The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  “I have another present for you, too,” Abalone announced. She handed Coralline a book, Appropriate Muses for Mermaids. “We must speak about the Ogre.”

  “Please don’t start on Pavonis, Mother.”

  “I can’t help it. I should have stopped your silliness when you were young. I pleaded and scolded for you to find a more feminine muse, but I should have placed my tail down and insisted upon it. I know you’re attached to the Ogre, but only mermen, never mermaids, have sharks as muses. It’s a breach of convention for a mermaid to be accompanied by such a large creature. You know the rule of thumb: A mermaid’s muse should never be more than half her length. The Ogre is five times your length. I think you should try to find yourself a pretty little snail, like I have, or maybe a seahorse, like your father’s muse, Altair. Another possibility is to be un-mused, of course, like your brother and the vast majority of merpeople.”

  “Pavonis has always been there for me,” Coralline said crossly. “I will never leave him.”

  “Well, what if Ecklon leaves you because of him?”

  “What?”

  “Ecklon’s mother, Epaulette, is even more traditional than I am. I’ve heard that she jeers at you behind your back because of the Ogre. As soon as you’re married to Ecklon, Epaulette will urge you to replace the Ogre with another animal. You have to consider the wishes of your mother-in-law-to-be from now on, and place them before your own.”

  “I don’t care what Epaulette thinks,” Coralline snapped. “My animal best friend is my own business.”

  “Don’t be disagreeable. It doesn’t suit you.” Abalone left Coralline’s bedroom in a flutter of gold.

  Coralline swam to the window and looked out over the reef garden; Pavonis wasn’t there, fortunately, and so he wouldn’t have heard what her mother had said. Despite the stiffness of her bodice, she managed to fold herself into the cradle of the windowsill, and she sat there gazing out over the garden, hoping its sight would calm her.

  Cultivated by her father, the reef garden sprawled around the house in the shape and colors of a painter’s palette. Loose green tentacles of snakelocks anemone danced together, their lilac tips undulating gently. Green sea urchin crawled along the reef; Coralline remembered the time she’d pricked her fingers on their spikes as a mergirl—they were sharper than her mother’s sewing needles. A blanket of colorful jewel anemones grew along an overhang, with brilliant, golden-tipped tentacles. Coralline algae carpeted several rocks in bright pink; coralline was her father’s favorite algae, because its encrusted strata indicated the health of a coral reef. It was her father who had named her Coralline.

  The Costaria home was ordinary, an inverted bowl in shape, but the coral reef just outside its windows was extraordinary—it was said to be the most beautiful in the village. Everyone said Trochid had a reef thumb—he had only to look at a reef for it to flourish. As a coral connoisseur for the Under-Ministry of Coral Conservation, he had been responsible for the well-being of most reefs in Urchin Grove; now, in his retirement, this was the only reef he tended. The thought made Coralline sad.

  “Congratulations on your upcoming wedding,” said a low, tremulous voice.

  Coralline looked down. Just beneath the windowsill swayed a small, brilliant orange form, his tail coiled around a tuft of turtle-grass. Her father’s muse, the lined seahorse Altair.

  Trochid had found Altair as a fingernail-sized baby seahorse, living in a bleached coral reef where he would almost certainly have died from a lack of sustenance. Trochid had brought him home and deposited him in his own thriving coral reef. The two of them had bonded immediately; part of their bond related to their preference for quiet and solitude, Coralline thought. Altair had never once left the reef, believing the world outside to be full of “moral confusion and peril,” as he’d once told Coralline.

  “Congratulations to you as well,” Coralline said with a smile. “Father told me yesterday that you’re expecting.”

  Altair camouflaged, becoming indistinct among the grasses. When he glowed orange again, the lines that outlined his neck area—and served as the source of his species name—shone particularly white. He bobbed his coronet, a tiny, star-shaped crown atop his head. He then cast a glance about for his mate, Kuda, red in color. Coralline looked at Altair warmly: Seahorses could change their color, brightening and dulling at will, but they never changed their mate. If either Altair or Kuda were to die, the other would likely never seek another mate. They cemented their bond with a quivering ritual dance every morning, in which they spun around and swam side by side, their tails entwined. Seahorses were the most romantic animals in the ocean, Coralline had always thought.

  “You’re looking rather shapeless, Pole Dancer!” Nacre cackled.

  Looking about, Coralline found the snail clammed to the wall, her tentacles pointing at Altair’s pregnant, slightly protruding belly. Nacre called him Pole Dancer because he, like other seahorses, needed to wrap his tail around something, usually a strand of grass, in order to avoid getting blown about by the currents. But what was Nacre doing in her room? Coralline wondered with a flash of irritation. She must have climbed off Abalone’s shoulder without Coralline noticing. It was not the first time Coralline had caught the snail in her room, spying and snooping. Coralline didn’t know Altair well but liked him well enough; Nacre, she found as galling as nails on shale.

  The waters outside the window swelled and shifted, and they would have pushed Coralline away from the window had she not wrapped her fingers around the windowsill. Pavonis came to a stop before her, the size of a ship. She extended a hand through the window and patted his yellow-spotted back.

  “Have you decided to leave the apothecary field in favor of becoming a clown?” he drawled, his orb of an eye roving over her gaudy corset. Coralline chortled, then stopped, as the sequins pricked her ribs. “What are the Minions doing here?” he said.

  Nacre, smaller than Pavonis’s eye, hid in her shell. Altair, the size of Coralline’s hand, camouflaged, vanishing as completely as a ghost.

  “Minions is not their name,” Coralline said, giving Pavonis a warning look.

  “I have no reason to know their names. They’re beneath me.”

  Coralline sighed. How could she and her parents have such different muses, all three of them disliking one another?

  “Coralline!” Abalone called from the living room. “It’s time to leave for your engagement party!”

  Coralline’s vertebrae sagged in the frame of the windowsill. In the aftermath of her firing from The Irregular Remedy, all she wanted was to lie in bed under her blanket. She didn’t want to greet a hundred guests at her engagement party. She particularly didn’t want to greet Ecklon’s mother, now that she knew Epaulette jeered at her behind her back.

  “You know, we could have avoided all this if we’d left for Blue Bottle yesterday,” Pavonis said in an I-told-you-so voice.

  “Oh my,” Altair gasped from among the grasses, even as he remained invisible. “Leaving your love Ecklon . . .”

  “I couldn’t leave him,” Coralline said.

  The water formed a sheet of turquoise embroidered with white, and the breeze was heavy with brine evaporated from the froth. A seagull with gray wings cackled as it flew over the drillship.

  “Any word yet from Zaurak?” Izar asked Deneb. “Or Serpens?”

  “I’ve tried both of them every ten minutes since we left Menkar,” Deneb replied.

  Zaurak had a written checklist for the oil drill; Izar had a mental one, with just one word upon it—Zaurak. Zaurak was like a cane upon which Izar relied—without the cane, Izar could still walk, but his feet felt precariously unsteady. Yet the director of operations was missing today.

  Izar had phoned him repeatedly before the drillship had departed Menkar. The phone had rung continuously, but there’d been no answer. Zaurak was always at least a quarter-hour early; where could he possibly be? Izar had wondered. On the other side of the ocean, the sun had scurried into the sky in
limpid pink fragments that had dissolved to a burning gold. Izar had reluctantly given the crew an order to unlatch the ropes and hoist out to sea. It was the first time an Ocean Dominion drillship had departed on its mission an hour after schedule.

  It was not just Izar who felt Zaurak’s absence—and, to a lesser extent, Serpens’s, who was also missing. The workers seemed to feel it, too, for their legs and arms moved robotically, mechanically, as they proceeded about their tasks. Izar looked at them with distrust: One of them had attempted to murder him yesterday. Dominion Drill I was an immense, sturdy ship, but Izar could just as well have been out at sea alone on a raft—that was how unsafe he felt. His gaze flew up to the derrick, in whose shadow he stood. His toes trembled in his steel-toed boots, prepared to leap out of the way in case the tower collapsed on him again. At any point, one of the workers could attempt to murder him, one of them might be plotting it at this very moment. . . .

  The schedule for the day had been tight and had been tightened further by their delayed departure. The press conference was this evening, and Izar had to return to Menkar in time for it. With the constricted timeline he himself had established, he felt as though he’d buckled his belt two notches too tight and just couldn’t feel comfortable. Too many things could go wrong, and he had too little control over them.

  “May I ask you something?” Deneb asked.

  He was standing on the lowest rail of the ship, balancing somehow without holding onto the higher rails. Much of his face lay in the shadow of the sun, such that it appeared a dark oval. The mermaid tattooed across his forearm shone brightly. The only worker with whom Izar was speaking this morning was Deneb, for he had saved Izar yesterday, and so Izar trusted him and was trying to like him.

  “Ask away,” Izar said.

  “After the fall of the derrick yesterday, Zaurak was supposed to have double-checked the drillship. If we haven’t seen him today, how do we know he completed his check?”

  “He left his clipboard on my desk. Everything was checked off.” Izar recognized the swerving handwriting, the spelling mistakes, the deep-blue flow of Zaurak’s engraved pen.

  “But why would Zaurak and Serpens not be here? Both of them?”

  “I can’t speak for Serpens, for I hardly know the man. As for Zaurak, maybe he’s sick.”

  Izar was lying—he knew Zaurak could not be sick. In all of Izar’s six years at Ocean Dominion, he’d never once seen Zaurak so much as cough. Even in the weeks after his leg injury twenty-seven years ago, Zaurak had continued to work—from the hospital. Zaurak was like Izar; even had his leg been amputated, he would not have shirked work. His absence today went deeper than the water, deeper than the riser pipe the crew would soon drive into the ocean floor.

  “I haven’t drilled oil before without Zaurak or Serpens,” Deneb persisted, “let alone without both.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Ocean Dominion’s competitor Atlantic Operations went bankrupt three months ago after its oil spill and the resulting loss of shareholder confidence. The entire crew died in the spill. What if that’s us, today?”

  “We’re not Atlantic Operations.” Izar’s gaze shifted to the lifeboats. He could see part of two lifeboats over the rails, clinging to the sides of the drillship.

  “As manager, Serpens’s role is especially crucial during an oil drill. He leads the men—”

  “I will lead the men today,” Izar interrupted. “I alone designed the drillship and supervised its construction. I know the functioning of every nail and screw on this vessel, just as a biologist knows the functioning of every cell of the human body. Do you not trust me, Deneb, although I trust you?”

  “But I do!” The derrickhand jumped down from the rails and strode over to Izar. He braced his feet hip-distance apart and crossed his arms, his stance paralleling Izar’s. His face gleamed under the morning sun, his ebony skin coated with a fine spray of froth. “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “If you must.”

  “When you take the private elevator down from your office, what do you do?”

  Izar’s lips tightened. He only ever descended into his Invention Chamber late in the evening; the time of day was intentional, for the workers would have gone home by then. He supposed a few workers may have seen him step into the elevator once or twice, but all of them had the sense to not ask him about it.

  “I cannot answer that,” he said. From Izar’s first days at Ocean Dominion, Antares had made him promise to not tell anyone of his underwater-fire work until an announcement was made publicly, in order to keep competing firms at bay. Other than Antares and Saiph, only Ascella knew about Castor, and she did not believe him.

  Deneb was about to return to his position on the rails, when Izar said, “I now have something to ask you.”

  The derrickhand squared his shoulders and stared at Izar like he was a one-man firing squad. “Anything!”

  “Why is there a mermaid tattoo on your arm?”

  “Oh, this.” Deneb smiled sheepishly at the tattoo, as at a crush. “I think mermaids are beautiful. I’ve always wanted to see one but have never been so fortunate. I wish they wouldn’t avoid ships, but I can understand why they do. Have you ever seen a mermaid?”

  “I haven’t, and never want to. You’re trying to catch sight of a mermaid—is that why you insist on perching like a pelican upon the rails?”

  Deneb’s eyes sparkled, as though Izar’s words were an indication of prophetic perception. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “In that case, your loyalties seem troublingly confused. The company for which you work is called Ocean Dominion. The ocean and all its inhabitants are ours to dominate. I recommend you erase your tattoo at once—mermaids won’t exist on earth for much longer anyway.”

  “Why not?” Deneb asked in an alarmed voice.

  “You’ll see soon enough. Now, please try Zaurak and Serpens again.”

  7

  Absence

  How very unseemly of Ecklon to be late to his own engagement party,” said Sepia Selene.

  She waved a small, cushiony hand in an attempt to signal a waiter. The rings that adorned each of her fingers clanged against one another, and the flesh of her arm swayed loosely.

  Coralline’s gaze roved over the garden of the Elnath Mansion. Much of it was planted with paddle-grass, the stalks shorter than those of other grasses, the leaves bright green. Scarlet bushes of berry wart cress and crimson stalks of siphoned feather grew in bright columns, interspersed with the dreamy, silvery concentric bands of peacock’s tail. The whole garden was hemmed with sea fans, large, lacy sheets of beige and lilac that swayed like fanning servants. The garden was twice the size of the Costaria home.

  People glided about smoothly underneath trellises and cloud-like arches erected intermittently among the grasses. Coralline did not recognize most guests; they were friends of her mother and mother-in-law-to-be—strange acquaintances, acquainted strangers, that was how she thought of them. Her heartbeat rose when she caught a sliver of a silver tail, but when the merman turned, she saw it was not Ecklon. She yearned to tell him about her dismissal from The Irregular Remedy—he would understand her devastation; he would console her. But where was he? She rarely found herself agreeing with her mother’s best friend, Sepia, but it was true: It was unseemly of him to be late to his own engagement party.

  “You know,” Sepia continued, giving Coralline and Abalone a conspirational look from beneath raised eyebrows, “I cannot help but notice that Rosette Delesse is missing from the party as well.”

  An image floated into Coralline’s mind: Rosette and Ecklon tangled in an embrace, her crimson scales against his silver, her red hair draping his chest, her long neck craned up to his. . . . She shook her head so hard at the thought that a periwinkle shell tumbled out of her fishtail braid.

  A waiter arrived, bearing a tray. His breast pocket was inscribed with the word Caulerpa; the most expensive restaurant in Urchin Grove was catering her engagement party, Corall
ine realized with a measure of surprised alarm. It must have been Ecklon’s idea; it would not have been his mother’s. Even simple suppers of colander kelp or velvet horn at Caulerpa cost no less than a slipper limpet—a hefty five carapace.

  “I have all four kinds of wine,” the waiter said, gesturing smoothly to the decanters lining the tray he clutched close to his shoulder. “Oval sea grape, bell sea, beaded cushion, and parasol.” The color of each wine he mentioned was a darker green than the previous, in reflection of its greater strength. “Which would you like?”

  Sepia picked off a bright-green decanter of oval sea grape wine, Abalone chose a medium-green bell sea wine, and Coralline’s fingers snatched up dark-green parasol wine. She tilted the decanter at her lips; if Ecklon decided to leave her for Rosette, she would need all the bolstering she could get. The sweet, pungent wine stung her throat, leaving a lingering relish.

  “Coralline!” Abalone reprimanded. “Mermaids don’t drink parasol wine. And please stop swigging!”

  “Yes, Mother.” Coralline took a smaller sip, trying to be daintier.

  She looked at the Elnath Mansion, in whose shadow the three of them hovered. Other houses in Urchin Grove were low, rounded, single-story homes, shaped as half-bubbles or sea-biscuits, walls turning smoothly into ceiling; the Elnath home, in contrast, was a wide rectangle looming three stories over the seabed. The walls of other homes were ordinary shale—usually variations of gray but otherwise dull brown, rust, or gray-green; the Elnath Mansion was a stark black shale, the most rare and expensive of the fine-grained laminated sedimentary rocks. In keeping with the hard angles of the structure, the windows were rectangular rather than the usual oval shape, and they had ornate golden borders that looked like portrait frames. Coralline tried to imagine herself looking out at the world from within those frames, but she couldn’t imagine it. She quivered, wishing she could scratch her itchy, sequin-covered back against the wall of the Mansion.