by Sonia Faruqi
“I’m going to be Tarazed’s escort while he’s in Menkar,” Ascella continued.
Izar’s dessert fork paused mid-air. “His escort?”
“Yes. His personal escort. I’ll show him all the sights the city has to offer.”
“Is it usual for a curator to serve as an escort to an artist?”
“It’s not, but the relationship with Tarazed is an important one for Abstract, given his artistic status.”
“I see.”
“I’ve admired his work for so long,” she said dreamily. “I’ve been counting the days to his visit.”
Though Ascella worked at an art gallery, Izar had never been to an art gallery. In his field of invention and engineering, precision was key—every bolt mattered, and a single misplaced screw or nail could ruin the whole. In abstract art, in contrast, there were no standards of value that he could discern; the concept of value itself seemed subverted, for the most absurd pieces seemed to fetch the most absurd prices.
Izar’s world and Ascella’s were entirely different, and they would never have intersected if not for Saiph. Saiph had met Ascella while requisitioning a Tarazed art piece for his office. The next day, he had introduced Izar and Ascella at a cocktail party he’d organized at a bar. Izar hadn’t known how Saiph had guessed Izar would be infatuated with Ascella immediately, but he had known it, and Izar had been. Izar still remembered how Ascella had looked that night, a year ago, her hair lustrous, her nose pert, her neck long and smooth. An ivory dress had caressed her long curves and an ivory purse had dangled at her elbow, as she’d sipped a cloudy drink. She’d been surrounded by men, but she’d also stood apart from them, as conspicuous in their midst as a gazelle among rhinoceroses.
The scar along the left side of Izar’s jaw had, for the first time, prickled with self-consciousness. He’d hoped she wouldn’t notice it, but her eyes had traced its hook-shaped line from his earlobe almost to his lip. She’d frowned at it, as at chipped nail varnish. It was not just the physical mark of the scar that had given her pause, Izar thought, but the fact that it hinted at harshly different upbringings. Yes, Izar had been adopted by Antares, a wealthy businessman, but his biological father had been an impoverished fisherman; Ascella, meanwhile, was the daughter of a billionaire real estate tycoon.
A lanky waiter bowed obsequiously before refilling their glasses with the thousand-dollar vintage red wine they’d ordered. Upon his departure, Izar grasped the stem of his glass close to the base and swirled the wine just as his etiquette consultant had taught him to do, bringing his nose close for a whiff. The wine smelled a little like his old sneakers, but, smothering the thought, he took a sip.
“Happy twenty-seventh birthday, my love,” he said, putting his wineglass down. He extended Ascella a black velvet box across the eggshell tablecloth.
She opened it. Even from across the table, Izar could see the bracelet’s rose-cut and princess-cut diamonds flashing thousands of shards of brilliance across the restaurant, across the smile crescenting her face, across her shoulders, which glowed just a shade fairer than snow, and across her eyes, which sparkled like frost melting in the spring sun. She extended him her hand, and their fingers intertwined over the tablecloth.
But it was ironic, he thought for the first time: Jewelry was the most expensive thing in the world, yet it was also the least functional thing in the world. Now that he thought about it, jewelry posed, for him, a similar contradiction as abstract art, with its dichotomy between price and value.
“Ascella,” he said softly, leaning forward, “I’ve invented underwater fire.”
She sat back and stared at him, her eyes cooling. “You can’t have,” she said. “Underwater fire is impossible, a fantasy.”
Izar neutralized his expression so that she would not learn how deeply her words hurt him. He looked at the candle flame at the center of the table, at how delicately it flickered. At one point in the history of humanity, even this miniature flame would have been considered a miracle.
Avoiding her eyes, he clasped the bracelet over her wrist. Beaming at it as at a friend, she tilted her wrist this way and that, and the diamonds shimmered even more brightly.
He would prove his breakthrough to her soon enough, Izar told himself. After all, the thirty-thousand-dollar diamond bracelet he’d just given her formed a paltry substitute for what he truly wished to give her: a ring that would make other rings look like gaudy trinkets, a ring of the sort to which no other woman could lay claim, a ring that would be mined by Castor from the depths of the ocean and fashioned by Izar’s own hands in his Invention Chamber—a ring that would glitter like a constellation of stars upon her finger.
4
Intellect and Intuition
Coralline dawdled outside the door of The Irregular Remedy. She saw red from the corner of her eye and turned toward it. Rosette Delesse stood staring at her from the remedial garden of The Conventional Cure. There were no flasks or snippers in her hands—it seemed to have been the sight of Coralline that had drawn her out among the algae. She stared at Coralline’s rose petal tellin as though a magic spell could rip it off and transfer it to her own throat. Closing her hand over the shell, Coralline hurried through the door of The Irregular Remedy.
Coralline knew Rhodomela was waiting for her in the back office, but Coralline was alone in The Irregular Remedy only rarely, and she looked about the small space with the hunger of a trespasser. Her gaze caressed the shale walls, the low ceiling, the two counters crisscrossed by scratches, the narrow stretcher, and her beloved unit of shelves, stacked with white-gray limestone urns. How little the sight of the urns meant to a passerby, but how much it meant to her, the contents of each prepared painstakingly by her own hand.
She lingered before an article in a scuffed sandstone frame close to the door. Its ink was faded, as was the portrait accompanying it, but Coralline recognized Rhodomela by the hooked angle of her nose. Her cheeks had been full then, and there’d been a softness about her eyes that had alluded to an ephemeral beauty. Titled “A Young Master,” the article from The Annals of the Association of Apothecaries stated that Rhodomela was the youngest person in the whole nation of Meristem to ever have achieved the title of master apothecary, at a mere twenty-five years of age.
Five rungs defined a typical healer’s path: apprentice, associate, senior, manager, then, only for some, the coveted title of master. The Association of Apothecaries typically awarded the title of master not on the basis of experience but of invention: A healer had to devise a novel, life-saving medication to attain the title. Rhodomela had invented a solution called Black Poison Cleanser, which had propelled her in rank from associate to master apothecary, skipping the two rungs in between.
Rhodomela had founded The Irregular Remedy within a week of attaining her new title. Most healers started practices at a respectable distance from other clinics, in order to reduce competition, but Rhodomela had started The Irregular Remedy next door to The Conventional Cure, which had always rejected her on account of her nontraditional techniques. Though Rhodomela was just one person, and healers at The Conventional Cure numbered half a dozen on a typical day, The Irregular Remedy had, over its twenty-five years of existence, slowly but steadily supplanted The Conventional Cure to become the best regarded clinic in Urchin Grove, the place where the most confounding medical cases were solved.
Taking a deep breath, Coralline knocked on the door to the back office.
“Enter,” called an imperious voice.
Coralline slipped inside the back office. It had a low ceiling and two tiny windows that formed circular tears in the abraded walls. It was intended to be a supplies room, but it was not used as such, nor was it quite furnished as an office. Its minimal windows made it almost as dark as a cave, yet only two luciferin orbs traveled the ceiling.
Rhodomela frowned at Coralline from a high stool behind a tall slate desk. Coralline perched on the stool across from Rhodomela, feeling as though she’d been summoned to the school p
rincipal’s office for misbehavior.
Her elbows resting on the desk, Rhodomela leaned forward, her snake-like eyes peering at Coralline. “You’re diligent and hard-working,” she said. “You arrive early, and you leave late. But, other than yesterday, during Agarum’s heart attack, have you ever prepared medication without relying on a textbook? Have you ever devised anything of your own?”
“No.” This was not how Coralline had expected her probationary review to begin.
“Precisely. That’s because you rely on your intellect, but you reject your intuition.”
“What does intuition have to do with anything?” Coralline asked, pronouncing the word “intuition” like it was the name of an algae she was encountering for the first time.
“Everything. It was my intuition rather than my intellect that led me to save Agarum during his heart attack. Intuition thrives in the presence of courage and conviction but falters in the face of fear—fear, such as that of blood.”
Coralline flinched. How long had Rhodomela known?
“I noticed your fear of blood in your first week here. I didn’t say anything, because I hoped you would rid yourself of it. But you didn’t. You don’t understand that in order to heal others, you have to first heal yourself. You don’t understand that fear and success cannot co-exist any more than can day and night. The reason you consult your medical textbooks endlessly is that you fear being wrong or looking foolish. You think that by doing what other healers have done, you will become as good as them. But success is an outcome not of imitation but of authenticity—of not abiding by the rules but changing them. The questions are more important than the answers.”
“What does this mean for my future at The Irregular Remedy?”
“The Irregular Remedy is a place for those who think irregularly. You don’t. As such, I’m sorry to say that you have no future here.”
Just yesterday, Coralline had been snipping algae in the remedial garden and treating patients at her counter. How could it all end so suddenly? “I rejected offers from other clinics to work for you,” she stammered. “I rejected jobs that paid twice what you offered me.”
“I’m sure other clinics would still be happy to have you. I believe your style and personality would be most suited to The Conventional Cure. I’d be happy to refer you.”
It was a slap to the face, Rhodomela’s recommendation to refer Coralline to the clinic she reviled.
“You never told me why you hired me,” Coralline said, tears pricking her pupils, “when you’d never hired anyone else.”
“You never asked.”
“I’m asking now.”
“Your father was an extraordinary coral connoisseur. Even though he’s now retired, he continues to know coral reefs better than anyone else in Urchin Grove.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I hired you because I was hoping you’d be your father’s daughter. I’ve discovered, however, that you are your mother’s.”
Red, blue, and yellow flashed before Coralline’s eyes—primary colors that reflected her primary emotions. How dare Rhodomela speak to her as such? How dare Rhodomela look down on Abalone?
“My mother is right about you!” Coralline snapped. “You truly are a Bitter Spinster. Your meanness drives everyone away. Everyone in Urchin Grove hates you!”
“I know.”
Coralline’s cheeks flamed at her own vitriol, and tears trickled from her eyes, water meeting water, salt meeting salt. She erupted out of her stool and whirled around to leave. Her hand was on the doorknob, when Rhodomela called quietly, “Coralline.”
She turned. She hoped Rhodomela would apologize, then Coralline would also apologize. She admired Rhodomela; she didn’t care what anyone else said about her; she owed Rhodomela a lifetime of gratitude for having saved her father—these were the things Coralline would say, and then Rhodomela would say that she wanted Coralline to continue to work at The Irregular Remedy, that there’d been some horrible misunderstanding.
“Your medical badge, please.”
Coralline glanced down at the sand-dollar badge pinned to her corset just above her heart. The shell was a smooth white circle engraved with the words, in small black letters: Coralline Costaria, Apprentice Apothecary. With trembling fingers, she unpinned the badge from her corset, turned it over, and read the words on its back: Association of Apothecaries. Printed and provided by the Association, it was this badge that gave Coralline license to practice. She was required to wear it anytime she was treating anyone other than herself.
As she handed the badge to Rhodomela, she felt as though she were handing over part of her own palpitating heart.
Izar did not know what had compelled him to Mira on this day specifically, but he had canceled his meetings, boarded a cabin cruiser, and steered himself to the one place Antares had warned him to always avoid: the island of his birth. The ghosts of your past will only haunt you, Antares had said.
And so, as Izar disembarked on the brittle sands of Mira, he could not help feeling he was betraying Antares. But he swallowed his guilt and, hands on his hips, looked about him. His nose wrinkled—there was a powerful stink of rotting fish and a sense of death and decay among the flaking palm trees. Children emerged out of doorways and stared at him, their knees knobby and faces sweaty, their arms dirt stained. Izar must have looked just like them before Antares had adopted him.
Mira had been flooded some years ago—Ocean Protection had decried the flood as a symptom of climate change—and the paltry population of fishermen had plummeted. Fewer than a hundred families lived on the scrappy sands today, compared to three hundred families a decade ago. And so, as Izar strode on the sands, he had the sense that he was walking in the shadow of a place rather than the place itself. Spotting a fisherman on the shore, he stopped to ask the bedraggled old man, “Where can I find the home of Heze and Capella Virgo?”
The man squinted suspiciously at Izar’s sunglasses, cleanly shaven face, and collared shirt. But his gnarled hand pointed, and Izar followed. When he reached the house in question, he identified it by a sign on its door: The Virgo Residence.
The formality of the sign seemed an attempt at self-deprecating humor, for the place was a hovel that had rusted upon itself. Its tin roof was dented in the center, and its doorway was so low that Izar had to bend his neck to fit through. He came to stand in what he supposed was the living room, but it was the size of his childhood basement storage closet. The floorboards squished beneath his feet, spongy and frayed like limp asparagus.
Izar fell to the floorboards on his knees, in order to be closer to the eye level of the toddler he once had been. He stared at the fissures in the walls and ran his hands over the scabs on the floor. He hoped to recognize something, anything, that would tell him that this hovel had been his home until the age of three. Often during the last twenty-five years, he had felt hollow and unmoored, like an empty shell, and he’d longed for some memories to clam onto when tossed about by the currents of life, but he’d had nothing. He’d hoped desperately to find something here, in his childhood home, but it could just as well have been a stranger’s home—no recollections flew forth in his mind.
Even the meteors that crashed into the surface of the earth could be traced back to where they’d begun, their trajectories plotted with a degree of accuracy. How could his own past be such a black hole? It was as though his memory had been systematically wiped clean the night of his parents’ death, like a computer’s hard drive erased upon a command.
He had often been told he was fortunate to have been adopted by Antares, and he had often thought it, but he had never felt it as he did now, in his very pores. He had often thought about the trials he himself had undergone, but only now, as he knelt on the floor of his childhood home, did he properly consider the trials Antares had undergone on his behalf. Antares had risked his life to dive into the ocean and rescue Izar from merpeople, and he had carved a wedge in his marriage with Maia by adopting Izar.
/> Izar found himself irritated by the lone furnishing in the hovel, a bright blue pail. Water dripped into it slowly but steadily from a leak in the roof; the splash of the droplets, low though the sound was, grated on his nerves by its incessance. He watched a droplet as it struck the surface of water in the pail. The surface fragmented then settled, becoming smooth and flat as a mirror, only to be shattered by the next droplet. As Izar watched, a reflection materialized in the pail, a reflection of a thickset man with a sun-sizzled face as furrowed as downtrodden leather.
Jumping to his feet, Izar whirled around.
The man narrowed his eyes at Izar, but the effect of the narrowing was lost—his deep-blue eyes had squinted so much that they’d become permanently narrowed, the pupils unable to expand or contract even indoors.
“Who are ye?” he slurred, his breath smelling of stale beer.
“I’m Izar, the son of Heze and Capella Virgo. Who are you?”
“Rigel Nihal. I lived beside Heze and Capella Virgo for a decade before they died.” Rigel pointed his thumb in the presumed direction of his own hovel. “Ye cannot be their son.”
“Why not?”
“Because that boy is dead. I buried him meself.”
Izar blinked, stunned.
“Most kind folk I ever met, Heze and Capella Virgo,” Rigel continued. “Most mysterious death I ever saw. Heze never fished at night, but the night he died, someone forced him out onto the water—forced him to drag Capella and the boy with him. Capella cried and screamed, and I came out of me home at her shouts, but Heze dragged her and the boy onto his fishing dinghy. I asked him why he was taking his wife and boy onto the sea, when he otherwise never did. He said he couldn’t tell me, but it was important, said his job with Ocean Dominion depended on it.
“When I woke up in the morning, I saw that all the fishermen of Mira had gathered on the shore. They told me that Heze, Capella, and the boy were all dead. I steered meself into the water and found the three bodies. I brought them back in me dinghy and buried them next to one another. I called the chief police commissioner of Menkar, Canopus Corvus, the man with the handlebar moustache. I told him he should investigate the deaths. He told me he already knew what had happened: Heze and Capella Virgo had been drowned by merpeople, while their son had been rescued. I said that Heze and Capella looked like they’d been bludgeoned by a man, not drowned by merpeople, as did the boy himself—who was dead. Canopus had the nerve to tell me I was lying, but I put aside me dignity”—Izar couldn’t imagine him having any—“and begged him to come see the bodies. He said he would send someone to take a look the next morning. But the next morning, all three bodies had been stolen from the grave—someone stole them overnight!”
