The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  “What? Am I dreaming?”

  “You’re not, unfortunately,” Altair said. “I’m glad your stance seems to parallel mine. I only hope your influence exceeds mine.”

  Ecklon looked about for the voice, bewildered. Coralline pointed out the seahorse, his head sticking out of her satchel. Altair looked somewhat embarrassed at his presence in the midst of their embrace.

  “Cora, you’re forgetting who you are in the wake of the black poison spill,” Ecklon said, his gaze returning to her. “You’ve never left Urchin Grove before. You’re delicate—like the algae after which you were named—”

  “I’m not delicate.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it in an offensive way. What I mean is that you’re fragile, feminine. You don’t know how to wield a dagger—”

  “Tell me about it,” Pavonis commented dryly.

  Ecklon looked toward the whale shark’s face in the window, then, turning back to Coralline, continued, “You can’t honestly believe the elixir exists. You have a scientific mind, Cora. The whole concept of the elixir is ridiculous—the magician, the starlight. Doesn’t it sound absurd even as I say it? I mean, The Legend of the Elixir is a children’s story—that’s because adults shouldn’t believe in such things. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that the elixir does exist. Even if so, no one has found it in our lifetime. What are the chances that you will find it, in the short time frame that you have? And if The Legend of the Elixir is true, that means the elixir comes accompanied by a curse—which is hardly something to be excited about. Finally, those who do try to find the elixir often die over the course of their quest. My point is: Don’t chase a legend. It’ll be equivalent to chasing your own tail—except imagine that your tail is equipped with a stinger, like a stingray’s. Please, I beg you, don’t venture out into the unknown and risk your life, all for nothing.”

  “It’s not for nothing,” Coralline said, her voice as pleading as his expression. “It’s for Naiadum. I can’t just let him die. My only question is: Will you accompany me on the Elixir Expedition or not?”

  Ecklon clasped her hands and held them to his heart. “I would like to accompany you on your quest, if only to keep you safe. But my mother has fallen sick in the aftermath of the black poison spill. I cannot abandon her.”

  “How can you side with your mother over me!”

  Coralline’s face flushed at her words. She was acting like a haranguing wife before she was even a wife. She had not told Ecklon what his mother, Epaulette, had said to her and Abalone during the engagement party. She found herself bristling at Epaulette’s words even at this moment, but this was not a time for pettiness, she told herself. Either way, Ecklon didn’t deserve to be punished for that unpleasant exchange.

  “I’m sorry,” Coralline said. “I should thank you, not blame you. It was you who waded first into the black poison; it was you who located Naiadum. Of course, I understand completely that you want to stay here and care for your mother.”

  Ecklon nodded and pulled her close. She fingered the rose petal tellin shell at her collarbone, the symbol of her engagement to him. It would serve as a memento of him during her quest, but it wouldn’t be enough. “Give me a portrait of you so I can look at it every time I miss you during the Elixir Expedition.”

  He rummaged through a dresser drawer and returned with a miniature portrait. His face was somber in the little black-and-white sketch, his hard jaw softened by a vertical cleft in the chin. He formed just the image of a dashing detective, Coralline thought, as she tucked the portrait carefully in her satchel.

  “I promise I’ll return as soon as I can,” she said, clasping hands with him again. “Can you do me a favor while I’m gone?”

  “Anything.”

  “Try to stay clear of Rosette. With me gone, she’ll be stalking you day and night, thinking this is her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get you to pick her over me.”

  He threw his head back and laughed.

  “I’m only partially joking,” Coralline said, smiling.

  “I must say, on the verge of marriage,” interjected Altair, “the two of you separating—I don’t like it.”

  “I can’t wait to marry you, Ecklon,” Coralline said, trying to pretend they were alone.

  “I love you, Cora.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He bent his head and kissed her, but she found the taste of his mouth disconcerting—it was the taste of finality.

  Izar’s head throbbed, and his eyes opened groggily. Fog circled him in spectral gray wisps, and he shuddered in its grasp. The rail behind his shoulders was cold; he was half-sitting, half-leaning against it, every pore of his body soaking wet.

  He tried to place his hands to either side of him and jump to his feet, but he couldn’t summon his hands. They were tied behind his back, he realized drowsily. But how was he even alive? When Alshain had pointed the gun at him, Izar had thought the giant would shoot him, but, instead, Alshain had knocked the butt of the gun against Izar’s temple. Where was the giant now?

  A beard erupted through the fog, high above him, then dropped down to his eye level.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Izar sputtered.

  “Yer tin is in this satchel.” Alshain held out a bag weaved of a stiff, murky-green fabric—an ocean variation of a duffel bag, it seemed. “The Ocean Dominion identification card I found in your pants pocket is also in here.”

  Alshain dropped the satchel diagonally over Izar’s chest, such that the top of the strap rested on his right shoulder and the bag itself lay on his left hip. The giant tightened the strap over Izar’s torso. Only then did Izar look down to find that he was naked.

  “I took yer clothes off because they’d get in the way,” Alshain explained.

  “In the way of what? Drowning? You don’t want to waste a bullet on me, so you’re throwing me overboard to the sharks. Is that it?”

  “The privates of merpeople are sheathed in their scales, ya know,” Alshain continued calmly, as though Izar hadn’t spoken.

  “Why would I care to know that? Have you lost your mind?”

  The hairy hands reached forward. Izar retreated into the rail behind him, despising the powerlessness of his position. But Alshain gripped Izar’s biceps and pulled him up to his feet as easily as though Izar were a sack of cotton. Then, with a single push, he shoved him out over the rails.

  The moment of contact with water made Izar gasp and convulse from head to toe. Waves lashed him like cold whips, freezing the blood in his veins. He tasted salt on his lips, in his mouth, in his nostrils—harsh and tangy. It pricked his eyes like dozens of pins. He was facedown in the water, he realized belatedly. He knew how to swim, and his arms fought to loosen his hands from their binds, but couldn’t. Using the power of his shoulders, he managed to turn over onto his back.

  He coughed out the salt water he’d swallowed, then inhaled cautiously. But just as his lungs began to inflate, a wave smashed over him. Waves crashed over him one after another in quick succession, pounding him mercilessly, like hammers over a nail.

  His eardrums felt on the verge of explosion, like fizz attempting to escape from a bottle. The air in the cavities was being compressed by the pressure of water, he acknowledged to himself—a fact that meant he was sinking. His face scrunched, and he pressed his lips together to keep water out of his lungs, but his mouth opened of its own volition.

  He choked. He thrashed. Then he was attacked.

  Teeth as sharp as butcher’s knives slit open the sides of his neck, carving one painful gash after another on each side. He wished the creature would just swallow him whole, but instead, it broke the bones in his legs, starting with his toes and ankles, which gave way as easily as toothpicks, then his shins and thighs, which held up no better than rickety chairs.

  Slowly, agonizingly, he died.

  ZONE II

  Twilight

  12

  Dead or Alive

  Sunshine refracted into th
e water slowly but steadily, in thick segments and spurts. Octopuses and eels retreated into their lairs, and rays and snails emerged slowly from their crevices.

  Grateful for the daylight, and for having survived her first night out of doors, Coralline stuck the rod of her luciferin lantern in an outer pocket of her satchel.

  Houses no longer sprouted out of the seabed, there were no shops or lanes, just clear, uninterrupted expanses of ocean. Urchin Grove was now behind her. At twenty, she had finally left the village of her birth. She hadn’t known what she’d expected to see, but what she did see was that, if not for the lack of dwellings, the vista before her quite resembled Urchin Grove—the water, the algae, the rocks, the sands—yet it somehow also looked different.

  She’d hoped to feel something inspiring or poetic as she examined novel surroundings, but all she felt was the sleepless tiredness of her muscles. She continued to follow Pavonis’s tail, flapping right and left in front of her, but there was an aimlessness to its swing. During the night, their goal had been to leave Urchin Grove; now that they’d accomplished that basic feat, they did not know where to actually begin the Elixir Expedition.

  Pavonis came to a sudden stop. Coralline bumped into his tailfin. But the collision was different than usual, for his tail was now stiff, and Coralline felt as though she’d bumped her head against a door. She’d seen such stop-and-stiffen reactions in him before—they happened when he smelled blood.

  “Let it go, Pavonis—” she began, rubbing her forehead, but he was already cutting through the waters at breakneck speed. She trailed him with a sigh. He was the detective of blood—where there was blood, he could not rest until he knew its source. Generally, the source was someone with a minor cut across the hand or arm—nothing particularly interesting—and Coralline apologized to the person on Pavonis’s behalf; his sudden arrival, with its great swell of water, tended to alarm. The only serious case Pavonis had ever encountered had been her father’s hand.

  But now, when Pavonis came to a stop, Coralline’s hands flew to her mouth.

  A dead merman hovered vertically before them. His eyes were closed, his gill slits lay flat and unfluttering along the sides of his neck, and his tail was as bleached as though it had never once held a spot of color. Goosebumps prickled all over Coralline’s arms. She’d always been terrified at the idea of encountering death; now, she realized why: There was an eerie stillness and finality to it.

  There was also a mystery to it, in this case: The merman’s body should have descended to the seabed instead of hovering as it did, almost precisely midway between the waves and the ocean floor. The descent to the seabed should have happened naturally, for surplus water should have filtered into the body through the gills, making it heavier. Humans, she had heard, were different than merpeople in this regard. Just as they lived differently than merpeople, they also died differently—on the rare occasions that they died in the ocean, their bodies floated up to the waves. This person had died like he was neither a merman nor a human, or else was both.

  “It’s a bad omen to be near a dead body,” Nacre said quietly, emerging at the top of Coralline’s satchel, “especially one in such an unnatural position.”

  “Let’s go,” Pavonis said, his tail starting to swish.

  “But what if he isn’t dead?” protested Altair. “It’s our moral duty to help him, in that case, especially given that Coralline is a healer.”

  Coralline nodded in Altair’s direction, her gaze unveering from the merman. She should at least examine him perfunctorily—that way, she could tell herself she’d done what she could. She approached him cautiously.

  His face was angular, with a hard jaw and a set line to his mouth; it was similar to Ecklon’s in structure but there was nothing to offset the severity in this case—no traces of dimples, no cleft in his chin. Rather, a hook-shaped scar ran from his earlobe almost to his lip, making his face harsh.

  Also, disconcertingly, he was bare chested. At The Irregular Remedy, Coralline had sometimes examined mermen without their waistcoats—such as Agarum, during his heart attack—but never outdoors had she encountered a merman without a waistcoat. There was a vulgarity, as well as a strange intimacy, to being in such close proximity to him. Coralline proceeded with her examination swiftly. She placed two fingers just below his jaw; there was no pulse, as she’d expected, but his temperature was high—so high that her hand almost flew back to her side. He must have died of a fever, she decided, though she’d never come across such an extreme fever before.

  There was no blood on him that she could see, yet there had to be some, otherwise Pavonis would not have smelled it. “Take a look at his hands,” Pavonis drawled from above.

  There were red marks along his wrists, as though his hands had been tightly bound, but he’d managed to wrest them free just before dying. She turned the palms of his hands gingerly. A gash cut through the palm of his right hand—it did not seem to be bleeding anymore, but it must have been just a short while ago.

  Toothed wrack salve would soothe the wound. And yet to apply a salve to a dead merman, it was ridiculous. It was not against the law, however: The Association of Apothecaries required Coralline to possess a badge in order to treat anyone other than herself—anyone alive. There was no law against treating a dead person, for the obvious reason: Why would anyone want to? Recognizing that what she was doing was idiotic but at least not illegal, Coralline extracted her jar of toothed wrack salve from her satchel and quickly dabbed the balm onto his cut.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Pavonis bellowed. “I’m starting to think your sentimentality borders on insanity.”

  Pavonis’s tail flicked sharply in disapproval. The gush of water pushed Coralline toward the dead merman, until their scales and shoulders touched. She did not know what drew her, but her hand rose to his cheek, and her finger traced the ridge of his scar.

  His eyes snapped open.

  Izar was flooded by water—it was in his ears, nose, eyes, and mouth—yet he somehow remained alive. A girl with turquoise eyes was staring at him, her lips just a kiss away from his, but before he could so much as blink, she slipped away, tail flashing—she was not a girl but a mermaid.

  He looked down at himself. He had a tail similar to hers. Commencing abruptly at the hips, below the navel, the monstrosity that had swallowed his legs divided him into two bodies—his own upper body and an alien lower body. The scales of his tail were white, but the color indigo was streaming steadily into them, as with an invisible paintbrush. He touched his scales with a tentative hand and shuddered—they were slimy, coated with a film of mucus like oily soap. That was how fish scales were, he knew, in order to help fish escape; merpeople belonged to the class of fish, and so, he supposed, it would make sense for their scales to be similarly slimy.

  His tailfin, meanwhile, was long and gauzy and close to transparent at the tips. It made him about seven feet in height, as tall as that blasted giant Alshain Ankaa, who’d thrown him overboard.

  But Izar should have died. How had he transformed into a merman instead?

  Whatever the reason, Alshain must have somehow expected the transformation. When he’d told Izar that clothes would get in the way, he must have meant they would get in the way of his transformation into a merman. And when he’d said the privates of merpeople are sheathed in their scales, it was because he must have thought that would be the most alarming aspect to Izar about his transformation.

  Izar was a pawn in a game—of that, he felt by now certain, but it was a bizarre game with rules he couldn’t understand. He wished he’d died rather than transformed. He would rather be anything than a merman, even a slug or stone, for merpeople had murdered his biological parents.

  He fixed his attention on the mermaid, who was staring at him from about ten feet away.

  He’d known in theory how merpeople looked, but he’d never seen one before. She was a little over six feet tall—the heights of most merpeople ranged from six to seven feet, he knew,
just as that of most humans ranged from five to six feet. Her scales were bronze, and they shimmered like hundreds of pennies arranged close together. Her immense blue-green eyes gave a look of fragility to her face, of youthfulness—hers was a face that would never grow old—yet he found her eyes unsettling, like two beams turned upon him with unflinching brightness.

  Along the sides of her neck fluttered light layers of skin, buoyed by the currents like window blinds in a breeze. Izar raised his hands to his neck and groaned—his neck was lined with exhaust fans just like hers, his gills slippery and supple, like slices of peaches. When he’d felt his neck being slashed, as with a butcher’s knife, gill slits had been forming on either side.

  He glanced down at his chest. It neither rose nor fell; his lungs, if they still remained in his chest, were now defunct. That helped explain the statuesque stillness to the mermaid. He supposed he had it, too. It was due to the absence of lungs, which created that steady rise and fall to which his mind and body were so accustomed.

  Not even his body hair had been spared in his hideous transformation—not the hair on his chest, nor even the stubble on his cheeks. Body hair would slightly increase water resistance, he supposed, and so, from an evolutionary perspective, it would make sense that merpeople would not have any, but he still found his new smoothness emasculating. He passed a hand over his skull and found that the hairs on his head remained but had a different texture than before—they were thicker and heavier. The mermaid’s hair seemed similarly thick and heavy, for the tendrils that had escaped her bun were not blowing about in all directions with the ripples of water but were framing her face.

  His skin had also altered in his transformation. It was no longer sun-tanned but, like the mermaid’s, was so pale as to be practically translucent, and so fine, he could almost make out the capillaries. Merpeople had no direct exposure to the sun, and so, from an evolutionary perspective, he could understand that they would lack melanin, the pigment that darkened skin and provided sun protection—but that did not mean he liked his new paleness.