Marina pulled out a map and spread it on the deck. “So, here we are,” she said jabbing an indistinct point somewhere south off the coast of Ocean Bay. “We’re going to follow the route White Beak would have taken on her way to the lagoons. And the best place to start is here.” She pointed to a coordinate about a hand’s width away. “Thanks to your grandmother’s calls, some of the watchers who live just across the border are combing that area. There’s also a couple of boats searching around San Diego. So, this means our search zone is from just past LA to San Diego.”

“We need to hurry,” Birch said, “if we want to get there before nightfall.”

34

No Sightings

For the rest of the day, the boat sailed steadily on, stopping only for lunch, which was slightly stale cheese sandwiches and a long thirsty gulp from a can of Coke.

Although it was hot on deck, Rio and Marina stayed at the bow end the entire time. Marina sat cross-legged with her notebook, while Rio kept his eyes and ears fixed on the horizon. Occasionally, he would check on his grandmother, who mostly stayed below deck, where she said her seasickness wasn’t so bad. Birch left them all in peace, preferring the solace of his coffee and the feel of the boat under his hands as he navigated the Spyhopper against the headwind. And it was this headwind that was making their progress much slower than it should be.

“We’ll never get there at this rate!” Rio said, exasperated.

Now and again, they would make radio contact with some of the other boats that were out searching. Each time the radio crackled, his hopes sparked that it was someone confirming they had spotted White Beak, but each time, the response was just the same as theirs.

There were no whales in sight.

Apart from the intermittent radio noise, they might have been the only people in the world. The only sound was the Spyhopper scything its way through the water. Hours passed without a single word being uttered, and somehow that felt perfectly normal.

Once or twice, they saw the occasional fishing vessel, and just after lunch, a huge cruise liner passed in the distance like a block of apartments on water. Rio could just about make out individual balconies, three huge funnels, and some kind of elaborate plastic water slide on deck. Even from that distance, the turbulence of the ship’s waves caused the Spyhopper to rock up and down.

Fran, who had come up on deck for some fresh air, shook her head in disgust. “Terrible things.”

Marina gazed at it with a worried expression on her face. “Look at the size of it. No wonder so many whales get killed each year by ship collisions.”

In Rio’s hand, his binoculars suddenly felt cold and slippery. Before coming here, he had never stopped to think how many threats the whales faced in their day-to-day life. They were the greatest, biggest animals on earth, and by rights, the ocean should have been theirs—to roam and swim and live in freely. But somehow, the sea, like everything else on earth, belonged to humans.