Coralline tried to anchor her thoughts onto something, for it would help her remain conscious. Her glance fell on her father’s right arm.
It was a narrowing rod that culminated not in a hand but in a bony swelling of a wrist. There was a filmy softness to the skin of his wrist, like that of a newborn; though her father was fifty years old, the skin over his stump was just months old. Coralline shuddered to remember the day his hand had been severed: His wrist had been a mangled mess of bone and sinew, blood spurting out of it like the ink of an octopus. Her mother called it his haccident—an abbreviation for “hand accident”—but Coralline considered the term misleading (though she’d grudgingly come to use it as well). What happened to her father had not been an accident: Ocean Dominion, its ships ever-present on the waters, had planted dynamite in a coral reef in Urchin Grove, in order to kill and collect schools of fish.
Coralline’s father, a coral connoisseur, had been studying the reef with his microscope. He’d made a note on his parchment-pad that coral polyps, the tiny, soft-bodied organisms whose exoskeleton formed the reef, were finding it difficult to absorb calcium carbonate from the waters, due to ocean acidification. When he’d looked up from his parchment-pad, he’d spotted dynamite tucked in a crevice of the reef. Immediately, he’d inserted his hand into the crevice to extract it. He’d managed to wrest the dynamite out and had raised his arm to hurl it away, but it had exploded, taking his hand with it.
Coralline’s mother had told him he should have bolted the scene instead of risking his hand and life.
“My hand exploded, so the reef wouldn’t,” Trochid had replied. “I would do it again, Abalone.”
“Well, I don’t want a handless husband!” she’d snapped, her amber-gold eyes flaming. “And if you have such poor judgment, I must insist you retire, Trochid.”
Applying steady pressure over the next days like a tightly bound tourniquet, Abalone had compelled him to resign from his role in the Under-Ministry of Coral Conservation. In his retirement, he had become a shadow of his former self, in Coralline’s opinion. He drifted aimlessly through the living room in the early hours like a ghost. His desk, previously stacked with books like The Animated Lives of Anemones and Love of Limestone, now sat empty, except for one volume: Handling a Difficult Adjustment to Retirement.
Coralline looked at her father’s stone-stick on the floor. It divided into two, then three, until it looked like an array of fingers. Her head started to loll, but, just then, the tremors in the waters ended. The ship had passed. Her daze dissipated slowly. . . . Once she was mentally steady again, she bent at the waist, collected the stone-stick, and handed it to her father. He took it, but rather than eat with it, he set it to the side of his plate. He clasped his left hand around his stump, as though his wrist throbbed with a phantom pain in proximity to the phantoms on the waters.
“Humans are a menace,” Trochid said. “Our only solace is that they cannot disrupt our lives any more than they already do.”
“Why not?” Coralline asked.
“Because they’re fire, and we’re water. Fire vaporizes water, and water vanquishes fire. The two can never truly meet.”
Izar stepped out of his small basement office and looked right and left down the hallway. Satisfied that he was alone, he turned on his heel and strode down the dimly lit corridor to the private elevator, where he flashed his identification card before the scanner. The elevator was right there—Izar was the only person to ever use it—but it was so old and ramshackle that its bars moved as slowly as arthritic knees.
Izar examined his identification card as he waited for the elevator bars to part. A circular bronze-and-black insignia glowed on the back of his card, the letters O and D intertwined over a fishhook that slashed the circle in half. The front of the card stated: Izar Eridan, vice president of operations. Underneath the words was a faded picture of him—light-blue collar, chestnut curls, indigo eyes staring at the camera somewhat anxiously, for the day the photo had been taken six years ago had been his first at the company where he’d decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
The elevator bars groaned to a halt. Izar stepped inside the decrepit cage and rode it from the first floor of the basement, B1, down to the second floor, B2. The thirty floors of Ocean Dominion aboveground were sleek and modern—the building formed a bronze glass arrow pointing toward the sky in Menkar—but the three underground floors had always intentionally been excluded from renovation. B1 contained Izar’s office and those of other key men in the operations department; B2 was accessible only by this private elevator, to which Izar shared access only with Antares Eridan, the president of Ocean Dominion. But Antares had never descended into B2 after Izar’s first day at the company, so Izar considered B2 his private asylum. As for B3, it was accessible only to Antares, but Antares had no use for it, so it lay dark and dusty.
When the elevator opened again, Izar marched three steps to the one door on B2 and stepped inside the room. It was a windowless warehouse with unpainted walls and untiled floor, but he felt as comforted to enter it as though it were a penthouse—this room was his Invention Chamber. Every night, as soon as the responsibilities of his vice president day job were complete, after other employees had grumbled their way out the doors of Ocean Dominion, Izar slinked into his Invention Chamber to start his night-shift: Castor.
Outside the Invention Chamber, Izar existed; in the Invention Chamber, he came alive. But not tonight.
Instead of stomping into his lair like a lion onto a savannah, Izar closed the door and leaned against it, his shoulders sagging. Looking resolutely away from Castor, he took off his pin-striped suit jacket and dropped it to the floor. He then uncuffed his white, starched-cotton shirtsleeves and rolled them up to his elbows. His glance fell upon his watch; the luminescent hour markers told him the time was close to eleven at night. He unclasped his watch and dropped it upon his suit jacket on the floor, finding the concept of time too manacling in a place where sparks of innovation appeared and disappeared as suddenly as the glimmers of fireflies.
Izar continued to stand there, leaning against the door, for how long he did not know. He despised procrastination, but this night, the odds were stacked so high against him that he could not bear to face them . . . not yet. If he succeeded in what he intended, he and Antares would become the richest men on earth; if he failed, his life to date would have been a waste, like the dirt under his shoes. Not only the years of his adulthood but also his childhood would have been a waste, for he had been preparing for this purpose for the last twenty-five years, since the very day Antares had adopted him at three years of age.
Izar still remembered the moment like it was yesterday: Kneeling before him, Antares had lit a match. Izar had been mesmerized by the flame—it was a drop of suspended sunlight, a tiny golden phoenix—but Antares had dropped the match in a glass of water. Izar had plunged his fingers into the water to try to rescue the flame, but it had died instantly. Izar had snatched the glass out of Antares’s hand, raised it over his head, and smashed it to the floor. He could still feel the droplets of water splattering his shins.
Antares had not rebuked him. Instead, he had smiled. “I believe you’re a very clever boy,” he’d said in his hoarse smoker’s voice. “When you grow up, I want you to invent underwater fire.”