Chapter 4

Elfangor hadn't shown any of us how to use the communications array except Tobias, and he really didn't know how it worked. Not fully. He had written down the step-by-step instructions on a little notepad, which was a detail we hadn't known last week.

I shook my head a little. We all had our little moments before we'd gone to San Jose to infiltrate the Yeerk pool. Jake had spent time watching TV with his brother or something. I had a makeover night with my sisters. Jordie was only just now getting old enough to have a little makeup and Sara was almost never allowed, so even just having some nail polish, lipstick, and eyeshadow was a treat for her. Of course, I had ended up looking like a clown, but hey, little sisters.

Anyway, Elfangor had left instructions on how to use his shit without him. It was hard to make heads or tails of whether he had ever even planned to come back. We found out in his last minutes that this was not his first trip to Earth, and it kinda tarnished our experiences a bit. He had lied by omission, kept secrets, and it made me question his intentions and some of the things he told us.

Tobias made his adjustments, and turned on the device.

Nothing.

"Is it working?" I asked.

Tobias nodded. "If I did it right, yes, it should be on."

Marco made a face. "I thought Elfangor said he couldn't understand English unless he was close enough to pick up brain waves or something."

"It's built for thought-speech," Tobias said. "I don't even know if it sends audio at all."

"He could understand us fine last time," Cassie said.

"Well if we're broadcasting, maybe let's stop talking like he can't hear us," I said. "Aximili? Aximili, are you there?"

Nothing. No answer. We waited a while. Longer than we probably should have. Tobias triple checked the comm array, struggling to find a step that he had screwed up. He was hoping it was technical. The unspoken alternative was that Aximili could hear us but was deliberately ignoring us.

Marco, unsurprisingly, was the first to give up. Or at least, the first to say it out loud. "Fuck this shit. T, turn it off."

Tobias didn't though. Not right away. I could see the conflicting emotions on his face as he turned to Jake. My cousin sighed, clearly exasperated. He nodded to Tobias. The shutdown process seemed easier, but that didn't put us in a great position.

"We're not going to be able to do this without some cooperation on his end," I said.

Marco nodded. "She's right. We don't know anything about the dome ship except that it's big and presumably dome-shaped. Whale morphs are fine for getting down there, but we don't know what kind of airlocks that thing has."

Tobias shrugged. "It's like an aircraft carrier, though, right? I mean Elfangor's ship wasn't whale sized, but it has to have some kind of serious bay doors. Right?"

"See, that right there is exactly the kind of technical question we need answered," Marco said.

"We can try again tomorrow," Cassie said. "We knew this wasn't going to be a one-night thing, and he just lost his brother. We can give him some time."

"No," Jake said. "We really can't. It's been a week. Elfangor said he had enough air and water for a month. He's down to two or three weeks now, and we can't give him anymore bereavement time."

"Well, what do you want us to do about it?" I asked.

"We could go to the library…" Marco said, kinda trailing off.

"Do they have books on alien spaceships?" Tobias asked, not missing a beat.

Marco explained that internet results for the Fieberling tablemount were frustratingly sparse, but the few web results he had found referenced journal publications. And because of the unique submarine geology of the Monterey Bay, there was no shortage of marine or oceanographic institutes in the area. So the library had some of those publications in stock. And of course, it might not hurt to learn some stuff on sperm whales either.

It wasn't a bad plan, I guess. There were worse ways for me to spend a Saturday morning than hanging out at the local library. It was conveniently located near the high school, so not that far of a walk. But while Jake and Marco did both have work, they were working different shifts. Jake would be starting around eleven this morning, and as I had no issue dropping him off at the movie theater, he was fine with me having the SUV. I would have to go pick him up after work, but when I brought that detail to his attention, he'd just reminded me that I still had yet to see Wonder Womanso that gave us a plan for later. And since he wasn't working till closing, that was an option for my sisters, too.

We adjourned our little meeting, tossed clothes back in the duffel, and one by one, all of us except Tobias morphed into owls to head home. All told, it wasn't a total loss, I supposed. We struck out on Aximili. That sucked. But we had a plan. It was somewhere to start, and that was the part I tried to focus on as I flew home.

It was late when I flew in my bedroom window. I remembered seeing the clock after I demorphed and shut my window; after two thirty. Marshmallows, hot dogs, and alien rescue plans, what a night. I had a headache, I was tired, and I knew I'd have my sisters all day. I changed out of my fitness apparel and back into my nightclothes, and got some ibuprofen from the bathroom medicine cabinet. I don't actually remember getting back in bed.

It was a quarter till nine or thereabouts when I woke up. I hadn't gotten a ton of sleep, but that wasn't out of the ordinary for me anyway. For the first time in a week, though, I had slept through the night without any nightmares. And without the nightmares, six hours felt like enough.

My sisters were in the living room eating PopTarts. Sara was watching Glitter Force and Jordan was playing a game on her tablet as she listened to music. They got themselves breakfast. They weren't fighting. There is a God. Or my sisters love me. One of those seems more likely than the other.

When Sara saw me, she paused Netflix. "Hey, Rachel. Are we going back to the beach today?"

I laughed. "We went to the beach yesterday."

"I like the beach," she said, like I was missing something. For a girl not yet in second grade, she was a sharp little thing sometimes.

"We might get to the beach later, okay?," I said. "We're going to the library first."

"Oh, okay." Just like that, she went back to her cartoon. Sara was easy like that sometimes. Other times, she could really dig her heels in, though, and I was glad this was not one of those times.

"Wait," Jordan said, apparently hearing us over her headphones. "Why are we going to the library?"

I gave her my best because-I-said-so look. "Because," I said, "your sister is starting second grade in three months and I'm supposed to keep you guys on your summer reading."

Jordan rolled her eyes at me and made a face.

"You got headphones and a Kindle. You can survive an hour or two at the library." God, I sounded like Mom.

I got Jordan and Sara ready to go, made sure they were dressed and presentable, then went to unload the dishwasher. That's when Jake showed up, naturally. Jordan let him in.

"Hey, Jordie. Where's Rachel?"

"Kitchen."

"Ah, there you are. Ready to go?"

"Yeah, just… Fuck it, I don't even know why I'm doing this. Not like anyone is gonna need a spoon while we're out."

Jake laughed. "Got your house key?"

Jake packed my sisters into his SUV while I locked up. He rode shotgun and let me drive him to work so we didn't have to park.

The downtown branch of the Santa Cruz public library is kind of an odd looking building. It's a blonde-white brick building, with red accents and a wraparound brown-shingle roof separating the second floor. The parking lot was on Church Street, and in the summer, the row of oak trees gave rise to an obscuring green canopy that brilliantly contrasted the red paint. The first floor had been recently renovated. I guess taking a cue from bookstores, part of the first floor had been set up as a quaint little cafe, and the smell of coffee and tea mixed with the aroma of old books and laminated posters. Sara took off for the children's section immediately and started looking around for books. Jordan found a bean bag chair, plopped down, and went back to her Kindle.

But I found Marco and Tobias at the computer station, the part that ran like part cyber cafe and part budget copy shop.

"Hey, you guys been here long?" I asked quietly.

"No, about twenty minutes," Tobias said.

I looked over to make sure Sara hadn't run off, and she was sitting with some oversized book on kittens. She could read, but she still preferred picture books. "Find anything yet?"

"Yeah," Marco said. He handed me a book on sperm whales. It was thick, almost two inches.

"Okay… am I supposed to sit and read this whole thing?" I asked.

Marco shrugged. "If you want to. The Wikipedia page referenced that book a lot, and I figured we could make some notes." He handed me a small stack of index cards and a print out of the Wikipedia page riddled with yellow highlighter.

"Okay, so I have the book on whales, what are you two doing?"

"Tobias is looking into whale watching tours."

"Oh, that's gotta be expensive," I said. I knew those tours ran about a hundred bucks a person, minimum. Good ones cost way more.

"Yeah, thank Christ we don't have to actually buy tickets. Just trying to find out where to find a good spot to find them."

"Right. So he's doing that, I'm doing this, what about you?"

"Oceanographics and bathymetry," he said. "The Fieberling is just one of a small cluster of undersea mountains so I want to try to get some info in case we need to hit one of the others."

For the one of us that had been trying to make an exit, Marco had easily done the most legwork for this mission. Bathymetric maps weren't something you just happened on, so this was something he'd put effort into. Maybe he wasn't as finished as he thought he was. Or, more likely, he was trying to get this mission over with and he was making sure we didn't fuck up anything this time.

Getting out there and back was going to be at least nine hundred miles of open Pacific. Getting the whale morph was one leg of it, but we weren't going to swim there. "Any idea how we're going to get there if we're not on a boat?"

He shrugged. "Cassie's going to work on some of that from home, probably hear from her later. She's doing chores right now, so not sure when."

Between the normal chores like doing her laundry and doing dishes, Cassie was basically a zookeeper and a vet tech at her house. The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center was something both of her parents did, but since her mom worked for the Lexington Zoological Gardens and her dad taught the veterinary program at UCSC, a lot of the day-to-day care of the animals was done by Cassie. Actual care was done by her parents, and to a lesser extent, by UCSC graduate students. But changing bandages, filling food dishes, mucking stalls, and delivering medications, all of that could be done - and was expected to be done - by Cassie. Plus, they housed horses for some riding school. So there was always stuff to do there and she only had so much free time.

I think, like me, she was really getting sick of it. I had never really expressed much interest in boys, because, you know, reasons, but Cassie's dad was one of those not-my-daughter types and I half-wondered if they weren't keeping her so busy at home on purpose.

What is it with parents that they treat daughters like this anyway? Jake didn't have to deal with this kind of stuff. If he wanted to play video games on a weekend, take girls to a movie, or be out late, Aunt Jean would let him. He had freedom as he wanted it. He had responsibilities, just like I did. But he earned equity with his parents, and for some reason, that just wasn't a thing that seemed to happen for girls. Not me, not Cassie, not Melissa. For whatever reason, my parents simultaneously treated me like an adult while refusing to acknowledge that I wasn't thirteen anymore. Everything they asked me to do was just an expectation. And everything I did was just… nothing. I earned no trust, got no brownie points. I got paid, so what was the problem? I did the math once. I made less than a buck seventy a day in the summer, and no defined days off. It was probably going to surprise the hell out of Mom, but when I turned eighteen, I was gone.

Anyway, Marco went off to find the oceanographic articles and I sat down with my whale book in a chair next to Sara. The book had some really interesting notes. Sperm whales dive very deep. In fact, it's not really fully understood how deep they can dive. Their average seemed to be between three and eight hundred meters, well within the expected four hundred we needed to go. But they could dive more than a kilometer down, over thirty-two hundred feet. And they could hold their breath for an hour and a half. Maybe more.

I set the book down on one of the tables in the children section and got my phone out of my purse. I like skirts, but sometimes I wish they had pockets. I found a website that calculated pressure at depth. It was something I probably would've been happier not knowing. At four hundred meters, the whale experienced forty atmospheres of pressure. Nearly six hundred pounds per square inch. And that was nothing. At a thousand meters, they could tolerate more than twice that. There was some evidence that they could even go as deep as two thousand meters.

I took a moment to remind myself that I was in a library. I looked out the window to the June sun, and saw the oak trees ripple in the breeze. I forced myself to breathe. Thinking about the diving and the pressure, I think I'd made myself a bit claustrophobic.

I was actually thinking about becoming an animal so large that it wouldn't fit in the library. And we weren't just going to go whale-watching either. We needed to touch it to acquire it, and the thought of having to pet such a leviathan was making me nervous. This was an animal that could get up to sixty feet long and weigh more than forty tons. They were arguably kings of the ocean. They ate giant squid. Like seriously the mythical kraken of the deep, and these things ate them like chicken nuggets. Most sperm whales had scars from tentacles.

And I had seen that Chris Hemsworth movie, In the Heart of the Sea, the true story of a sperm whale attacking a whaling ship and the inspiration for Moby Dick .

I pushed thoughts of Ahab aside and joined Tobias. I could probably have spent more time going through the book. I probably would later. But I knew more about sperm whales in fifteen minutes than I ever thought I'd need to know and I didn't feel like loitering in the library was helping our situation.

"What's up?" I asked.

"I think I have an idea for finding our whale," he said. He pointed at the monitor. There in the Chrome browser was a page on the Farallon Islands.

Located just thirty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge, the islands were a popular destination for whale watching tours, and in the summer through the fall, sperm whales came to the islands to feed.

"Okay, lemme go get Marco."

Marco was impressed but skeptical when we brought him up to speed. "They don't list sperm whales in their tours," he said.

"Well, they sorta do," I said. They did have them on the site, but it was more in the vein of an outside chance. Oh, and sometimes there are sperm whales. If sperm whales were a high probability, the whale-watching charters would almost certainly have it as a selling point.

Tobias shrugged. "I think it's a matter of how they run the boat tours, more than it is the whales being out there."

"What do you mean?" Marco asked.

"Well, the whales are only at the surface for like fifteen minutes to half an hour before diving again. They're down for an hour, possibly two. It's only an eight hour boat ride so it's a crap shoot. Have to be at the right place at the right time."

"Alright, I'll buy that. At any rate, it's something we can run with. What are we thinking?"

Tobias zoomed in on the map. "Okay, the Farallon Islands are a small cluster of islands. This is the biggest one here, the one with the abandoned lighthouse, but there are researchers stationed on the island. Over here, though," he said pointing to two smaller islands," these are basically just rocks in the ocean. As far from human eyes as it's possible to be in California."

Marco nodded. He looked around the library - which wasn't particularly busy but not empty either - to make sure we weren't going to be overheard. Being a library, we weren't exactly being loud to begin with. "Okay, so morph a seabird of some sort, fly out to the islands. Demorph, fly off again, and scan for sperm whales?"

Tobias nodded. "Can you think of a better idea?"

Marco smiled. "No, dude, I think given what we have to work with, this is perfect."

I looked at the photos of the islands on the monitor. Just a swath of rock in the ocean. And judging by the sea spray in the photos, the seas were rough enough out there. We had never flown out in bad weather, and neither the owl or the raven were seabirds.

"If we're going to have to land and demorph, not to mention demorph in the sea, we might wanna think about more utilitarian morphing outfits," I said.

Marco looked at me. "Does our mismatched assortment of underwear and gym clothes offend your fashionista sensibilities?"

I rolled my eyes. "Like you said in the beginning, it's not like none of you have seen me in a bikini before. But I think all of us might prefer something more than underwear."

"What are you thinking?" Tobias asked.

"Actually, it's something that came to my mind yesterday at the beach. Marco, how much are wetsuits?"

He laughed, but nodded. "That's not a bad idea really. Wetsuits aren't cheap, but it's definitely something to look into. I know some guys at the surf shop, I'll see what I can do."

Before she died, Marco's mom had worked for a surfing and diving shop as an instructor. Marco had probably forgotten more about open-water swimming than I ever knew.

"Hey, speaking of which, I wanted to check if you were serious about teaching Tobias to swim."

"Yeah, why?"

I had to admit that it actually wasn't a terrible idea, really. I could swim well enough, but I'd never been in open water. I've never been so far out that I couldn't swim back to shore. But I hedged it, instead. "My sisters want to hit the beach again, thought maybe we'd join you guys," I said.

He paused for a second as though wondering how three girls were going to impact his plan for the day. "Hmm. I have work in a few hours and some things to do at home. Swim lesson's probably going to be Monday when I'm off."

"So we're done here?" I asked.

"Yeah," Marco said. "Just about. I already checked out that book by Whitehead, so you can take it home if you want."

I rolled my eyes. "And just why exactly am I suddenly the one entrusted to learn whale facts?"

He shrugged. "Fine, I'll take it."

"Oh," Tobias said suddenly. "I was curious about one thing. I never understood why they're called sperm whales."

I'm sure I turned bright red. "God, Tobias, are you twelve?"

"Oh, please. No, seriously. Like if they were tadpole-shaped, I'd get it. But who named those whales?"

I knew the answer. But it was something I didn't want to say. I learned reading the book Marco gave me, and it was one of those things that I wished I didn't know. "Yeah, its… um… it goes back to whaling days and you know… stupid whalers."

"Okay, so how did they get that name?" Marco asked.

I sighed. I looked around again to make sure no one would hear us, especially not my sisters. "Okay, fine, I'll tell you, but I'm going to regret it immediately." I grabbed the book where I'd set it by Tobias and opened it to a diagram of a sperm whale skull and the tissues that made up its distinctive box-like head. "Okay, so this is their jaw. You see how narrow it is. All this bulk in their heads is soft tissue, and this organ here is filled with this emulsion of waxy oil. It helps with echolocation, I guess. The wax hardens as the whale dives."

The boys looked at me. "And they named it the sperm whale because…?" Tobias pressed.

I never blushed so hard in my whole life. "Well, they were harvesting whales for the whale oil, the stuff… it's kind of a white, milky liquid…"

Marco put his hand in his mouth to keep from laughing. Tobias leaned over and had this really awkward silent laugh. Tobias got his voice first. "You're telling me that old-timey whalers thought its head was full of cum?" he asked.

I nodded. "Hundreds and hundreds of gallons of it." My cheeks felt like they were going to catch fire.

It sounds crass, but it's true. The actual scientific name for the waxy substances is spermaceti . It literally means whale cum, and not one scientist in two and a half centuries thought to maybe make up a new word for it. Saying it in Latin doesn't really make it any less crass. It took me ten seconds to find out the Latin for 'deep wax' was cera abyssi and I think that sounds prettier. Maybe whale biologists just get a kick out of a really old dirty joke?

"That's... that's a lot of splooge," Marco said.

"More than you've got," I said. "Now stop with the jizz jokes, okay. My sisters are here."

"Yeah, yeah," Marco said. "You guys are good to go. I checked and you aren't allowed to check out scientific journals, so I need to stay here and make some copies and shit."

I had little else in mind for the day, and while I would have liked to have done the open water stuff, that wasn't really a big deal as far as my sisters were concerned. I had the SUV, so really I didn't need anyone else to go with me. Still, though, I felt like having some company. "Hey, Tobias," I said, casually. "You want to come to the beach?"

He looked surprised. "With you?"

"Yes, silly. With me. And them," I said, gesturing to my sisters.

"I, uh… Yeah, I guess. I was going to head back over to Cassie's after this."

"No," I said, suddenly emphatic. "I'm not going to have you live in the woods like some kind of doomsday prepper. You're going to the beach."

Marco chuckled. "You're not getting out of this, Tobes. If Rachel says you're going, you can go willingly or you can be kidnapped."

A few minutes later, the four of us were in the SUV. My sisters were very intrigued that Tobias was in the car. They knew him mostly as the weird kid that played with them at the zoo the other day. And they had seen the giant sand sculpture he had made at the beach the day before. So Tobias was cool with my sisters. Tobias, though, seemed very uncomfortable as he buckled in next to me.

He wasn't this weird when we had stolen a car. Now that had been fun.

It wasn't that big of a deal, really. Well, yeah, felony and all, but Tobias knew how to hotwire a car if it had come to it, and at any rate, someone at the shop had apparently changed out the ignition and it had keys. Since Tobias knew about the chop shop, and since ravens could get in an open window, it had actually been really easy to pull off. We didn't get caught, which was the important thing, but Jake really seemed to think we had some big secret mission to get it, and neither Tobias or I had really felt like telling him just how easy it was.

"Are your parents going to be okay with you having a boy over?" he asked.

That… that was actually a good question. I mean, we were going home for lunch and changing, then going to the beach. It's not like anything would happen, but the only boy I'd ever had over before had been Jake, and obviously my mom was fine with my cousin hanging out. I half wanted to say fuck it. I was sixteen and had never had a boyfriend. Making Tobias a sandwich shouldn't have a stigma to it. But there was no way my sisters wouldn't mention it. I didn't have the energy to get into a thing with my mom.

"Fine," I said. And for a minute, Tobias looked a bit relieved that I would let him out of the beach trip. Fat chance, Tobes. "Let me call Cassie. She should be done with her morning rounds."