by Sonia Faruqi
“Open the door!” a voice called. A slap sounded against the door, as though a tail was thumping against it.
Naiadum opened the door, and Trochid swam into the room. With a worried look at Coralline, Naiadum slipped outside, closing the door behind him.
Trochid was juggling four luciferin orbs in his arms, leading Coralline to think of a circus performer. Yesterday, he’d brought her three orbs; the day before, it had been two; and the day before that, it had been one. Like an apothecary increasing his daily dosage of medication for a patient, he might bring her five tomorrow, Coralline thought, though she could not imagine how he would carry five orbs in two arms, especially when one arm was missing a hand.
He released the white-blue spheres of light, and they floated up to the ceiling, bouncing against the others, turning her room even brighter. Coralline wanted to tell him she was practically squinting already, but it would hurt his feelings, for he was only trying to help, she knew, believing that the luciferin orbs would lift her spirits. Ordinarily, they would have, for they’d always made her think of traveling galaxies, but now she avoided looking at them because they reminded her of Mintaka’s cavern and her companion in the cavern—Izar. She hoped her father would glean of his own accord that the constellations in the orbs would not help her stars align.
Trochid assumed a seat on the chair Naiadum had vacated at her bedside. Coralline could not remember whether it was her mother, father, or brother who’d placed her desk chair there, just next to her bed. During her first two days in bed, whoever had used the chair had slid it back under her desk before leaving her room, but in the last two days, they seemed to have reached an unspoken consensus to leave the chair there. She wished they hadn’t, for the chair by the bedside made her room a sick room. She’d thought of returning the chair to its place, but she’d been unable to find the energy.
“My darling daughter, will you join me in the living room and read with me there, as we have on so many evenings?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
He frowned; she’d said the same over the last days. “You’re on house arrest, dear,” he said gently, “not room arrest.”
Coralline wished she were on room arrest rather than house arrest, so her family would not expect her to leave her room. It would have been better still, in fact, if Ecklon had not fought for her house arrest, and she were awaiting trial at the Wrongdoers’ Refinery. That way, at least her family would not have to suffer by watching her suffer. Her father’s eyes were ringed with thick black circles at the moment; since his retirement, he’d often found it difficult to sleep, she knew, but his insomnia was exacerbated now because of her.
“I’m sorry, Father,” Coralline said. “I’m just exhausted after the Elixir Expedition.”
“I’m sure you also miss Ecklon, dear.”
Ecklon had departed for Hog’s Bristle immediately after Pericarp had left the Costaria home. There, he was working furiously to learn the identity of Tang Tarpon’s murderer. Once Ecklon had an identity and a motive, Coralline’s name would be cleared of the murder charge. But detective cases often took months to solve; Ecklon had very little time left—only two days remained to their wedding.
Trochid glanced once more at Coralline’s crumpled condition, then rose and left abruptly, closing the door behind him. Coralline heard her father and mother speaking in hushed voices in the living room, and she knew they were talking about her, but she breathed a sigh of relief—finally, she was alone. Solitude was its own form of companionship, the only kind she wanted.
Her stomach growled. Coralline glanced perfunctorily at the covered bowl on her bedside table. She did not need to remove its lid to know that it contained the bland sea lettuce ulva. Every day, for breakfast, lunch, and supper, her mother gave her no more than ulva, so that she would become so slim by her wedding day that she would be “almost as transparent as a lobed comb jellyfish.” Even if her mother had given her not ulva but the fragrant fronds of undaria, Coralline would have rejected them—although remnants of hunger persisted, her appetite had vanished since her return. Her sustenance now was not food but her secret, Izar—every thought of him seemed a morsel just for her. She slipped her hand under her pillow and extracted the card with his picture. She tried to imagine his life—what he was doing at this very moment—but she couldn’t. It was like trying to imagine life on another planet; land was a foreign expanse to her.
She relived her moments with him. She’d done it so often in the last days that she’d begun to envision them with alternate endings. When she thought of the time she’d first seen him, hovering unconscious midway between the surface and the seabed, as though he were both human and merman—and she’d traced her finger over his scar, the line of the scar was gently curved in her memory, not sharp. When she thought of their night at Honeymooners Hotel in Rainbow Wrack, she imagined him sleeping not on the floor but next to her in bed. When she thought of their swims between settlements, she pictured herself and him swimming not at a distance of arm’s length but hand in hand.
Every word he’d spoken to her, every glance he’d fixed on her, seemed imbued with a brilliant light, as though the sun were shining directly upon it. She often felt as though he were continuing to watch her even now, an omniscient god in the ceiling, his gaze caressing her shoulders like a blanket. But his gaze was most likely caressing someone else at this very moment. One day, standing on his stodgy legs, he would marry a human, like himself, and he would recall Coralline occasionally, if at all. The thought made Coralline want to die.
She thought of the curse Mintaka had pronounced to her: You will die soon after the light dies. In the cavern, Coralline had been dismayed by the curse, but now, she wanted to die.
She found it strange that she’d spent her life terrified of death. Death was, in its simplest form, non-existence, and the fact was that she no longer wanted to exist. As an apothecary, she’d considered early deaths tragic; now, she considered it a worse fate to linger on late. There was a time for everyone, and that time had, for her, come the moment she’d discovered Izar’s Ocean Dominion card and realized he’d betrayed her. Since then, she was just lingering, unsettled as a ghost, like a planet confused about her orbit.
Suddenly, the luciferin orbs extinguished, their white-blue glow vanishing.
Coralline blinked—perhaps her mind was so muddled that she’d shut her eyes and confused internal darkness for external. But she blinked again, and again, and again—the darkness remained, just as dense as that of the deep sea. You will die soon after the light dies, Mintaka had said. The light had just died, which meant Coralline would soon die. Thank you, Mintaka, thank you! she whispered. She laughed for the first time since she’d returned home, and listened curiously to the ring of her laughter. She cherished the feel of water as it fluttered gently in and out of her gills, and she pressed her hand to her heart—her heart that would soon be still. Mintaka’s curse was a blessing.
In a flash, the luciferin orbs sparked back to life, glowing as brightly as before. Coralline needed to talk to Pavonis; she needed to tell him she would die. Pavonis had tried to beckon her to her window often, even claiming his snout needed scratching, but she’d said she was too tired to move. He’d attempted all manners of humor to draw a laugh out of her: “The yellow spots on my back aren’t contagious.” “I know you’re better than the lump you’re pretending to be.” “Getting enough sleep over there?” Coralline hadn’t laughed at his words, but she’d smiled every time, if only to be polite.
Returning Izar’s card carefully under her pillow, Coralline turned her head to the window, a black oval broken intermittently by sparks of bioluminescence. Sitting up, she started extricating herself from the folds of the blanket. The process was like that of a snake moulting, for the fabric seemed to have become a second skin—she felt as much a part of the bed as the mattress. Dragging her tail over the side of the bed, she climbed out, almost crippled by the effort.
She looked down at herself. Her
flesh was as soft and limp as the pillows upon which she lay all day. Her skin was tender all over, like a young, unmoving snail’s. Her chemise was held up only by its straps, and she could discern the outline of each rib under the ivory fabric—she was fast disappearing inside herself. If someone were to press a hand into her, it would go straight through, as through empty space. Shifting to the window, she sagged against the windowsill, no longer having the strength to hover.
“Took you long enough,” drawled a voice.
“Oh, Pavonis!” Coralline said, extending a hand into the darkness. His snout arrived neatly under her fingers.
“I missed you,” he said.
He truly must have, for he would otherwise have derided such words as sentimental. “I missed you, too,” Coralline said.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Me, too. You start.”
“Now that we’ve returned to Urchin Grove from the Elixir Expedition, I see that all the while I was trying to escape this horrible village, I was actually trying to escape my horrible self.”
“You’re not horrible, Pavonis!”
“But I am. And you’ll think so, too, once you know the truth about Mako: He was killed by humans, yes, but he was also killed by me.”
Coralline gasped.
“Soon after Mako and I left Urchin Grove for our North-to-South Expedition, an Ocean Dominion ship came upon us. The men ensnared Mako in a net. Instead of staying to try to free him, to try to distract the ship, I swam away as fast as I could, not looking back once at my best friend, who was crying out for me. My only friend in the world apart from you, and I left him to die a torturous death.”
Coralline wished it were not dark, she wished she could look him in the eye, so that he could see she meant the words she said: “It’s not your fault you were afraid, Pavonis. It’s natural to be afraid. Forgive yourself.”
He sighed; she did not hear it as much as feel it in the lilt of water. “Even if I forgive myself for Mako,” he said, “I’ll never forgive myself for you. I rescued you from a human fishnet when you were a baby, but I failed to rescue you from the human in our own midst during our elixir quest.”
“I made my own mistakes, as far as the human in question is concerned.”
“I know you love him, Coralline, but control your heart; don’t let it control you.”
“Oh, I wish I could!” Coralline’s head dropped in her hands, and tears streamed down her cheeks in sticky trails. “But I can’t help it!”
“In time, you’ll forget all about him. Now, what did you want to tell me?”
“I wanted to tell you that there’s no time. I’m about to die.”
“There’s no need to be dramatic!” Pavonis snapped.
“But I am about to die, I know it. In the cavern, Mintaka said that I would die soon after the light died. Just before you arrived, the light died, which means I’m going to die soon.”
“You’re usually quite humorless. Is this a convoluted attempt at a joke? If so, I must say it’s pathetic.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Because I’m happy I’m dying.”
She regretted the words as soon as she’d said them, for it sounded as though she did not care for him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
Whenever her mother had advised her to find herself another muse, Coralline had said she would consider it after Pavonis died, and she’d laughed inside, for whale sharks lived longer than merpeople. “I hope you find yourself another best friend after I die,” she said tearfully, “someone who enjoys travel and adventure as much as you.”
“How can you leave me alone in this world?” Pavonis cried. “You are my entire world.”
His tail slammed against the wall, then the waters rippled, and he vanished.
The door opened. It was the taller of Serpens’s two lackeys, Izar saw. Whistling a low tune to himself, the man bent down to place a tray on the floor. He then collected the old, empty tray and closed the door behind him, causing bundles of dust to liberate themselves from the doorjamb and sprinkle about the room.
The place was vast but dark, lit by no more than one naked, low-hanging yellow lightbulb of the kind Izar imagined in torture chambers, casting a jaundiced glow over a prisoner’s head. It made a constant whirring racket, a steady drone that seemed to penetrate Izar’s eardrums and grate against his brain. Another sound cracked through the whine of the bulb—a gurgle. Izar looked up at the ceiling, for he knew the gurgle spewed out of the pipes in the ceiling of his Invention Chamber, directly above this room. Imprisonment was a strange thing. His Invention Chamber on B2 held the precise proportions as this room and had the same untiled floor and unfinished walls, but Izar considered that room a haven and this room on B3 a dungeon.
Izar strode over to the tray the lackey had placed next to the door: two heaping bowls of soggy cereal—breakfast. Returning to the vicinity of the lightbulb, Izar squatted and carved a notch in the floor. The breakfast told him it was the start of a new day in his imprisonment, and the five earlier notches told him it was the sixth day. There were no windows on B3, three levels underground, and so it was not through sunrises but mealtimes that Izar gauged the passage of time.
There was just one day left to Coralline’s wedding, and to his escape attempt.
The celebration will be a funeral, Mintaka had told him. It was possible that she’d been referring to Coralline’s wedding. But she had not specified whose funeral it would be. Perhaps it would be Izar’s own—he would prefer that to Coralline’s.
He heard a rasp from the other side of the room. He collected the breakfast tray and marched in the direction of the sound. Zaurak Alphard sat hunched on the floor, leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out before him. Izar barely recognized his fifty-seven-year-old mentor, the director of operations, not only because his face was now bearded, but because his nose was broken, the nostrils encrusted with blood. The shin of his right leg was broken as well, a thick, angry red welt stretching diagonally across it. The leg had already been lame, but now, it was also injured and infected. A cloud of yellow pus circled it like growth in a petri dish, and flies buzzed around it, feeding, breeding. When the flies had first appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, Zaurak had twitched his leg at intervals to shoo them away, but he was too weak to do so anymore.
Izar plopped down cross-legged next to Zaurak’s leg and swatted the flies away. If Coralline were here, he thought, she would know what to do. She could not bear to watch anyone suffer.
He passed a bowl of cereal to Zaurak and ate his own cereal absentmindedly.
“I’m not hungry,” Zaurak said.
“We’ll need the energy for our escape tomorrow.”
Zaurak proceeded to take a few half-hearted mouthfuls of his cereal.
When Izar was done, he put his bowl down and said, “Let’s practice walking. You’ll need to be able to run tomorrow.”
“Not now,” Zaurak said, resting his head against the wall.
When they’d practiced walking yesterday, Izar had supported Zaurak with an arm around his shoulders, and Zaurak had hobbled about for a few minutes, then, crying out in pain, had collapsed.
Four days ago, when Serpens had shoved him through the door of this room, Izar had fallen flat on his chest. Closing his eyes, he’d rested his forehead on the floor—its coolness had reminded him of the ocean. A scuttle had sounded across the room. The place must be infested with rats, Izar had thought, but the scuttle had approached him steadily, an unevenness to its scurry. It had not been something, but someone, who was hobbling over to him, Izar had realized. He had risen to his knees and squinted at the man emerging from the shadows, his face like a rock with scraggly moss sprouted over it: Zaurak.
Over the last four days, Izar and Zaurak had shared with each other everything that they knew. After the derrick had fallen on Dominion Drill I, failing to crush Izar, Zaurak had spent the night doubl
e-checking parts of the drillship. He had marked off everything in his checklist and had placed it on Izar’s desk. He had been about to leave for home when he’d noticed a flashlight on the drillship. He’d clambered back upon Dominion Drill I to investigate and had discovered Serpens there, switching out a blowout preventer. He’d tried to stop Serpens, but Serpens had broken his leg and knocked him unconscious. His pen had fallen out of his shirt pocket during the skirmish and gotten caught in the stopper of the borehole. When he’d awoken, hours later, he’d found himself locked in this room.
Zaurak’s account complemented Izar’s own. The night Izar had discovered the gray tin on his desk, he’d heard a series of sounds coming from below. He’d taken the private elevator down from B1 to B3, and had flashed his identification card before the scanner, but the elevator bars hadn’t opened. Izar had assumed the sounds must be coming from the gassy pipes in his Invention Chamber on B2, but he knew now that Zaurak had been the source of the sounds, as he’d tried to escape.
Izar shifted such that he sat next to Zaurak, his back leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out before him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
It was Izar’s fault that Zaurak was trapped here, and in this condition. He had been double-checking the drillship to protect Izar, he had confronted Serpens to protect Izar. Serpens had imprisoned him here so that Zaurak couldn’t interfere any more with further attacks on Izar’s life. And yet, despite everything Zaurak had been doing for him, Izar had doubted Zaurak, believing him to have been responsible for the attempts on his life. His most loyal friend, he’d viewed as his most suspect.
“I don’t know whether I’ll survive our escape tomorrow,” Zaurak said, “but—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Regardless of what happens tomorrow, there’s something I have to tell you before I die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Izar said crossly, “but, fine, tell me.”
“It relates to Antares.”
Izar stiffened. He had not told Zaurak what Osmundea had told him. He wanted to speak to Antares about it first. “What about Antares?” Izar said, turning his head to look at Zaurak.
