The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  “I’m sorry.” Deneb removed his cap and fidgeted with it, his eyes downcast.

  “It’s fine,” Zaurak assured him with a swift smile. “I’m hardly sensitive about it. When I was thirty, and a manager of operations at Ocean Dominion, I was skinning a whale shark, and my leg got caught in the skinning equipment—which quite resembled a shark’s jaws, as a matter of fact. My shin bone split in half horizontally across the middle. Doctor Navi said I would lose my leg below the knee, and he was prepared to saw it off himself, but Antares hired the best specialists money could buy and paid for my medical care and rehabilitation out of pocket—a total of a quarter million dollars. The sum enabled me to retain my leg. When Antares visited me in the hospital after my surgery, he gave me this pen.”

  Deneb looked at the pen as incredulously as though it were a wand. “That’s a beautiful story,” he said, whistling. “Antares sounds like a great man.”

  “He is,” Izar said.

  Continuing to whistle, Deneb slipped away.

  Workers arrived at Zaurak’s elbow one after the other to tell him which parts of the drillship they had checked: stand pipe, draw works, turn table, rat hole, crown blocks, suction line. Zaurak nodded, smiled slightly, and made tick marks steadily in his clipboard. He commanded a natural loyalty and deference from the men, as he did from Izar.

  “Is the drillship check almost complete?” Izar asked him.

  “Almost, boss,” Zaurak replied.

  Izar laughed at the word that formed a running joke between them.

  Six years ago, when he’d been Deneb’s age, Izar had begun as a lowly but spirited assistant engineer at Ocean Dominion. (Antares had been willing to give Izar any role he wished, but, unlike Saiph, who’d decided he wanted to start off in senior management, Izar had wanted to start at the very bottom—that way, he would earn each of the promotions he aimed to get.) On Izar’s very first day, Zaurak had hobbled over to him and pumped his hand. His black eyes had glinted like he knew him—like he was greeting a long-lost nephew, not a young, replaceable worker. Izar had had the strange sense that Zaurak had been waiting years for him to arrive.

  Like the other assistant engineers at the company, Izar had kept his hands perpetually in machine parts, grime blackening his nails, grease smearing his elbows. Within a year, however, in addition to performing his ordinary workload with extraordinary quality, he’d also managed to invent an ultra-lightweight fishnet. The net had doubled Ocean Dominion’s catch of schools of small fish, and Zaurak had promoted Izar to the role of Engineer.

  Soon after, Izar had informed Zaurak that he wished to widen Ocean Dominion’s focus from fishing to oil. “Commence your research today,” Zaurak had said, “and meet with me in my office every week to provide me an update.” Every week, Izar had arrived in Zaurak’s office with stacks of papers—articles, early drillship designs, scraps of calculations. Zaurak had offered suggestions, never directions, for Izar’s consideration.

  A year after he’d commenced his oil research, Izar had a detailed drillship blueprint in hand, three feet in length. He’d shown the blueprint to Antares and Saiph during his weekly meeting with them in Antares’s thirtieth-floor office. Antares had beamed so widely that even his tufty eyebrows had appeared to be grinning. “I promote you to director of operations,” he’d said.

  “Thank you,” Izar had said, “but I have to decline.”

  Antares had nearly choked on his cigar, clouds of smoke billowing from his lips. “Why?” he’d asked, coughing.

  “Because Zaurak is director.”

  “Do you think he’ll be in his office right now?” Antares had continued, sipping his whisky.

  Izar had nodded. Zaurak was an eternal bachelor, married to Ocean Dominion’s fleet of ships. He worked steadily through the evenings like a train making its rounds.

  “Good. I’ll call Zaurak up here and dismiss him straightaway.” Antares had started dialing the phone, but Izar had placed his finger on the dial, his arm almost displacing Antares’s whisky.

  “Zaurak mentored me through all aspects of the drillship blueprint,” Izar had said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. If anything, Zaurak and I can be co-directors of operations. I can lead our new Oil division, and he can continue to lead the Fishing division.”

  Antares’s steel-gray eyes had pondered Izar from across the wisps of cigar smoke. “Zaurak was among my very first men,” he’d said. “He started at Ocean Dominion thirty-five years ago, in the first month of the company’s founding itself. I like him well, and I’m not opposed to paying two director salaries for a single role, but that’s not how the world works, son. He would be competing with you every step of the way, undermining you, in order to protect his position and maintain his influence. I cannot give you his position while he still has it.”

  “He’d turn the men against you,” Saiph had added, charred-kale eyes gleaming. “He wouldn’t let you succeed, not over his dead body.”

  Izar had removed his finger from the dial.

  “I’m glad you finally understand—” Antares had begun.

  “If you fire Zaurak,” Izar had pronounced, “I’ll resign from Ocean Dominion this moment.”

  Antares’s fist had slammed down on his desk, and his face had jutted forth through his cigar smoke, the reddening color of his cheeks making Izar think of a tiger. Izar had been startled at his own declaration, for he had nowhere else to go—his walking away from Ocean Dominion would have been equivalent to a penguin waddling away from ice. There was no habitat he could imagine to which he was as specifically suited as to Ocean Dominion. Antares had waved his cigar reproachfully until its embers had dusted his mahogany desk like black pepper, but, eventually, he’d relented.

  A year later, when Dominion Drill I was built and had conducted its first oil drill, tugging twenty thousand barrels of gurgling black bubbles out of the ocean floor, Antares had promoted Izar to vice president of operations and informed him that he’d gotten a new office built for him next to his own on the thirtieth floor.

  Izar had insisted on remaining in his present office, next to Zaurak’s on the first floor of the underground, B1. He had done it in part so that Zaurak would not feel that Izar had risen above him not only in title but also physically, in the level of the building. Another reason was that Izar viewed Ocean Dominion as a giant with wide feet and a gargantuan head. He’d always resided in the feet of the giant—both his office and Invention Chamber were underground. The feet of the giant were a place he understood, a place where respect was earned through diligence and effort. The head of the giant was populated by men recruited by Saiph, men with expensive degrees but obscure duties. The head of the giant was perpetually in the clouds, Izar had come to conclude—he wanted to do his best to ensure the giant’s feet remained steadfast on the ground.

  Antares had promoted Saiph to vice president of strategy in the same meeting. Izar’s sense of his own accomplishment had been diluted, for Saiph had done nothing to deserve his promotion—he simply would have resented Izar’s rise over him.

  When Izar had informed Zaurak of his promotion, Zaurak had said, “Congratulations, boss,” and they’d both laughed.

  Atop Dominion Drill I, the sun was so bright that Izar could see every mote of dust between himself and Zaurak as a suspended golden particle. He waved a hand before his face to watch the particles dance, then settle again—the laws of physics continued to amaze him even long after he understood them.

  Serpens Sarin, a large, red-bearded man, shuffled up to Zaurak’s elbow. He had cloud-gray eyes and an energetic manner, like a tense violin string. Each of his ears was studded with one-inch-long spears, arrows that pointed at the face of anyone to whom he spoke. Thirty-five-year-old Serpens had started off in the oil-drilling business at a competing firm, Seven Seas, at the lowest level, roustabout, and had risen steadily through the ranks of motorman, derrickhand, then driller. He’d been a driller for four years when, two years ago, Zaurak had poached him t
o be manager on Dominion Drill I. Serpens was in charge of supervising oil drills, including the one planned for tomorrow. Increasingly, he had become Zaurak’s right-hand man.

  “The drill bit and conductor casing are checked,” he said.

  “Good man,” Zaurak said. Upon making two quick tick marks in his checklist, he placed an arm around Serpens’s shoulder and started whispering in his ear. A chorus of waves and cackling seagulls drowned out his voice, such that, though Izar’s ear was keened, he could not hear a word.

  “What was that about?” Izar asked when Serpens shuffled away.

  “Nothing worth your time.”

  Returning to his clipboard, Zaurak scribbled along the margins of his checklist, while Izar’s gaze roved over the workers, surveying their activity.

  “Zaurak,” said Deneb, arriving between Izar and Zaurak, “I’ve checked the lifeboats; they’re all in good shape—”

  His face froze, and his eyes widened as his gaze flew over Izar’s head. Izar felt a shadow darkening over him, but before he could crane his neck to look, Deneb had flung himself onto him with the force of a grizzly bear. They hit the floor together with a smack and tumbled toward the opposite rails of the ship. A crash sounded just where Izar had been standing.

  He rose to his feet and stared incredulously at the derrick that had, just moments ago, stood stalwart at the center of the drillship. A tower of power and stability meant to withstand extreme winds and waves, it now lay flat on its side like a fallen tree. It had almost splintered the floor of the three-thousand-ton vessel; if not for Deneb, it would surely have splintered Izar from head to toe. Someone must have secretly traipsed below deck and loosened its foothold—someone who wanted Izar dead. But who?

  Izar looked suspiciously at the workers, assembled now to the other side of the derrick. They stood with their arms wrapped around themselves, their faces distressed, as though someone had just pointed a gun in their midst. Standing next to Izar, Deneb examined the collapsed derrick, his brow as puzzled as at a spaceship that had landed before him.

  “You saved my life,” Izar said, pumping Deneb’s hand.

  “Good man,” Zaurak told Deneb, slapping him so hard on the back that Deneb coughed. “Now, derrickhand, lead the men in re-erecting the derrick.”

  Deneb ambled over to the crewmen, appearing equally excited and flustered by the responsibility assigned him.

  Zaurak beckoned Izar over to the rails of the ship, his eyes like black ice. Their heads together, their elbows on the highest rail, they looked out over the sea, deliberately facing away from the workers.

  “We have to cancel the oil drill tomorrow,” Zaurak hissed.

  “We can’t. Antares asked me when to schedule a press conference, and I suggested tomorrow. The drill tomorrow is meant to mark two years of oil exploration for Ocean Dominion. The Marketing department has already written it into the press release.”

  “Blast the press release! There’s a traitor among us, someone trying to kill you. We can’t go out onto the ocean until we learn who. Trust me, cancel the drill.”

  “I trust you with my life, but I’ve given Antares my word. We have to proceed as planned tomorrow.”

  “If you insist,” Zaurak muttered, chewing the lid of his pen. “I’ll dismiss the crew for the evening as soon as the derrick is re-erected. Then I’ll double-check the whole ship myself, down to the lowliest corkscrew. Tomorrow, in the middle of the ocean, any mistake will be fatal for all of us.”

  6

  Muse

  Abalone carried a limestone tray into Coralline’s room, with two covered bowls upon it and a pair of stone-sticks.

  Her stomach rumbling, Coralline eagerly uncovered one of the bowls. Rich red clumps of pepper dulse tangled with bright-green tubular fingers of velvet horn. The contrasting colors created a tornado effect—the dish looked like a work of art. Coralline’s mouth watered; she particularly loved pepper dulse, the truffle of the sea. She reached for the stone-sticks.

  “The algae in this bowl is not for you to eat,” Abalone said.

  “What’s it for, then?”

  “Once you’re married, Ecklon will expect you to prepare supper for him. This is the kind of beauty and complexity you should be aiming for in the dishes you prepare. The algae in the other bowl is for you.”

  Coralline uncovered the other bowl. It contained light-green sheets of ulva. She looked questioningly at her mother.

  “I know sea lettuce is tasteless, darling, but it’ll help you lose weight between your engagement party and wedding. I remember that in the weeks before my own wedding, my only goal in life was to become wispy, just barely visible, like a moon jellyfish. Until your wedding, consider ulva your only friend—after me, of course.”

  Coralline reluctantly ate a few fronds of ulva. They tasted like sand.

  “Now, let’s get you ready for your engagement party, starting with your hair!”

  Coralline plopped down in the chair her mother placed in front of the full-length mirror behind the door. Abalone brushed Coralline’s long black locks briskly, using the olivine-encrusted comb she’d gifted Coralline for her twentieth birthday. Coralline examined her mother’s reflection in the mirror.

  Abalone’s cheekbones were aristocratic, and her neck was long and regal. Her bodice was woven of a fine white brocade; long, translucent tendrils of white swayed off its hem and swirled about her hips like a school of eels. The white bodice above the golden scales led Abalone to resemble the beautiful white-and-yellow butterfly fish darting about the coral reef outside the window. As a mergirl, Coralline had hoped she would resemble her mother when she became a mermaid, but they looked nothing alike. In addition to a difference in hair color, there was a difference in tail color—Coralline’s bronze scales were closer to her father’s copper than her mother’s gold. Coralline’s shoulders were also narrower, and she was half a head shorter. As she sat in front of the mirror, she felt herself very much in her mother’s shadow.

  Abalone put the comb aside and began fashioning Coralline’s hair into a fishtail side braid.

  “I wonder why her eyes look puffy and her cheeks splotched,” said a shrill voice.

  Coralline’s glance flew to her mother’s shoulder, and she groaned. She had not detected Nacre because of her mother’s side bun, but two finger-length tentacles were poking out through the golden locks now. Nacre, a medium-sized snail with a thick, solid shell carrying a high spire and five rounded body whorls, looked down on Coralline from Abalone’s shoulder. She was a scotch bonnet snail, her shell cream in color, with a pattern of red rectangular patches. Most snails were beautiful, but Nacre was more beautiful still than most. Even within her scotch bonnet species, she was particularly bright—others tended to have orange, brown, or tan patches rather than a vivid red. Her location on Abalone’s right shoulder was not coincidental; she claimed to always be right.

  “She looks sullen and ungrateful,” Nacre continued, speaking of Coralline to Abalone as though Coralline were not there. “She’s forgetting that no one likes a bleached coralline.”

  “You’re right, my dear muse,” Abalone said. Raising cautionary eyebrows at Coralline in the mirror, she tugged Coralline’s hair sharply, making her wince. “There’s no excuse for you to not be smiling from ear to ear, Coralline. You’re marrying the sole heir of the wealthiest family in Urchin Grove—an heir who happens to also be handsome and intelligent. You’re the envy of all young mermaids in the village. You’ll spend the rest of your life in the Mansion, as cozy as a clownfish among anemones. Unlike your mother, with her continuously toiling fingers, carving stitch upon stitch into fabric, you’ll never have to work a day again in your life.”

  Well, Coralline could not work even if she wanted. She had cried all night about her firing, hence the puffy eyes and splotched cheeks Nacre had mentioned. She was planning to tell her parents about her firing tonight, after the engagement party, when things were less busy, and, hopefully, she would be able to talk about it wi
thout bursting into tears.

  Abalone knotted Coralline’s fishtail braid at the end. It formed a black rope that draped Coralline’s left shoulder, falling to her waist. Abalone then embedded a dozen cloudy periwinkles within the plait, the tiny shells glistening in the braid like a constellation of fog-draped stars in the night sky.

  She asked Coralline to rise, then whirled Coralline about by her shoulders. She traced two circles with a stick of rouge over each cheekbone, then smeared the color outward with her index finger. “I want you to look prettier than Rosette just this one day,” she said. When Coralline looked again in the mirror, she found that her blotchiness from crying had transformed into a rosy glow.

  Abalone’s eyes met Coralline’s in the mirror, glimmering as brightly as globules of knotweed. “Your engagement party bodice is modeled after the latest fashion in Blue Bottle, the kind of sensational high fashion Urchin Grove has never seen before. Aren’t you just itching to see it?”

  Coralline nodded, a little unnerved by her mother’s enthusiasm.

  Abalone slipped out of the room, returning with a corset in her hands. Diagonal stripes of orange-and-purple sequins traversed it like full-body bandages, as though intending to mummify its wearer in shimmer.

  “I can’t possibly wear this—”

  “Of course you can. I took precautions to ensure you fit.”

  Before Coralline could protest, Abalone swept the bodice over her and proceeded to button it. It had a high collar that reached Coralline’s throat and long sleeves that reached her wrists. Its buttons, a medley of bright, mismatched shells, formed a column along her spine. As Abalone closed the buttons one by one, the sequins pricked Coralline’s skin like hundreds of blunt needles, and the stiff fabric constricted her ribs. She shivered with itchiness, wishing she could scratch her back by sliding up and down against a wall. But she remained in front of the mirror, her reflection making her think of a puppet being prepared for a mysterious sacrifice.