by Sonia Faruqi
Linatella piled heaps of felty fingers onto Coralline’s and Izar’s plates. She then stared as they devoured the slender green fronds. Neither of them had had a bite to eat since a rushed breakfast in Rainbow Wrack yesterday, and they ate voraciously. Linatella herself ate ulva, and she offered the sea lettuce to Coralline. Coralline shook her head vehemently at the diet food. She would probably be eating big bowls of ulva soon, though, she thought with a gulp—her mother would give her nothing but ulva in the days before her wedding.
“What brings you two to Blue Bottle?” Linatella asked.
“The Ball of Blue Bottle tonight,” Coralline replied.
Linatella’s stone-sticks clattered against her plate. “It’s an event for the most illustrious and successful people in Meristem, most of them twice to thrice your age. How ever did you two manage to get an invitation?”
“We were just lucky, I suppose.” Coralline didn’t want to mention Tang Tarpon to Linatella, given that she was the principal suspect in his murder.
“Attending the Ball of Blue Bottle would be a dream come true for me,” Linatella said. “I adore fashion, and the Ball is considered the very height of fashion. What are you wearing to it?”
When Coralline had packed her satchel for the elixir quest in her bedroom, she had not planned on attending any parties, let alone the Ball of Blue Bottle. The prettiest corset she’d brought with her had been the sky-blue one that Ecklon had liked, which now lay in tatters at the bottom of her satchel.
“I have nothing to wear,” Coralline said, somewhat worried.
“I don’t know my origin,” Izar said. “I was adopted by a benevolent businessman, Antares, whom I consider my father and whose son, Saiph, I consider my brother. . . . I’ve always been passionate about inventing things. . . . I suppose what drives me is the idea of connecting two things no one has connected before—it’s similar to your medical breakthrough this morning, the thrill you got from connecting two kinds of algae no one has connected before. . . .”
Izar listened to his own words with some incredulity, for though they were true, they sounded foreign—he had never spoken much about himself to anyone, not even Ascella. Now, as he chatted with Coralline, the darkness of his childhood, the desperate loneliness of it, seemed a lifetime away—like glass that had shattered at a distance, unable to draw blood.
The Ball was to take place in the evening, and he and Coralline had had nothing to occupy them after breakfast with Linatella, so they’d set out to explore Blue Bottle. As she swam next to him, Coralline’s hair formed a swaying rope over her shoulders, and her scales shimmered like panes of tiny mirrors, her tailfin fluttering like a silk fan.
Of all the settlements Izar had seen so far in Meristem, Blue Bottle, with its tall buildings, most resembled his hometown of Menkar. Buildings underwater were similar to buildings on land, he saw, except for their frequently bizarre shapes. The building in front of him resembled a prickly cactus, and the one to his left looked like a snake slithering upward.
“I’ve never seen this algae before!” Coralline exclaimed. Hovering horizontally, she fingered something that Izar thought looked like a cross between a wrinkled gnome and a head of broccoli. Though she was not looking at him, he could not help but smile at her state of rapture—she was as passionate about algae as Ascella was about jewelry.
Turning vertical again, Coralline grabbed his hand and peered at his wrist. There was nothing to see there anymore, not even a scar to mark the procedure. “Any pain?” she asked, flopping his wrist back and forth then right and left, such that he appeared to be waving.
Izar shook his head, finding himself speechless. Coralline placed two fingers to the side of his neck beneath his earlobe. “Your heart is beating fast,” she observed in a dispassionate voice. “Perhaps after the procedure yesterday, even the moderate pace of our swim through town today is too fast for you.” And then, just like that, she turned and started swimming again—at a slower pace, for his sake—her tail a carpet of traveling coins.
Her effect on him was heady; he felt like he was an adolescent spending the day with his first crush. Catching his breath, he caught up with her. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, tracing the line of the scar along his jaw. “Do merpeople ever drown boats?”
“No. I’ve never heard of that before.”
So, if merpeople had not drowned his biological parents’ fishing dinghy, how had his parents died? Could someone—a man rather than a merman—have bludgeoned them, as their neighbor Rigel Nihal had insisted on the island of Mira? If so, who could the man have been?
“I’ve told you a little about my life,” Izar said softly. “Will you tell me about yours?”
“Sure,” Coralline began with a smile. “I’m from a little village called Urchin Grove. I have an eight-year-old brother, my mother is a seamstress, and my father is—or was—a coral connoisseur. As I focus on merpeople anatomy, my father used to focus on coral reef anatomy, studying reefs and trying to heal them—because of human activities, reefs have really been suffering. But my father’s hand was blown off in a coral reef dynamite blast seven months ago.”
A coral reef dynamite blast . . . a hand . . . Izar thought it should mean something to him, but he could not imagine what.
Coralline stopped and looked at him, her eyes more serious than he had yet seen them. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you as well,” she said quietly. “Do you know a man named Zaurak Alphard?”
“What?” Izar said, his face blanching.
“I found a pen in the midst of the black poison spill in my village.” Coralline rummaged through her satchel and handed Izar the pen he recognized well, engraved with Zaurak’s name in block letters and the bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion. As Izar clasped the pen, he felt as though he was holding Zaurak’s face in his hands.
His mind churning, Izar thought of telling Coralline that he didn’t know Zaurak. But she was looking directly at him and would know he was lying. “Yes, I know Zaurak,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I consider him an enemy.” It was true, unfortunately. “But why were you there, in the oil spill?”
“Oil? Do you mean black poison?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“I was there to find my brother, Naiadum. Black poison is what made him terminally ill and led me to embark on this Elixir Expedition to find a way to save him. I’ve never wanted to murder anyone before, but I would like nothing more than to strangle this man Zaurak with my own hands.”
Sick to his stomach, Izar regretted all the felty fingers he’d gobbled up for breakfast. Coralline had mentioned the term black poison to him during their first conversation, when he’d asked her why she was looking for the elixir, but he hadn’t understood the term until now. He had assumed from the word poison that her brother must have gotten sick from what he’d eaten. But it was Izar’s oil spill that had sickened him; it was Izar who had obligated Coralline to leave her home and confront all manner of danger in an effort to save him.
The oil spill had been in Zone Ten, which meant that Urchin Grove fell under Zone Ten in Ocean Dominion’s map of the Atlantic Ocean. There were no names of merpeople settlements on the Ocean Dominion map, only neat little squares dividing the Atlantic from North to South Pole. Now that Izar thought about it, the map was the sort that colonialists might once have drawn, with arbitrary lines dividing people into countries. Well, at least Zone Ten was relatively under-exploited, Izar consoled himself. Other than the oil spill, Ocean Dominion had done little in Zone Ten in recent years except for a coral reef dynamite blast about seven months ago—in which they’d caught few fish, but a merman’s hand.
Her father’s hand.
Coralline continued to swim, but Izar stopped, his tailfin appearing to have turned to stone. He had lulled himself into a sense of peace and security with Coralline, but there could be no peace or security between them. There was an enmity between their worlds, there always had been. As a le
ader of Ocean Dominion, Izar was at the forefront of that enmity. He had temporarily crossed over to the other side and seemed to have forgotten the sharp divisions that existed between their two worlds.
He looked at the city all around him, the city that reminded him of his hometown. He imagined the buildings around him as a pile of fragments; he imagined Needle-to-the-Sky, where he and Coralline were staying, as a heap of rubble.
He had never seen Coralline’s home, but given that she lived in a village—and extrapolating from the Purple Claw village they’d visited—he imagined her home as a semicircular mound, like half of a bubble. His army of Castors would trample it and burn it, destroying her books, her desk, her bed. She would have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat. For a while, perhaps weeks or months, she and her family would find other places to stay, but, eventually, all settlements in Meristem would lie in ruins, and there would be nowhere else for them to go.
At that stage, Coralline, like all other merpeople, would die. Izar would have killed her as surely as though he’d stabbed her with a knife. But how could he bring himself to stab her with a knife, given that she’d saved his life not once, not twice, but thrice—cutting him out of a net on two occasions, then extracting his platinum chip.
“What’s the matter, Izar?” Coralline asked. Hovering vertically ahead, she waited for him, tailfin flicking.
He turned and swam away.
Jellyfish floated above Coralline like watchful ghosts, translucent, effervescent. Below her, garden eels bobbed in the sediment, their heads poking out of their burrows while the rest of their bodies remained hidden.
“Oh, look at that hammerhead!” Nacre commented from her perch on Coralline’s shoulder. Her tentacles waggled in the direction of a fifteen-foot-long shark with a wide, flattened head resembling a hammer. “How hideous. Thank goodness I was born a beautiful snail rather than a misshapen beast. Oh wait, is that monstrosity actually a mermaid’s muse? And I thought your Ogre was bad!”
Coralline saw that the hammerhead shark was accompanied by a young mermaid, whom she hadn’t noticed at first because the mermaid was swimming to the shark’s other side. The sight of the two of them made her smile—it was the first time she’d seen a mermaid other than herself mused by a shark. Her smile widened to spot another mermaid, farther ahead, swimming out an apartment window. Coralline’s mother always reprimanded her for swimming in and out windows rather than doors, but in Blue Bottle, there seemed to be no such rules for female social etiquette. Coralline was liking the capital more and more as the day passed.
“That corset is so fashionable!” Nacre commented, her tentacles pointing at a mermaid wearing a bodice shimmering with black-and-white sequins. “I know your mother would just love it. Don’t you think so? . . . Can you believe the Pole Dancer—Altair, I mean—will give birth in just a week and a half to hundreds of little nuisances? In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I think his delivery date is your wedding date. . . .”
Coralline sighed, trying to block out Nacre’s voice. Snails were often private and quiet, spending much of their time inside their carapace, but not Nacre. Coralline had been exploring Blue Bottle alone, perfectly happy, when she’d happened to pass Needle-to-the-Sky. Nacre had called to her from the wall of the building, crawled up her arm, settled on her right shoulder, and ordered: “Show me the capital.” Coralline would much rather have explored the city with Pavonis, but he’d left early in the morning, saying: “There’s so much to see, and such little time—I’m going to make the most of my day.” He’d said he’d be back late at night and would meet her and Izar at the Laminaria apartment after the Ball of Blue Bottle. As for Altair, he was spending the day alone in a square of paddle-grass close to Needle-to-the-Sky, trying to regain his “moral compass.”
“Where is Izar?” Nacre asked.
“We were swimming together, then he left quite suddenly. I can’t imagine why.”
“I can. It’s because he has feelings for you and is conflicted about them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Coralline scoffed, her eyes crossing to look at Nacre.
“I have an eye for such things. I’ve often kept my tentacles trained on him during our swims. I’ve noticed how often he looks at you when he thinks no one’s looking. This is an advantageous position for you.”
“How so?”
“If he thinks you return his feelings, he might give the elixir to you, if or when the two of you find it. Do you return his feelings?”
“I’m engaged to Ecklon, Nacre. What do you think?”
“Be honest, Coralline.”
“I am being honest!”
“I think you might feel more for Izar than you’re letting on—even to yourself.”
“If you say so.” Nacre was light in weight but heavy in every other way, and Coralline would rather have carried three satchels than this one snail.
“Oh, what’s that?” Nacre exclaimed.
Among the buildings, one structure stood out, for it was not tall; it was stout, a house rather than an apartment. Specifically, a house shaped like a snail. The snail’s flesh was fashioned of light-brown shale, and its carapace of blush-pink shale, set in the shape of a series of whorls ending in a spire. A tall cylinder marked the front of the home, culminating in two long windows meant to resemble snail tentacles.
“Does a sage live inside?” Nacre asked Coralline in an awed voice.
“How would I know?”
“Read the placard!”
Following the direction of Nacre’s tentacles, whose tips had joined and were pointing as one, Coralline saw a small placard tucked in the garden surrounding the snail. “For one carapace, let Sage Dahlia Delaisi tell you about yourself!” Coralline read out loud. “How did you know, Nacre?”
“Call it my sixth sense. Now, we must go in!”
“Don’t be silly. How can a sage tell me anything about me, without ever having met me before? The more accurate term for a sage is fortune teller, and fortune tellers are all shams.”
“I’ve accompanied you all over Meristem during your Elixir Expedition,” Nacre said in a hurt voice. “Visiting with this sage is the one thing I ask of you, for your own good. Is it so much to ask?”
“I guess not.” Coralline sighed, thinking that Nacre’s emotional manipulation was similar to Abalone’s. “If you’re so interested in hearing the sage tell me about myself, who am I to stop you?”
Coralline rapped her knuckles on the door.
“Use your head, and use the window to the side of the door!” barked a shrill voice.
Coralline shifted to the window and looked in.
Sitting upon a settee, Sage Dahlia Delaisi was as orange as a clown anemonefish. Everything about her was orange, from her thick lips to her low-cut corset revealing plump, wrinkled cleavage. Each of her fingers was studded with a ring, such that they were splayed by necessity. Coralline wished she’d had the foresight to peek through the window before knocking—Sage Dahlia’s sight would surely have dissuaded her.
A large true tulip snail perched on Sage Dahlia’s shoulder—her right shoulder. His brown-and-white shell was twice the size of Nacre’s but half as pretty. “Well, hello,” he said, waggling his tentacles in Nacre’s direction.
Nacre waggled back enthusiastically. “Not only does Sage Dahlia live in a house shaped like a snail,” she whispered to Coralline, “but she also has a snail for a muse. I’m sensing excellent judgment and gratuitous wisdom here.”
Coralline rolled her eyes at Nacre, then extracted from her satchel a one-carapace moon snail shell (which she’d borrowed from Izar), and added it to the carapace crock on the windowsill. She then swam into the living room.
“Get in there,” the sage ordered, pointing an index finger at a large ampoule with a narrow neck and wide base, filled one-quarter of the way with pearl-white sand. “Swish your tailfin around in the ampoule.”
Coralline did as she was told, feeling rather idiotic.
“That’s
enough!” Sage Dahlia called eventually.
“No more!” screeched Nacre, as though Coralline might not have heard the sage.
Coralline slipped out of the ampoule.
In all her clownfish-like glory, Sage Dahlia approached the ampoule and surveyed the sands at its bottom. There were now some streaks in the sands—a pattern of jagged lines not more sophisticated than Naiadum’s drawings.
“You don’t trust me,” Sage Dahlia pronounced. She was frowning at the sands as though she’d gleaned this particular tidbit there rather than in Coralline’s expression. “Very well. I shall tell you a few things about you, in order to get you to trust me.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re an apothecary.”
Coralline looked down at herself—her satchel, her honeydew corset, Nacre; nothing about her appearance should have indicated her profession.
“You’re no longer an apothecary,” Sage Dahlia continued. “At least not in terms of official employment.”
Coralline swallowed hard. How could the sage have known?
“You’re searching for the elixir for your brother,” Sage Dahlia persisted, her gaze unveering from the sands. “Your brother is young in age . . . eight, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yes,” Coralline sputtered. Nacre gave her an I-told-you-so look.
“Am I right about everything?” Sage Dahlia said, now looking up from the sands to Coralline. Her eyes were squinted and tired, as though deciphering the sands had been draining.
“Yes, but how did you know—”
“Never mind that. Do you trust me now? Do you trust me wholly, with both your heart and mind?”
“I guess so,” Coralline replied quietly.
“Do you want me to tell you something the streaks in the sands are telling me about you, something that you don’t already know?”
“Yes,” Coralline said, curious now despite herself.
“Fine. You are being betrayed by your love.”
