“Will you tell me how Mako died?” Coralline asked Pavonis gently. She peered into his orb of an eye, whose dark color looked partly green in reflection of the surrounding kelp.
“I can’t,” he hissed in a pained voice. “But don’t trouble yourself. My issues are my own problem.”
“Well, my issues have always been your problem, so it’s only fair for your issues to be my problem as well. What can I do to help you?”
“I’ve always longed to travel, but especially since Mako’s death. Everywhere in Urchin Grove, I’m haunted by memories of him. But I cannot leave Urchin Grove without you—you’re all I have left.” His eye sparkled suddenly; Coralline knew it meant he had an idea. “We failed to leave Urchin Grove after your graduation,” he said, his voice high with excitement, “but we could leave today!”
“What? How?”
“You can view your dismissal from The Irregular Remedy as an unexpected gift. You don’t have to be anchored to Urchin Grove anymore!”
“But I do. My engagement party is tomorrow, and I’m marrying Ecklon two weeks after.”
“Well, you don’t have to.”
“You don’t approve of him?”
“Approving of him and approving of your marriage to him are two different things.”
“Don’t speak in riddles,” she said, slapping his side in reprimand. With his thick skin, it would feel like a pat.
“Fine. Ecklon will most likely get tenured at work soon. To marry him means to marry Urchin Grove.”
Coralline’s gaze fell upon a rock below smattered with acorn barnacles. The arthropods had grown their round, bumpy beige shells directly onto the rock and would spend the rest of their lives there, utterly sessile. Would that be the rest of her life, unbudging from Urchin Grove? If so, would it be so bad? “Life is peaceful here,” she said at length.
“Oh, please, who are you kidding?” If Pavonis could roll his eyes, she knew he would. “People here are not at peace; they’re fast asleep.”
“Life is safe here,” Coralline persisted. “Year after year, Urchin Grove is ranked the safest settlement in Meristem in the annual Settlement Status rankings prepared by the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs—”
“Stop it. You sound like a salesperson for the Under-Ministry. Safety is an illusion. Anything can happen anywhere at any time. I learned that when Mako died.”
Coralline fell silent.
“You face two choices today,” he continued, in the voice of a lawyer closing his case. “You can clam yourself to Urchin Grove for the rest of your life, like those acorn barnacles you’re looking at, or the two of us can pick up and leave today.”
“But where would we even go?”
“We could start with . . . Blue Bottle.”
The capital of the nation of Meristem, a long swim south. There, no one would know of her professional humiliation. There, she would be able to start over, in another clinic—a better clinic. “Blue Bottle,” Coralline whispered, her heart lifting out of her chest, as light and airy as the fronds of kelp all around her.
Izar looked about his drillship, Dominion Drill I, which stretched one-hundred-and-sixty feet from bow to stern. Fifty or so men shuffled aboard it under the blazing sun, a mass of denim-clad legs and sun-scorched arms, their shirts and caps featuring the bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion. A ninety-five-foot-tall derrick ascended to the sky at the drillship’s center, its towering height and structure intended to provide the strength to haul oil out of underwater wells and into the storage tank below deck. The oil drill was tomorrow morning; this evening marked the routine drillship check that preceded every oil drill. Dominion Drill I was anchored to shore but bouncing lightly with the currents.
Izar stood where he always stood, in the shadow of the derrick—a circle could have been drawn to mark the spot—for it was the one position that afforded him a three-sixty-degree view over the entire drillship. He stood with Zaurak Alphard, the fifty-seven-year-old director of operations. Zaurak’s large, shaved head was shaped as a boulder, with a flap of flab lining the back of his neck. A drop of sweat dangled off the tip of his lumpy nose before splattering onto his boot. After Antares, there was no man on earth Izar trusted more than Zaurak.
“I apologize for interrupting,” said Deneb Delphinus, arriving between Izar and Zaurak.
Deneb had a chest as built as a bison, but his tread was light as a mouse’s. A tattoo of a mermaid marked his ebony forearm, twirling all the way from the inside of his elbow to his wrist, the mermaid’s tailfin billowing over his veins. Many workers at Ocean Dominion were stamped with ink, but their tattoos tended to feature fishhooks, nets, trawlers, ships, sometimes even the Ocean Dominion logo. A mermaid tattoo was a first in Izar’s experience; he frowned at it with distaste.
“I just wanted to let you know that I’ve checked the drill pipe and monkey-board,” Deneb said. “They’re ready for our oil drill tomorrow.”
Nodding, Zaurak placed two neat tick marks on the checklist he held, tacked to a clipboard. His pen glinted in the sun, its black surface engraved with the bronze-and-black insignia of Ocean Dominion as well as his name, Zaurak Alphard, in block letters.
“Thanks,” Zaurak said. He thumped Deneb’s strapping shoulder, but the playful gesture almost unbalanced him. Clutching Deneb’s arm, Zaurak leaned on his left foot, his right all but ornamental, the toes lifted. His arms were thick, hairy, and sinewy like a gorilla’s, as though to try to compensate for the limp in his right leg.
“May I ask you a personal question, Zaurak?”
Izar raised his eyebrows disapprovingly at Deneb, but the twenty-two-year-old derrickhand did not notice.
“Ask away,” Zaurak replied cheerfully.
“What happened to your leg?”
“That’s a personal question,” Izar interjected coldly. Zaurak fraternized with the men, but Izar wished he would keep them at a distance, as Izar himself did—Ocean Dominion was a corporation, not a community collective. He was, however, surprised that Deneb did not already know the story of Zaurak’s leg; all the other men did. It must be because Deneb was new, hired by Zaurak just two months ago.
“I’m sorry.” Deneb removed his cap and fidgeted with it, his eyes downcast.
“It’s fine,” Zaurak assured him with a swift smile. “I’m hardly sensitive about it. When I was thirty, and a manager of operations at Ocean Dominion, I was skinning a whale shark, and my leg got caught in the skinning equipment—which quite resembled a shark’s jaws, as a matter of fact. My shin bone split in half horizontally across the middle. Doctor Navi said I would lose my leg below the knee, and he was prepared to saw it off himself, but Antares hired the best specialists money could buy and paid for my medical care and rehabilitation out of pocket—a total of a quarter million dollars. The sum enabled me to retain my leg. When Antares visited me in the hospital after my surgery, he gave me this pen.”
Deneb looked at the pen as incredulously as though it were a wand. “That’s a beautiful story,” he said, whistling. “Antares sounds like a great man.”
“He is,” Izar said.
Continuing to whistle, Deneb slipped away.
Workers arrived at Zaurak’s elbow one after the other to tell him which parts of the drillship they had checked: stand pipe, draw works, turn table, rat hole, crown blocks, suction line. Zaurak nodded, smiled slightly, and made tick marks steadily in his clipboard. He commanded a natural loyalty and deference from the men, as he did from Izar.