Even the meteors that crashed into the surface of the earth could be traced back to where they’d begun, their trajectories plotted with a degree of accuracy. How could his own past be such a black hole? It was as though his memory had been systematically wiped clean the night of his parents’ death, like a computer’s hard drive erased upon a command.
He had often been told he was fortunate to have been adopted by Antares, and he had often thought it, but he had never felt it as he did now, in his very pores. He had often thought about the trials he himself had undergone, but only now, as he knelt on the floor of his childhood home, did he properly consider the trials Antares had undergone on his behalf. Antares had risked his life to dive into the ocean and rescue Izar from merpeople, and he had carved a wedge in his marriage with Maia by adopting Izar.
Izar found himself irritated by the lone furnishing in the hovel, a bright blue pail. Water dripped into it slowly but steadily from a leak in the roof; the splash of the droplets, low though the sound was, grated on his nerves by its incessance. He watched a droplet as it struck the surface of water in the pail. The surface fragmented then settled, becoming smooth and flat as a mirror, only to be shattered by the next droplet. As Izar watched, a reflection materialized in the pail, a reflection of a thickset man with a sun-sizzled face as furrowed as downtrodden leather.
Jumping to his feet, Izar whirled around.
The man narrowed his eyes at Izar, but the effect of the narrowing was lost—his deep-blue eyes had squinted so much that they’d become permanently narrowed, the pupils unable to expand or contract even indoors.
“Who are ye?” he slurred, his breath smelling of stale beer.
“I’m Izar, the son of Heze and Capella Virgo. Who are you?”
“Rigel Nihal. I lived beside Heze and Capella Virgo for a decade before they died.” Rigel pointed his thumb in the presumed direction of his own hovel. “Ye cannot be their son.”
“Why not?”
“Because that boy is dead. I buried him meself.”
Izar blinked, stunned.
“Most kind folk I ever met, Heze and Capella Virgo,” Rigel continued. “Most mysterious death I ever saw. Heze never fished at night, but the night he died, someone forced him out onto the water—forced him to drag Capella and the boy with him. Capella cried and screamed, and I came out of me home at her shouts, but Heze dragged her and the boy onto his fishing dinghy. I asked him why he was taking his wife and boy onto the sea, when he otherwise never did. He said he couldn’t tell me, but it was important, said his job with Ocean Dominion depended on it.
“When I woke up in the morning, I saw that all the fishermen of Mira had gathered on the shore. They told me that Heze, Capella, and the boy were all dead. I steered meself into the water and found the three bodies. I brought them back in me dinghy and buried them next to one another. I called the chief police commissioner of Menkar, Canopus Corvus, the man with the handlebar moustache. I told him he should investigate the deaths. He told me he already knew what had happened: Heze and Capella Virgo had been drowned by merpeople, while their son had been rescued. I said that Heze and Capella looked like they’d been bludgeoned by a man, not drowned by merpeople, as did the boy himself—who was dead. Canopus had the nerve to tell me I was lying, but I put aside me dignity”—Izar couldn’t imagine him having any—“and begged him to come see the bodies. He said he would send someone to take a look the next morning. But the next morning, all three bodies had been stolen from the grave—someone stole them overnight!”
“You’re lying.”
Izar’s fists clenched and unclenched compulsively at his sides, and blood pounded into his head, turning his eyes bloodshot. Perhaps the degree of his anger was irrational, but everything that he knew about his past was little enough to be wrapped in a handkerchief, and Rigel was tearing holes in that meager fabric. How dare this drunkard fabricate stories about his parents, such farfetched and absurd tales?
“I am Heze and Capella Virgo’s son,” Izar reiterated through gritted teeth.
“That yer not! That boy is dead—dead as his parents, dead as this home, dead as this island. I held his dead body in me own hands!” He held out his hands, fingers splayed, palms dark and grainy. “Yer not who ye think ye are—”
“Stop talking.”
“Don’t ye see, through that thick skull of yers? Yer a pawn in a game, the same game that killed Heze and Capella, the same game that will kill ye—”
Izar’s left arm curled, and though he recognized he shouldn’t follow through, the realization dawned too late: The punch landed along the side of Rigel’s jaw.
The man fell flat on his back, toppling the pail along the way. Water splattered Izar’s shoes and seeped into Rigel’s shirt. It also spread over the floorboards, which absorbed it as readily as a sponge. Cursing, Izar bent down to reinstate the pail below the leak. It was probably Rigel who’d placed the pail there, he thought now—in his own way, maybe Rigel had cared about Heze and Capella. Maybe Rigel had been unable to help the things he’d said—maybe he was not only drunk but mentally deranged, unable to comprehend the nonsense spewing out of his mouth. Yet there had been a lucidness to his voice.
Shaking out his fist, Izar examined it with regret. His punch was strong, too strong, because of the platinum chip in his wrist—it carried the strength of an anvil, Doctor Navi had told him. Izar had expected Rigel to stagger back, but not to collapse unconscious on the floor. Glancing at him one last time, Izar strode out the door, wishing he’d taken Antares’s advice and never set foot on the island of Mira.
5
Friend
The next collision will be your last!” Pavonis growled. With his snout, he tossed up the merboy who’d happened to be lingering in his way.
The familiar sights around Coralline blended together in a blur of color as she clung with both hands to the dorsal fin on Pavonis’s back. She saw homes of shale, standing encompassed by small, crescent-shaped gardens. She saw the majestic columns of the bank called Grove Trove, where her parents stored their conchs and whelks, shells worth fifty and a hundred carapace each. She saw Alaria, her favorite restaurant, where Ecklon had taken her for their first date and her birthday.
She breathed a sigh of relief when Pavonis came to rest in a kelp forest.
Sculpin fish rose at their sudden entrance, then settled again among the holdfasts of giant kelp—the shorthorn sculpin, dark and rock-like, and the longhorn sculpin, with long cheek spines and fan-like fins.
Pavonis had been circling The Irregular Remedy during Coralline’s probationary review, so he already knew much of what had transpired, but Coralline recounted it to him nonetheless in a hushed whisper. “I’m so ashamed. . . . My dreams are dead. . . . And I feel awful for the things I said to Rhodomela in anger. . . .”
She leaned against the five vertical gill slits along Pavonis’s side. Five feet long, they flared open and close in synchrony with her sobs. She wrapped her arms around as much of him as she could, which was not much. From the tip of his tailfin to his snout, Pavonis stretched to thirty feet, five times Coralline’s length. He was a whale shark, the largest sort of shark in the world. Whale sharks were part of the shark family, not the whale family; the first half of their name related merely to their size and filtering pads—screens inside the mouth through which food filtered into the throat.