The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  Of course. His identification card was still that of vice president. In order to obtain a higher level of access, he would first need to get a new card from the security department. He nonetheless stood there, listening intently, trying to catch a whisper, a rustle. And there it was again, a sound—this time, like a sigh.

  The Third Man was here, on this floor. He might have a gun; he might spring out of the shadows at any moment and point it at Izar’s head. Trapped in the elevator, Izar would be unable to defend himself. He should flee immediately up to the safety of B1. But though his finger poised over the button, it refrained from pressing it. He continued to stand there, listening with both his ears and body.

  But all fell silent. Not even the air swirled anymore on this deserted floor. The only sound he heard was the grating of his own breath. Clutching the bars of the elevator, he banged his head against them, like a caged bear.

  It had been a long day; the noises he’d heard must have spewed from the pipes in his Invention Chamber.

  10

  The Night Assailant

  Her decision made to find the elixir, Coralline felt a reservoir of eel-like electric energy building in her tail. She changed out of her chemise into an iridescent-green bodice with thick straps. She then lifted her hair to the top of her head and made a big, loose bun, tying it all with a rope of sisal. Next, she grabbed her satchel off a hook on the wall and laid it open on her bed.

  Darting to her armoire, she pulled out a handful of corsets from a drawer. One she held up and examined whimsically—it was the sky-blue bodice she’d worn on her second date with Ecklon, with lace along the neckline and cloud-white ribbons down its center. She remembered how admiringly he’d appraised her that evening. It remained his favorite item of her wardrobe, she believed. Folding it delicately, she placed it in her satchel, along with the other corsets. Then she packed an ivory chemise in which to sleep, carefully tucking into its folds the olivine-encrusted comb her mother had given her.

  “You’re going on an Elixir Expedition, not your honeymoon,” Pavonis called. “Only the bare necessities, please.”

  Ignoring him, Coralline clutched the pen she’d discovered in the midst of the black poison spill, with the name Zaurak Alphard engraved upon it. She held it close to her nose and stared at it so fiercely that her eyes crossed. It would serve as the funnel for her anger, a motivator if she ever lost courage. She added it to the contents of her satchel.

  She then shifted to the shelves lining the wall next to her bedroom door. Her fingers traveled over the spines of some of her favorite medical textbooks: A Reference Guide for the Diligent Apothecary’s Bedside, The Medical Relationship Between Happiness and Healing, The Age-Old Amalgamation of Alleviating Algae. She wanted to pack them, but there was no space in her satchel for books. She rose toward the ceiling to look at her most precious medical item, sitting lofty and self-important on the highest shelf, its case a pretty, pearlescent white: her apothecary arsenal.

  Collecting it off the shelf, she slid aside its twin clasps. The apothecary arsenal consisted of two sections: one for algal experimentation—with polished flasks and vials in precise compartments, snippers with shining blades, a blue-shale mortar and pestle, a long-handled microscope; and another section for patient treatment—soft swaths of pyropia bandages, fine filaments for stitches, a scalpel, even a vial of anesthetic.

  Her father had given the medical kit to her on her twentieth birthday. It was intended to be used outside of a clinic, when one didn’t have all of one’s implements at hand. But Coralline had never used it before, because she’d never treated anyone outside of The Irregular Remedy before. Plus, she’d been saving it for a medical emergency.

  “As I examined anemones with a microscope during my career as a coral connoisseur,” her father had said as he’d handed her the apothecary arsenal, “you will examine algae with a microscope during your career as a healer. My career was shorter than I would have liked”—he’d looked down sadly at his stump—“but I hope yours lasts as long as you live. No joy is more rejuvenating than that which springs from the work you love.”

  Coralline hugged her apothecary arsenal to her chest. She longed to pack it in her satchel but wondered whether she should. Without a medical badge from the Association of Apothecaries, she would be in defiance of the Medical Malpractice Act if she were found to be treating anyone other than herself. But she was legally permitted to experiment with algae—it was just that no one could consume her preparations other than her. Also, since she’d packed a memento of her mother—the jeweled comb—the apothecary arsenal could serve as a memento of her father. Yes, that was fair, reasonable.

  She added it to her satchel, packing it vertically, to one side, so its case would not get scratched. It consumed almost half the space of the satchel, but it let her entertain the illusion that she was still an apothecary, and just for that, it was worth it.

  Coralline added two small jars of salve to her satchel: toothed wrack salve, for open wounds like cuts and gashes, and horned wrack salve, to reduce swelling and bruising. She’d applied toothed wrack salve every night to her father’s stump in the weeks after his haccident, and she’d applied horned wrack salve to Ecklon’s fractured elbow the day he’d arrived at The Irregular Remedy for the first time.

  “You’re taking too long!” Pavonis hissed through the window. “Time waits for no one.”

  Ignoring him again, Coralline sat at her desk. She examined the streaked red-brown sandstone jar standing in its corner—her carapace crock. Holding the crock next to her ear, she shook it, listening intently to the jingle of shells. She hadn’t told anyone except Ecklon and Pavonis—she hadn’t even told her father—but she was saving to start her own clinic one day, Coralline’s Cures.

  She unlidded the crock carefully. The shells within would clang if she were to empty the crock directly onto her desk, so she gathered the shells in her hand and placed them one by one on the gray-slate surface of her desk. When she’d arranged them all in a neat line, from smallest to largest, she started counting them eagerly. She had one moon snail shell, luminous even at night—equivalent to one carapace. One wentletrap, a lovely, spiraled little white cone—two carapace. One slipper limpet, smooth and rounded—five carapace. One scallop, patterned calico—ten carapace. And, thank goodness, one cerith, pigmented and pointed—twenty carapace.

  She did the math; the total came to thirty-eight carapace. It was much less than she’d hoped. How she wished she had a conch or whelk in hand—shells worth fifty and a hundred carapace each! But Rhodomela had paid her only fifty carapace per week at The Irregular Remedy, and Coralline had spent much of the amount in household expenditures, for she’d wished to ease her family’s financial burden in the wake of her father’s retirement. Her decision to work at The Irregular Remedy had been a wrong one in every way, she now admitted to herself.

  She piled the shells in a golden drawstring pouch her mother had stitched for her, embroidered with her first and last name in cursive letters. She then extracted a pen and small parchment-pad from the first drawer of her desk. She ran her fingers lovingly over the cover of the pad, embossed as it was with the armored, branching shape of coralline algae. Naiadum had given it to her on her twentieth birthday, and she’d adored it the moment she’d laid eyes on it. She’d considered using it for medical instructions and prescriptions to patients, but she had decided it was too beautiful and special for such a mundane use.

  Biting a corner of her lip, she tore a page out of her parchment-pad and wrote:

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I’m leaving to find the elixir to save Naiadum. I’ll return as soon as I can.

  Love, Coralline

  She read it over. The note’s brevity gave it an unintended sense of formality and finality. She thought of writing a new note, but tears rose to her eyes and her hand trembled over the parchment. She had never left her family before. Not one night had she spent away from her home. Could she truly leave her paren
ts and brother, and that, too, in the middle of the night? Why did she feel like she was abandoning them, like she was trying to escape the circumstances she herself had created? Was leaving home the courageous thing to do, or the cowardly thing?

  “Don’t, Coralline.”

  She didn’t know how he knew, but Pavonis always knew what she was thinking.

  Coralline hurriedly placed a starfish-shaped parchment-weight atop the note. Her parents would see the note as soon as they entered her room in the morning. She added the pen and parchment-pad to her satchel—the parchment-pad would serve as a memento of Naiadum.

  “The Elixir Expedition may be the journey of a lifetime,” Pavonis drawled, “but it will not last a lifetime. Your satchel is as thick as two pillows. We haven’t even left, and we’re already stalled with your sentimentalism.”

  Coralline drifted up to the ceiling and collected a luciferin orb. It was warm in her hands—its heat and glimmering white-blue light consoled her. She connected the orb to a rod—thus connected, the luciferin orb transformed to a luciferin lantern. It would guide her at night during the Elixir Expedition.

  Zipping her overflowing satchel with difficulty, she slung it over her shoulder.

  “You’ve forgotten the most important thing,” Pavonis called. “A dagger.”

  Ecklon had tried to teach her how to wield a dagger, but after trying a few swipes with his dagger, she’d handed it back to him, saying, “The only sharp instrument I need to be able to wield with any level of skill is a scalpel.”

  “Fetch your father’s dagger,” Pavonis directed.

  Coralline could picture her father’s dagger precisely; it would be hanging in a sheath above his desk in a corner of the living room. He would never miss it—it was largely ornamental—nor would he begrudge her borrowing of it. But her bedroom door would creak if she were to open it, and if either of her parents awoke from the sound, the Elixir Expedition would end before it could begin. They would not want her to leave home, not like this, not on a quest to find something that may be no more than a legend.

  “You’re better than any dagger, Pavonis,” Coralline said, intending it as a compliment.

  “You need to be able to defend yourself—” His voice cut off, and his body slammed against the wall. Coralline’s desk rattled, her bedside table quivered, and several books tumbled off her shelves. “Something’s attacking me!” he bellowed. “Help, Coralline, HELP!”

  The gray tin under his arm, Izar rang the doorbell for the fifth time, keeping his thumb pressed to it until his nail whitened. From the entryway in which he stood, decorated with a glass foyer table and a porcupine-like spiky ball balanced precariously atop it, Izar could hear the bell echoing to the other side of the door. Was she asleep? Or was she not home? But where could she be in the middle of the night?

  He’d never arrived at her penthouse unannounced before—it felt a little like arriving for dinner at Yacht without a reservation—but he’d had an impossibly tumultuous day and would feel steady only when he held her in his arms.

  Footsteps pattered on the other side of the door, soft as reindeer on snow. The door opened a wedge. Izar stared at Ascella with open-mouthed astonishment.

  The lids of her frost-blue eyes shimmered with sultry shadows, like an early-morning sky topped with swirls of smoke. Her lips were as crimson as poppies—it was the same lipstick she’d worn during their dinner at Yacht. She wore a low-cut powder-blue slip that ended at her thighs, with a slit rising up to the hip on one side. A matching silk robe covered her loosely, then tightly, as her fingers knotted its sash at the waist.

  “Were we supposed to meet here tonight?” Izar asked, chagrined. “Am I late?”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “Good.”

  Izar stepped inside Ascella’s apartment, closed the door behind him, and wrapped his arms around her. She smelled of lavender, the fragrance sweet and purple, delicate and subtle. “I’ve missed you more than you can imagine today,” he said softly.

  “Er, thank you—”

  “How come you didn’t call me after the oil spill?” he said, his voice a gentle reprimand. “Didn’t you hear the news smearing all the channels, spouting poison at Ocean Dominion?”

  “I did hear it. I’m sorry, but I’ve been busy with Tarazed all week. Abstract hosted an exhibition for him this week—”

  “I know, I know. You told me. Never mind. Let’s not talk about work now.”

  Izar ran his thumb over the third finger of her left hand, the finger that would soon wear a ring mined by Castor from the depths of the ocean. He leaned forward to kiss her but pulled apart abruptly at the sight behind her. Forgetting her momentarily, he strode farther into her living room.

  There was her glass coffee table that he recognized, with an icicle-shaped quartz vase standing in its center like a glacier in a transparent sea—Ascella loved diamonds, and quartz and crystals were as close as home decorations could get to diamonds. Behind the coffee table was something he didn’t recognize: a purple-and-black painting, five-by-six feet. A series of jagged black strokes over a violet canvas, it made Izar think of a massive bruise. As his scar marred one part of his jaw, he felt that this bruise marred one part of her home, which was otherwise white and glassy, much like her complexion.

  The painting, in Tarazed’s signature style, seemed to make the entire apartment an advertisement of the artist. Worse, like the other senseless work Tarazed produced, it must have cost a fortune, at least a quarter million dollars. “How did you afford it?” Izar asked, turning back to her.

  “I didn’t. It was a gift.”

  “From Tarazed—?” Just then, he heard a splatter like a waterfall, coming from her bedroom, whose door was closed.

  Someone was in her shower.

  Izar’s gaze ran with new understanding over Ascella’s slip, smoky eyes, and poppy lips. His insides felt as though they were being slowly extracted out of him with burning tongs. He’d been prepared to give Ascella the world, but she’d wanted it from another man.

  Tarazed must be the man. Hence the gift of his artwork, which served to mark her penthouse, and her, as his territory.

  Izar’s eyes glazed over, such that he seemed to be looking at Ascella from across a screen of bubbles over a pot of boiling water. She became no more than a blur of powder blue. He turned back to Tarazed’s painting. The black lines on the violet canvas shifted, as though the bruise were bleeding, festering, just like his heart.

  He opened the gray tin that he’d discovered on his office desk. He’d brought it here to show it to her, to ask her to help him interpret its contents. His intention now changed, he extracted the half-shell and staggered into her bedroom.

  He’d expected to see some evidence of Tarazed in the room, but not a scrap of clothing littered Ascella’s lily-white sheets. He crossed the room until he stood just outside her bathroom. He became dimly aware that his body was shaking as severely as though he was in the throes of an epileptic fit. Ascella was flapping about him, the sleeves of her robe swaying like the wings of a blue jay. Her mouth was moving—she was talking to him, perhaps trying to get through—but he couldn’t hear a word.

  His hand felt warm and wet. Looking down mechanically in its direction, he saw droplets of red splattering the white floor tiles—he was clutching the half-shell so fiercely that he’d cut himself on its ragged edge. Tarazed’s blood would soon join his on the floor, except that it would be not a drip but a gush like a shower.

  Pavonis wriggled and tossed, creating a powerful current that shoved Coralline back from the window. But she pushed through the swell, pulled open the pane of shutters, and leaned out. She placed one hand on his snout and, with her other hand, held her luciferin lantern nervously out over the reef garden in an effort to identity his assailant.

  Tentacles of snakelocks and jewel anemones cast shifting shadows in the darkness. Spikes of green sea urchin and purple sea urchin looked twice as long and sharp as they ordinarily did, like needl
e-thin pens. A marble cone snail, with its white-spotted carapace, crawled slowly in search of a victim to poison with its single, harpoon-like tooth.

  “I beg your pardon, Pavonis,” said a low, tremulous voice. “I was trying to reach the window, and my strand of grass must have rubbed you the wrong way.”

  Coralline slipped out the window and lowered her lantern toward the voice. Her father’s muse, Altair, gazed up at her and Pavonis from among dense, bright-green tufts of turtle-grass, his tail coiled around one of them. His dorsal fin fanned as he ascended haltingly to the very peak of the tuft, his color darkening to orange. “I’ve never eavesdropped in my life,” he said, as though defending himself against an unstated accusation, “but I was unable to sleep and could not help overhearing your conversation about the Elixir Expedition.”

  “Go to sleep, Minion,” Pavonis growled, “unless you want me to put you to sleep.”

  Coralline stroked the side of Pavonis’s face. She knew he was embarrassed by his strong reaction, by the fact that a thirty-foot-long creature such as him had been so rattled by the movement of one the size of her hand.

  Altair trembled but did not lower himself among the grasses. “It’s life-threatening to venture out into the unknown,” he said. “Think about your parents, Coralline. When they wake up in the morning, how do you think they’ll feel to find that not only is one of their children dying before them, but the other is quite possibly dying away from them—in some unknown place?”

  Coralline flinched.

  “She will come to no harm as long as I live,” Pavonis rumbled. With the wide shape of his head and eyes set to either side of it, the whale shark could not examine anything with both eyes, and so, as though to compensate, he fixed a particularly cold eye upon Altair.

  The seahorse shrank, camouflaging partially. “And what if you die, like your friend Mako?”

  Coralline gasped. If silence had not been advisable, in order to avoid waking her parents, Pavonis’s tail would have smashed against the wall of the house to wring out his wrath. “Minion, you’re a coward who’s never once left this coral reef,” Pavonis retorted. “Let’s go, Coralline.”