by Sonia Faruqi
“She did not marry me,” Ecklon said quietly. “You must be Izar.”
Ecklon slipped aside without a further word, and Izar replaced him, such that Coralline’s head came to lie on his lap. Tears sparkled in Izar’s eyes. The expression on his face resembled that from Mintaka’s cavern in the deep sea, Coralline saw—it was truth, in all its harshness, in all its beauty.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Coralline’s anger from earlier streamed out of her as seamlessly as her blood.
The eyes Izar had thirsted all this time to see were not the eyes he recognized—their expression was dull, dying. Her eyes were his home, but the doors to the home closed—the lids shuttered, her lashes casting long, limpid shadows over her cheeks. The celebration will be a funeral, Mintaka had told him. He wished it were his own funeral instead of hers.
“What are you waiting for?” cried a shrill voice, startling him. He recognized the voice as belonging to Nacre, but it took him a moment to locate her: She was emerging from his satchel, tentacles waggling furiously. She must have crept off Coralline’s shoulder and slipped into his bag through the partially open zip. “Give her the damn elixir! Do I have to do everything myself?”
“But I don’t have the elixir.”
“You do. I just saw it!”
His hands moving as fast as flying knives, Izar rummaged through his satchel. His hands slipped into an under-compartment, and there it was, the silver sphere of starlight.
Zaurak had not taken the elixir, this meant. He must have slipped it back into Izar’s satchel without Izar’s noticing. That was why Zaurak’s leg had not healed. And that was what he’d been trying to tell Izar before he died. Zaurak had wanted Izar to save the elixir for himself, were he to require it. And he required it now. His heart bursting with gratitude for his friend, Izar placed the elixir in Coralline’s mouth.
Her body, previously sagging, immediately stiffened. Her face glowed, then the glow spread throughout, becoming most prominent in the scales of her tail—which shimmered silver. She became a source of light herself, a shard of a star. Then her muscles clenched, her face scrunched, and the bullet flew out. Izar caught it in his hand, incredulous. The tear along her ribs started to close; through the gap in her bodice, Izar could see the skin joining. It joined entirely—not even a dot remained where the bullet had entered. If not for the scarlet stain of her bodice, he would not have believed she’d been shot. And then her glow faded, her scales darkened to a beautiful bronze, and her eyes flew open.
Pavonis’s thirty-foot-long body rocked up and down so hard that wave-sized ripples formed, and the stalks of kelp swayed as wildly as grasses in a thunderstorm.
Placing her hands to either side of her, Coralline sat up and turned to face Izar. With her turquoise eyes and peach-pink cheeks, she looked like a fairy, he thought, his breath catching in his gills. He leaned toward her, and she leaned toward him, but just before their lips could meet, a thud sounded to his left.
Castor. He had found them among the kelp.
“Scatter!” Izar yelled.
Everyone bolted, spreading outward like confetti. Izar grabbed Coralline’s hand and dashed away, just as bullets wrenched through the spot in the kelp forest where they’d been.
“There is a way to stop him,” Izar told Coralline hurriedly, “a way that’s both simple and dangerous. There’s a battery in his skull—”
“Battery?”
The sound of her voice almost made Izar smile, but there was no time to smile: Both of their lives, and everyone else’s, depended on his disabling Castor as soon as possible. “The battery is an object that powers him, like a brain. Its removal will paralyze him.”
“All right,” Coralline said. “I’ll try to distract him while you remove his battery.”
Izar nodded, his face set and tight. There was no other way, but he did not like this way. If Castor shot Coralline again, there would be nothing to save her this time.
They swam out of the kelp forest hand in hand. Castor stood directly before them, fire blazing out of his dragon arm. Izar could not help but look upon the golden flame with shocked admiration—how smoothly it flowed, like liquid lava. But he had only a moment to admire the fire, for Castor pointed his arm in their direction. Coralline and Izar flew apart. Castor’s head swiveled as he looked between them, his confusion a manifestation of Saiph’s confusion, but then he seemed to make up his mind: He turned toward Coralline. It was what Izar had predicted, for Saiph had promised to kill Coralline today, but a muscle jumped in his cheek nonetheless and his jaw clenched. He could not let anything happen to Coralline.
She swam a few feet above Castor, as a fly buzzes overhead, and she swam in circles. Castor’s head started turning on his shoulders to follow her movements. But even had she been still, her upward angle would have been a difficult one for Castor—she was essentially in his blind spot, a fly who could not be swatted.
Izar approached Castor’s skull stealthily, from one side, so the robot would not detect the movement. Quickly, he came to hover behind Castor’s head. He recalled the moment he’d knelt above Castor in his Invention Chamber and inserted the battery in his skull. At that time, Izar would have sneered at the notion that he would ever be disabling Castor instead of enabling him. But now, Izar pressed the top of the robot’s skull lightly. The pane opened on touch, but Izar drew his hand back sharply—the zinc-galvanized steel skull was as scorching as a poker. The waters directly surrounding Castor were also hot and bubbling; that was how Castor created fire, by heating water and evaporating it until the oxygen in it turned from liquid to gas. The heat was also a manner of shield for Castor; had Castor been creating fire for just a few minutes longer, the waters would have been hotter still, and Izar’s skin would have blistered.
With slow, shuffling steps, Castor started to turn around, but Izar reached a hand into his skull and plucked out the battery. It was searing as an electric plate, and he dropped it immediately.
The battery floated down slowly to the ocean floor, lilting like a textbook-sized feather. Meanwhile, Castor stood perfectly still, like a man turned to stone. Then he started to fall backward, arms swinging, like he was fainting. It was a striking phenomenon to observe, and a tragic one, like a dinosaur collapsing. Castor hit the seabed flat on his back, a torrent of sands rising all around him. Izar’s insides churned—Castor was an extension of him, albeit past, and now he lay dead, killed by none other than Izar himself.
From the other side of the sands, Coralline swam up to Izar, her hair framing her face in dark, loose tendrils. Izar had lost Castor, but he had gained Coralline. He wrapped his arms around her, and their lips met in a long, languorous kiss.
30
Fire and Water
From the living-room window seat, Coralline surveyed the scene in the living room.
Naiadum sat at the dining table, reading one of his children’s stories, The Magical Fairy Basslet. Abalone sat on the settee, stitching a frilly yellow corset, Nacre on her shoulder. Trochid sat at his desk in a corner of the living room, perusing two thick volumes: Calcium Carbonate and The Animated Lives of Anemones. Coralline was happy to see him immersing himself in books from his past career, but she did not understand it. She had asked him about it, and he had demurred that he would tell her soon enough.
She turned her head and patted Pavonis’s snout, just outside the window.
A knock sounded at the door. Coralline swam to the door and pulled it open. It was Izar, looking dashing in a royal-blue waistcoat, his chestnut curls smooth on his forehead.
“The hummer’s here!” Naiadum announced, as Izar swam into the living room. Naiadum considered Izar an exotic creature and had asked Coralline if he could have him as his muse. With a laugh, she’d replied that he could ask Izar himself when he grew older.
Trochid smiled at Izar, got up from his desk, and joined Abalone on the settee. Abalone focused resolutely on her stitches, holding the fabric up to her nose, such that her eyes al
most crossed in her desire to avoid the sight of Izar. Coralline nonetheless led Izar to the settee across from that of her parents.
“I have something to tell all of you,” Trochid beamed. “I’ve decided to return to work as a coral connoisseur at the Under-Ministry for Coral Conservation. I start tomorrow!”
“I’m so happy for you, Father!” Coralline exclaimed, as she rose and hugged him.
“But how will you work without a hand?” Abalone asked. “How will you hold a microscope, parchment-pad, and pen, all in your one hand?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“I may be able to help with that,” Izar said. He unzipped his satchel, extracted a parcel bundled in twilight fabric, and handed it to Trochid.
Trochid opened it to reveal what looked to be an artificial hand, with a malleable band around the wrist, four fingers, and a thumb—so life-like that it even had veins across the back of the hand. Coralline looked at Izar quizzically, as did Abalone and Trochid.
“It’s a prosthetic,” Izar explained. “It won’t have the full range of functionality of a biological hand, but it should be good enough to hold things like a pen or microscope and to perform most day-to-day activities.”
His eyes wide with wonder, Trochid wrapped the prosthetic’s band around his stump. He then flexed the fingers of his new hand, at first slowly, then fast. The prosthetic seemed flexible in all the ordinary ways of a hand—the wrist, the knuckles, the fingers, all could crook and bend. He reached for the fabric on Abalone’s lap and held it up between two fingers—the grip was as steady as that of tongs. “This is a medical breakthrough in the ocean, isn’t it?” he asked Coralline incredulously.
She nodded.
“How did you devise it, Izar?” Trochid continued.
“I suppose I started thinking about artificial hands years ago,” Izar replied sheepishly.
Izar had constructed a whole, towering, multi-functional machine in the form of Castor, Coralline had seen with her own eyes. Compared to Castor’s two arms—called the crusher and the dragon, Izar had told her—this prosthetic would have been a relatively easy feat, but it would still have taken many hours of laborious experimentation. She smiled at him gratefully.
“Given that the loss of your hand was my fault,” Izar told Trochid, “this prosthetic is the least I can offer you.”
The day of her failed wedding, Coralline, Izar, Abalone, and Trochid had all sat on these very settees, and Izar had told them all the truth about everything—Ocean Dominion, the coral reef dynamite blast, the black poison spill. “I forgive you,” Trochid had pronounced easily, continuing, “All that matters to me now is that you make my daughter happy.” Abalone had examined all of them coldly.
Now, Abalone snatched the yellow corset out of Trochid’s grasp and resumed her stitches.
“I also have an announcement to make, Mother and Father,” Coralline began, taking a deep breath. “Izar, Pavonis, and I have decided to move to Blue Bottle.”
The fabric slipped out of Abalone’s hands. Ensnaring it with his prosthetic, Trochid grinned at Coralline and Izar like a child with his favorite toy.
“Whyever would you wish to leave your family and village?” Abalone demanded.
“In Urchin Grove, it may take decades for people to get accustomed to the idea of desmarestia not as a poisonous acid kelp, but a healing algae. In Blue Bottle, I think patients will be more open-minded to the use of desmarestia, and I’ll be able to truly develop as an apothecary. But more than that, I like Blue Bottle. Izar, Pavonis, and I all do.”
Pavonis slammed his tailfin against the wall in agreement.
“Good for the three of you!” Nacre piped.
Altair drifted up into the window frame in front of Pavonis, a flame of orange. Were Nacre and Altair not bonded to Abalone and Trochid, they might have liked to come, too, Coralline thought.
“You don’t have a job there, Coralline,” Abalone said. “How will you support yourself?”
“I don’t need a job. I’m going to start my own clinic.”
“And how will you afford that?”
“With the one thousand carapace Rhodomela left me.” Coralline and Osmundea were the only two people Rhodomela had named in her will.
“That dear, darling apothecary.” Abalone sighed, shaking her head so hard that a golden lock tumbled out of her barrette.
Coralline and Osmundea had organized Rhodomela’s funeral. Abalone had wept loudest, crying, “I owe Rhodomela the lives of both my husband and daughter.” Abalone no longer referred to Rhodomela as the Bitter Spinster, nor did she abide by anyone else doing so—when Sepia had whispered the term at the funeral, Abalone had looked ready to slap her face.
A tear had trickled down Trochid’s cheek at the funeral. Abalone had clasped his elbow, but he’d pulled his arm away.
They’d spoken few words to one another since Rhodomela’s death. Today was the first time they were sitting on the settee together, Coralline noted, and that, too, only because a guest was here, Izar. As far as Coralline could tell, her father, with his forgiving nature, was trying to forgive her mother for her trickery, but the wound was still too raw. The wound would heal eventually, Coralline expected—if not for Trochid’s sake, then for the sake of Naiadum, who was still young and dependent on both parents—but, like Trochid’s stump, it would take months to heal, and things would never be quite the same again. Coralline hoped her parents would remain together.
“I think it’s an excellent idea for you to start your own clinic,” Trochid said. “What will you name it?”
“I was thinking of Coralline’s Cures, but I’ve decided on The Irregular Remedy, in memory of Rhodomela.”
“You don’t want to appear irregular!” Abalone protested.
“But I do. I’m planning a full shelf called Exotic Experiments.”
“You’re turning your life into an exotic experiment.” Abalone glanced pointedly at Izar. “A word in private, Coralline.”
With a swish of her tailfin, Abalone swam into Coralline’s bedroom, trailed by Coralline. Abalone closed the door behind them and turned to face Coralline, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes blinking fiercely.
“Hummers are often unable to have children,” she said. “Have you thought of that?”
“I haven’t, Mother, because I’m not planning to have children.”
“What’s the point of marriage without children?”
“I’m not planning on marrying.”
“So you’re planning to be a Bitter Spinster?”
“Not bitter, no.”
“Go back to Ecklon, I beg of you. Tell him you made a huge mistake and want to marry him.”
“As you know, Mother, Ecklon is now with Rosette.”
“He would leave her in a heartbeat for you.”
“I don’t want him to. I’m happy for them.”
From the corner of her eye, Coralline detected a movement through her bedroom window. Turning her head, she saw that it was an oyster thief—a wispy brown algae—floating about, studded with shells. That was its mechanism: It inflated with gas, shells got attached to it, then it drifted about with the currents, carefree. Coralline admired its loose freedom, its ability to go anywhere unrestricted—that level of freedom was what she envisioned for her own future.
“I don’t expect you to understand me, Mother,” she said gently, “but I hope you can still accept me.”
“I hope so, too!” Abalone said, amber-gold eyes ablaze.
She swung Coralline’s bedroom door open, and she and Coralline returned to their seats on the settees. “If only you’d been right, Trochid,” she stated, “in what you’d said that day, when Ecklon proposed, and the ship passed above.”
“What did I say?”
“That fire and water can never truly meet.”
The waters were dull gray. Even without looking at a sand-clock, Izar was by now familiar enough with the ocean to know that the time would be about half past six in the evening.
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“I’ll go do some exploring,” Pavonis said, “and I’ll see the two of you in the morning.”
Izar smiled at the whale shark and, along with Coralline, stroked his yellow-spotted back. With a swing of his tail, Pavonis swam away, and Izar continued swimming through Blue Bottle hand in hand with Coralline.
A long shadow fell over them, even longer than Pavonis.
Izar whirled over onto his back and looked up, his heart racing. Could it be a ship, here to hunt him? No, from its splash and immense, bumpy gray shape, he identified it as a humpback whale. The whale angled up, rose straight into the air, its path straight as a dart, then crashed onto its back on the waves. The resulting swell of water pushed Izar and Coralline several feet down. Continuing to swim on his back, Izar admired the whale’s sleek length, its muscular strength.
“Note that the whale’s tail does not swish right and left like ours but slaps up and down,” Coralline said, swimming on her back alongside Izar. “The whale tail is different from the fish tail because, although whales entered the oceans many millions of years ago, they’re still outsiders. Fish have vertical tails, as merpeople do, because the slicing motion fights water resistance; whales did not evolve from fish, but from mammals who left land for water, and so their tail continues to carry the up-and-down motion of their ancestral legs. Whales look like fish, but they’re not fish, just as you look like a merman, but you’re not fully a merman.”
Perhaps he would have a whale as a muse one day, Izar thought, for they straddled two worlds, as he did. The more time he spent with Pavonis, the more he found himself liking the idea of a muse.
Izar and Coralline drifted upon the balcony to their fifth-floor apartment. Izar opened the door and smiled as he entered the living room. It was small and shabby—furnished with little more than a pair of scratched stone settees and a low-lying bed—but all that mattered was that it was their own place.
