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CHAPTER TWO
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Monterey, California: July 28, 2022

What do you mean, fired?”

Jay O’Malley, owner and operator of Dream Dives Whale-Watching, looked impassively at the young marine biologist. “I mean, you’re fired,” he said. “You’re a smart girl, it’s a simple phrase, you should be able to get it if you think hard. I believe in you.”

Tory sputtered. “But—but—the season isn’t over!”

“It is for you,” he said. He sighed. “When we let Jon go for calling passengers names, you were fine with it. I didn’t find you in here fighting for his job. You took his shifts and you smiled and told me to my face that you’d rein in your tongue, and like a fool, I believed you. I don’t like it when people make me feel like a fool, Victoria. It makes me wonder what else I might be letting slip by me.”

“I said I was sorry,” she protested.

“You made two children cry,” he said implacably. “You caused immediate emotional distress to families who were looking for a nice day out on the water, enjoying the majesty of nature. Some of those same families have been to SeaWorld or Atlantis to enjoy the majesty of nature. They didn’t enjoy being told that they were wrong to do so.”

Tory opened her mouth to speak, then paused, closing it again. He wasn’t going to give her back her job; she could see that. When she’d crossed the line this time, she’d done it conclusively. She still hadn’t thought he’d fire her. She took a breath in through her nose, let it carefully out, and said, “Whether they enjoyed it or not, they needed to hear it. Those whales are being held captive against their will. They have a right to be free.”

“And I have a right to not have customers come rushing in demanding refunds, but here we both are.” Jay shook his head. He was a big man, soft from years spent on land, although his shoulders and neck were still thick with muscle from his time as a fisherman. He was an imposing figure when he stood, which was the reason he gave for staying seated almost all the time: he wanted to delight people, not intimidate them. “You’ve been a good guide. If you want to reapply next summer, I’ll consider you. But for this season, you’re a liability. You’re done.”

Reapplying would mean coming in at entry level: half the pay and all the worst boats, the ones no other marine biologist wanted. The thought burned. Even worse, by next summer, she’d either be defending her dissertation or looking for a new adviser, either of which would leave her too exhausted to jockey for a new place in the pecking order. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, hoping her unhappiness wouldn’t come through in her voice, even though she knew full well that it would. “Should I see Christine for my last paycheck?”

Jay frowned. For all his good points, he didn’t like paying his employees even a second early—or, quite honestly, at all. There’d been a bit of a scandal a few years back, when he’d tried to convince college students to intern on his boats for the “experience.” That had been shut down quickly by students and universities alike, but the memory clearly still stung. “I’ll mail it to you.”

“If I don’t have it by the end of the week, I’ll have to come back and ask about it,” said Tory, in her sweetest tone. “I guess I might wind up talking to some people about whales.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“You just fired me. I think I’ve earned a little blackmail.”

Jay exhaled hard. “You can’t talk to your bosses like this in the real world.”

“I’m not planning to go into the real world. I’m going to work in marine conservation. As long as I’m not dangling from the ceiling, people will take me seriously as a scientist.”

“I’ll get Christine to set up your deposit and provide you with a receipt.”

“Thank you,” said Tory. She took one last look around the Dream Dives offices, taking in the maps of the Monterey Bay, the awards from local polls and contests, and the framed pictures on the walls. Her entire life was on these walls, from her childhood as a passenger to her gawky teenage years as a deckhand, all the way to her time as an adult subject matter expert. She had grown up here, measuring things one summer at a time.

When she looked back to Jay he was watching her, a strangely gentle look in his eyes. “You still chasing mermaids, Vic?” he asked.

“I’ve never been chasing mermaids,” she said. “I’ve only ever been chasing Anne.”

Jay nodded solemnly. “Well, then. I hope you find her.”

Tory drove along the road that would take her home, trying not to dwell on the meager size of her final paycheck. It had been enough for a few weeks’ worth of groceries, or to buy access to another set of private camera rigs. The oceans were still the great unknown: with so many fledgling marine biologists switching to climate science and meteorology when the die-offs began, and with so many others going straight into conservation, the ones who remained didn’t have the manpower to chart everything that was out there. Cameras were smaller and cheaper every year, and there were video networks sunk through the entirety of the open sea, but almost all of them were privately owned. Passes were sold by the season, since most of the people requesting access were trying to map the increasingly unpredictable weather patterns of the world’s oceans.

Tory could have done guided whale-watching tours for years without saving enough to buy camera time on one of the really exclusive networks, the ones sunk around volcanic vents or in the spawning grounds of the great white sharks. That was fine. The cameras she needed were smaller, less reliable, and almost entirely pointed at the Mariana Trench. She checked the amount of the deposit twice before sending off requests for access to two more of those networks. Food was less important than footage. She’d lived on ramen noodles and dried seaweed sheets before. Doing it again was no problem.

Monterey was still a beautiful city, even after closing on twenty years of drought, wildfires, and other complications. The fires had never reached the city, although they’d come close a few times; Tory would never forget the first evacuation, huddled on the beach, wrapped in a thermal blanket while she watched the sky turn red. She’d been nineteen at the time, Anne less than two years gone, and the thought of losing her home so soon after she’d lost her sister had been enough to trigger a full-blown panic attack, sending her weeping into her father’s arms. But the city hadn’t burned. The firefighters had stopped the fire before it could get that far, and Monterey had endured, becoming a little bit more of a period piece masquerading as a tourist town with every passing year. They’d always been haunted by the ghosts of Steinbeck and Cannery Row, those two great icons of the Great Depression. Now they were also haunted by the coastal towns that hadn’t been so lucky, by all the pieces of a dying way of life.

What people didn’t understand was how hard Monterey worked for its own survival. They hadn’t been able to stop or slow climate change, but they had been blessed with a high concentration of scientists, drawn by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its many conservation programs. Faced with the idea of losing that research site, those same scientists had set themselves against the problem with an iron will. They had chased funding, pursued grants, and encouraged innovation. As a result, while the rest of the state was falling into despair, the people of Monterey were building as fast as they could, throwing lines into the future and hoping they would hold.

Desalination plants dotted the coastline like fairy towers, their solar-paneled roofs glittering in the California sun. They were closely monitored by marine biologists and conservationists, watched for signs of negative environmental impact. That was just a formality. The city needed the tax breaks provided by the state in exchange for them waiving their groundwater rights. The city needed the food produced by local farmers. The city needed water.

Tory was grateful for the desalination plants, like every other child of California, but that didn’t stop the shiver from running up her spine when she looked at them. The waste produced by the desalination process was proving invaluable to scientists, letting them catalog pollution, document plankton, even analyze salt levels to determine the scope of the dilution effect triggered by the still-melting glaciers. The water that went back to the sea went back clean. Fully two-thirds of the desalination plants were also devoted to water purification, removing pollutants before restoring the salt level and pushing the cleansed water back out to sea. The ocean’s potential to supply humanity with freshwater seemed limitless.

But the rain forests had seemed limitless once, as had the redwoods. It was hard not to look at the plants and guess at the shape of an as-yet-uncharted future looming out of the fog, too distant to see clearly, but coming closer all the time.

Tory took her eyes away from the coast and focused on the road.

There were three kinds of people in Monterey: the idle rich, who’d moved there when it became clear that this small jewel of the Pacific wouldn’t burn like Lake County or wither into desiccated silence like Santa Cruz; the scientists, who lived in subsidized housing and kept the complex system of desalination, solar power, and grant-bearing research going; and the remainders of the old Monterey, the people who weren’t going anywhere, no matter how much they were offered, no matter how broadly the research organizations hinted.

Tory’s parents had been fresh out of the Coast Guard when they purchased their home, bright-eyed newlyweds with a decent amount in savings (and an even more decent amount in Katherine’s trust fund, left by a wealthy relative who would never have called it a dowry, even though it functionally was). They had fallen in love with the little Colonial-style house overlooking a remote strip of beach with no convenient parking lots or access roads. Their small, well-maintained property would fetch four million dollars in today’s real estate market. They intended to live there until they died.

Both her parents’ cars were in the driveway. Tory pulled in behind them and took a moment to compose herself before she opened the door, got out, and walked around the end of her father’s battered panel van to the open garage door. The buzz of a table saw cutting through hardwood greeted her before her father himself came into view. He was bent over his equipment like a mad scientist bending over a slab, slicing a vast piece of driftwood. His goggles and heavy gloves added fuel to the mad scientist impression.

“Hi, Dad,” said Tory.

Brian Stewart looked up. Then he smiled, held up one finger in a “hold on” gesture, and went back to bisecting driftwood. Tory leaned against the nearest workbench to watch. Prior to his retirement, her father had been the manager of one of the local resorts, a position that paid surprisingly well, thanks to the demands put on him by his employers and his high-ticket clients. He’d been a troubleshooter, mediator, and general calming presence for thirty-five years, and had retired at the age of sixty with a healthy pension and an even healthier savings account. Of all the things Tory had to worry about in this world—and she had plenty, thanks to her fondness for causes anyone else would have been willing to let go—the future of her parents was not among them.

The driftwood separated into two pieces, falling to the sides of the saw blade. Brian pulled his hands away and turned off the saw, waiting until it stopped spinning before removing his goggles and taking out his earplugs. Tory hadn’t noticed them before, but should have assumed they were there; years of being a woodworker at home and a perfectly groomed, coiffed manager at work had left her father meticulous about anything that could affect either his appearance or his performance.

“Hello, pumpkin,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be on a boat somewhere?”

“Funny story,” said Tory.

Brian raised his eyebrows. “Suspended or fired?”

“A suspension wouldn’t make sense this late in the season,” said Tory.

“Neither does firing their best marine biologist. What could you possibly have done to make Jay think that this was the best option?”

Tory’s cheeks reddened. Brian waited. Living with Katherine had been preparation for life with Anne and Tory, who never met a mountain they wouldn’t throw themselves against. He was surrounded at all times by strong-willed women, and sometimes the best way to deal with them was to step back and let them work through the obstacles they presented to themselves, rather than throwing up any of his own.

Finally Tory said, “I told a boatful of tourists how unethical and inappropriate it is to keep orcas in captivity.”

“See, I thought you were going to hold out until the next person asked if dolphin was good eating,” said Katherine. Brian and Tory turned. She was standing in the doorway that led into the house, drying her hands on a dish towel and smiling. “It’s all right. The season was almost over, and you have to go back to school soon.”

“I was hoping to earn enough to buy access to a few more networks before I went back,” said Tory. “I have blind spots that stretch for miles, and every network comes with the associated processing cost. How am I supposed to monitor the water for a large, unknown marine animal if I can’t afford camera feeds?”

“Some people would say you’re not,” said Katherine.

Tory didn’t say anything.

The silent standoff wasn’t new. Brian busied himself tidying his workbench, stacking the driftwood against the wall and wiping the shavings out of the machinery, leaving it as pristine as he could without breaking out the cleaning oil. They were still standing there looking at each other when he finished. He clapped his hands, the sudden sound making Tory jump and Katherine look at him reproachfully.

“Well, then, we’re all here now, so what do you say we head for dinner?” he asked. “My treat. I’d love a nice slice of pizza at the end of a long day.”

“Let me get my coat,” said Tory, and fled into the house, pausing to kiss her mother’s cheek as she squeezed past her in the doorway.

Katherine waited for her daughter to pass out of earshot before she looked at her husband reproachfully and said, “You did that to distract me.”

“I did.”

“You know she’s wasting her potential.”

“I do.”

“Then why—”

“Because it’s her potential to waste.” Brian walked over to his wife, putting his hands on her waist and tugging her toward him. She came willingly. “We made her—and God, didn’t we do a remarkable job of that?—but that doesn’t mean we get to dictate what she does. She’s looking for answers. She’s looking for peace. If this is what she has to do to find it, let her. Ahab tilted at that whale of his for a long, long time before he found it.”

“And it killed him when he did,” said Katherine. “Are you sure that’s the comparison you want to make here?”

“I don’t have a better one,” said Brian. He rolled his shoulders in an easy shrug, taking his hands off his wife’s waist and pressing them to either side of her face. He smiled, waiting until she smiled back before he let his own smile die and said, “Tory is young and angry and trying to figure out what she wants. Right now, she wants answers. She wants to know what happened to her sister. To be honest, I’m glad. I’d be doing the same thing if I were younger and had her training. Anne… The thought of her gnaws at me. Every night, it gnaws at me, because I didn’t save her. I’m her father. I should have saved her.”

“If we lose Tory too, what will we have left?” asked Katherine. “She’s chasing a dream. She’s chasing a hoax. Whatever they’re covering up has to be so much worse than mermaids.”

“She’s an adult. You can’t stop her. Learn to accept it, or we might lose her anyway.”

Katherine sighed and pulled away. “I hate it when you’re right.”

“I know,” said Brian. He kissed her forehead before letting go. “Let’s get ready for dinner.”

The pizza was fresh and hot, made with local ingredients by a pizzeria that had been a part of Monterey’s landscape for more than thirty years. The price of pork had more than tripled in the last ten years, taking mainstays like sausage and pepperoni to the “deluxe toppings” menu, replacing them with salmon and ground hamburger. Brian looked mournfully at his slice of the daily special—farm-raised shrimp, pineapple, garlic, and mushroom—and said, “I would commit serious crimes for a real meat lover’s pizza.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m a doctor, and not an officer of the law,” said Katherine. “Eat your pizza and stop whining.”

“I like seafood pizza,” said Tory.

“You like seafood anything,” said Brian. “You’re no help. You’re a traitor to my foodie cause.”

“Seafood has less of an ecological impact, and pigs are smart,” said Tory. “You shouldn’t eat anything that knows how to play fetch. It’s rude.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Brian.

The pizzeria was virtually empty. The neighborhood wasn’t the sort to attract tourists: most of them would be on Cannery Row, oohing and aahing over the Steinbeck attractions, stuffing their faces at overpriced chain restaurants disguised as local color. Locals knew to stay on the side streets and in the districts well away from the water, where a pizza wouldn’t necessarily lead to bankruptcy, and where they wouldn’t have to listen to overstimulated, sunburned children whine their way through dinner.

The bell above the door rang. Tory glanced over automatically, and went still as she saw the man standing in the doorway.

Luis Martines was the sort of tall that made basketball coaches sit up and take notice, and the sort of skinny that made those same coaches sit back down in despair. It didn’t help that his glasses were too large for his face, giving him the air of a myopic, perennially confused owl. His personal hygiene was impeccable, but his grooming went through a slow cycle over the course of every school year: At the moment, he was clean shaven. By the end of the semester, he would be boasting the sort of big, bushy beard that a mall Santa would envy. As usual, he was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and an unbuttoned plaid flannel two sizes too large for his frame. His arms were loaded with folders and loose papers, and he looked like he’d wandered into the pizzeria by mistake while looking for the nearest library.

He spotted Tory and lit up, suddenly all smiles. He was surprisingly handsome when he smiled. “Victoria!” he exclaimed, causing the heads in the pizzeria that hadn’t already turned to whip around, looking for the source of the disturbance. He ignored them, wading through the sea of tables until he reached the Stewart family.

Dropping himself into the one empty chair, Luis thrust his armload of papers at Tory. “You need to see this,” he said.

Tory took the paperwork automatically. Several years of sharing lab space and research projects with Luis had taught her that if she didn’t accept what he tried to give her, he’d let go anyway, resulting in papers everywhere. One cleanup too many had given her a very firm grab reflex.

“What is this?” she asked.

“I finally got those deepwater sonar scans broken down,” he said. “You know, the ones centered on the Challenger Deep? I was able to get full analysis of audio signals going back five years—oh, uh, hello, Mr. and Ms. Stewart.”

“Hello, Luis,” said Katherine, fighting to keep the laughter from her tone. “Would you like a piece of pizza? We have plenty, and seafood is so difficult to reheat.”

“That’s because it has a very delicate index of ‘done,’” said Luis. “Thermodynamically speaking—”

“Thermodynamically speaking, my partner is an enormous nerd,” said Tory, and flipped open the first folder. “Eat pizza, Luis. Enjoy not being in a lab. It’s nice to not be in a lab sometimes.”

“I went to the wharf first,” said Luis. “I thought you might still be on the boat. But your boss said you don’t work there anymore. What happened?”

Tory grimaced. She’d known the news of her firing would get back to her lab mates sooner or later—Jason would tell everyone the second he found out, if nothing else, and he would find out; he was doing a sampling project that brought him through the harbor twice a week, and he’d eventually notice her absence on the whale-watching boats—but she’d been hoping it might take a little longer.

“I sort of expressed my opinion on keeping orcas in captivity over the microphone to a boatful of tourists,” she said. “Jay canned me as soon as we got back to shore.”

“Oh.” Luis took a piece of pizza. “I guess I can’t blame him. I mean, he’d warned you like six times.”

“I thought you were supposed to be on my side.”

“I am on your side,” he said, looking stung. “I just brought you something that’s going to change everything, if you’d take a second and look at it. You needed to be out of that job, because you need to be free to chase this down.”

Tory blinked, slowly processing the words he was actually saying, rather than the words her mind kept trying to supply. Finally she looked at the papers in her hands and began to read. The rest of the table went silent as her eyes got wider and wider.

“Oh,” she said.

Deepwater sonar was an interesting mix of junk signals and useful readings. Filtering out the inevitable beeps and bloops from military testing, oil pipelines, and other man-made structures was the work of hundreds of hours and sensitively calibrated computer programs. What was left behind fell into two categories: known and unknown. The known noises included whale songs, dolphin chatter, and all the soft, organic sounds of the sea. Even water had a sound, to the people who knew how to listen. The unknown noises were a mess and a mystery, and all too often turned out to be nothing—a military test that hadn’t been declassified until after the readings were taken, a submerged glacier collapsing in a novel way.

But there were always a few sounds remaining. Always a few novelties. Always a few mysteries.

Always a few runs of blips that science just couldn’t explain.

Tory stared at the peaks and ridges of the sonar readout, feeling her heart struggle to fall out of sync with itself, excitement hastening her breath and tightening her skin. “Where was this taken?” she asked finally.

“Twenty miles east of the Mariana Trench,” said Luis. “The ship that snagged the recording wasn’t supposed to be there. They dropped a hydrophone for research purposes, since they were off course anyway, and then they answered our standing offer to pay for anything novel from those waters. I think they were sort of laughing at us. I mean, why would a ship’s engine that big be running a thousand feet down?”

Brian put up his hand. “Can we get this with a little less intentional obfuscation, for the nonscientists in the audience?”

Tory swallowed hard, trying to force her body to listen to her. Years of therapy and meditation courses had left her with a few tricks; she summoned the sound of the sea, packing it into her ears until she felt her heart rate begin to drop. Carefully, she placed the paper on the table where her parents would be able to see.

“This,” she said, touching the top line of waves and curves, “is the standard sonar reading for that area. We’ve had blips before—surprisingly little whale song, given how remote it is and how rich the water has historically been; we’d expect a place like that to be a popular feeding ground, and it isn’t—but most of the time, the water looks like this.”

“And what is ‘this’?” asked Katherine.

“The song of the sea,” said Luis.

Brian raised an eyebrow. “That’s surprisingly poetic.”

“Studying the ocean forces you to be poetic, because we haven’t worn all those ideas and concepts soft around the edges yet,” said Luis. “The language is still mired in the maritime, and I don’t know that it’s going to catch up anytime soon.”

“Water sings,” said Tory. Luis could talk for hours about the words used to describe the ocean. If she let him get started, they were going to be here for a while, and she wanted to get to the lab as soon as possible. “It’s a function of the way it moves. Everything makes a sound, and vibrations hang in water for much longer than they can hang in air. They travel further, too. It’s why whales can communicate with each other even when they’re miles apart.” Air was too thin, compared to water, to really carry sound. There was no such thing as silence in the sea.

“Okay, cool,” said Brian, nodding in the way Anne had always called “cool dad.” He didn’t really understand, but he was pretending as hard as he could. Tory didn’t trigger “cool dad” as often as Anne had. Tory had always been more easygoing and less likely to get embarrassed by her parents. But sometimes Brian still brought out the nod, like he was afraid he’d forget how to do it if he stopped for too long. Nothing that reminded them, as a family, of Anne was allowed to be forgotten; she was the ghost at every table, and they’d keep her with them forever if they could.

“So the standard sonar represents the song the water in that area is usually singing. It can tell us things about the currents, the tides, the depth, and more, about the creatures that live there. Not as many marine mammals as we’d expect, for example, since there aren’t many of their songs embedded in the profile.” Tory slid her finger down the paper, to a line marked with jagged peaks and deep valleys. “We got this recording about three years ago.” Three years, two months, one week, four days. She would never forget the first time she’d listened to it, the breakthrough it had seemed to represent—or the crushing disappointment it had become when no one else could hear the things she did. “A family of sperm whales wandered into the zone we’ve been monitoring. It was normal song for a few days, and then they went into distress, all of them. At least six that we’ve been able to isolate by their voices, possibly more. They screamed for about fifteen minutes. Then they went silent. We’ve reached out to marine biologists who might have encountered that family either before or after the incident; the pod has never been heard again.”

“You think something killed them?” asked Katherine.

“Unless aliens are stealing our whales,” quipped Luis.

Tory kicked him under the table. He yelped. “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said, as if she hadn’t just assaulted her research partner. “Sperm whales dive deep. They run into things that whales that stick more to the photic zone might never see. There’s a chance they disturbed something, and it, well, ate them. But here’s the interesting part.” She began tapping other rows of sonar readings, finger moving so fast that it was clear she wasn’t looking for the data she wanted: she already knew where it was, and was just revealing it to the people around her.

“These recordings were made after the whales disappeared,” she said. “There’s nothing higher than the mesopelagic zone, which is interesting, because whales have to surface to breathe. There’s nothing new, either. All these sounds match up to recordings made during the period when we know the whales were present. Note for note, they match. That sort of consistency isn’t natural. It’s not the way whales communicate.”

“Dear, we can’t look at little squiggly lines and know what they mean,” said Katherine patiently. “What are they?”

“They’re blips of whale song, like someone—or something—had been sampling from the whales while they were in the area. And there’s nothing new. Whales sing the same songs when they’re talking to each other, just like people use the same words. But they inflect them differently. They have tones of voice, rising notes for excitement, falling notes for sorrow… Nothing in the sea is ever identical to what it was five minutes ago.”

“Oh,” said Katherine. She was starting to look baffled.

Tory moved her finger down to the last line of sonar recording, barely touching the paper, like she was afraid the printout would smear and vanish if she allowed herself to get too close. “This was just taken. These peaks and valleys? This isn’t a natural sound. This isn’t whale song, or water moving, or anything we’ve recorded in this part of the ocean. And part of that may be that we don’t have consistent, linear audio files; the longest contiguous stretch we’ve managed to record was less than a week. So maybe this wasn’t the first time it happened. Regardless, we have it now. We can see it now.”

“What is it?” asked Brian.

Tory looked at her father for a long moment. Then she leaned back, so she could see both of her parents at the same time, and said, “If you showed me this sonar pattern and said it was recorded at the surface, I’d tell you it was the engine of a ship the size of the Atargatis. But it wasn’t recorded at the surface. It was recorded in the abyssopelagic zone.”

“How is that possible?” asked Brian.

“It isn’t,” said Luis.

Tory didn’t say anything. She just looked at the printout in her hands, and thought about her sister, and all the lost and lonely ghosts of the sea.