The Third Man. Perhaps he was trying to leave the building, now that he’d placed the tin on Izar’s desk. Izar would not let him leave Ocean Dominion alive.
Quiet as a panther, he stepped out from the restroom into the corridor, and looked about, beads of sweat sprouting on his brow. But the hallway was empty—not a shadow, neither to right nor left. Izar heard another sound—a rattle, like someone was wrestling against his chains. It had come from below. He strode into his office, placed the scroll on his desk, then fell flat to the floor in the position of a push-up, as he had on Dominion Drill I when he’d been looking down through the borehole. He pressed his ear to the floor and, eyes shut tight, listened. A faint clang again—definitely from below.
That made even less sense than if it had come from above.
Hurrying out of his office, Izar stomped to the end of the hallway. He flashed his identification card in front of the scanner to the private elevator. Jumping into the ramshackle cage, he pressed B2. As soon as the bars parted, he bolted into his Invention Chamber. But no one was there except for Castor. He breathed a sigh of relief, for the Invention Chamber was the most vulnerable part of the company—a raw, open kidney—because of its shelves of flammable fluids.
A sputtering sound—Izar’s gaze flew up to the maze of intestine-like pipes in the ceiling. But this gaseous noise was different than the sounds he’d heard earlier.
He shut the door to the Invention Chamber and returned to the private elevator. His index finger hovered over B1, then dropped down to B3, the floor accessible only to the president of the company.
With a small shock, Izar realized that he was now president of Ocean Dominion, along with Saiph, and so the floor should now be accessible to him. He pressed the B3 button so hard that its crimson light flickered out. The ramshackle cage closed and descended. When the elevator came to a halt, Izar flashed his identification card against the interior scanner, but the bars did not part.
Of course. His identification card was still that of vice president. In order to obtain a higher level of access, he would first need to get a new card from the security department. He nonetheless stood there, listening intently, trying to catch a whisper, a rustle. And there it was again, a sound—this time, like a sigh.
The Third Man was here, on this floor. He might have a gun; he might spring out of the shadows at any moment and point it at Izar’s head. Trapped in the elevator, Izar would be unable to defend himself. He should flee immediately up to the safety of B1. But though his finger poised over the button, it refrained from pressing it. He continued to stand there, listening with both his ears and body.
But all fell silent. Not even the air swirled anymore on this deserted floor. The only sound he heard was the grating of his own breath. Clutching the bars of the elevator, he banged his head against them, like a caged bear.
It had been a long day; the noises he’d heard must have spewed from the pipes in his Invention Chamber.
10
The Night Assailant
Her decision made to find the elixir, Coralline felt a reservoir of eel-like electric energy building in her tail. She changed out of her chemise into an iridescent-green bodice with thick straps. She then lifted her hair to the top of her head and made a big, loose bun, tying it all with a rope of sisal. Next, she grabbed her satchel off a hook on the wall and laid it open on her bed.
Darting to her armoire, she pulled out a handful of corsets from a drawer. One she held up and examined whimsically—it was the sky-blue bodice she’d worn on her second date with Ecklon, with lace along the neckline and cloud-white ribbons down its center. She remembered how admiringly he’d appraised her that evening. It remained his favorite item of her wardrobe, she believed. Folding it delicately, she placed it in her satchel, along with the other corsets. Then she packed an ivory chemise in which to sleep, carefully tucking into its folds the olivine-encrusted comb her mother had given her.
“You’re going on an Elixir Expedition, not your honeymoon,” Pavonis called. “Only the bare necessities, please.”
Ignoring him, Coralline clutched the pen she’d discovered in the midst of the black poison spill, with the name Zaurak Alphard engraved upon it. She held it close to her nose and stared at it so fiercely that her eyes crossed. It would serve as the funnel for her anger, a motivator if she ever lost courage. She added it to the contents of her satchel.
She then shifted to the shelves lining the wall next to her bedroom door. Her fingers traveled over the spines of some of her favorite medical textbooks: A Reference Guide for the Diligent Apothecary’s Bedside, The Medical Relationship Between Happiness and Healing, The Age-Old Amalgamation of Alleviating Algae. She wanted to pack them, but there was no space in her satchel for books. She rose toward the ceiling to look at her most precious medical item, sitting lofty and self-important on the highest shelf, its case a pretty, pearlescent white: her apothecary arsenal.
Collecting it off the shelf, she slid aside its twin clasps. The apothecary arsenal consisted of two sections: one for algal experimentation—with polished flasks and vials in precise compartments, snippers with shining blades, a blue-shale mortar and pestle, a long-handled microscope; and another section for patient treatment—soft swaths of pyropia bandages, fine filaments for stitches, a scalpel, even a vial of anesthetic.
Her father had given the medical kit to her on her twentieth birthday. It was intended to be used outside of a clinic, when one didn’t have all of one’s implements at hand. But Coralline had never used it before, because she’d never treated anyone outside of The Irregular Remedy before. Plus, she’d been saving it for a medical emergency.
“As I examined anemones with a microscope during my career as a coral connoisseur,” her father had said as he’d handed her the apothecary arsenal, “you will examine algae with a microscope during your career as a healer. My career was shorter than I would have liked”—he’d looked down sadly at his stump—“but I hope yours lasts as long as you live. No joy is more rejuvenating than that which springs from the work you love.”
Coralline hugged her apothecary arsenal to her chest. She longed to pack it in her satchel but wondered whether she should. Without a medical badge from the Association of Apothecaries, she would be in defiance of the Medical Malpractice Act if she were found to be treating anyone other than herself. But she was legally permitted to experiment with algae—it was just that no one could consume her preparations other than her. Also, since she’d packed a memento of her mother—the jeweled comb—the apothecary arsenal could serve as a memento of her father. Yes, that was fair, reasonable.
She added it to her satchel, packing it vertically, to one side, so its case would not get scratched. It consumed almost half the space of the satchel, but it let her entertain the illusion that she was still an apothecary, and just for that, it was worth it.
Coralline added two small jars of salve to her satcheclass="underline" toothed wrack salve, for open wounds like cuts and gashes, and horned wrack salve, to reduce swelling and bruising. She’d applied toothed wrack salve every night to her father’s stump in the weeks after his haccident, and she’d applied horned wrack salve to Ecklon’s fractured elbow the day he’d arrived at The Irregular Remedy for the first time.