by Sonia Faruqi
“I guess not,” Coralline admitted sheepishly.
“I forgive you for your theatrics.”
Abalone swam up to them in a flurry of gold, her hands on her hips. “In addition to this Ogre,” she said, her chin jutting toward Pavonis, “another troll of your choosing has just arrived.” Coralline followed her gaze to a reed-thin figure clad in black—Rhodomela.
“I’ll see you soon, Pavonis,” Coralline said, patting his side. She swam down to Rhodomela, finding that she looked at Rhodomela differently now, for she knew the reason for the grooves of grief around her eyes. On an impulse, she hugged the master apothecary. Rhodomela stiffened at first, then wrapped her arms around Coralline.
Only when they separated did Coralline notice Osmundea by Rhodomela’s side. Just as Coralline had, moments ago, stared at Rhodomela with private knowledge, Osmundea seemed to now be staring at Coralline, her indigo eyes glimmering. “Do you know my son?” she asked.
“I doubt it. Who’s your son?”
“Izar.”
The indigo eyes, the indigo scales, the scar along the side of the mouth—an extension of Izar’s own. Could he truly be Osmundea’s son? Did that mean he was partly human and partly merman—a hummer? If so, why had he not told her—or had he not known it himself? Osmundea lived in Velvet Horn, Coralline remembered, and Izar had said he’d had a personal errand to tend in Velvet Horn—perhaps visiting Osmundea had been the errand.
“In your seats, please!” boomed a voice. “The wedding ceremony will commence shortly.”
Rhodomela and Osmundea were ushered toward the chairs by a waiter. A centralizing current was created by the movement of the guests, and Coralline was swept along in its sway, dazed, unresisting, until someone collided into her from behind. “Cora,” he said, and turned her around by the shoulders.
Ecklon.
He wore a smooth, thick, beige waistcoat, its shade matching the embroidery of her bodice. He flashed her a smile, dimples carving wedges into his cheeks. She hadn’t seen such a smile on his face for a long time, she realized now, not since their engagement party. His smile steadied her as nothing could.
“You look beautiful,” he said, with an admiring glance.
“Thank you,” she said, returning his smile shyly.
Clasping her hand, he led her toward the gazebo. Together, they hovered below its white, arched ceiling, facing each other, holding hands. A sizable merman arrived next to them, his paunchy belly almost touching their joined hands, his jowls hanging down to his neck, making Coralline think of a bowhead whale. “I, Kombu Kasmira,” he began in a sonorous voice, looking past Coralline and Ecklon at the guests, “am honored to hover here in the role of Wedded Bliss Bureaucrat of the Department of Marriage Management, part of the Under-Ministry of Birth, Marriage, and Death Events.”
It dawned on Coralline only now, truly dawned on her—not in theory but in the thud of her heart—that she was getting married.
“Do you, Ecklon Elnath, take Coralline Costaria to be your partner in life?” Kombu asked.
Her mother’s idea of love was based on competition: Life was a marriage mart, and a husband from a wealthy, well-regarded family was some sort of prize, like a choice dessert. But marriage should be based on connection, not competition, Coralline thought now. And, for better or worse, one could not quite control whom one connected with.
“I do,” Ecklon pronounced. Sighs sounded among the mermaids in the audience.
Desmarestia and sea oak—that was the sort of potent combination Coralline and Izar were—he the acid, she the base. It was a dangerous, foolhardy blend, but, miraculously, it worked. Coralline herself had proven it.
“Do you, Coralline Costaria, take Ecklon Elnath to be your partner in life?”
Coralline’s fingers tingled in Ecklon’s, and her gills felt as though they were shuttering one by one. She looked out frantically at the guests, hoping they could save her from Kombu’s question. But most of them were staring at her blankly, and her mother was glaring at her. In the front row, Epaulette’s crab-red corset made Coralline think of Sage Dahlia Delaisi, in all her orange-red fortune teller’s glory. He is not your love, she had said, when she’d seen Ecklon through the window.
Kombu cleared his throat loudly.
Coralline looked toward Altair, who formed a spot of orange among the holdfasts of kelp, accompanied by red—his mate, Kuda. The two seahorses bounced ever so slightly with the currents, their tails twirled around a single strand of eel-grass. Altair’s color started to dull steadily, until Coralline could no longer see him. With a start, she recalled their conversation last night, while she’d been flitting between sleep and consciousness: If she spent her life with the wrong partner, she would be living in camouflage rather than glowing.
She did not want to live in camouflage. “We need to talk, Ecklon,” she heard herself say.
A flurry of whispers sprouted among the guests. Kombu’s eyebrows ascended into his hairline. Ecklon’s face paled, but he nodded.
Despite the bright morning sunshine, the shadows of the ships in the harbor remained dense and dark, Izar was relieved to find, for they enabled him to hide in daylight. Crouched in the shadows, he looked upon his fleet of ships. The largest Ocean Dominion ship, Vega, designed by him last year to be virtually unsinkable, was missing from the docks. Saiph must have selected Vega for his Castor mission; it was a good choice—Izar would have selected the same.
To pursue Vega, Izar would require a vessel of speed and stealth, but something small, so it would not be detected by Saiph and his crewmen. His gaze roved over the ships to find the ideal one. His eye caught on one that did not belong, but that he recognized: Alshain Ankaa’s trawler. What was the giant doing here, at Ocean Dominion’s harbor?
Whatever it was, it was a good thing Alshain was here. Izar had not a moment to waste, but he wanted to thank Alshain for having saved him from Saiph and Antares earlier by tossing him overboard. He crept along the docks, half-crouching, until he stood at the stern of the fifty-foot-long vessel. His step as light as a fox’s, he leapt over its rails. He remembered the first time he’d clambered onto Alshain’s trawler—in the middle of the night, with rain pounding the platform and lightning cracking the sky open.
Now, as before, there was no one on the platform. Izar strode to the narrow set of stairs on the other side of the platform, leading belowdecks. Upon the top stair shone a drop of blood, red as a poppy. His heart thudding, Izar skulked down the stairs. To the side of the lowest stair, he saw Alshain’s seven-foot-long frame, lying crumpled.
Alshain had been shot in the heart, and his blood was soaking into his scraggly beard. The precision of the shot and the location of Alshain’s body, close to the stairs, suggested that he’d heard someone above deck and had been about to climb up, but had been shot before he’d taken his first step.
But why? Why would Saiph or Antares have ordered Alshain shot?
Saiph might have assumed that with Alshain dead, even if Izar managed to escape his underground prison, he would be unable to transform into a merman, and thus would be unable to try to kill Castor, save Coralline, or otherwise attempt to escape into the ocean. Saiph didn’t know that Izar did not require Alshain’s moonmumble potion to transform to a merman. Perhaps Antares didn’t know it, either; twenty-five years ago, when Izar was three, he’d transformed to a human without a potion, but Antares had been transforming simultaneously, according to Zaurak’s recounting of events, so had not seen it.
Squatting next to Alshain, Izar closed the unseeing eyes gently with a hand. It was his fault Alshain was dead, just as it was his fault Zaurak was dead—it was their association with him that had killed both of them. He could not let the same happen to Coralline.
Whirling around, he ran up the narrow stairs, but came face-to-face with the barrel of a gun. Serpens grinned at him from behind his red beard, his face as menacing as the spears in his earlobes. There was nowhere for Izar to go—he could not move forward, for Serpe
ns was blocking his path, and he could not retreat down the stairs, for Serpens would simply shoot him in the back. He put his hands in the air.
Serpens pointed the gun at Izar’s heart. His finger paused on the trigger—he would take his time to kill Izar, he would enjoy it as a hunter might luxuriate over a kill.
The people in Izar’s life flashed before his eyes: Antares lighting a match then drowning the flame in a glass of water; Saiph handing Bumble back to him, with the teddy bear’s innards streaming out; Maia tugging his hands out of the hood of her car and slapping his face; Zaurak shaking his hand on his first day at Ocean Dominion; Ascella frowning at the scar across his jaw as at chipped nail varnish; Coralline staring at him with her big blue-green eyes as she leaned against her shark; Coralline—it was her face Izar wished to hold in his mind in the moment before he died.
His smile widening, Serpens started to press the trigger—but a dark, strapping figure vaulted upon him, a mermaid tattoo on his arm. Deneb Delphinus, who’d served as derrickhand atop Dominion Drill I.
The gun fell out of Serpens’s hands and between Izar’s feet. Deneb wrestled Serpens to the ground, but Serpens, almost as sinewy, fought back and started to rise—Izar grabbed the gun, turned it around, and knocked the handle into the top of Serpens’s skull. Serpens’s limbs went slack, and he collapsed on the platform, his head lolling. Izar helped Deneb to his feet and shook his hand, clasping it with both of his.
“You seem to be my bodyguard, Deneb. This is the third time you’ve saved me. Thank you.”
Deneb shrugged, as though it was simply a part of his job description.
“How did you know to find me here?”
“I saw you on the docks,” he said, “and I was about to approach you—there’s something I want to talk to you about—but then I saw Serpens stalking you with a gun. I figured he intended to kill you, and I decided to save you.”
“I’m glad for it. What did you want to talk about?”
“I was in your Invention Chamber.” He shuddered.
“Was it you who tidied it up?”
“Yes.”
“And did you put in the new shelves, planning for mass production of Castors?”
“I certainly didn’t! I hate Castor. To be honest, I wanted to burn down your Invention Chamber, but, somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“Me neither,” Izar said quietly.
Izar looked with Deneb toward the bronze glass skyscraper of Ocean Dominion, forming an arrow to the sky. Izar had held a lit matchstick above the pail of combustible chemicals in his Invention Chamber, but he’d snuffed it out. No sane person would describe the Invention Chamber as warm or cozy but, to Izar, it had been. He had spent more time there than in his own apartment, often sleeping on the floor when the hour grew late. For all of his adult life, the Invention Chamber had served as his asylum, and Ocean Dominion as his home.
“I resign from Ocean Dominion,” Deneb said.
“That makes two of us.”
“I’m surprised. When we last spoke, on Dominion Drill I, you said that the ocean and all its inhabitants are ours to dominate.”
“I said that before I fell in love with a mermaid, Coralline.”
Deneb’s eyes widened until they resembled black marbles. It would be a dream come true for him to even catch sight of a mermaid, Izar knew, let alone fall in love with one.
“My brother, Saiph, is on his way to Coralline’s village, where he plans to kill her through Castor. Will you help me save her?”
“I will!” Deneb said eagerly.
“Thank you. Let’s set forth.”
Izar would have to writhe and drown in order to transform into a merman, but he would rather die a hundred deaths before Coralline died one.
Coralline and Ecklon hovered together inside the kitchen of Kelp Cove, facing each other, holding hands. The waitstaff had left as soon as Coralline and Ecklon had entered, such that the two of them were alone, surrounded by the smooth, sultry scents of wines.
Coralline’s words tumbled out in a trembling, almost incoherent stream: “I fell in love with someone else.”
“I know. Izar.”
She blinked at Ecklon in rapid succession.
“I was a detective on your case, Cora. As such, I was following your every move from a distance.”
There was no ire or indignation in his silver-gray eyes. “Why didn’t you say anything before?” Coralline asked quietly.
“I was waiting for you to tell me. And I’m glad you did. Regardless of the painfulness of the truth, I couldn’t bear the thought of your lying to me.”
“If you know about Izar,” Coralline whispered, “then you know we can’t marry.”
“You faced extraordinary obstacles during your elixir quest. You were not yourself.”
“You’re making excuses for me.”
“Maybe I am,” Ecklon said, clasping her hands tighter, “but we can still make our relationship work. I’m willing to let the past be the past, in favor of a future with you.”
The past . . . Coralline thought of her six-month relationship with Ecklon: The day they’d met, at The Irregular Remedy, when she’d set his elbow, the time he’d gotten her a bowl of buttonweed when she’d been sick with the flu, the autographed copy of The Universe Demystified he’d given her on her birthday, the rose petal tellin shell he’d presented her when he’d proposed. She thought of how he’d ventured into the wave of black poison to save Naiadum, of how he’d twirled her in circle upon circle upon finding her at the Telescope Tower, of how valiantly he’d fought to clear her name of her murder charge, risking his tenured post at Urchin Interrogations for her.
There was nothing Ecklon had not done for her, nothing he would not do.
“All that matters to me now is: Do you love Izar still?”
Coralline’s teeth gritted, and she tried to prevent the words, but they spewed out through her lips of their own accord: “Yes, I love him still.”
She needed to remove the rose petal tellin shell at her throat—she felt as though the shell would choke her if she didn’t. There was no time to whirl around and ask him to unclasp the translucent string; curling her hand around the tellin, she wrenched it off in a single sweep.
Her muscles turned unbearably weak, as though she’d removed her own heart—for Ecklon had been her heart. Tears rolled hotly down her cheeks. Sobs racked through her, shuddering through her ribs, creeping down her vertebrae. She cried for the life she would have shared with Ecklon, for the love that she had shared with him. Their foreheads together, their tears merged, even though their lives would, from this day, diverge.
29
Man and Machine
Ecklon remained inside the kitchen, saying he needed a moment, so Coralline swam out the kitchen window alone. But she stopped in her tracks: Perching on the edge of their seats, two hundred people were staring at her, their eyes inquiring whether the wedding would continue. After all the tears she’d shed, Coralline found she could no longer speak, but she shook her head emphatically.
Her mother’s eyes narrowed to needle-thin slits; Coralline felt relieved at the distance between them. Epaulette clapped her hands to her mouth gleefully and hugged Rosette. The pretty, purple-tailed mermaid whom Coralline had overheard earlier, sat up straighter. Even plump Telia beamed, handing her baby to her mother, Sepia, as though she was single again.
Half the mermaids of Urchin Grove would soon be chasing Ecklon, Coralline felt certain. Her own prospects, meanwhile, were dismal.
“Let’s get out of this freak show,” Pavonis said from above her.
Coralline started to rise toward his white belly, when a thud sounded from the other side of the boundary of kelp. It reverberated through Coralline’s tendons and through the legs of the chairs, causing guests to jump off their seats. Was it an earthquake? Coralline wondered, staring in the direction of the thud. It was impossible to tell, because the fronds of kelp formed layers of curtains, blocking all view to the other
side. And yet the earthquake seemed to be approaching, for the kelp started quivering, down to the holdfasts. Coralline keened her ear; it was not an earthquake, no—it sounded like stomping. And then the stalks of kelp started falling, one by one—the creature, whatever it was, was trampling everything in its path. . . . Unmoving, every muscle of her body trained toward it, Coralline watched as the final layer of kelp collapsed, and the creature entered Kelp Cove.
Towering to three times her height, he was a demon of metal, his chest stamped with the bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion, as well as a name, Castor. With his legs, Castor was crafted in the image of his creator, man, but not just man—one man, in particular: Izar, for a hook-shaped scar marked Castor’s jaw, matching Izar’s own.
Castor pounded his left arm, which was twice as thick as his right arm, into the ocean floor. Every grain of sand in Kelp Cove trembled, every drop of water rippled, and a mass exodus of fish occurred from the kelp forest. Castor then started spewing a series of bubbles, before crooking his right arm at the elbow. A blaze shot out of his arm, hot and golden, twice the length of Coralline herself. This must be fire, she thought, but she could not be certain, for fire, to her, was not a specific thing. It was not like a rock or a whale, which she could envision precisely. It was simply something associated with the sun, something that could not exist in the ocean. And yet she was looking at it, its flame reflected in her very eyes.
Coralline had not believed Izar when he’d claimed to have invented underwater fire, but she believed him now. Fire and water can never truly meet, her father had said, but Izar had somehow tricked fire to burn in water, just as he had somehow tricked her into falling in love with him.
Castor’s fire stopped abruptly, and his head swiveled on his shoulders—if he were sentient, Coralline would think he was looking for someone. The Ocean Dominion insignia rotated ten degrees over his chest, then a sharp click sounded, and a bullet flew out of his navel. The shot seemed experimental, but had the bullet struck someone, it would have killed like a dagger tearing through the flesh. People screamed and scrambled in all directions.
