The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  It was a game they’d played many years ago, when she was a mergirl, called A Hasty Retreat. She’d enter a place such as a library, he’d find a back door, and she’d try to reach it as quickly as possible upon hearing the dual thumps of his tail, the private alarm signal between them. Over time, he’d become faster at locating exits and she’d become more accurate at locating the beat of his tail. But it had always been just a game; she’d never once thought she’d actually have to beat a hasty retreat.

  “Let’s go, Coralline,” Izar said. “We can’t do anything for Tang.”

  Tang’s eyes were closed, and his face was still, but its lines were set in pain—that meant he remained alive. Regardless of the Medical Malpractice Act and what it might mean for her future, she could not just let Tang die, she decided.

  Her fingers fumbled with the zip of her satchel. She extracted the pouch of carapace sitting atop her apothecary arsenal, deposited it on the floor with a jangle, then took out her arsenal and unclasped it. She unrolled thick swaths of pyropia to stanch the flow of blood and put pressure on the wound. She then turned to the dagger: She would have to pull it out. But that would cause more blood to flow. The thought made her fingers jitter and her stomach turn somersaults.

  She heard two consecutive thumps; Pavonis was tapping his tail against the back door he’d found.

  Coralline wrapped her hands around the hilt of the dagger, its encrustations hard and cold beneath her fingers. Closing her eyes, leaning forward, she mustered all her strength to wrench it out—

  “Murderess!” a voice yelled.

  Coralline’s head whirled toward the shout. A square face was staring at her through a window—it belonged to the thickset loiterer she’d noticed as she’d hovered at Tang’s doorstep. She looked down at the dagger in her hands, then she looked at Tang: Each and every scale of his tail was white, and his face was blank—he was dead. Just minutes ago, he’d been alive—thinking, feeling, breathing—telling her and Izar about his wife, about the elixir, and now, as fast as a snap of her fingers, he was dead. It was dizzying, the speed of it.

  “Let’s go, Coralline!” Izar said. “We can’t remain here. . . .”

  The wide movement of his lips told her he was yelling, but she could hardly hear him through her daze. His words were arriving to her as though from across a great distance.

  The living room doorknob turned. The door did not open—thank goodness Tang had locked it. And the windows were too small for the loiterer to fit through—earlier, she’d disliked the tiny windows of Hog’s Bristle; now, she felt grateful for them.

  Izar shook her by the shoulders, stopping only when her teeth rattled. It snapped her out of her stupor. Shrugging his hands off, she returned her apothecary arsenal to her satchel and added the invitation to the Ball of Blue Bottle on top. She then stopped in her tracks and closed her eyes, trying to listen to Pavonis’s dual thumps not just with her ears but with her body. “This way!” she called to Izar. Trailed by him, she fled through a narrow corridor, swept past a few bedrooms, and erupted out a back door.

  “Murderess!” screamed the square-faced loiterer, speeding toward her from within the alley outside Tang’s home.

  Pavonis’s tail cut a mighty diagonal streak above, and Coralline followed it resolutely.

  14

  A Shady Place

  Bristled Bed and Breakfast looked like a wide, crooked, coarse-grained rock, misshapen in places, with haphazard crevices carved throughout to serve as rooms. Even algae seemed to have given the place a wide berth, for its surroundings consisted of bare, brittle sands.

  Two mermen lingered next to the door like weeds, both with orange tails. One of them was obese, his belly pushing against the seams of his waistcoat, and the other was gaunt, with concave cheeks and hollow eye sockets. A dagger glinted in the hand of the fat one.

  “I feel sick to even look at this place,” Altair moaned from Coralline’s satchel.

  “Everything makes you sick, Pole Dancer!” Nacre said from Coralline’s shoulder.

  “To think what your father would say, Coralline, at the prospect of your staying here,” Altair persisted.

  Coralline tried not to think of it.

  “Regardless of its aesthetics,” Pavonis said, “Bristled Bed and Breakfast is our safest option for the night. Located along the southern perimeter of town, this hotel is as far as we can get from Tang’s home, in the north, while remaining in the same settlement. The distance from Tang’s home is important in case any constables are searching for you, Coralline. We face two options at this moment: We can swim through the night to reach the next settlement, far away, or you can stay the night here.”

  Coralline’s scales quivered at the thought of a second night without sleep. Her gills had fluttered profusely all day during their swims between settlements, and there was an airy lightness to her body. It took all her effort to even keep her shoulders straight. And even if she were willing to swim through the night, she knew from her visit to Ecklon last night that Pavonis, despite his strength as a daytime navigator, might well lose his way in the dark.

  “You’ll be staying here just one night,” Pavonis continued, “not the rest of your life. I don’t know why you’re even hesitating.”

  “I’m hesitating because Bristled Bed and Breakfast was the site of a brutal murder just two weeks ago.” She had heard of it from Ecklon. As a detective, he knew of practically all murders committed anywhere in Meristem. Whenever he’d told her about them, they’d sounded distant and foreign, in faraway places, but now here she was—at her second murder scene of the day.

  “Tell you what, Coralline,” Izar said, “I’ll sleep next to you, if you’re afraid.”

  Altair gasped.

  “How dare you, you vulgar human!” Pavonis hissed. His tail slapped the waters, creating turbid ripples, and his snout tossed Izar up. Coralline tried to follow Izar’s trajectory with her eyes but could make out little past the narrow radius of her luciferin lantern’s white-blue glow.

  Long moments later, when Izar managed to return to her side, his hair was disarrayed and his expression bewildered. “I meant I would sleep in the room next to you,” he clarified.

  “Thank you for the thought,” Coralline said, only to be polite.

  “It’s irrelevant where you sleep, human,” Pavonis growled. “My eyes are always open.”

  He meant it literally, Coralline knew: Sharks did not have eyelids. Many types of sharks, including whale sharks, didn’t truly sleep, not the way people did. Sharks experienced rest periods, turning off one side of their brain like whales and dolphins, but they were always partially conscious and aware. Some sharks, including whale sharks, continued to swim while resting, so that water would continue filtering through their gills, providing fresh oxygen. If they stopped swimming for even a short period of time, they could die of hypoxia, or oxygen loss. Coralline had always found it a lucky thing that merpeople didn’t need to move in order to breathe—imagine, nights without sleep! Yes, merpeople had five sets of gills like most sharks, but merpeople gills were finer and floatier than most, such that even the barest of ripples let water, and oxygen, pass through. Pavonis’s lifestyle had its own advantages, though—his incessant swimming meant that tiredness was an alien concept to him.

  “Think of it, Coralline,” Pavonis persisted. “Instead of wasting time in indecision, you could be fast asleep at this moment, cocooned comfortably in a bed.”

  A blanket covering her up to her chin, a bed beneath her back, her tail resting—Coralline could not resist the vision. “You’re right, Pavonis,” she said, tucking the rod of her luciferin lantern in her satchel.

  She deposited Altair in a spot he chose in the shadows of Bristled Bed and Breakfast. He camouflaged himself immediately, as though to hide from the world that he was in the vicinity of such a place. She deposited Nacre on the exterior wall of the hotel, upon Nacre’s order of such. “I’ll entertain myself by eavesdropping through open window shutters,” t
he snail said cheerfully.

  “Keep your shutters open, Coralline,” Pavonis said. “I’ll drop by before you sleep.”

  Coralline nodded. From his tone, she knew there was something he wished to say but could not say in front of the others. Trying to suppress her sense of foreboding, she took a deep breath and forced herself across the threshold of Bristled Bed and Breakfast with Izar. A dagger continued to glint in the hand of the merman just outside the door.

  Fissures marked the walls of the lobby like acne, and the whole place looked like it might collapse into a pile of rubble at any moment, but Izar felt relieved that he and Coralline were finally inside Bristled Bed and Breakfast. No one had asked him for his opinion outside, so he had not bothered to offer it, but it was his opinion that Coralline took too long to make simple decisions and that everything affected her too deeply—Tang Tarpon’s death, the feelings of each of her ridiculous pets, the appearance of this motel-like place. She was like a sponge—absorbing everything around her and letting it steep through her skin.

  The two of them approached the concierge, a pudgy, slack-faced merman with pores on his nose that made Izar think of sprinkles of black pepper. A square stitched onto his breast pocket stated his name as Bream. A placard on his desk announced: “If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the lobby.”

  “Did you send us a scroll to make a reservation?” Bream asked placidly, his arms lifting and landing softly on his desk.

  “No,” Coralline answered.

  Izar could not help but scoff. He thought of the many reservations he’d made at the restaurant Yacht through an act as simple as picking up the telephone. But merpeople were primitive, living without long-distance communications such as phones and cables, without electricity—with nothing but running water. Even their clothes were old-fashioned, the corsets and waistcoats. Izar had traveled a few hundred feet below sea level but felt as though he’d traveled a hundred years back in time.

  “Here’s the key to your room,” Bream said, dangling a single key before their faces. Long and weighty, it made Izar think of a relic from the sixteenth century. “Your room number is—”

  “Separate rooms,” Coralline pronounced.

  “You could have said,” Bream muttered in an injured voice.

  “Rooms next to each other,” Izar said, remembering his promise to Coralline outside, not that it had seemed to matter much to her.

  As Bream poked about a drawer for another key, Izar felt a slight current at his back. He was now attuned to currents, he realized—a current was like a breeze, except that a short-lived current was usually created by movement rather than the elements.

  He turned around. Two mermen came to hover behind him and Coralline, the same two who’d been lingering outside the door. Their orange tails made Izar think of a cantaloupe and a carrot. Despite the discrepancy in their shapes, he could tell at a glance they were brothers: An identical circle of baldness brewed at the center of their skulls, and their complexions looked like pallid lumps of powder.

  Though Izar stared at them now, they did not seem to notice him. Their eyes were traveling up and down Coralline’s iridescent-green bodice and bronze scales, as she leaned over the counter. “Let’s get a room next to hers,” the fat brother said to the thin one.

  “Your room numbers are forty-one and forty-two,” Bream said, dangling one key before Izar and the other before Coralline.

  Izar grabbed his key, then asked, “Is there anything to eat around here?”

  Bream opened a drawer conspirationally. “I can offer you a snack of devil’s tongue from my personal stash,” he said in a low voice.

  Izar did not know what to make of the offer.

  “Devil’s tongue is my favorite snack!” Coralline said, her eyes sparkling.

  Bream handed them each a set of thin red strips, knotted also with a red strip. It looked like a packet of tongues—it was a sort of red algae, Izar supposed. Coralline snatched her packet from Bream’s hand, extracted a tongue, and began to munch on it enthusiastically. Izar tried a tongue more gingerly. The bite was rubbery, with the taste and texture of jerky—he liked it and took another bite.

  “Three carapace each, please,” Bream requested.

  Recalling Coralline’s counting of his carapace earlier, Izar placed two shells on the counter, one of them small and round—she’d called it a moon snail shell—and the other ridged and pointed, shaped like a miniature ice-cream cone—she’d called it a wentletrap. Coralline dipped her hand into an outer pocket of her satchel, extracted the same two shells as him, and placed them on the counter. After lunch, Izar had noticed that she’d given her cerith, worth twenty carapace, to the yellow-tailed waitress Morena, and had requested smaller denominations. Morena had given her a fistful of moon snails and wentletraps. Coralline had placed most of them in her golden carapace pouch and had inserted a couple into an outer pocket of her satchel for easy access.

  Following Bream’s directions, Izar and Coralline entered a shadowed, bumpy corridor to the side of the lobby. Room numbers started at one and continued onward, with ten rooms to a corridor. After they’d turned their fourth corner, Coralline slipped her key into the keyhole of a door marked forty-two, said good night to Izar, and closed the door abruptly. Izar fumbled with his key at length—he was used to flashing a card for entry, not wielding a museum-variety object.

  There was a current at his back again. He turned around. It was the same two mermen from the lobby, the carrot and the cantaloupe. They inserted their key into the keyhole for room forty-three, next to Coralline’s, and looked at her door with longing. The fat merman licked his lips.

  Izar squared his shoulders and clenched his fists. He considered confronting them, but then thought: What would he confront them about, precisely? And why should he confront them about anything? Coralline meant nothing to him. She was simply a pathway to the elixir, to his becoming a human again.

  The brothers entered their room and shut their door. Izar managed to pry his own door open, and swam in.

  It was a small, cave-like space with a slanting floor, equipped with three items of furniture: a topsy-turvy desk with cracked pillars; a narrow bed somewhere between a twin- and a full-size; and a dented dresser, upon which he immediately tossed his satchel. His nose wrinkled—the room had a musty odor. In water, smell was just as pronounced as on land, but the specific source of the odor was harder to pinpoint—smell was similar to sound underwater, in that sense. But other than its smell, Izar didn’t particularly mind the shabbiness of his room—he’d grown up in a storage closet, after all. He swam to the three little round, submarine-like windows and pulled their shutters over them.

  Breathing a sigh of relief at being alone at last, he unzipped his satchel and pulled out the gray tin he’d found on his desk at Ocean Dominion. He unrolled the scroll inside the tin, turned it over, and ran his thumb over the logo Tang Tarpon had indicated in its top-left corner: P&P, referring to a stationery shop in Velvet Horn. Who knew where within Meristem that settlement might be, but, if time and circumstances permitted, he would like to go there, Izar decided. It might give him context on how the elixir note and half-shell had ended up in his possession, and, more importantly, how he’d transformed into a merman.

  Eager to sleep soon, he turned his attention up to the half-dozen luciferin orbs meandering over the ceiling. Pulses of light within the glassy baubles cast a white-blue glow over the room. Luciferin orbs were always there, in all indoor spaces, journeying slowly over the ceiling, Coralline had told him at the restaurant Taeiniata. The orbs sought the ceiling automatically because, bubbling with nothing but bacteria, they were practically weightless and thus had a tendency to travel up. The orbs were not noticeable during the daytime because their bacteria glowed only in the dark.

  The principle of the orbs was not different than that of his Castor’s dragon arm—both depended on oxygen. In the case of the orbs, the spark of light was obtained from a trick of biology: the reaction of oxygen and
luciferin, a naturally occurring compound. In Castor’s case, the spark of fire was achieved through a trick of chemistry: the meeting of oxygen and combustion chemicals.

  But how to dim these luciferin orbs at night? Izar wondered with irritation.

  Flicking his tailfin, he ascended toward the orbs, but he moved so fast that he bumped his head against the ceiling. Movement indoors was different than outdoors, he’d just learned the hard way. Indoors, merpeople seemed to move slowly, vertically, the tailfin flicking gently to prevent collisions. Outdoors, merpeople swam horizontally, the tailfin flapping hard right and left to generate speed.

  Izar grabbed a luciferin orb in his hands. Countless tiny pores smattered its surface to permit the flow of oxygen, just as the skin of Castor’s dragon arm was fitted with a distillation chamber to permit oxygen. Izar ran his hands over the orb; his fingers discovered a tiny switch and rotated it. The pores closed, and the light within the orbs dimmed, then eventually died, as the quantity of oxygen dwindled. Izar rotated the switches of two other orbs. He decided to leave the three other orbs in the room aglow, so that some light would remain. He did not trust the darkness of the water.

  He collapsed on the bed but winced—the mattress was more of a plank than anything else, just a couple of inches thick. The blanket, meanwhile, was heavy—so that it wouldn’t float away, he supposed.

  In an effort to become more comfortable, he tried to unclasp the baby’s-ear shells buttoning his waistcoat. The tight fit of a waistcoat made sense while swimming—so the fabric wouldn’t fly up due to water resistance—but it was constraining when lying down. His fingers fumbled with the shells, but they were too tiny and cumbersome to maneuver through buttonholes. Cursing, he conceded to sleeping in his waistcoat.

  Chewing on his strips of devil’s tongue, he then aired his frustrations to himself.

  He hated wasted time; every day was supposed to prove its use in the form of a tangible, precise accomplishment. But the feeling he’d had all day had been of wandering about with an animal circus. He still knew no specifics of the elixir; the conversation with homeless-looking Tang had only made him skeptical. Tang’s murder had also confirmed his suspicions about merpeople—given their bloodlust and eagerness to kill, it was no surprise they had murdered his parents.