All necks craned up simultaneously. Shouts began, then blended, such that they became a deafening roar. Guests started scrambling into the Elnath Mansion through the windows. The black blanket, now directly above, was descending continuously, its path blocking sunshine and shrouding the waters. Coralline clutched Ecklon’s elbow. The ocean was closing in around her. No place could offer a superior refuge to the Mansion, and her tailfin flicked in her readiness to swim through a window herself, but she had to find her brother first. “Naiadum’s missing,” she told Ecklon.
Within a minute, all guests were indoors, and only Coralline and Ecklon remained in the garden, their eyes scanning the waters for Naiadum. An immense bow shape circled above and descended with a powerful swell of water—Pavonis. Coralline sagged against him and asked him whether he’d seen Naiadum. “I haven’t,” he huffed. “Your brother tends to always be under-tail; how can he have vanished?”
The sands agitated, and velvety, navy-blue wings patterned with white spots emerged like bedsheets lifting—Menziesii. He nodded his head at Coralline in greeting, and she nodded back at him. Spotted eagle rays were often taciturn, but Ecklon’s muse, Menziesii, was more taciturn than most—a nod usually formed the extent of his communication with her.
“Did Naiadum give any hints about where he could possibly be?” Ecklon demanded, grasping Coralline by the arms.
“The day before yesterday, when I was reading him a bedtime story, he told me he wanted to crest. He threatened he might venture up to the waves when I wasn’t looking.”
Coralline, Ecklon, Pavonis, and Menziesii looked up as one at the dark swath. Opaque and indiscernible, descending continuously, it was by now almost upon them. Coralline shrank and shuddered in its shadow.
Ecklon raised his arms such that they formed arrows to either side of his head and, without a further word, he dove upward into the blackness. Before Coralline could even blink, he’d disappeared in the swirl, vanishing as fast as a tube anemone. Menziesii disappeared after Ecklon, just as completely and wordlessly, his long whip of a tail slapping the waters behind him. Pavonis fixed a grim eye on Coralline and then angled himself up and vanished also.
Part of the reason they were entering the black poison so readily was that they were not apothecaries. From her medical textbooks, Coralline knew the precise perils of black poison: gill slits could close, causing suffocation, and ingestion of the poison could cause blood contamination. The difference between the two forms of death was speed—fast versus slow. Those who were prone to fainting were particularly susceptible during a black poison spill, because, when unconscious, their bodies were limp and defenseless against the poison. And Coralline was more prone to fainting than anyone she’d ever known.
What if she died in her attempt to save Naiadum? In fact, what if Naiadum was already dead? But he could not be dead, she told herself. Had he died, his body would have sunk down to the seabed—as merpeople bodies did in death—and a passing mermaid or merman would have spotted him. Unless, of course, black poison caused flotation, in which case his body would not sink.
Coralline’s hands rose to her gill slits, as she imagined them closing like window shutters in the slime. Smacking her forehead to clear her thoughts, she scolded, Stop being a coward! Then she raised her arms over her head, pressed her lips together, and, tail quaking violently, arrowed her way into the black poison.
The blackness coated first her fingers, then her arms, then her shoulders—a slippery, stinking layer—then it covered her scales and slipped steadily through the sequins of her corset to swathe her skin. It constricted her breathing—her gills were no longer flaring open and closed freely, but were fluttering weakly along the sides of her neck. It weighed down her tail, such that she had to swing with all her strength in order to move at all.
She sought Pavonis’s wide tailfin in the blackness but could see no farther than her own fingertips. Knowing she wouldn’t last long in the low-oxygen environment, she swung her tail harder in order to arrive at the surface faster. The blackness became increasingly impermeable, a part of the water but also apart from it. . . . Her eyes closed, her head lolled, and her arms flopped down to her sides. I can’t afford to faint now, she whispered to herself. Both her life and Naiadum’s depended on her remaining conscious. Opening her eyes, she managed to force her arms back over her head. All of a sudden, her head erupted over the waves.
She kept her neck submerged, so that her gills could continue to breathe (to the limited extent that they could in the black poison). The air whipped and parched her greasy cheeks and desiccated her eyes, turning her vision as gray and heavy as the sky that stretched above. A wave of blackness crashed over her head. She shivered uncontrollably, feeling as vulnerable as a turtle without a shell. She considered the ocean itself a shell—like a roof over the head, it formed a dense layer of protection, as well as separation, from humans.
“Coralline!”
The voice was unfamiliar, as was the face in the distance. It took her a moment to recognize Ecklon, for his face was smeared black; she probably looked the same to him, she thought. And his voice sounded different because he’d called her name in the air rather than water.
Behind Ecklon, Coralline made out the triangular shape of Pavonis’s dorsal fin, as well as one of Menziesii’s white-spotted wings. Far behind them was a ship, retreating into the distance, a tower rising to the sky at its center. From her position, the men trodding about the ship looked like black sticks against the sun. She’d never seen humans before—their legs truly were as stodgy and graceless as she’d always heard. A bronze-and-black Ocean Dominion insignia glowed on the side of the ship.
An object floated over to Coralline’s nose. Narrow and black, it was a pen engraved with the Ocean Dominion logo and a name next to it in block letters: Zaurak Alphard.
She squeezed the pen with both hands, as though it were the villain’s throat.
“Coralline!” Ecklon cried again.
She slashed toward him, her head still over the water. But her progress was stalled, for she bumped into countless carcasses along the way: a northern puffer fish, floating with its yellow belly pointing skyward; a patch of tripletail fish floating on their sides; a leatherback sea turtle, the length of its carapace rivaling her own length.
Only when Coralline reached Ecklon did she see that his arms were cradling a body. A small, limp form with a pudgy, blackened face. Only the edges of his tailfin still hinted at its earlier tawny color. Naiadum.
The wall-to-wall carpet was not the standard, scratchy office floor covering; rather, it was an extravagant beige rug with an immense, bright-pink chrysanthemum blooming at its center. The walls of the press conference room were not a cold white, but were covered in a wallpaper of flying fish. And the chandeliers imparted a warm golden glow rather than an unfeeling fluorescent one. Floor-length windows stretched over one whole side of the rectangular room, and a slow sunset crept over the faces of the assembled men and women, bathing half of their faces in long, orange shadows.
Reporters are like “rabid dogs,” Antares often said, like “a hissing herd of hyenas,” and the press conference room, with its spongy colors and soft swaths of light, was designed to try to sedate their senses.
Antares stood at the center of a small stage at the front of the room. Saiph and Izar flanked him, standing along the two back corners of the stage, their hands folded before them in the manner of security guards. It had always been the role of the three of them to protect Ocean Dominion, but Izar had failed today, and his failure had endangered them all. The company he loved more than life itself stood liable to burst into flames all around him.