He held out the T-shirt. “None of us can save the world single-handedly. But together, we might just stand a chance. Someone like you can truly help us, Rio.”

Marina and Birch were looking at him with such earnest, hopeful expressions that his own heart leaped in response. Because it wasn’t just his mom that needed him anymore. It was the entire ocean. And as Rio pulled the T-shirt over the top of his yellow one, he wasn’t just slipping on a T-shirt; he was slipping on a whole new identity.

23

Training

Over the next few days, Birch and Marina taught Rio everything there was to know about becoming a whale-watching guide. Not just the practical aspects—like how the safety of humans and the whales always came first, but also the finer details of recording their sightings in the Happywhale database.

By spending time on the Spyhopper, Rio learned more about the ocean than he ever could from a book. Whenever he had thought of it previously it had always been in terms of the crudest statistics and figures. Which ocean was the biggest or the deepest or the coldest. But it wasn’t just a graph. It was home to millions of animals, some of which most people would never ever see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. It didn’t mean they weren’t important.

And since Marina was basically a human encyclopedia when it came to not just gray whales but seemingly every species of marine animal out there, he also inhaled as much information as he could about the creatures of the deep. It was like being at ocean school.

Rio also learned some sad things too, things that made him feel slightly sick.

How once upon a time, there were also gray whales in the Atlantic Ocean, but they had been driven to extinction by hunting. That the lagoons of Mexico hadn’t always been the safe sanctuaries they are today. Indeed, not even that long ago, the whalers would close off the mouth of a lagoon, trapping all the mothers and calves in there, and then they would slaughter each and every one of them—leaving behind a sea of thick red blood.

But Rio didn’t like to dwell on that too much.

In the space of a few minutes with White Beak, he had felt a bond so deep he still heard the faintest echo of it in his heart. The thought of anyone or anything hurting her made his insides shrivel up. Having been face-to-face with her, he would do everything he could to look after her. At night, tired, sunburned, and dazzled from his day at sea, he had gotten into the habit of pulling out his mom’s picture of White Beak.

“I’ll look after you,” he promised her. “I’ll keep you safe.”

He didn’t really have any idea how he would be able to do that. But at least he could track her in the Happywhale database. While many of the whale sightings came from specialized boat trips, a great deal also came from normal, everyday people watching from onshore armed with nothing other than a pair of binoculars and a big dose of patience. Birch even said there was a name for them. They were called citizen scientists.