by Sonia Faruqi
A judder sounded underfoot, and the drillship fell by several inches. Losing their footing, men tumbled and rolled about the platform.
“We’re all going to die!” a motorman yelled.
“I knew we shouldn’t have left without Zaurak and Serpens!” Deneb said to Izar. He came to imitate Izar’s position, such that he also lay sprawled on his belly, peering down through the borehole at the cape of blackness below. He squeezed his cap in both hands until it was as shapeless as a rag. “What should we do?”
Izar alone knew the drillship inside and out, the whole in addition to the parts. But there was nothing that could be done. Trying to save the drillship would be like trying to save an airplane whose engine was dead.
But he had to try. They would all die otherwise. The only way to save the drillship and the men aboard it would be to detach the rig from the ship. With the rupture of the annular blowout preventer, most of the rig was already detached, but it would be essential to detach it fully. The rig was like a limb that had torn off unevenly instead of being cleanly severed; its gangrenous tissue would infect and kill the whole. Izar would have to dislocate the ram blowout preventer and plug the borehole, otherwise oil would lap onto the platform soon, and Dominion Drill I would sink under the weight of the very oil it was supposed to have collected. But to remove the preventer was a job that would take at least an hour, not minutes—yet minutes were all Izar had.
“Do exactly as I’m doing,” he directed Deneb.
He wrapped both hands around the ram blowout preventer. Deneb placed his hands next to Izar’s. They tried to turn the preventer, to rotate it clockwise, and then counterclockwise, but the valve didn’t budge. Meanwhile, the ocean continued to darken below, the oil like a sticky, thickening cake of tar. The drillship continued to lower, several sudden inches at a time; Izar felt each lurch in his belly. A gush of grease washed onto the platform through the borehole. Gooey, stinky, it rolled underneath Izar on the platform, through his shirt and pants, and Izar thought of himself as a cutlet in a frying pan. And then another wave of oil hijacked the ship. The drillship fell again; this time, the fall was by more than a foot, and Izar felt as though a string connected to his navel had jerked him down.
Time was almost out.
A sweat broke out on his brow. Deneb was also sweating, so profusely that the mermaid across his arm seemed to be weeping, her tears falling into the ocean through the borehole. Izar shifted in position slightly, such that his left hand, with the platinum chip, bore most of the pressure of the attempted rotation. He clenched his teeth so tightly that he thought the two rows might shatter against each other. But then it happened: The preventer started to loosen.
A froth of oil splashed his face and Deneb’s; they managed to shut their eyes just in time. They continued to rotate the valve together, their eyes opening cautiously. The blowout preventer came off, their hands released it, and it fell into the oil, where it disappeared instantly, like a clove in a stew. Their hands working in unison, Izar and Deneb slid the stopper out from just underneath the platform and rotated it upward through a handle in its center. It was like a bathtub drain plug, except with a diameter of four feet rather than four centimeters. They rotated it repeatedly until it was on level with the platform and could be tightened no further, like the lid of a jar.
Oil could no longer get onto Dominion Drill I—which, now, without the rig, was no longer a drillship, but just a ship. The thought made Izar feel both safe and sad as he laid his cheek against the stopper. The stopper was greasy, filthy, but it did not matter—he would live; they would all live.
Through oil-smeared eyelashes he saw rows of steel-toed boots; he had not realized it, but the men had gathered around him and Deneb while the two of them had been working. Now they tugged Deneb up to his feet, lifted him onto their shoulders, and tossed him up and down, cheering raucously. They knew better than to be so informal with Izar—he would view it as an infraction. As the men celebrated their survival, Izar continued to lie there on the platform, in the midst of others but pleasantly alone.
Something rolled over to his cheek, coming to a stop along his scar. Narrow and cylindrical, it was blackened with oil, such that he could identify nothing beyond its shape. It must have gotten lodged in the stopper, otherwise he would have noticed it before. He picked it up and dabbed the oil off with his thumb.
It was Zaurak’s engraved pen, he saw with a start.
Its location all but stated that Zaurak had been at the borehole and that he’d been there after having placed his checklist on Izar’s desk, for he’d have used the same pen to complete the checklist.
But why would Zaurak have visited the borehole specifically? Izar tried desperately, but he could think of no reason Zaurak would have for visiting the borehole other than to switch out the annular blowout preventer. But Zaurak had a crippled leg; he could not plunge into the water through the borehole himself. The thought did not bring Izar the relief he expected, though, for Zaurak could have done it with his right-hand man, Serpens. Relatedly, Serpens would have been the one to lean out over the rails and slash all the lifeboats. Was that why they were missing together—because they were working together to try to kill Izar?
It could not be, yet it had to be . . . the pen in his hand told him so. It must have slipped out of Zaurak’s shirt pocket and gotten lodged in the stopper by accident.
Yesterday, Zaurak had whispered in Serpens’s ear during the drillship check—he must have been telling Serpens to loosen the foothold of the derrick and make it fall upon Izar. When that ploy had failed—Deneb had rescued Izar—Zaurak and Serpens must have started hatching this second plan, to sink the ship.
Izar wrapped his arms around himself, feeling as though invisible feet were kicking him in the ribs. Three years ago, when Antares had wanted to fire Zaurak upon promoting Izar, he had fought fiercely for his friend and mentor, even threatening to leave Ocean Dominion for him. He would give his life for Zaurak; why would Zaurak want to take his life?
He shook the pen in his hand, as though he were shaking Zaurak by the shoulders. Answer me! he implored the pen. But it remained silent. His neck hot and red, Izar dragged himself to his feet and lumbered over to the rails. With all the strength of his arm, he flung the pen as far away as he could and watched it fall and disappear in the flood of blackness below.
8
Black Poison
I caught you!” Coralline cried.
Ecklon whirled around.
His companion was very much not Rosette, Coralline saw. It was a grim, diminutive merman with an enormous nose, fossil-gray eyebrows, and deep lines through his forehead: Sinistrum Scomber—his boss. Sinistrum grimaced at her, then swam past her out the window with such haste that his tailfin practically knocked her decanter of parasol wine off the windowsill.
Ecklon swam over to Coralline, wrapped his hands around her waist, and pulled her into his room through the window. His hands lingered over her tailbone, his fingers loose and light. He was wearing a stiff, deep-green waistcoat with a high collar encrusted with translucent-green olivine stones. Coralline’s arms draped around his neck, her fingers strumming through his hair. She saw her face in his silver-gray eyes and tried to concentrate on her reflection, but it melted and vanished as fast as a sea pen. She should not be drinking so much, she thought, as she took another sip.
Turning her head slowly, she looked about his bedroom—in two weeks, it would be their bedroom. His floor was laid not of the usual dull gray gabbro stone, nor even the more fine-grained basalt, but limestone. White and smooth, streaked gently with pale gray, it formed a sharp contrast to the black shale exterior of the Mansion. A large, bright rug sprawled in the center of the room, its pile filaments carrying the red, blue, and yellow tones of a flame angelfish. Beside the rug stood a bed, twice the size of Coralline’s, its posts pointing as pinnacles toward the ceiling. Its frame was slate but not the traditional gray slate used for furniture—rather, a rare, handsome green slate. A sk
y-blue blanket with shimmering golden threads lay upon the bed.
She could get used to life in the Mansion.
There was a nonchalance she noticed in Ecklon’s manner, an indifference to the opulence around him, as though no matter the superiority of his surroundings, they could not be superior to him.
“Who exactly did you think I was with, Cora?” Ecklon asked.
“No one,” she said, looking away.
“Rosette?”
Her gaze darted to his. It seemed to provide him his answer, for he threw his head back and laughed, dimples carving triangles in his cheeks. Coralline tried to cling to her hapless sense of indignation, but she found herself smiling at him. “I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly.
“I’m sorry, too. I should have been with you instead of Sinistrum. But he requested to speak with me urgently.”
“What about?”
“He’d promised me he’d tenure me when I solved my next case. I solved it last night—a poisoning by the acid kelp, desmarestia.” Ecklon’s eyes glittered so brightly that Coralline had the illusion of looking at twin stars. “Sinistrum tenured me today! I now have a lifetime position with Urchin Interrogations. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Coralline’s fingers stilled in his hair. Pavonis had been right in saying that marrying Ecklon would mean marrying Urchin Grove. Just when she’d become somewhat unmoored to the village, through her firing, he’d become especially moored to it, through his tenure.
“What’s the matter, Cora? I thought you’d be happy for me—for us.”
“I am. . . .” she said, studying the array of olivine stones studding his collar.
“Talk to me.” He tilted her chin up with a hand, such that she had no choice but to meet his eyes.
“What if we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in Urchin Grove?”
He blinked. “Our families live here. We want for nothing here. Why would we ever leave?”
“To see more of the world.”
“Urchin Grove is our world.”
“I guess you’re right. . . .”
Coralline rested her cheek against his waistcoat, so he could not see her face. The village of her birth would be the village of her death—surely, there were worse things in life than that. Earlier she’d longed to tell him about her dismissal, but she could not tell him now, not when he was celebrating his tenure. Here he was, the superlative detective of Urchin Grove, marrying a mermaid fired from her very first job.
A blue-striped grunt fish snorted as it passed outside the window. Coralline’s head rose from Ecklon’s chest, her eyes pursuing its path.
“We should go see our guests,” Ecklon said, sighing.
Coralline nodded, though there was nothing she wished to do less. As she and Ecklon swam over the rug, its kaleidoscopic colors fractured into a thousand fragments, then assembled again just as swiftly—the parasol wine was really muddling her mind. Hand in hand, she and Ecklon emerged from the window, swerved around the rear of the Mansion, and swam into the garden.
All eyes turned to them, and a crowd started to form. People looked at her differently when she was with him than without him, Coralline noticed, their gazes carrying more respect.
A figure hurtled toward the front of the crowd. Her corset formed a wisp of low-cut sapphire blue, minimalist both at the top and bottom, for it culminated at her ribs, revealing an enviably slender waist. With her sapphire bodice and flaming hair, Rosette Delesse formed a stunning vision. Batting her eyelashes at Ecklon, she wrapped her arms around him. A long moment passed, and whispers started among the guests, and Coralline cleared her throat loudly, before Rosette managed to untangle herself from him. Turning to Coralline, she asked with a smirk, “How’s work?”
Coralline gulped. From Rosette’s tone, it was clear Rosette knew of her firing, but how could she possibly know?
From the window of The Conventional Cure, she must have seen Coralline leaving The Irregular Remedy in tears, and she must have guessed the reason for it. How humiliating—at Coralline’s own engagement party, Rosette must have told many guests about the firing, perhaps fabricating colorful rumors as well.
Just then, Coralline overheard one mermaid say to another, “Do you think it’s true Coralline got fired for stealing carapace?” Her companion whispered back, “Oh, I thought she stabbed a patient who was having a heart attack.”
Coralline felt her cheeks burning. Fortunately, Ecklon did not seem to have heard the two mermaids, for he was looking politely between her and Rosette. This was not how Coralline wanted him to find out. He did not yet know; she hoped her parents, and his parents, didn’t either.
Abalone arrived in front of Coralline, displacing Rosette, who left grudgingly. But Coralline’s relief at her mother’s arrival was short-lived. Grasping Coralline’s wrists, Abalone hissed, “I’ve been looking everywhere for Naiadum and I don’t see him. You promised you’d find him. Where is he?”
“I’m sorry. I forgot to look for him.” In her haste to escape Rhodomela (whom she could not see at the moment), then her snooping on Ecklon, Coralline had neglected to search for Naiadum. She scanned the throng now for a tawny tail, but the darting of her eyes made her as dizzy as though she were spinning in circles. Where could her little brother possibly be?
Coralline looked up. A tornado of large silver cod were descending so rapidly from the surface that the lateral line along their sides looked like single arrows. Above them, along the waves, a band of blackness seemed to be settling. Because of the band’s position, far behind and above everyone, she seemed to be the only one to see it, but she must be wrong, she had to be imagining it, it had to be a lingering effect of the parasol wine, for she’d never seen a band of blackness before.
Coralline looked down. A yellowtail flounder buried itself in the sediment until no more than two of its rusty red spots remained visible. Half a dozen hogchokers smaller than a finger settled into the sands until their tiny, dark-brown forms were fully covered.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Coralline looked up again. The black was a growing blanket, rippling menacingly close. She should point and scream. Her lips parted, but her tongue remained glued to the roof of her mouth. What if she was wrong? Wouldn’t she look foolish then? Wouldn’t everyone know she was drunk?
“BLACK POISON!” a voice yelled. Coralline could not see Rhodomela—she must be at the hem of the crowd—but the voice was distinctively hers.
All necks craned up simultaneously. Shouts began, then blended, such that they became a deafening roar. Guests started scrambling into the Elnath Mansion through the windows. The black blanket, now directly above, was descending continuously, its path blocking sunshine and shrouding the waters. Coralline clutched Ecklon’s elbow. The ocean was closing in around her. No place could offer a superior refuge to the Mansion, and her tailfin flicked in her readiness to swim through a window herself, but she had to find her brother first. “Naiadum’s missing,” she told Ecklon.
Within a minute, all guests were indoors, and only Coralline and Ecklon remained in the garden, their eyes scanning the waters for Naiadum. An immense bow shape circled above and descended with a powerful swell of water—Pavonis. Coralline sagged against him and asked him whether he’d seen Naiadum. “I haven’t,” he huffed. “Your brother tends to always be under-tail; how can he have vanished?”
The sands agitated, and velvety, navy-blue wings patterned with white spots emerged like bedsheets lifting—Menziesii. He nodded his head at Coralline in greeting, and she nodded back at him. Spotted eagle rays were often taciturn, but Ecklon’s muse, Menziesii, was more taciturn than most—a nod usually formed the extent of his communication with her.
“Did Naiadum give any hints about where he could possibly be?” Ecklon demanded, grasping Coralline by the arms.
“The day before yesterday, when I was reading him a bedtime story, he told me he wanted to crest. He threatened he might venture up to the waves when I wasn’t looking.”
Coralline, Ecklon, Pavonis, and Menziesii looked up as one at the dark swath. Opaque and indiscernible, descending continuously, it was by now almost upon them. Coralline shrank and shuddered in its shadow.
Ecklon raised his arms such that they formed arrows to either side of his head and, without a further word, he dove upward into the blackness. Before Coralline could even blink, he’d disappeared in the swirl, vanishing as fast as a tube anemone. Menziesii disappeared after Ecklon, just as completely and wordlessly, his long whip of a tail slapping the waters behind him. Pavonis fixed a grim eye on Coralline and then angled himself up and vanished also.
Part of the reason they were entering the black poison so readily was that they were not apothecaries. From her medical textbooks, Coralline knew the precise perils of black poison: gill slits could close, causing suffocation, and ingestion of the poison could cause blood contamination. The difference between the two forms of death was speed—fast versus slow. Those who were prone to fainting were particularly susceptible during a black poison spill, because, when unconscious, their bodies were limp and defenseless against the poison. And Coralline was more prone to fainting than anyone she’d ever known.
What if she died in her attempt to save Naiadum? In fact, what if Naiadum was already dead? But he could not be dead, she told herself. Had he died, his body would have sunk down to the seabed—as merpeople bodies did in death—and a passing mermaid or merman would have spotted him. Unless, of course, black poison caused flotation, in which case his body would not sink.
Coralline’s hands rose to her gill slits, as she imagined them closing like window shutters in the slime. Smacking her forehead to clear her thoughts, she scolded, Stop being a coward! Then she raised her arms over her head, pressed her lips together, and, tail quaking violently, arrowed her way into the black poison.
