Licia Delaware

Licia Delaware is an investigative partner to Leon Anawak whose curiosity reaches beyond the whale attacks first drawing their attention. By searching reports from around the world, she uncovers a pattern of marine dangers and disappearances that local accounts have kept separate. Her clear-eyed defense of Jack O'Bannon also reveals a capacity to look past his reputation; when she is killed during the assault on the Independence, that understanding becomes a source of grief and accusation for him.

Identity and Investigative Role

At breakfast aboard Leon Anawak’s boat, Licia Delaware is the only one of the three with an appetite, steadily eating scrambled eggs while the others worry over a crisis they cannot yet explain. The moment places her among Anawak and Tom Shoemaker as a working companion, but also distinguishes her composure from the unease around the table. Their conversation turns from an explosion near Japan to the lack of public reporting about the Barrier Queen, and Licia’s contribution is to widen the inquiry rather than accept the fragmentary local account.

After the plane crash, she has already begun searching the internet for evidence that whales have attacked elsewhere. Her research ranges across South America, Germany, Scandinavia, France, Australia, and Japan. Instead of finding a single repeated incident, she finds different kinds of trouble in different places: in some reports, the conspicuous danger is jellyfish rather than whales. The breadth of the search matters because it makes events that seemed isolated available for comparison.

Connecting Distant Incidents

Licia reports that boats began disappearing around the same time as the whale trouble, both in South America and off South Africa. The missing vessels include motorboats and cutters; investigators find only occasional pieces of wreckage. She offers no settled explanation, but puts the disappearances beside the attacks as evidence that the apparent crisis extends beyond the incidents receiving attention in Tofino.

Her search also turns up a statement by a Costa Rican scientist who suspects that the jellyfish terrorising parts of South America are not Portuguese men-of-war, but a similar, unidentified species with far greater toxicity. The difference between an identifiable animal and an unknown, more dangerous one deepens the uncertainty: the scattered reports may describe distinct symptoms of a problem whose cause is still unseen. Anawak initially resists reading too much into separate incidents, but Licia’s findings give him concrete reasons to keep looking for a connection.

When Shoemaker questions how such events could have escaped notice, Licia answers with a comparison drawn from ordinary life. Tofino has only twelve hundred inhabitants and three main streets, yet even its residents cannot know everything about one another. If a small town cannot keep every fact in view, she argues, the planet is still less likely to register every local disaster. Her point does not prove a deliberate cover-up; it challenges the assumption that an event must be globally visible simply because it is important. That distinction helps Anawak consider how information can remain scattered without requiring a conspiracy.

Loyalty and the Dispute over O'Bannon

After Shoemaker leaves, Licia places a copy of the Vancouver Sun in front of Anawak. It contains a short report about Bill Sheckley, a five-year-old rescued from the sinking Lady Wexham on 11 April. After weeks in Victoria Hospital with hypothermia and pneumonia, Bill has recovered and returned home with his parents. The account credits Jack O'Bannon, described as the leader of the rescue mission, with showing particular concern for the boy. Licia uses this public record to challenge Anawak’s view of O'Bannon, insisting that his conduct cannot be reduced to his reputation for trouble.

She has her own reason for taking his actions seriously. After O'Bannon pulled her from the water, she went to find him at a pub in Ucluelet and thanked him. He had not expected her gratitude, but was pleased, and asked how she was. Licia tells Anawak that she thinks O'Bannon has few friends and is fond of him. Anawak replies that they used to be friends, a personal history he had not volunteered earlier. Her observation brings that history into the conversation without forcing him to explain it, and the exchange shows her acting as a perceptive intermediary between two men whose old friendship has given way to mistrust.

Stories, Friendship, and Cultural Understanding

Licia’s connection with Anawak is also expressed through a story. She finds the ancient legend of Sedna for him, which he remembers from the long winter nights of childhood in multiple, never-quite-identical versions. He understands her choice as a gift and a sign of friendship. The gesture reaches him through memory and cultural inheritance rather than through argument: she offers a story of the sea that belongs to the imaginative world he carries with him.

The legend becomes another occasion for the friction between Anawak and O'Bannon. O'Bannon dismisses the version under discussion and supplies his own account of Wonderful Creator, an underwater chief who makes the Queen Charlotte Islands and the mainland by casting two rocks into the water. Licia points out the pair’s feud, while Anawak answers O'Bannon’s alternative tale with dry humor. She does not resolve their disagreement, but she recognizes its persistence and remains present as a friend to both men. The scene complements her investigative work: she is attentive not only to evidence that can be collected, but also to the different stories through which people understand the sea.

Death and Its Consequences

During the crisis aboard the Independence, O'Bannon calls out for Leon and Licia as people are sent to retrieve them and the footage from their cameras. The action places Licia among those caught in the dangerous effort to recover people and evidence. In the ensuing emergency at the sluice, she recognizes an enormous orca rising vertically at speed. It has a rounded head, black beak, white chin, and rows of teeth; she estimates it to be at least twelve metres long and capable of launching itself from the water at fifty-six kilometres per hour. The armoured glass hatch is solidly built, but she understands that it may not withstand a collision with an animal moving like a living missile.

Licia tries to get clear of the sluice, but a large dark shape comes at her from the side and bites into her chest. She is already dead when the glowing mass shoots past her and reaches the sluice. The rapid sequence compresses her last recognition of the danger into a failed chance to escape: the machinery, the approaching animal, and the luminous presence converge before she can get away.

Afterward, O'Bannon says that Licia died because of Mick Rubin. Judith Li apologizes and promises that Licia’s death will not have been in vain; O'Bannon answers that people only ever die in vain. The exchange does not establish the full responsibility behind her death, but it makes its personal consequence unmistakable. The woman who had defended O'Bannon when others dismissed him becomes the loss through which his anger and grief are voiced.