Waveborn

5

Cass hummed a bit of melody, but softly, so it blended with the ocean's murmur and the steady grumble of the whale boat's engine. The 19-foot Boston Whaler sped across the chop, making Cass had to squint against the wind and flying sea spray. It washed away the morning's stress, leaving in its place the tangled smells of brine and seaweed.

It was always like this: She felt at home on the water in a way she never did on land. The few times she'd stayed in a hotel, she couldn't sleep, but the ocean calmed her. More than that, it made her feel more alive, made every sound sharper and every color brighter.

Sometimes, when they cut the engine, she'd swear she could feel the clicks of dolphins and orcas vibrate through the hull.

Mist hazed the rocky shore off their port bow, painting the world in pearly grays and muted granite, blurred like watercolors.

They were following the coastline to check the series of underwater receivers moored offshore between the harbor and the southern tip of the island. The receivers were extremely sensitive, designed to pick up low-intensity transmissions from tiny monitor patches that could be fastened to an orca's body with minimal impact. It meant researchers could affix these patches to lots of orcas and collect much more data about their movements and vocalizations than they could using traditional monitoring technology.

But the patches put out such a faint signal-they had to, or they could interfere with the orcas' ability to communicate and coordinate their movements-that they required special receivers to collect their transmissions, and those special receivers tended to be finicky. They needed to be cleaned and recalibrated every week or they stopped collecting data. That was their current mission: find the receivers, pull them up, clean them up, and exchange new memory chips for the old ones, which they would take back to the lab for analysis.

They found the first receiver, its location marked with an orange buoy, in a small bay half a mile south of Rodger's Harbor. A pocket beach bordered the water, a semi-circle of rocky shore enclosing a half moon strip of sand. Bleached white logs sat high on the shore, tossed above the water line by some flood tide.

Cass took over the tiller, bringing the boat in slowly so Jen could hook the buoy and pull up the receiver, which dangled in a protective basket twenty feet below the surface. Jen opened the cage to scrape the monitor housing clear of barnacles and mineral deposits, then popped open the side port to slide out the old chip and slide in the new.

The whole procedure took less than ten minutes.

As they motored along the coast to the next site, it felt like they could be anywhere: the San Juan Islands, Argentina, even Hawaii, where water and weather were completely different. The familiarity ran deeper, a spell cast by the sea's swell and fall, the engine's steady thrum, and, in the distance, a smudge of gray that looked like an orca's blow.

"What are you looking at?" Jen motioned over the water, but went on without waiting for Cass's answer. "Whenever your mother came on the boat with us, we'd see orca. Usually the same one, a female from the J pod, but not always. It was amazing. They came right up to the boat as if...as if they were showing off. For her."

Cass froze. Jen almost never talked about her parents. "Did she go out with you often?"

"Whenever Dan was on the boat."

They were approaching the next buoy. Cass cut the motor twenty-some feet out and let them drift in. Rain drummed on the hull, suddenly loud.

"When we were in Hawaii, it was so difficult to find the orcas there, the offshores, but they always showed themselves when you came on the boat. Just like they did for your mother." Jen caught the buoy with the boat hook, tied them off, and pulled up the receiver cage. "I was tempted to drag you back out of public school, just so I could have you with me."

Cass felt a tug of wistfulness. That year in Hawaii had been her one and only experience with public school-a nightmare of trying to find all her classes in a school of five hundred, trying to make friends with kids who had been together since kindergarten. She had made friends, eventually, the only friends her own age she'd ever managed. "You did take me back out, though."

"Only to go to Argentina."

Cass bit her lip. She hadn't wanted to go to Argentina, any more than she'd wanted to move the time before that or the time before that. The story of their lives: always moving on to the next great opportunity when Cass would rather just stay put. When she complained, Jen responded with a pile of glossy brochures for college prep boarding schools, but it wasn't just that Cass wanted to stay in one school. She wanted to stay in one place, and she wanted to do it with Jen. Jen could be annoying-working all the time and turning every conversation back to her research-but she was all the family Cass had.

Slowly, Jen scraped off barnacles and exchanged memory chips. "There's something I need to tell you. I've meant to tell you ever since we decided to come here, but we were so busy with travel preparations, and then it didn't seem right on the airplane."

"What's wrong?"

"I never meant to come back here." Jen replaced the receiver in its cage and lowered it, hand over hand, back into the water. "I kept waiting for a good time to talk, but there wasn't one."

Cass realized she was shaking her head, as if that would shut out whatever terrible thing Jen was about to say, whatever dark secret had kept them out of Rodger's Harbor for the past twelve years.

"It's about your parents. You know they died in a storm, but it wasn't the storm that killed them. They were-your mother was-murdered."

Cass swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. "And my father?"

Jen drew a deep breath, finally meeting Cass's eyes. "Your father was the prime suspect."