Chapter 1

ONE

Friday, April 15

Roatán Institute for Marine Science

Roatán, Honduras

Eva sat

on the steps down into the water of Bailey’s Key, stroking Taffy and fighting back tears. The Navy had come for her. For her and the dolphins. She couldn’t believe it. It was her worst nightmare. But what had she expected? The dolphins had done exactly what she had asked them to do.

The only problem was, they had done it too well.

Taffy and Finn, her dolphin research partners, had worked with the US Navy once, years ago. Thomas was their handler back then. And then, under a directive from DARPA—who funded Eva’s grant through a university in the States—the dolphins were brought here, to Roatán, to participate in Eva’s research.

Her research objective had been simple and yet daunting: she intended to learn how to communicate with dolphins. She’d begun by compiling a library of dolphin whistle signals, and over the years she’d decoded thousands of them. These whistles were the basic building blocks of cetacean communication, including nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Eva had developed the Delphi Imago software to upload the library, process it, and play it back to the dolphins, creating a rudimentary form of bidirectional communication. And the dolphins loved it.

But Eva had suspected for years that dolphin communication involved far more than just whistles. And now she had proven it. Dolphins used a form of sonar that was superior even to modern sonar technology, sending out echolocation clicks and receiving sounds back in return—sounds that communicated a 3D image of the object being echolocated on. Eva had demonstrated that dolphins could

mimic

these returning sounds, essentially sharing that received image of an object with another dolphin.

And she and her dolphins had then used this knowledge to work together. They’d taken down a mutant

Tylosaurus

, defeated the drug lords who terrorized Roatán, and cleaned up the mutant CobiX fish that the less-than-ethical business tycoon Julian Gulliver had grown in a monstrous fish farm just offshore.

Although those events were not public knowledge, her breakthroughs in dolphin communication were—and in addition to her academic tomes, some of her findings had gone viral on the internet. Not that this would have mattered, because it turned out that DARPA and the US Navy, having funded her research, had kept a close eye on her all along.

And now, it seemed, they wanted something in return—and Eva and all her dolphins were now being shipped off to Hawai‘i, leaving behind their home of the past decade.

Eva startled when Taffy suddenly whistled. She knew that whistle. It was the dolphins’ whistle for Axel, her assistant.

She turned and saw him coming up the trail, his headphones on as always, with one off his ear. It was hard to be disappointed with Axel, yet she was.

She shook her head at him. “When were you going to tell me?”

She had only just found out the truth. She had thought she wouldn't be able to take Axel, a German national, with her to the base in Hawai‘i, only to find out, quite by accident, that he’d worked with the military previously, and had a high-level clearance. One he couldn’t talk about, apparently.

Rascal, sensing her displeasure from her tone, put his tail between his legs and crept back up the trail toward the pavilion. Axel wasn’t as smart.

Axel gave her a sheepish smile. “

Ja

, boss. I understand I should have told you. It’s just... that work was, well,

classified

.”

He sat down beside her on the steps. Finn swam up with a

chuff

, and Axel patted the wholphin’s head. Baby Chico and Cleo frolicked nearby.

Eva sighed. “Well, the upside is, you do get to come along. I’m told your security clearance is certainly sufficient.”

“

Ja

, but what are we going to do about Jose? When it comes to the sound work, we can do each other’s jobs, but our best work happens together. We are like two pieces of the puzzle.”

Eva nodded. “Not to mention his organizational skills. And most important, he’s so good with the dolphins, especially baby Chico. They’re inseparable. I don’t know what the stress of separation will do to them.”

At the mention of Jose, baby Chico swam over and stuck his head out of the water. The baby wholphin looked around as if looking for his human friend. He then made his signature whistle for Jose over and over. It sounded so sad; it almost broke Eva’s heart.

Eva had little faith in what the Navy had told her—that they were doing everything on their end to expedite Jose’s security clearance as an independent contractor working on her research team—so Jose’s mother had taken him to the US embassy in Tegucigalpa to see what they could do about his visa process. But it was a holiday weekend, and the offices were closed by the time they had arrived, so now they would just have to wait and hope.

Axel patted Eva’s shoulder. “It’ll work out. They don’t seem to have a problem with Chico and Cleo coming along, right? They’ll find a way for Jose too.”

“They better, because I’m not going without my team,” Eva said.

She tried to sound confident, but she knew the truth.

In the end, it won’t be up to me.