by Sonia Faruqi
“You’re lying.”
Izar’s fists clenched and unclenched compulsively at his sides, and blood pounded into his head, turning his eyes bloodshot. Perhaps the degree of his anger was irrational, but everything that he knew about his past was little enough to be wrapped in a handkerchief, and Rigel was tearing holes in that meager fabric. How dare this drunkard fabricate stories about his parents, such farfetched and absurd tales?
“I am Heze and Capella Virgo’s son,” Izar reiterated through gritted teeth.
“That yer not! That boy is dead—dead as his parents, dead as this home, dead as this island. I held his dead body in me own hands!” He held out his hands, fingers splayed, palms dark and grainy. “Yer not who ye think ye are—”
“Stop talking.”
“Don’t ye see, through that thick skull of yers? Yer a pawn in a game, the same game that killed Heze and Capella, the same game that will kill ye—”
Izar’s left arm curled, and though he recognized he shouldn’t follow through, the realization dawned too late: The punch landed along the side of Rigel’s jaw.
The man fell flat on his back, toppling the pail along the way. Water splattered Izar’s shoes and seeped into Rigel’s shirt. It also spread over the floorboards, which absorbed it as readily as a sponge. Cursing, Izar bent down to reinstate the pail below the leak. It was probably Rigel who’d placed the pail there, he thought now—in his own way, maybe Rigel had cared about Heze and Capella. Maybe Rigel had been unable to help the things he’d said—maybe he was not only drunk but mentally deranged, unable to comprehend the nonsense spewing out of his mouth. Yet there had been a lucidness to his voice.
Shaking out his fist, Izar examined it with regret. His punch was strong, too strong, because of the platinum chip in his wrist—it carried the strength of an anvil, Doctor Navi had told him. Izar had expected Rigel to stagger back, but not to collapse unconscious on the floor. Glancing at him one last time, Izar strode out the door, wishing he’d taken Antares’s advice and never set foot on the island of Mira.
5
Friend
The next collision will be your last!” Pavonis growled. With his snout, he tossed up the merboy who’d happened to be lingering in his way.
The familiar sights around Coralline blended together in a blur of color as she clung with both hands to the dorsal fin on Pavonis’s back. She saw homes of shale, standing encompassed by small, crescent-shaped gardens. She saw the majestic columns of the bank called Grove Trove, where her parents stored their conchs and whelks, shells worth fifty and a hundred carapace each. She saw Alaria, her favorite restaurant, where Ecklon had taken her for their first date and her birthday.
She breathed a sigh of relief when Pavonis came to rest in a kelp forest.
Sculpin fish rose at their sudden entrance, then settled again among the holdfasts of giant kelp—the shorthorn sculpin, dark and rock-like, and the longhorn sculpin, with long cheek spines and fan-like fins.
Pavonis had been circling The Irregular Remedy during Coralline’s probationary review, so he already knew much of what had transpired, but Coralline recounted it to him nonetheless in a hushed whisper. “I’m so ashamed. . . . My dreams are dead. . . . And I feel awful for the things I said to Rhodomela in anger. . . .”
She leaned against the five vertical gill slits along Pavonis’s side. Five feet long, they flared open and close in synchrony with her sobs. She wrapped her arms around as much of him as she could, which was not much. From the tip of his tailfin to his snout, Pavonis stretched to thirty feet, five times Coralline’s length. He was a whale shark, the largest sort of shark in the world. Whale sharks were part of the shark family, not the whale family; the first half of their name related merely to their size and filtering pads—screens inside the mouth through which food filtered into the throat.
“You’re the only one I’ve ever told of my fear of blood, but Rhodomela guessed it.”
“For the life of me, I still can’t understand your fear of blood,” Pavonis drawled. “There’s not a smell in the world to which I am more attuned than that of blood. That’s how we met, in fact—through your blood.”
When she’d been two years old, Coralline’s mother had plopped her down on the window seat in the living room and had swum away to bustle about the kitchen. The currents had risen and, unseen by her mother, Coralline had drifted out among the dahlias and jewel anemones of the reef garden. Unable to swing her tailfin at that age, she’d been blown about the waters like a young snail, the currents lifting her higher and higher as they swelled. A golden mesh from an Ocean Dominion ship had descended like a delicate blanket from the surface, and her dimpled fingers had curled around it. But something sharp in the net, a flint of a hook, had scratched her arm, and a drop of blood had sprouted. A force larger than life itself had tossed her away from the net just in time, for the net had been tightening around her, about to haul her up to the waves. Upon Pavonis’s push, she’d rolled and tumbled through the froth, giggling, her stomach tickled by her own speed. When she’d come to a stop, she’d marveled at his yellow-spotted back, and her tiny hands had clasped trustingly around his dorsal fin.
Pavonis had dived down vertically, and Coralline’s stomach had churned at his descent, and she’d squeezed her eyes shut. When she’d opened them, she’d found that the two of them were at the center of a scene of confused commotion. Dozens of merpeople were gathered outside the Costaria home, for Abalone had been knocking on doors and shouting that her daughter had been abducted.
As soon as she’d seen Coralline with Pavonis, Abalone had pried her off his fin and fled with her indoors.
Undeterred, Pavonis had arrived at the living room window every afternoon to visit Coralline. Months later, when Coralline had grown a little and learned to flick her tailfin and swim on her own, she’d ambled out the window one afternoon while her mother was in the kitchen. She’d grabbed Pavonis’s dorsal fin and he’d taken her for a turbulent, rumbling ride through Urchin Grove.
He’d returned her home in time for supper that evening, and every evening after over the next fourteen years, even when she enrolled at Urchin Apothecary Academy at sixteen years of age. When she’d bite her lip in trepidation before a test, he’d pull faces outside the classroom window, opening his mouth five feet wide, as only a whale shark could. His tunnel of a mouth, columned with three hundred teeth, would make her giggle.
Now, Coralline laid her cheek flat against Pavonis’s side, her hands patting his ridges. “You also detected Father’s blood the day of his haccident,” she reminded him.
“Ah yes,” Pavonis said. “We had another dream that day, remember? We were going to traverse the Atlantic from top to bottom. Our North-to-South Expedition was to be the greatest adventure of our lives. We were to leave immediately after your graduation from Urchin Apothecary Academy and to travel to places with deeper waters and wilder waves, before returning to Urchin Grove, forever changed by our adventure. . . .”
Coralline nodded guiltily. On this day, Rhodomela had crushed her dream of healing; on that day, seven months ago, Coralline had crushed Pavonis’s dream of travel.
The day after her graduation, Coralline had waited at the window seat in the living room for her father to return home from work, so that she could tell him and her mother that she and Pavonis wished to embark on a North-to-South Expedition. Pavonis had lingered outside the window next to Coralline to ensure she didn’t lose courage before the conversation—they both knew her parents would require considerable convincing to agree to the Expedition.
Together, Coralline and Pavonis had scanned the darkening evening waters for a hint of her father’s copper tail. But Coralline’s gaze had shifted to her family’s reef garden, as new inhabitants had emerged one after another. A seven-foot-long conger eel had glided across the sediment, then a tiny cardinalfish had erupted from a crevice underneath an overhang, then a horseshoe crab had clambered onto a rock. The three heralds of the night had made her wring h
er hands and forget all about the North-to-South Expedition: Her father was a beacon of punctuality. Why was he late returning home from work? Had he been injured—or worse—by humans?
Suddenly, Pavonis’s snout had twitched, and he’d departed with a sharp swing of his tail. He’d sniffed blood, Coralline had known from his reaction. She’d paced the living room, swimming back and forth, her glance flitting repeatedly to the sand-clock on the mantel, watching the trickle of sand from the upper to the lower ampoule. Most of the sand was collected now in the lower ampoule, for most of the day was gone. She only hoped the same could not be said for her father’s life.
When Pavonis had returned, it had been with her father. He had been on the verge of unconsciousness, his left hand clutching Pavonis’s dorsal fin just barely, his right hand creating a shroud of blood that surrounded him like an expanding cape, his tail as lusterless as the sand gathered underneath the doorjamb.
Had Pavonis not smelled his blood, her father would likely have died of blood loss at the site of the coral reef dynamite blast. As such, both Pavonis and Rhodomela had saved Coralline’s father, Pavonis by finding him, Rhodomela by treating him. And yet Coralline had just spoken rudely to Rhodomela.
“You know I couldn’t leave, Pavonis,” Coralline said softly, brushing aside the large, bright-green fronds of kelp to look into his eye. “My family needed me.”
“I understand,” he rumbled.
“But I do still owe you an apology. I haven’t been there for you when you’ve most needed me, in the last nine months since Mako’s death. First, it was my graduation, then it was Father’s hand, then I started at The Irregular Remedy, then I met Ecklon. None of this is any excuse, of course.”
Pavonis was Coralline’s only best friend, but, just nine months ago, Pavonis had counted two best friends: Coralline and Mako. Mako had been a whale shark like Pavonis himself, but his birth name hadn’t been Mako; in adulthood, he’d renamed himself after the shortfin mako, among the fastest sharks in the world. Pavonis and Mako had been similar in personality—irreverent and adventurous—and they’d even looked similar, to an uncanny extent. Individual whale sharks could be distinguished by the yellow spots on their skin, but Pavonis’s and Mako’s patterns had borne such a strong resemblance that they were often mistaken for each other.
One day, a merman had arrived at the Costaria home. Coralline had been perusing The Ultimate Apothecary Appendix at the window seat in the living room, but the stranger had looked at her with such alarm that she’d thrown the book aside and followed him outside immediately. He had taken her to the scene of a mob. At the center of the mob had been Pavonis, slamming his great white belly down onto rocks until they fragmented into pebbles. The mob had kept a safe distance from Pavonis, but Coralline had dashed over to Pavonis’s side.
“Mako’s dead,” he’d wailed.
With that admission, the anger had drained from him, and he’d lain in the rubble, as still as though he himself had died. She’d asked him how Mako had died; he’d refused to say. That day, by the time he’d arisen, he’d changed permanently. He’d started snapping and snarling at children, smacking them with his tailfin. Worse, from Coralline’s perspective, he’d developed a habit of falling into long, brooding silences, sometimes for days at a time.
“Will you tell me how Mako died?” Coralline asked Pavonis gently. She peered into his orb of an eye, whose dark color looked partly green in reflection of the surrounding kelp.
“I can’t,” he hissed in a pained voice. “But don’t trouble yourself. My issues are my own problem.”
“Well, my issues have always been your problem, so it’s only fair for your issues to be my problem as well. What can I do to help you?”
“I’ve always longed to travel, but especially since Mako’s death. Everywhere in Urchin Grove, I’m haunted by memories of him. But I cannot leave Urchin Grove without you—you’re all I have left.” His eye sparkled suddenly; Coralline knew it meant he had an idea. “We failed to leave Urchin Grove after your graduation,” he said, his voice high with excitement, “but we could leave today!”
“What? How?”
“You can view your dismissal from The Irregular Remedy as an unexpected gift. You don’t have to be anchored to Urchin Grove anymore!”
“But I do. My engagement party is tomorrow, and I’m marrying Ecklon two weeks after.”
“Well, you don’t have to.”
“You don’t approve of him?”
“Approving of him and approving of your marriage to him are two different things.”
“Don’t speak in riddles,” she said, slapping his side in reprimand. With his thick skin, it would feel like a pat.
“Fine. Ecklon will most likely get tenured at work soon. To marry him means to marry Urchin Grove.”
Coralline’s gaze fell upon a rock below smattered with acorn barnacles. The arthropods had grown their round, bumpy beige shells directly onto the rock and would spend the rest of their lives there, utterly sessile. Would that be the rest of her life, unbudging from Urchin Grove? If so, would it be so bad? “Life is peaceful here,” she said at length.
“Oh, please, who are you kidding?” If Pavonis could roll his eyes, she knew he would. “People here are not at peace; they’re fast asleep.”
“Life is safe here,” Coralline persisted. “Year after year, Urchin Grove is ranked the safest settlement in Meristem in the annual Settlement Status rankings prepared by the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs—”
“Stop it. You sound like a salesperson for the Under-Ministry. Safety is an illusion. Anything can happen anywhere at any time. I learned that when Mako died.”
Coralline fell silent.
“You face two choices today,” he continued, in the voice of a lawyer closing his case. “You can clam yourself to Urchin Grove for the rest of your life, like those acorn barnacles you’re looking at, or the two of us can pick up and leave today.”
“But where would we even go?”
“We could start with . . . Blue Bottle.”
The capital of the nation of Meristem, a long swim south. There, no one would know of her professional humiliation. There, she would be able to start over, in another clinic—a better clinic. “Blue Bottle,” Coralline whispered, her heart lifting out of her chest, as light and airy as the fronds of kelp all around her.
Izar looked about his drillship, Dominion Drill I, which stretched one-hundred-and-sixty feet from bow to stern. Fifty or so men shuffled aboard it under the blazing sun, a mass of denim-clad legs and sun-scorched arms, their shirts and caps featuring the bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion. A ninety-five-foot-tall derrick ascended to the sky at the drillship’s center, its towering height and structure intended to provide the strength to haul oil out of underwater wells and into the storage tank below deck. The oil drill was tomorrow morning; this evening marked the routine drillship check that preceded every oil drill. Dominion Drill I was anchored to shore but bouncing lightly with the currents.
Izar stood where he always stood, in the shadow of the derrick—a circle could have been drawn to mark the spot—for it was the one position that afforded him a three-sixty-degree view over the entire drillship. He stood with Zaurak Alphard, the fifty-seven-year-old director of operations. Zaurak’s large, shaved head was shaped as a boulder, with a flap of flab lining the back of his neck. A drop of sweat dangled off the tip of his lumpy nose before splattering onto his boot. After Antares, there was no man on earth Izar trusted more than Zaurak.
“I apologize for interrupting,” said Deneb Delphinus, arriving between Izar and Zaurak.
Deneb had a chest as built as a bison, but his tread was light as a mouse’s. A tattoo of a mermaid marked his ebony forearm, twirling all the way from the inside of his elbow to his wrist, the mermaid’s tailfin billowing over his veins. Many workers at Ocean Dominion were stamped with ink, but their tattoos tended to feature fishhooks, nets, trawlers, ships, sometimes even the Ocean Dominion logo. A merm
aid tattoo was a first in Izar’s experience; he frowned at it with distaste.
“I just wanted to let you know that I’ve checked the drill pipe and monkey-board,” Deneb said. “They’re ready for our oil drill tomorrow.”
Nodding, Zaurak placed two neat tick marks on the checklist he held, tacked to a clipboard. His pen glinted in the sun, its black surface engraved with the bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion as well as his name, Zaurak Alphard, in block letters.
“Thanks,” Zaurak said. He thumped Deneb’s strapping shoulder, but the playful gesture almost unbalanced him. Clutching Deneb’s arm, Zaurak leaned on his left foot, his right all but ornamental, the toes lifted. His arms were thick, hairy, and sinewy like a gorilla’s, as though to try to compensate for the limp in his right leg.
“May I ask you a personal question, Zaurak?”
Izar raised his eyebrows disapprovingly at Deneb, but the twenty-two-year-old derrickhand did not notice.
“Ask away,” Zaurak replied cheerfully.
“What happened to your leg?”
“That’s a personal question,” Izar interjected coldly. Zaurak fraternized with the men, but Izar wished he would keep them at a distance, as Izar himself did—Ocean Dominion was a corporation, not a community collective. He was, however, surprised that Deneb did not already know the story of Zaurak’s leg; all the other men did. It must be because Deneb was new, hired by Zaurak just two months ago.
