Rio had come from the city. He knew all about noise. But the sea? Surely below the ocean was the quietest place on earth?

“Lots of ships make the same noise as the whale, and that interferes with their sense of direction. It’s why a lot of them end up stranded on beaches.”

“Like the whale in the museum?” Rio gulped.

“That could have been the reason. No one knows for sure.”

“And White Beak?”

“She could have just gone off course . . . She might have been confused by something or . . .” Marina’s voice wobbled in a way Rio had never heard before. “But if no one spots her soon, then . . .”

She closed the laptop, and a heavy silence filled the cabin. Not the nice kind of silence they’d shared while lying on the bow end, but the kind of silence that is full of ominous things.

“White Beak?”

Something tugged so hard at Rio’s insides that he suddenly wanted to cry. Not this. Not now. He needed Marina to tell him that there’d been a mistake and White Beak would turn up soon. But she did neither of those things. Instead, she patted his arm clumsily. And the pain returned like a tsunami, tightening its grip around his chest.

“I—I—I need to go,” Rio muttered, disentangling himself from the bench and stumbling toward the door.

Out of the cabin, the clouds cast a huge shadow over the water. Wind smacked him in the face. Everything was moving up and down, and he could barely see where the boat ended and land began. He tripped over a coil of rope and with shaky legs, jumped back onto solid ground. It was then the rain started to fall. Not gently, but in sharp icy daggers splintering down from the sky.

“RIO!” Marina jumped off the boat and ran over to him. Rain plastered her hair against her face. “What’s the matter?”

He thought of his mom. Her collection of heart-shaped pebbles, the memory of her coppery hair, and finally the way her eyes shone when she played the violin.

“She’s probably fine,” Marina said, and it took Rio a second to realize she was talking about White Beak and not his mother.

28

Whispers on the Wind

Over the next few days, Rio scoured the Happywhale database for any sightings of White Beak. He urged Marina to message some of the other whale watchers based farther down the coast, in case one of them had seen her and had forgotten to upload their photos.

Nothing came back.

He knew Marina was worried and trying to hide it from him. It wasn’t anything she said, but then she didn’t have to. Rio could hear worry. The anxious tapping of her fingers on the table, the grinding of teeth when she was staring at the computer, and the way she snapped at everyone around her—even her dad.