“Took you long enough!” a voice hissed. “Black poison has made this horrible village even more horrible.”
Pavonis. Coralline could hardly see him because of the darkness, but she would have recognized him even had he not spoken, from the strong ripples created by his arrival. She reached a hand through the shutters to touch his face and felt comforted when her fingers found his snout. His head itself was larger than the window frame, so he angled himself to it diagonally, such that one eye was looking at her through a slit in the shutters. She would normally have pulled open the pane of shutters and stayed with him at the window, but, drained from the events of the day, she returned to her bed and pulled her blanket up to her chin.
“I have an idea,” Pavonis announced.
“What?” she asked with little interest.
“We can save Naiadum through the elixir.”
“The elixir is just a legend, Pavonis.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Well, I don’t understand how an elixir can be made of starlight. And a quest for the elixir is known to be foolhardy.”
“Foolhardy is a league above cowardly.”
“I am a coward, Pavonis! When a ship passes above, my first inclination is to hide under a table.”
“That may be your inclination under ordinary circumstances, but not necessarily under extraordinary circumstances. You saw the ship from the waves today, the ship that spewed the black poison—you didn’t hide; you stayed.”
“I suppose,” Coralline said glumly.
“Beyond saving your brother, I have another motive for my elixir quest recommendation, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.”
“I haven’t.”
“I’m itching to leave Urchin Grove. We never managed to make it on our North-to-South Expedition after your graduation from Urchin Apothecary Academy, but we can make it on this expedition, this . . . Elixir Expedition, let’s call it. Let’s leave tonight, before anyone rises.”
“But where would we even begin our quest? How would we find Mintaka, the magician who makes the elixir?”
“Hmm. Let’s begin by swimming over to that fiancé of yours and enlisting him in our Elixir Expedition. Given that he’s a detective, I’m hoping he can make himself useful—”
“Well, I wouldn’t dream of leaving without him!”
“That makes one of us. Now get out of bed, Coralline.”
Coralline thought back to a day at Urchin Rudimentary, when she’d been summoned to the principal’s office. She’d been fourteen, and a merboy in her class had shoved Naiadum, then two years old, during playtime. Naiadum’s arm had gotten scratched against a stone, and he’d wailed to draw Coralline’s attention away from her lunch of felty fingers. Despite being a head shorter than the bullying merboy, Coralline had hurled herself at him and pushed him down into the sand. Her face had been just as startled as his—she hadn’t known she’d been capable of aggression until then, when her brother had been hurt.
Now, while Naiadum was hovering on the brink of death, she was lying comfortably ensconced in her bed. She was responsible for Naiadum’s condition. Therefore, even if it killed her, it was her responsibility to find a way to save him. Flinging off her blanket, she leapt out of bed.
From the doorway, Izar looked about his office: the staid black desk, its surface scratched; the chairs, new but already worn; the faded blueprint of Dominion Drill I tacked to the wall with pushpins. For the first time, he understood why he’d always found himself comfortable in this shabby, underground space—it resembled the basement storage closet from his childhood.
His conversation with Saiph had been a shot of adrenaline. His legs pulsed with energy, but his office seemed too cramped to contain it, so he continued to hover in the doorway. There was a gray tin on his desk, he noticed suddenly, just a little bigger than a tissue box.
His neck swerved right and left so sharply that a muscle creaked across his shoulders. But the dimly lit corridor was empty. It was the middle of the night; the men had long gone home. He turned back to the tin, his breath turning low and deep, blood pounding in his ears. The tin must be a third murder attempt on his life. But he’d just spoken with Saiph, who’d just touched base with the Secret Search team, and they had not yet found Zaurak or Serpens. That meant there must be another man involved—a Third Man.
Izar shrugged out of his gray suit jacket, dropping it to the floor. He uncuffed his blue, starched-cotton shirtsleeves and rolled them up to his elbows.
In three long strides, he was behind his desk, in his chair, his gaze unveering from the tin. Its weight would give him a clue. He picked it up gingerly, his fingers leaving tracks in the dust. It was light; from all the dynamite he’d designed for coral reefs, he knew it was unlikely to contain an explosive device. Placing the tin in front of him, he flicked its lid up with a thumb.
A half-shell lay there, with long, flaunting beige ridges and dark-pink fan-like ribs. The shell would have been somewhat heart shaped had it not been broken precisely in half. The line of the break was sharp enough to maim; it was a crude version of a dagger, Izar decided. He had never seen this half-shell before, and yet he had . . . but where? And when? Holding it up to his face, he swept its point just over the ridge of his scar. Could it have been this very half-shell that had gashed his jaw, twenty-five years ago? If so, perhaps the Third Man was telling Izar that, just as his biological parents had died, so he would soon die. As his jaw had been cut open then, his throat would be cut open soon.
Placing the half-shell on his desk, Izar returned his attention to the tin. An amber scroll lay in it, its material as thick as cardboard but, fortunately, a little more flexible than cardboard. He unrolled it carefully. Words were written upon it, but they were as indecipherable as washed-out scratches on a tree trunk. He’d never seen material like this before—that meant it must have come from the water. But what could merpeople have written upon it? And why was it on his desk?
Maybe it was a death note. In fact, in all likelihood, it was.
Izar picked up the final item in the tin: a small card, the size of a business card, but without any words—just coordinates, latitude and longitude. It could be the location of the Third Man. Maybe he was taunting Izar to come out and find him. Maybe the contents of this tin were clues for Izar to solve his own murder mystery.
His feet tapped the wheels of his chair until the half-shell beat a faint tune on his desk, until the scroll started to roll away. His hand caught the scroll before it rolled off his desk—in that moment, a thought flew across his mind: Merpeople paper should be legible underwater! He raced to the restroom one door away from his office and held the bottom-right corner of the material experimentally under the spray of the faucet. It started bleaching a yellow pigment into the sink, like it was bleeding a pus-filled death. He yanked the scroll away from the sink, cursing. How could water damage that which was meant to be read underwater?
He heard a thud—it sounded like someone somewhere in the building was slamming himself against a wall. But between Izar, in the basement on B1, and Saiph, on the thirtieth floor—though he would have gone home by now—there should have been not a soul. Where could the sound have come from? And who could it be?