by Sonia Faruqi
“Coralline has triumphed over Rosette as winner of the marriage mart,” Abalone told Sepia. “She will soon become princess of this palace!”
Coralline cringed. Last year, Sepia’s daughter Telia, as fuchsia-tailed and voluminous as her mother, had married a wiry, low-level legal clerk who worked at the law firm of Ecklon’s father, Erizo Elnath. The law firm, Rights and Justice, started by Ecklon’s great-great-grandfather, was what had made the Elnaths the wealthiest family in the village. In the same way that Erizo’s station was above that of Sepia’s son-in-law, Coralline knew her mother viewed her own station as being above Sepia’s, now that Coralline would soon be Erizo’s daughter-in-law.
“Well, no matter the princess,” Sepia rejoined smoothly, “Epaulette will always be queen of her Mansion—an iron-fisted one.”
Coralline could not help but silently agree.
“My stomach is rumbling for a morsel,” Sepia said, rubbing the expansive area.
“Epaulette really should have hired more waiters,” Abalone said. “We had to wait an era for wine, now we must pine unto infinite for a bite—”
Sepia’s lips parted at the sight of two mermaids who’d just come to hover behind Abalone.
One of them had a silver tail, and her bodice dangled with long, confetti-like crimson-and-white tendrils that resembled the fins of a red lionfish. An elaborate matching headdress of quills crowned her silver bun. It was Ecklon’s mother, Epaulette. The mermaid who accompanied her was also flamboyantly red, but more naturally so, in the form of both her hair and her scales. It was Violacea, Epaulette’s best friend and Rosette’s mother.
Coralline hoped they hadn’t overheard her mother’s complaint; if they had, she hoped they would be polite enough to not mention it.
“I’ll send a waiter to you shortly with plenty of devil’s tongue,” Epaulette said.
Abalone’s amber-gold eyes lowered, and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. No fault lay with the service, Coralline knew—the truth was that her mother felt inferior in her new environment and wished to conceal it with a ploy of superiority in the form of a complaint.
“We’ve been admiring your garden,” Sepia gushed.
“I’m sure you have,” Epaulette said, but her gaze remained on Abalone.
“Everything seems to grow here,” Sepia continued enthusiastically.
“Everything except coralline algae.”
Coralline felt her face reddening. She sipped her parasol wine; the liquor seeped through her veins like hot steam. Epaulette frowned at the decanter. Her silver-gray eyes then swept over the orange-and-purple sequins swathing Coralline from neck to hip. “What terrible tailorship,” she remarked.
Abalone’s lips drew into a thin line.
“We’ve never worked a day in our lives, have we, Violacea?” Epaulette said, without turning her head to Violacea.
“We certainly haven’t,” she said, giggling.
“How goes your sewing, Abalone?” asked Epaulette.
“It goes well.”
“Strange, the way things are in your humble home,” Epaulette drawled. “The wife with overworked hands, the husband without a hand.”
Violacea laughed uproariously, as though she’d never heard something more original.
Abalone’s eyes narrowed to slits. “How smug—”
Coralline laid a hand on her mother’s arm. Her mother’s temper was like a corset with loose strings; any provocation, and it would unravel; once it did, the strings could not be rejoined, and the outcome would be a scandal, even if undeserved.
“Your family will never be good enough for ours,” Epaulette snapped. Her gaze turned to Coralline. “You will never be good enough for my son. There are still two weeks left to the wedding; there’s still time for Ecklon to come to his senses and choose Rosette over you.”
“Yes, it is my daughter who deserves him!” Violacea said.
“If I have my way,” Epaulette continued, “this garden will be as close as you and your family”—her gaze darted between Coralline and Abalone—“ever get to my Mansion!”
Coralline had never cursed before; to avoid doing so now, she bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood.
Epaulette and Violacea fluttered away arm in arm to greet other guests, the pace of their swim slow and ambling, as though no unusual words had been spoken. Coralline, Abalone, and Sepia sipped their wines in silence. Sepia rarely stopped talking, in Coralline’s experience, but even she seemed to find herself at a loss for words.
A waiter arrived, bearing a platter of devil’s tongue. Coralline loved the red algae, but she shook her head—she had no more appetite, knowing that Epaulette would have sent him over. Sepia collected a fistful of the slippery red flaps, and Abalone plucked up two. “Naiadum loves devil’s tongue,” she said, casting a glance about the garden. “Hmm . . . where is my little angel?”
Coralline looked for Naiadum’s tawny tail. There were only a few children in the garden, clustered together noisily, but her eight-year-old brother was not among them. She turned her head to look at her mother again; though her neck swiveled slowly, the movement felt lightning fast, as though her head might come unhinged.
“Now, we have to look for your brother.” Abalone sighed. “Will you find him, or shall I ask your father to search for him?”
Coralline’s gaze found her father on the other side of the garden, beside a pair of swaying sea fans. He was laughing with a merman she did not know, gesturing animatedly with both arms, a care-free aspect to his manner she hadn’t seen since his haccident. “Let’s not trouble Father while he’s enjoying himself,” she said. “I’ll find Naiadum.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good. Now, excuse me while I swim up to your father and remind him to conceal his stump behind his back. I don’t know why he can’t remember my social etiquette instructions—oh, goodness! What is the Bitter Spinster doing here?”
Coralline followed her mother’s gaze toward an emaciated mermaid arriving at the fringe of the garden. Her decanter almost slipped from her fingers. How dare Rhodomela attend her engagement party after firing her!
“I can’t believe you invited the Bitter Spinster!” Abalone shrieked. “And I can’t believe she’s wearing black, the color of mourning, even at this time of celebration. Oh look, she brought her older sister, Osmundea, with her.”
Osmundea shared Rhodomela’s dark hair but otherwise bore little resemblance to her. Her tail was indigo rather than black, and her face was more pleasantly contoured, with wide-set eyes and full cheeks. A short, faded scar lined the side of her lip.
“What a sorry spinsterly pair,” Sepia said.
No one greeted Rhodomela or Osmundea. Instead, mermaids cleared out of their way, forming a vacuum around them, as though spinsterhood were a disease contractable by proximity.
Rhodomela’s black gaze found Coralline.
Coralline slid aside and away, without a word to her mother or Sepia. She placed her now-empty decanter on a passing waiter’s tray and snatched up another decanter of parasol wine. Swerving around a corner of the Mansion, she found herself behind it. There was no one there. She saw only juvenile red crabs skittering among the pebbles and a common cuttlefish propelling itself upward by its frilly fin, camouflaged partially by its zebra-like stripes. Relieved to find herself alone for the first time all morning, Coralline leaned against the wall, closed her eyes, and shifted up and down sharply, feeling a pleasure-pain from scratching her sequined back against the smooth black shale.
Love is a farce, Rhodomela had said. Perhaps the master apothecary was right, Coralline thought now. After all, Ecklon still wasn’t here, long after all the guests had arrived, all the guests except Rosette—Coralline’s eyes flew open. Ecklon was likely somewhere in the Mansion. If he was with Rosette, Coralline might be able to catch him red-handed by peeking through the windows. If he was cheating on her, it would be better for her to know it now, so that she could leave h
im—though the thought of leaving him made her heart feel like it would shatter into a million pieces. . . . Could she bear to see him cheating on her? No, but she had to know.
He wasn’t the only one who could be a detective.
She shifted to the nearest window, along the bottom left of the first story. The room was a guest bedroom, and it was empty. Her tailfin flicking ever so gently, she crept toward the window next to the first—its shutters were drawn. She continued on to the next window, and the next. Half of the Mansion’s windows were open, featuring guest bedrooms or spacious armoires, and the other half were shuttered.
But then, there! Through a window on the third story, she saw him. He wasn’t alone.
A few clouds had gathered overhead, softening the glare of the sun, dampening the day.
His hands on his hips, Izar continued to stand where he had all morning, in the shadow of the derrick. Men bustled about Dominion Drill I all around him, making him think of bees buzzing about a hive.
Their sun-roasted faces bent to the equipment in concentration, they anchored the drillship in Zone Ten, the site of the oil drill today. In Ocean Dominion’s map of the Atlantic, neat squares divided the entire ocean from north to south pole. Izar had chosen Zone Ten for this day because Ocean Dominion had done little in the area in recent years, except for a coral reef dynamite blast about seven months ago—a failed project in which they’d caught few fish, but a merman’s hand.
Through a borehole in the moonpool on the base of the hull, four men lowered a riser into the water, a high-tension steel pipe with a diameter of close to two feet. The eight hands of the four men moved with the symmetric collaboration of a spider’s legs. Machines aboard Dominion Drill I shrieked and shouted as the riser powered deeper and deeper into the ocean. Many men wore earmuffs to block out the racket, but Izar didn’t mind it. Despite the clamor aboard, the penetration into the ocean floor would be smooth and soundless below; he’d designed it that way, to reduce the possibility of interference from merpeople.
A vibration soon rang through his elbows; it meant the riser had collided with the seabed and was on its way in.
Earlier, Izar had told derrickhand Deneb that he’d be directing the crew; he saw now that they did not need direction—together, they formed a well-oiled machine. He was redundant—the thought made him smile, for it meant Zaurak had trained them well.
Slowly, in ones and twos and threes, the crewmen completed their tasks and turned to face him. Izar strode to the base of the derrick, his knees stiff and creaking, protesting their first movement in hours. He looked down through the four-foot-wide borehole through which the men had passed the riser pipe. At the top of the borehole, on level with the floor of the drillship, lay the ram blowout preventer; below that, just underneath the hull, in the water, lay the annular blowout preventer. The two valves were more crucial than their size would suggest: Their donut-like rubber seals, reinforced with steel ribs, would prevent the riser from exploding under the erratic pressure of oil. Essentially, they formed the security guards of the drillship.
When Izar had been designing Dominion Drill I, a crucial decision had related to choosing blowout preventers. “Most oil spills are caused by malfunctioning preventers,” Zaurak had told him. “Don’t assemble your drillship of shiny new toys from the most expensive manufacturers in the world. And don’t trust anyone or their streams of warranties. Test everything yourself.” Izar had nodded and tested many makes of preventers, subjecting them to double the pressure they’d be subjected to during even the most tumultuous of oil drills. Only two had passed the test—he’d placed an order for both immediately. These were the two he stood examining now.
And yet the annular blowout preventer looked slightly different than usual, its metal less gray. It must be because of the clouds overhead, Izar thought.
“Any word from Zaurak or Serpens?” he asked Deneb. He did not need to turn his head to know that the twenty-two-year-old stood just behind him, like a stray puppy who’d found an owner.
“No,” came the reply from just over Izar’s shoulder, as he’d expected.
Izar stepped away from the borehole and did what he always did just before the commencement of an oil-drill—he wrapped his hand around a rung of the derrick. The ninety-five-foot-tall turret of metal would momentarily supply the strength to haul thousands of barrels of oil from the depths of the ocean, and Izar would obtain a measure of power from grasping its power. Were Zaurak here, he would have stood next to Izar, but, rather than clasping a rung of the derrick, he would have leaned against it, to alleviate some weight from his right leg. Their ears would have been instinctively keened below, even though they’d both learned on their very first drill two years ago that the rush of oil was something felt rather than heard, like a heartbeat.
Izar did not need to give an order to start the drill; the workers knew it from his clasp of the derrick, and they put the levers in motion. The floor of the drillship vibrated, and the pressure radiated up the soles of his boots until it swirled in his knees. It resembled the vibration of an airplane before takeoff, except much stronger. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the inside of his arm. He knew he wouldn’t be able to see oil flowing into the storage tank below, but he still craved to feel it—and he did. He never knew how he knew, but he smiled as he identified the precise moment when oil started surging up the riser pipe, flying past the blowout preventers, and settling into the storage tank beneath the hull.
He continued to stand there, eyes closed, in a meditative silence, losing track of time. When he eventually glanced at the luminescent hour markers on his watch, he saw that more than an hour had passed, as smooth as any he’d ever spent on the drillship.
Then, a sudden tremor shot through his fingers. He frowned, lifted his head from his arm. The tremor vibrated through the fingers wrapped around the derrick. He withdrew his hand, as though burned. Staggering away from the tower, he frowned down through the borehole at the two blowout preventers. The flow of oil seemed to be turning temperamental and uncontrolled, but its pressure could not possibly exceed that of his laboratory tests. But then he heard it—sputters and chokes, like a man coughing to death. The riser pipe that connected the drillship to the seabed was shaking manically, he saw through the borehole, so manically that it was creating huge waves. The floor of Dominion Drill I shuddered like a dog shaking off fleas.
Losing his balance, Izar tumbled forward and would have plummeted straight down through the borehole into the ocean had a hand not grasped his arm and pulled him back. “Watch out!” shouted Deneb from behind him.
“This is the second time you’ve saved my life in as many days,” Izar said, turning his head to flash a brief smile at him.
Then, in a single, fluid movement, Izar fell to the platform in the position of a push-up, his hands beneath his shoulders, his fingers clutching the round rim of the borehole, his head peering down. He placed both hands upon the ram blowout preventer. It was cool and strong and steady—nothing was the matter with it. He gazed farther down at the annular blowout preventer, close to the top of the riser pipe, in the water. It should have been still as an iceberg, but it was shivering like a man in the throes of a final fever, the steel ribs around its rubber seal beating violently.
He hadn’t been able to tell while he’d been standing, but he recognized now that the annular blowout preventer was different than the one he’d had installed on the drillship two years ago—that was why its color looked duller. Someone had switched out the original, and the new one looked similar enough to go unnoticed unless one stared at it closely. But who could have switched out the preventer?
It would have been the man who’d tried to kill him yesterday, through the collapse of the derrick. But who was that man?
“Shut everything down!” Izar hollered, raising his head from the borehole. “There’s a problem—”
The steel ribs of the preventer exploded like a dozen belts, the rubber seal beneath them dissolving into flac
cid fragments. The vertical, two-foot-wide riser pipe that connected the seabed to the storage tank cracked open, as smoothly as though struck by a saw. Blackness gushed out in all directions like blackberry juice. Izar felt as though he’d been stabbed and was watching his own blood spill out of him. But who had stabbed him?
Even if it killed him, he would learn the answer, he determined. He thought of what the drunkard Rigel had said on the island of Mira—that he was a pawn in a game. Could it be true? If so, who was playing this game against him, and to what end?
The platform quivered, as the earth might just before an earthquake. With the preventer broken, the drillship would sink in a matter of minutes, Izar recognized.
The workers, who did not have his background in engineering and physics, sensed it instinctively. With bull-like bellows, they leapt into a stampede of activity, hauling lifeboats onto the platform from over the rails. Working in pairs, they connected the lifeboats to mechanical pumps. The boats should have started inflating automatically, like tires connected to bicycle pumps, but they remained flat. One of the men knelt on the platform and thumped his hand along the fabric. “Someone knifed the material!” he cried.
Similar cries erupted from bow to stern throughout the drillship. All sixteen lifeboats had been ripped, it turned out. Like pin-pricked balloons, they could no longer be used.
“But I checked every one of them yesterday!” Deneb said.
“I believe you,” Izar muttered. Zaurak had checked them as well, for the “lifeboats” line-item, like all the others, had been marked off on the checklist he’d placed on Izar’s desk. Whoever had knifed the lifeboats must have done it in the middle of the night, when no one was there.
Whoever wanted Izar dead wanted it badly enough to be willing to kill the entire crew. As such, whoever it was, he was not on the drillship. That left only two men: Zaurak and Serpens. It could not be Zaurak, and so, by elimination, it had to be Serpens. But why? Why would Serpens want him dead? He hardly even knew Serpens.
