“Have you decided to leave the apothecary field in favor of becoming a clown?” he drawled, his orb of an eye roving over her gaudy corset. Coralline chortled, then stopped, as the sequins pricked her ribs. “What are the Minions doing here?” he said.
Nacre, smaller than Pavonis’s eye, hid in her shell. Altair, the size of Coralline’s hand, camouflaged, vanishing as completely as a ghost.
“Minions is not their name,” Coralline said, giving Pavonis a warning look.
“I have no reason to know their names. They’re beneath me.”
Coralline sighed. How could she and her parents have such different muses, all three of them disliking one another?
“Coralline!” Abalone called from the living room. “It’s time to leave for your engagement party!”
Coralline’s vertebrae sagged in the frame of the windowsill. In the aftermath of her firing from The Irregular Remedy, all she wanted was to lie in bed under her blanket. She didn’t want to greet a hundred guests at her engagement party. She particularly didn’t want to greet Ecklon’s mother, now that she knew Epaulette jeered at her behind her back.
“You know, we could have avoided all this if we’d left for Blue Bottle yesterday,” Pavonis said in an I-told-you-so voice.
“Oh my,” Altair gasped from among the grasses, even as he remained invisible. “Leaving your love Ecklon . . .”
“I couldn’t leave him,” Coralline said.
The water formed a sheet of turquoise embroidered with white, and the breeze was heavy with brine evaporated from the froth. A seagull with gray wings cackled as it flew over the drillship.
“Any word yet from Zaurak?” Izar asked Deneb. “Or Serpens?”
“I’ve tried both of them every ten minutes since we left Menkar,” Deneb replied.
Zaurak had a written checklist for the oil drill; Izar had a mental one, with just one word upon it—Zaurak. Zaurak was like a cane upon which Izar relied—without the cane, Izar could still walk, but his feet felt precariously unsteady. Yet the director of operations was missing today.
Izar had phoned him repeatedly before the drillship had departed Menkar. The phone had rung continuously, but there’d been no answer. Zaurak was always at least a quarter-hour early; where could he possibly be? Izar had wondered. On the other side of the ocean, the sun had scurried into the sky in limpid pink fragments that had dissolved to a burning gold. Izar had reluctantly given the crew an order to unlatch the ropes and hoist out to sea. It was the first time an Ocean Dominion drillship had departed on its mission an hour after schedule.
It was not just Izar who felt Zaurak’s absence—and, to a lesser extent, Serpens’s, who was also missing. The workers seemed to feel it, too, for their legs and arms moved robotically, mechanically, as they proceeded about their tasks. Izar looked at them with distrust: One of them had attempted to murder him yesterday. Dominion Drill I was an immense, sturdy ship, but Izar could just as well have been out at sea alone on a raft—that was how unsafe he felt. His gaze flew up to the derrick, in whose shadow he stood. His toes trembled in his steel-toed boots, prepared to leap out of the way in case the tower collapsed on him again. At any point, one of the workers could attempt to murder him, one of them might be plotting it at this very moment. . . .
The schedule for the day had been tight and had been tightened further by their delayed departure. The press conference was this evening, and Izar had to return to Menkar in time for it. With the constricted timeline he himself had established, he felt as though he’d buckled his belt two notches too tight and just couldn’t feel comfortable. Too many things could go wrong, and he had too little control over them.
“May I ask you something?” Deneb asked.
He was standing on the lowest rail of the ship, balancing somehow without holding onto the higher rails. Much of his face lay in the shadow of the sun, such that it appeared a dark oval. The mermaid tattooed across his forearm shone brightly. The only worker with whom Izar was speaking this morning was Deneb, for he had saved Izar yesterday, and so Izar trusted him and was trying to like him.
“Ask away,” Izar said.
“After the fall of the derrick yesterday, Zaurak was supposed to have double-checked the drillship. If we haven’t seen him today, how do we know he completed his check?”
“He left his clipboard on my desk. Everything was checked off.” Izar recognized the swerving handwriting, the spelling mistakes, the deep-blue flow of Zaurak’s engraved pen.
“But why would Zaurak and Serpens not be here? Both of them?”
“I can’t speak for Serpens, for I hardly know the man. As for Zaurak, maybe he’s sick.”
Izar was lying—he knew Zaurak could not be sick. In all of Izar’s six years at Ocean Dominion, he’d never once seen Zaurak so much as cough. Even in the weeks after his leg injury twenty-seven years ago, Zaurak had continued to work—from the hospital. Zaurak was like Izar; even had his leg been amputated, he would not have shirked work. His absence today went deeper than the water, deeper than the riser pipe the crew would soon drive into the ocean floor.
“I haven’t drilled oil before without Zaurak or Serpens,” Deneb persisted, “let alone without both.”
“Me neither.”
“Ocean Dominion’s competitor Atlantic Operations went bankrupt three months ago after its oil spill and the resulting loss of shareholder confidence. The entire crew died in the spill. What if that’s us, today?”
“We’re not Atlantic Operations.” Izar’s gaze shifted to the lifeboats. He could see part of two lifeboats over the rails, clinging to the sides of the drillship.
“As manager, Serpens’s role is especially crucial during an oil drill. He leads the men—”
“I will lead the men today,” Izar interrupted. “I alone designed the drillship and supervised its construction. I know the functioning of every nail and screw on this vessel, just as a biologist knows the functioning of every cell of the human body. Do you not trust me, Deneb, although I trust you?”
“But I do!” The derrickhand jumped down from the rails and strode over to Izar. He braced his feet hip-distance apart and crossed his arms, his stance paralleling Izar’s. His face gleamed under the morning sun, his ebony skin coated with a fine spray of froth. “May I ask you a personal question?”
“If you must.”
“When you take the private elevator down from your office, what do you do?”
Izar’s lips tightened. He only ever descended into his Invention Chamber late in the evening; the time of day was intentional, for the workers would have gone home by then. He supposed a few workers may have seen him step into the elevator once or twice, but all of them had the sense to not ask him about it.
“I cannot answer that,” he said. From Izar’s first days at Ocean Dominion, Antares had made him promise to not tell anyone of his underwater-fire work until an announcement was made publicly, in order to keep competing firms at bay. Other than Antares and Saiph, only Ascella knew about Castor, and she did not believe him.
Deneb was about to return to his position on the rails, when Izar said, “I now have something to ask you.”
The derrickhand squared his shoulders and stared at Izar like he was a one-man firing squad. “Anything!”
“Why is there a mermaid tattoo on your arm?”
“Oh, this.” Deneb smiled sheepishly at the tattoo, as at a crush. “I think mermaids are beautiful. I’ve always wanted to see one but have never been so fortunate. I wish they wouldn’t avoid ships, but I can understand why they do. Have you ever seen a mermaid?”