His eardrums felt on the verge of explosion, like fizz attempting to escape from a bottle. The air in the cavities was being compressed by the pressure of water, he acknowledged to himself—a fact that meant he was sinking. His face scrunched, and he pressed his lips together to keep water out of his lungs, but his mouth opened of its own volition.
He choked. He thrashed. Then he was attacked.
Teeth as sharp as butcher’s knives slit open the sides of his neck, carving one painful gash after another on each side. He wished the creature would just swallow him whole, but instead, it broke the bones in his legs, starting with his toes and ankles, which gave way as easily as toothpicks, then his shins and thighs, which held up no better than rickety chairs.
Slowly, agonizingly, he died.
ZONE II
Twilight
12
Dead or Alive
Sunshine refracted into the water slowly but steadily, in thick segments and spurts. Octopuses and eels retreated into their lairs, and rays and snails emerged slowly from their crevices.
Grateful for the daylight, and for having survived her first night out of doors, Coralline stuck the rod of her luciferin lantern in an outer pocket of her satchel.
Houses no longer sprouted out of the seabed, there were no shops or lanes, just clear, uninterrupted expanses of ocean. Urchin Grove was now behind her. At twenty, she had finally left the village of her birth. She hadn’t known what she’d expected to see, but what she did see was that, if not for the lack of dwellings, the vista before her quite resembled Urchin Grove—the water, the algae, the rocks, the sands—yet it somehow also looked different.
She’d hoped to feel something inspiring or poetic as she examined novel surroundings, but all she felt was the sleepless tiredness of her muscles. She continued to follow Pavonis’s tail, flapping right and left in front of her, but there was an aimlessness to its swing. During the night, their goal had been to leave Urchin Grove; now that they’d accomplished that basic feat, they did not know where to actually begin the Elixir Expedition.
Pavonis came to a sudden stop. Coralline bumped into his tailfin. But the collision was different than usual, for his tail was now stiff, and Coralline felt as though she’d bumped her head against a door. She’d seen such stop-and-stiffen reactions in him before—they happened when he smelled blood.
“Let it go, Pavonis—” she began, rubbing her forehead, but he was already cutting through the waters at breakneck speed. She trailed him with a sigh. He was the detective of blood—where there was blood, he could not rest until he knew its source. Generally, the source was someone with a minor cut across the hand or arm—nothing particularly interesting—and Coralline apologized to the person on Pavonis’s behalf; his sudden arrival, with its great swell of water, tended to alarm. The only serious case Pavonis had ever encountered had been her father’s hand.
But now, when Pavonis came to a stop, Coralline’s hands flew to her mouth.
A dead merman hovered vertically before them. His eyes were closed, his gill slits lay flat and unfluttering along the sides of his neck, and his tail was as bleached as though it had never once held a spot of color. Goosebumps prickled all over Coralline’s arms. She’d always been terrified at the idea of encountering death; now, she realized why: There was an eerie stillness and finality to it.
There was also a mystery to it, in this case: The merman’s body should have descended to the seabed instead of hovering as it did, almost precisely midway between the waves and the ocean floor. The descent to the seabed should have happened naturally, for surplus water should have filtered into the body through the gills, making it heavier. Humans, she had heard, were different than merpeople in this regard. Just as they lived differently than merpeople, they also died differently—on the rare occasions that they died in the ocean, their bodies floated up to the waves. This person had died like he was neither a merman nor a human, or else was both.
“It’s a bad omen to be near a dead body,” Nacre said quietly, emerging at the top of Coralline’s satchel, “especially one in such an unnatural position.”
“Let’s go,” Pavonis said, his tail starting to swish.
“But what if he isn’t dead?” protested Altair. “It’s our moral duty to help him, in that case, especially given that Coralline is a healer.”
Coralline nodded in Altair’s direction, her gaze unveering from the merman. She should at least examine him perfunctorily—that way, she could tell herself she’d done what she could. She approached him cautiously.
His face was angular, with a hard jaw and a set line to his mouth; it was similar to Ecklon’s in structure but there was nothing to offset the severity in this case—no traces of dimples, no cleft in his chin. Rather, a hook-shaped scar ran from his earlobe almost to his lip, making his face harsh.
Also, disconcertingly, he was bare chested. At The Irregular Remedy, Coralline had sometimes examined mermen without their waistcoats—such as Agarum, during his heart attack—but never outdoors had she encountered a merman without a waistcoat. There was a vulgarity, as well as a strange intimacy, to being in such close proximity to him. Coralline proceeded with her examination swiftly. She placed two fingers just below his jaw; there was no pulse, as she’d expected, but his temperature was high—so high that her hand almost flew back to her side. He must have died of a fever, she decided, though she’d never come across such an extreme fever before.
There was no blood on him that she could see, yet there had to be some, otherwise Pavonis would not have smelled it. “Take a look at his hands,” Pavonis drawled from above.
There were red marks along his wrists, as though his hands had been tightly bound, but he’d managed to wrest them free just before dying. She turned the palms of his hands gingerly. A gash cut through the palm of his right hand—it did not seem to be bleeding anymore, but it must have been just a short while ago.
Toothed wrack salve would soothe the wound. And yet to apply a salve to a dead merman, it was ridiculous. It was not against the law, however: The Association of Apothecaries required Coralline to possess a badge in order to treat anyone other than herself—anyone alive. There was no law against treating a dead person, for the obvious reason: Why would anyone want to? Recognizing that what she was doing was idiotic but at least not illegal, Coralline extracted her jar of toothed wrack salve from her satchel and quickly dabbed the balm onto his cut.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Pavonis bellowed. “I’m starting to think your sentimentality borders on insanity.”
Pavonis’s tail flicked sharply in disapproval. The gush of water pushed Coralline toward the dead merman, until their scales and shoulders touched. She did not know what drew her, but her hand rose to his cheek, and her finger traced the ridge of his scar.
His eyes snapped open.
Izar was flooded by water—it was in his ears, nose, eyes, and mouth—yet he somehow remained alive. A girl with turquoise eyes was staring at him, her lips just a kiss away from his, but before he could so much as blink, she slipped away, tail flashing—she was not a girl but a mermaid.