one really faintly.”

“But it’s still incredible!” Marina turned to Rio with eyes that shone like stars. “I’ve been on the water since I was a baby, and I’ve never heard the gray whales. But you can!”

Rio shook his head in disbelief. How strange to think he’d come all this way to the other side of the world to discover something so unusual about himself. He had only just begun to start processing it when the Spyhopper docked back at the jetty and Marina ran up to Birch and grabbed his arm. “Dad! You’ll never guess! Rio can hear the gray whales!”

Rio thought Birch was going to instantly dismiss it. The kind of reaction grown-ups gave a lot when they heard something that seemed far-fetched. But he did nothing of the sort. Instead, he narrowed his eyes and chewed his lip thoughtfully.

“I could tell there was something different about you the first time we went out on the water.” He paused. “You’ve got the ocean’s ear, as we sailors would say.”

Marina glanced up at her dad, and something passed between them. Rio wasn’t quite sure exactly what, but it was as if there were invisible words floating in the air and a conversation taking place out of sight.

Birch cleared his throat. “I have only ever heard of one other person in my lifetime who was able to hear the gray whales and that was a Mexican friend of mine from years and years ago who lived down in the lagoons.”