The Oyster Thief

by Sonia Faruqi

  At their second date, at another restaurant, Lacerata, Coralline had worn a sky-blue bodice with cloud-white ribbons, and Ecklon had found himself unable to look away from her. In murder investigations, there was often an aha! moment; in his relationship with her, the aha! moment had arrived that evening. Asking him to tell her about his day, she had rested her chin on her hands and looked at him with her big blue-green eyes. As a detective, his purpose was to uncover truth in a world that lied constantly, seamlessly. There had been no guile in her gaze, he had found. He had seen the ocean itself in her eyes, and he had seen himself, as part of the ocean, as part of her. He had decided then that he wanted to marry her.

  Ecklon touched his lips, hoping to remember his last kiss with Coralline, but the taste on his lips remained Rosette’s.

  16

  Silk

  Pavonis, can we please swim closer to the seabed?” Coralline asked, turning her head to look at him.

  “No,” came the reply.

  Izar looked at Coralline to his left and, past her, at Pavonis, to her left.

  “But the surface is dangerous,” Coralline wheedled.

  “No kidding. Thanks to humans.” Pavonis’s dark orb of an eye, the size of a golf ball, swiveled pointedly to Izar before returning to Coralline. “But we have to remain up here, because constables might be looking for you below. Right now, constables pose a greater danger to us than ships, so we won’t be descending to the seabed until we stop for the night, somewhere far, far away from Hog’s Bristle and on the way to Blue Bottle.”

  Listening to Pavonis’s thumps along the walls of Bristled Bed and Breakfast, Coralline and Izar had followed the convoluted corridor to a broken-hinged back door. But the constables had spotted Coralline just as she and Izar were slipping out the door, and they’d given chase. Thanks to Pavonis’s swerving and maneuvering, they’d managed to lose the constables, but it had not been easy.

  Izar looked at Coralline from the corner of his eye. Her rolled-up braid looked like an ant mound atop her ear, like a little pincushion, and the effect was not unpleasant, but Izar hated to look at it, for he knew the bruise it concealed. Her wrists were still pale blue from how tightly the carrot had clasped them. They must be sore, Izar thought, but Coralline seemed aware of any pain only subconsciously, when she massaged them at intervals.

  He was aware of his shoulder pain much more consciously—he felt as though forks were stabbing the socket. On land, he would not have been aware of his shoulder pain the way he was in the water. When he swam in the water, it was primarily his head and shoulders that combated the force of water resistance for his body, just as, when he’d walked on land, it was primarily his legs that had combated the force of gravity for his body. But water resistance was not easy to combat—water was eight hundred times denser than air. As such, to swim with an injured shoulder was worse than walking with an injured leg.

  “Are you a human or a turtle?” Pavonis growled.

  Izar saw that he’d fallen slightly behind Coralline and Pavonis, and he swung his tail hard to arrive at their eye level, his hand covering his shoulder to soften the impact of water against it. Coralline looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  A small white fish fluttered past Izar. A black dot on the fish’s tail, and black lines along its face, made him think of a magician with a pencil-thin moustache. He thought of yesterday, when he and Coralline had passed all manner of animals during their swims. In an encyclopedic voice, Coralline had told him their names: bluehead wrasse, fairy basslet, green razorfish, gray angelfish, roundel skate, turbot, tarpon. He’d nodded at her occasionally, curtly, until she’d discerned his disinterest, and her voice had trailed off.

  She had spoken more broadly about other things and had used certain expressions while doing so. Izar had managed to interpret the expressions as follows: Alewives circling the stomach was equivalent to the human expression butterflies in the stomach. A snake in an eel’s crevice was the parallel of a square peg in a round hole. Collecting two shells with one hand was equivalent to killing two birds with one stone.

  Coralline’s analogies to animals had been less easy to interpret, and Izar had asked her for explanation. To be a sinistrum whelk meant to be different, she’d said, because sinistrum whelks were in the one percent of snails whose shell coiled exclusively to the left. To be a starfish meant to rebound quickly, because they regrew limbs that were hacked off. To be a rockfish meant to live a long life, for they lived more than a century. To be an octopus meant to be defensive, for they had plenty of defenses, including black ink and camouflage. To be a jellyfish could mean one of multiple things—to be short-lived, flimsy in loyalty, or skinny in form. To be a whale did not mean to be large but to be confused about one’s identity, for whales straddled the boundary between water and air: They lived in water but breathed air.

  Now, Izar wished Coralline would say something, anything, no matter how confusing it might be. But she hadn’t spoken a word to him since he’d left her room.

  “This is the fourth time today I’ve had to yell at you to keep pace, human!” Pavonis bellowed. “I’m not going to say it a fifth time—if you fall behind again, I’m going to start tossing you around. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” Izar muttered, catching up again with Pavonis and Coralline.

  He looked up at the waves crashing just above him. Two otters frolicked among them—sleek, slippery, long-whiskered. Through the waves, Izar could make out the sky. When seen through a screen of water, the sky looked like a series of photographs taken one after another, forming an animated film of disparate pictures; every time a wave landed, the sky broke and reassembled. Just as uncomfortable as Coralline seemed to feel at the waves, Izar felt comfortable. He could almost convince himself that he’d simply tumbled off an Ocean Dominion ship and would climb back aboard any moment, his legs braced apart firmly below him.

  Something fell over him, a lightweight fabric. He fingered the mesh-like material curiously. Smooth and strong, it seemed to be the fishnet he himself had invented when he’d been an assistant engineer—the net that had doubled Ocean Dominion’s catch of schools of small fish. But how could his own net ensnare him? He flung his arms and tail in all directions but found that he could not move forward; he was simply flailing in the confines of the net. The net was utterly inescapable—it had to be his own.

  The net jerked him up through the waves. For the first time since he’d been hurled into the ocean, his head erupted over the surface. He gasped at the glare of the sun, a torturing flashlight that parched his eyes and fragmented his vision. Without the buoyant medium of water, his head felt loose upon his neck, as though it might detach and float away. Blinking profusely, he focused his gaze on the ship about twenty-five feet in front of him.

  It had a bronze-and-black insignia along its side, but it was not an ordinary Ocean Dominion ship—Izar recognized it as part of his Silk fleet. Upon his having become co-director of operations, Izar had designed the Silk fleet—fifteen narrow, light-bottomed, streamlined watercraft, intended to be as sleek in their movement as sharks, creating hardly a ripple. Like the lightweight fishnets he’d invented, the Silk fleet had increased Ocean Dominion’s fish catch. Beyond that outcome-based evidence, however, Izar had had no way of knowing whether they truly were as stealthy as he’d intended. He saw now that they were, for he hadn’t sensed this ship’s presence at all.

  Two men stared at him from the bow of the Silk ship, men with large, shaved heads and over-muscled arms. Izar did not recognize them. That was not surprising—hundreds of men worked in operations at Ocean Dominion, and he could not possibly recognize all of them. They did not seem to recognize him either, though. Perhaps it was because he was in the form of a merman, he thought.

  From behind and between the two men emerged a third, one with blood-red hair and beard, and spears through his earlobes: Serpens Sarin, the thirty-five-year-old manager who, in alliance with Zaurak, had tried twice to kill him—through the fall of the
derrick on the drillship, then through switching out the blowout preventer and almost drowning Dominion Drill I.

  Serpens’s arms held a gun, aimed at Izar.

  Izar knew he should try to escape, but he could not move, even if he hadn’t been trapped in a net. How had Serpens known he was in the ocean, in the form of a merman? he wondered. Serpens must have learned it from Alshain—which meant that Zaurak knew it, too. Zaurak did not seem to be aboard this Silk ship, but he must be directing Serpens from a distance. This would be the fourth attempt on Izar’s life. It would be successful, air-tight—no one in Menkar would know he was dead, not even Antares and Saiph.

  But how had Serpens located him in the Atlantic Ocean? It was the equivalent of locating a needle not in a haystack but in a forest. The chances were so low as to be negligible. There was something vital Izar did not know, there was more here than was meeting his eye—

  Serpens fired his gun. A bullet roared past Izar’s shoulder, missing him by an inch. But Izar still felt injured: Ocean Dominion was so much a part of him that it was as though his own body was attacking him in the form of an autoimmune disease.

  Another bullet fired, traveling past his ear.

  Floundering within the net, Izar pushed his weight down in an attempt to sink, but he found that he could descend no more than two feet—it was he who’d designed the net to enable flotation. But with his head again submerged, even if by only two feet, his first feeling was relief—his eyes were again moist, their vision crisp. In his present form, as much as he disliked it, he belonged underwater.

  A bullet careened through his hair, hot against his scalp.

  Where was Coralline? he wondered, his eyes seeking the scarlet color of her bodice. He’d forgotten all about her and Pavonis when he’d seen the ship. Now, he discovered her and the whale shark far below, at least a hundred feet down. Her eyes were staring straight at him, a dagger glinting in her hand.

  Coralline’s heart beat so turbulently that she felt certain the men aboard the ship could hear it.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Pavonis said, his tailfin billowing.

  But Coralline remained in place. As she watched, a bullet zoomed past Izar’s scar, a finger’s width away from grazing his jaw. Upon missing its mark, the bullet slowed, then glided about as haplessly as plankton. It made Coralline think of birds who swooped down into the ocean to catch fish—their flight was always fast at first, then slowed rapidly with water resistance. The greatest protection any creature of the ocean had was the ocean itself.

  She thought of the day when, as a fourteen-year-old mergirl, she’d discovered a bullet among the pebbles of Urchin Grove. She had not known what it was, a fact that had told her it did not belong to the waters. Clutching it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger, she’d shown it to her father. “I believe this is a bullet,” he’d said. “It ruptures through the flesh when shot out of a gun at high speed. You and I will never understand this, but humans have more ways of killing one another than an octopus has arms.” Coralline had placed the bullet on a corner of her bookshelf, to remind herself of the lesson she’d learned that day: When it came to humans, even things that looked innocuous were dangerous.

  “The Ogre is right!” Nacre cried from within Coralline’s satchel. “We have to leave right away.”

  “The ship might try to find us and kill us next,” Altair said tremulously.

  A bullet whizzed over Izar’s head.

  Coralline rotated the dagger in her hand.

  “We’d planned to leave without Izar in the morning,” Pavonis rumbled, “but, somehow, he’s still with us. This ship attack is the perfect opportunity for us to get rid of him. Let’s leave him here to die, at the hands of his own bloodthirsty people. What could be better? What are you even thinking, Coralline?”

  She was thinking that Izar had fought for her at Bristled Bed and Breakfast. She was thinking that if not for him, she would likely be dead—the two brothers had said they would kill her.

  A bullet swept in front of Izar’s nose.

  Soon, within minutes, the men on the ship would manage to kill him. Then it would be his blood she would be smelling in her nostrils, like she had smelled Tang’s yesterday.

  Raising her arms over her head, Coralline started cutting a path straight up like a swordfish, until she reached Izar and the fishnet. A bullet flew past her chin, so close that she momentarily froze. Then, swinging her tail, using all the strength of her arm, she started gashing through the bottom of the net with her dagger. As Izar dodged to avoid bullets, the net lurched and shifted continuously between her fingers, but she kept slicing, snipping filaments with the same meticulousness with which her seamstress mother joined them.

  Honeymooners Hotel swelled three stories above the seabed like the Elnath Mansion, and it had similar golden-rimmed windows, but its shale was not the stark, imposing black of Ecklon’s home—rather, it was a rare, pale pink, like a new blush.

  The hotel was encompassed by a brightly colored garden of siphoned feather, red comb, and berry wart cress. It was just the sort of fairy-tale-like place Coralline had admired in mergirl story books like Haptera’s Happily Ever After and The Adventures of Agarose. The mergirl in her longed to swim through its doors, but the mermaid in her was stayed by the fact that she was not here on her honeymoon; she was here with Izar.

  The town of Rainbow Wrack was a honeymoon destination, though. Almost all accommodations had sappy names, including the two, Romantic Retreat and Couples Corner, that flanked Honeymooners Hotel. Neither of them had availability. “It’s wedding season,” Coralline and Izar had been told in explanation.

  Coralline followed Izar through the arched doors of Honeymooners Hotel. The lobby had a high, rounded ceiling with continuous arches that merged with twirling pillars like a broad set of shoulders. The architecture was strong and masculine, but frills scattered throughout the lobby—mirrors and heart-shaped tables—made the place also feminine. Even the concierge, whose breast pocket stated his name as Plaice, seemed suited to the hotel, for he had a large hulking form, but his scales were as lushly pink as a horse conch shell.

  “We have a room available,” Plaice said in response to their unasked question.

  “Separate rooms,” Coralline said, though she did not know how she would pay for her room without any carapace.

  Plaice looked at her with surprise. Coralline supposed it didn’t happen often that a mermaid and merman requested separate rooms at Honeymooners Hotel, given that most people would be here on their honeymoon. “I’m afraid we have just one room available,” he said apologetically.

  Coralline turned on her tail to leave, but Izar’s hand landed gently on her elbow. “Can we speak, please?” he said, gesturing to a little alcove off to the side. Coralline nodded and trailed him into the nook. “I can sleep on the sofa,” he said.

  “The what?”

  “The thing on which one sits in the living room, like in Tang Tarpon’s home.”

  “Oh, the settee?”

  “Yes, that. I’ll sleep on the settee.”

  It was strange, the idea of sleeping on a settee, but if they shared a room, he might pay for it, and that would solve the problem of her carapace crunch. “Fine, thank you,” she said.

  They returned to Plaice. Coralline inhaled sharply when he requested twenty-five carapace for the room. The sum was half as much as she’d earned for a full week of work at The Irregular Remedy. But Izar handed Plaice a cerith and slipper limpet shell rather casually, as though he’d never once experienced a shortage of currency.

  She and Izar then trailed Plaice down a spacious corridor with limestone adornments along the walls. He opened the door to their room, bowed, and departed.

  The room was divided into seating and sleeping areas. The seating area was furnished with a coral-pink settee, a large mauve rug embroidered with bright-pink halymenia algae, and a white-slate dresser with a framed oval mirror. The sleeping area, located deeper in the room, contained an imm
ense bed covered with an orange-pink blanket. The room was luxurious by any standards, but especially after Bristled Bed and Breakfast, Coralline found it as opulent as a palace. She swam in enthusiastically.

  She placed her satchel on the dresser. In the mirror, she saw Izar fling his satchel onto the settee, then plop down next to it; from his wince, he appeared to have expected the settee to be cushiony. Their eyes met in the mirror. Only then did it properly sink in to Coralline that she was sharing a room with him, when she’d never even shared a room with Ecklon before. When she’d agreed outside to sharing a room, she had been thinking practically—her lack of carapace—she had not been thinking of propriety. She looked away from Izar now.

  Turning back to her satchel, Coralline extracted her jar of horned wrack salve and dabbed the balm onto the bruise next to her earlobe. She then unwrapped the braid she’d curled around her ear, loosened the strands with her fingers, and, jeweled comb in hand, fell gladly into her nightly routine: She ran the comb through her locks from one end to the other, pulling meticulously at her knots. For her, the nightly sweep of her hair was not just therapeutic but symbolic—if, with systematic effort, she could untangle all the knots in her hair, she could do the same with all the knots in her life. And this day, the knots had been many.

  At last putting her comb away, she dug her ivory chemise out of her satchel. She’d never slept in a bodice before—they tended to be stiff and fitted—and she longed to change out of her bodice into her chemise—as smooth and soft as anything in the world—but it would be inappropriate for her to sleep in a chemise tonight, with Izar there. Sighing, she tossed the chemise back in her satchel.

  In the mirror, she saw Izar rubbing his shoulder. She’d noticed him fiddling with it earlier as well, during their swim.

  “Take off your waistcoat.”

  “Excuse me?” He raised an eyebrow at her.