by Sonia Faruqi
White dots flashed before Coralline’s eyes, and she fainted.
ZONE III
Midnight
24
Home
Throughout the Elixir Expedition, Coralline had wondered how it would feel to return home. Which of her parents would open the door, and what would she say to them after having left in the middle of the night?
But now that she stood outside the door, there was no time to feel anything, nor even to knock. She swept in through the tall, arched living room window and darted past the settees toward Naiadum’s bedroom. Hovering silently in the doorway, she peered in.
Had she not known he would be in bed, she would have thought the bed empty—previously pudgy, Naiadum formed a skeleton under the blanket now, his cheeks concave and yellow. Abalone and Trochid sat on chairs to either side of his bed.
Trochid spotted Coralline in the doorway first. He looked in her direction, but she had the sense he was looking not at her but through her—in his grief, he seemed to have lost the power to perceive. Following his gaze, Abalone turned her head to the door. Her lips pressed together at Coralline’s sight.
Swimming in slowly, Coralline perched on the precise place on Naiadum’s bed where she’d sat every night, reading him a story. During story-time, he’d often been breathless with anticipation as she’d cackled and giggled while playing characters. Now, the gills along the sides of his neck lay still—he was barely even breathing. Coralline considered pressing two fingers to his wrist to measure his pulse, she considered opening his eyes to check their whites, but she would be pretending—from one look at him, she knew he would be dead before the end of the night.
“Do you have the elixir?” Abalone demanded.
“No, Mother.”
“Naiadum is dying because of you. You abandoned us in the most difficult week of our lives, and now you’ve returned empty-handed. Don’t you have any shame?”
Abalone snapped out of her chair and hovered before Coralline. Perhaps it was because she was wearing the black of mourning, but Coralline had the sense that it was not her mother, but her mother’s ghost, in front of her. The feeling evaporated when her mother’s hands landed on her shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled—
“Stop it, Abalone!” Trochid said, as he arrived between them and wrenched them apart. “It’s not Coralline’s fault she couldn’t find the elixir. She did everything she could.”
“It’s all right, Father. It is my fault. I found the elixir, but I lost it. I’m sorry.”
With a sob, Coralline darted out of Naiadum’s bedroom, then out the living room window. “Coralline!” her father called after her, but she did not look back.
She swam aimlessly through Urchin Grove, aware only dimly that Pavonis was swimming above her. She did not stop to notice the shops she passed, the houses, the lanes through which she’d swum countless times over the years. She did not stop to talk to anyone, not even people she recognized. They didn’t seem keen to talk to her either—whispering behind cupped hands, they refused to meet her eyes.
Coralline stopped only when she found herself at the door of The Irregular Remedy. It had previously formed her whole world; now, she saw that it looked no different than any other place in Urchin Grove: It was a low mound of gray shale rising from the seabed. Previously, the distance between her home and the clinic had seemed substantial; now, after her endless swimming over the course of the Elixir Expedition, Coralline felt as though The Irregular Remedy was practically next door to her home.
But there was no place for her at The Irregular Remedy anymore, she remembered—it was simply habit that had brought her here. Turning away, she found herself facing a patch of desmarestia that sprouted close to the clinic. She was about to swim over the side of it, in order to avoid the Doom of Desmarestia said to come from crossing over it, but Pavonis said, “You know better now than to follow senseless misconceptions!” Nodding up at him, Coralline started to traverse the olive-brown fronds, but she stopped with a gasp.
Her desmarestia-sea-oak solution had healed Izar’s wrist completely, almost miraculously. What if desmarestia’s use was not limited to healing external wounds? Could desmarestia’s toxins, when reversed, heal all manner of things? Specifically, could desmarestia, in combination with sea oak, cleanse contaminated blood?
It was possible, but it would be risky, more for her than Naiadum. Without the solution, he would certainly die; with it, there was a sliver of a chance he would live. But Coralline would suffer whether he lived or died. If he lived, she would be condemned under the Medical Malpractice Act for having practiced without a badge—in which case she would be barred for life from practice again. If he died, a second murder charge would be added to her name—Naiadum Costaria in addition to Tang Tarpon—and she would be imprisoned for life in the Wrongdoers’ Refinery.
Was she willing to take these risks? Yes, she decided, if there was a possibility to save him.
Coralline rushed through the door of The Irregular Remedy. Rhodomela was not there, to her relief. She must be visiting a patient at home, likely someone sickened by the black poison Izar had spewed all over Urchin Grove.
Coralline’s gaze fell on the white-gray limestone urns on her shelves: Swelling Softener, Rash Relief, Gill Gush, Cough Cure. . . . The urns had meant everything to her when she’d worked here, the medication in each prepared painstakingly by her own hand, but she found they meant nothing to her now—she could just as well be looking at another healer’s work. Why had Rhodomela not disposed of her urns? Coralline wondered, before leaping into action.
Grabbing her snippers, she swam out the window into the remedial garden. She sheared straggly golden-brown strands of sea oak, then moved outward to the patch of desmarestia and snipped several fronds. Stuffing the two algae in separate vials, she rushed back inside The Irregular Remedy and ground sea oak and desmarestia one after the other in her mortar and pestle. She returned the two algae to the vials and lidded the vials. When she looked up, a face was staring at her from the window.
It was not Rhodomela but a mermaid Coralline wished to see even less: Rosette. “Who are you trying to poison?” Rosette demanded, eyeing the vial of desmarestia.
“That’s none of your business.”
“How was your lover?”
Coralline looked at her in stunned silence.
“I told everyone you left Urchin Grove for a lover,” Rosette said slyly.
Now Coralline understood why the people she’d passed on her way to The Irregular Remedy had whispered behind cupped hands and refused to meet her eyes.
“My rumor became reality, didn’t it? I can see it in your eyes!”
Coralline placed the vials of desmarestia and sea oak in her satchel, along with an empty flask, then she pushed past Rosette out the window. Her swim home was a blur—she was aware of nothing, not even Pavonis, above her. Her senses returned only when she was sitting again at Naiadum’s bedside and extracting the two vials and the flask from her satchel. She emptied the vials into the flask. The two algae started to sputter and spew and screech, like people shrieking at the top of their voices. The shriek was disturbing but also reassuring—the reaction was exactly as it had been in Izar’s case. Coralline placed the flask to Naiadum’s lips, but a hand snaked around her wrist.
“What’s this?” Abalone asked.
“A solution that may save Naiadum.” Coralline tried to wring her hand free, but her mother’s grasp tightened.
“If something could save Naiadum, Rhodomela would have told us. What, precisely, is in the flask you’re putting to my son’s lips?”
“Sea oak and desmarestia.”
“Desmarestia? You’re poisoning Naiadum? Is he not dying quick enough for you?”
“I believe sea oak can reverse desmarestia’s toxins, Mother. I tried it once before, and it worked.”
“Nothing can reverse desmarestia’s toxins. If anything could reverse them, someone smarter and more experienced than you would have
figured it out before now. You can give this so-called solution to him only if you also take it yourself.”
“Don’t be absurd, Abalone!” Trochid interjected.
“I insist,” she yelled. “It’s Coralline’s fault he’s in this condition; I want to be sure she isn’t trying to poison him.”
Coralline bit back her tears. It would not do to cry now, even though her mother’s words felt like pinpricks all across her body. It would be dangerous for Coralline to take such a strong dose, given that she wasn’t sick, but she could see no other choice: The reaction was starting to fizz, the flask in her hand no longer rattling. It was losing potency by the second. There was no time to argue with her mother or explain to her the medical risks of what she was proposing. Coralline would have to act now, or it would be too late. “All right. I’ll drink the solution, too.”
Abalone released Coralline’s hand.
Coralline tilted the flask at Naiadum’s lips. Just as soon as half of it was empty, she tilted her own head back and swallowed the rest.
The potion burned a twisting path down her throat. The sun itself seemed to be licking her to flames from the inside. She started to writhe, every muscle in her body shaking, as though attempting to escape the burn. Naiadum thrashed as well, so hard that his bed frame thudded against the wall.
She’d made a huge mistake. They were both going to die. Coralline’s eyes closed, and she folded to the floor.
Izar rummaged through his satchel for his identification card. It must be in some under-compartment, he thought. Giving up on finding it, he knocked on the glass door to Saiph’s office.
Saiph glanced up. The pen fell from his hand, and he blinked at Izar repeatedly, as though he was looking at a spirit returned from the dead. Then Saiph pressed a button under his desk; the door buzzed, and Izar walked in.
The sight of Saiph in the same room as him filled Izar with a sense of such relief and safety that he paused midstride over the cream carpet. Izar had transformed physically on shore, but not until this moment, when he was looking into Saiph’s charred-kale eyes, did he transform psychologically: He became Izar Eridan, co-president of Ocean Dominion.
He wanted to hug Saiph, but it would require taking two extra steps into the office, and he could not conjure the strength. He collapsed in the chair across from Saiph’s mahogany desk.
“Father and I thought you were dead,” Saiph said in an accusatory tone. “What happened?”
“I was thrown overboard and transformed into a merman.”
The transformation to a human had been much more difficult than that to a merman. Izar had swum for a day straight to reach the shores of Menkar, stopping not even for the night, so eager had he been to leave Coralline and her world behind. From the sea, he’d recognized his city by its skyline of skyscrapers, standing straight and parallel like pushpins. He’d dragged himself out of the waves onto a secluded cranny of the coast, separated from the rest of the beach by rocks to either side. There, he’d died a most tormented death, his gills closing, his tail throbbing like it was being sawed down the middle.
When he’d awoken, he’d discovered that he had legs again and that his chest was rising and falling—his lungs were again functioning. The transformation was complete—or so he’d thought. He’d attempted to stand, but he had felt as though he was trying to support himself on cotton balls—his bones had been as soft and malleable as a baby’s. Crawling on his belly to the froth, he’d dipped himself in to remove the residual slime from his legs. He had shivered, the water frigid against his skin; he was warm-blooded again. He had thought to crawl back to the rocks, but his strength was depleted. He’d lain his head down on the sand and slept.
When he’d awoken, the droplets of salt water on his skin had transformed to a sheen of perspiration, as a result of the sizzling heat. He’d risen slowly and, after falling numerous times, had taught himself to walk again. Every step had felt like nails were being hammered into the soles of his feet. The adjustment to being a merman had been much easier than that to being a human, perhaps because in the water one always hovered—the lack of contact with the floor meant there was little impact on newly shaped bones.
His limping had eventually turned to strolling, and he’d ambled about on the beach in search of scraps of clothing, just as a scavenger might seek carcasses. He’d eventually discovered a smudged cotton shirt and khaki shorts. He’d then walked barefoot to the bronze glass arrow that was Ocean Dominion. Along the way, he had found himself looking at Menkar not through the eyes of the man he had been but through the eyes of the merman he had become—and through the eyes of the mermaid with whom he had been.
What he’d always assumed to be a wisp of clouds over the city was actually, he’d seen, a layer of smog. And there was something stifling about all the glass buildings, about their concentration—he’d had the impression he was trodding among shards of glass. The tinted windows rising from the ground to the sky had made him think of coffins stacked one upon another unto infinite. Was this the city he’d loved? What had he loved about it?
“How did you transform?” Saiph asked.
“I’m still figuring that out.” According to Osmundea, he’d transformed because he was a hummer.
“How was life in the ocean?”
“I fell in love with a mermaid, Coralline,” Izar said in a harsh, self-condemning voice, “but she turned out to be engaged to someone else. She’s getting married on the twenty-ninth of July in a place called Kelp Cove, in her village of Urchin Grove—Zone Ten, to us, the site of the oil spill. . . . Oh, Saiph, I’ve been betrayed twice in as many weeks, first by Ascella—whom I discovered cheating on me—then by Coralline.”
“I’m sorry, brother,” Saiph said softly. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”
Izar nodded. Saiph strode across the cream carpet and out the door.
25
Murder
Coralline’s eyes opened groggily. She was not in her own room but Naiadum’s, her tailfin dangling over the end of his bed because of its small size. But where was her little brother?
She turned her head to the door and cringed to see her flask in the doorway. Sea oak and desmarestia: that was what she’d poured down his throat. It must have killed him—that was why he was not here. Her parents were likely burying him at this moment, without waiting for her. She couldn’t blame them.
“Coralline!”
A tawny tail materialized in the doorway. Coralline rubbed her eyes; no, she was not imagining it. She hardly recognized him because of the hollow pits under his eyes and his skinny frame, but it was Naiadum. She bolted upright, and he darted over to her, wrapping his arms around her neck. She felt his arms up and down; they were real—not the pudgy arms she recognized, but still, they were his arms.
She had saved him, she realized dazedly. The elixir had not saved him—she had, with her own mind and skills. Halfway across Meristem, she had traveled to find the elixir, but the solution had been right here in Urchin Grove all along—the solution had been her. She would not have known it, though, had she not left on the elixir quest.
Trochid and Abalone swam into the room and, beaming, joined Coralline and Naiadum in their embrace.
“I knew it!” Trochid said. “You’re the best apothecary in the world.”
A gentle, wistful smile lighting her face, Abalone stroked Coralline’s hair. “I’m so very proud of you,” she said. “I’m sorry I doubted your solution.”
Coralline looked at her mother with surprise, for her mother had never once apologized to her before. Coralline wished she could remain in this moment forever—her mother’s hand on her hair was the most soothing sensation she’d ever experienced—but a knock sounded at the front door.
“I’ll get it.” She sighed, rising reluctantly from Naiadum’s bed. “It’s probably Ecklon.”
Naiadum collapsed on his now-vacated bed, and, in the time it took Coralline to blink, he fell fast asleep. After the week he’d spent comatose, his bones
and muscles would require time to rebuild their strength, Coralline knew. She tousled his hair, then swept into the living room, trailed by her parents. She pulled the door open.
The merman had a long, lanky frame, as though someone had stretched him end to end. His features seemed at war with one another—he looked equally pleased and disappointed to see Coralline, as though a part of him had been hoping no one would answer the door. He was attired in a deep-purple waistcoat with a circular black seal of the Under-Ministry of Crime and Murder stitched upon the breast pocket—he was a constable.
“I’m Pericarp Plicata,” he said nervously, pulling handcuffs out of his satchel. “Coralline Costaria, I pronounce you under arrest. Place your hands behind your back . . . please.”
The Constables Department of Urchin Grove must have been on alert for her, Coralline thought, waiting for her to return home, knowing that she would eventually.
A crowd started to form behind Pericarp, people gathering in thin, whispering strings. Coralline recognized some faces and not others, but she had a difficult time telling them apart—they all wore identical expressions of gleeful nosiness.
“On what charge are you trying to arrest my daughter?” Trochid bellowed. Arms crossed over his chest, he slipped between Coralline and Pericarp, his dark-brown eyes bulging.
“Father, it’s all right,” Coralline said hurriedly. She did not want her parents to know about her murder charge, not like this, with the whole neighborhood watching.
“Coralline Costaria is under arrest for the murder of Tang Tarpon in Hog’s Bristle,” Pericarp replied.
“Murder!” voices repeated. Neighbors beckoned passersby over to watch, such that the crowd behind Pericarp swelled to around the same size as that of her engagement party—a hundred or so people. For the first time, Coralline understood Pavonis’s aversion to Urchin Grove.
