“You’ll be staying here just one night,” Pavonis continued, “not the rest of your life. I don’t know why you’re even hesitating.”
“I’m hesitating because Bristled Bed and Breakfast was the site of a brutal murder just two weeks ago.” She had heard of it from Ecklon. As a detective, he knew of practically all murders committed anywhere in Meristem. Whenever he’d told her about them, they’d sounded distant and foreign, in faraway places, but now here she was—at her second murder scene of the day.
“Tell you what, Coralline,” Izar said, “I’ll sleep next to you, if you’re afraid.”
Altair gasped.
“How dare you, you vulgar human!” Pavonis hissed. His tail slapped the waters, creating turbid ripples, and his snout tossed Izar up. Coralline tried to follow Izar’s trajectory with her eyes but could make out little past the narrow radius of her luciferin lantern’s white-blue glow.
Long moments later, when Izar managed to return to her side, his hair was disarrayed and his expression bewildered. “I meant I would sleep in the room next to you,” he clarified.
“Thank you for the thought,” Coralline said, only to be polite.
“It’s irrelevant where you sleep, human,” Pavonis growled. “My eyes are always open.”
He meant it literally, Coralline knew: Sharks did not have eyelids. Many types of sharks, including whale sharks, didn’t truly sleep, not the way people did. Sharks experienced rest periods, turning off one side of their brain like whales and dolphins, but they were always partially conscious and aware. Some sharks, including whale sharks, continued to swim while resting, so that water would continue filtering through their gills, providing fresh oxygen. If they stopped swimming for even a short period of time, they could die of hypoxia, or oxygen loss. Coralline had always found it a lucky thing that merpeople didn’t need to move in order to breathe—imagine, nights without sleep! Yes, merpeople had five sets of gills like most sharks, but merpeople gills were finer and floatier than most, such that even the barest of ripples let water, and oxygen, pass through. Pavonis’s lifestyle had its own advantages, though—his incessant swimming meant that tiredness was an alien concept to him.
“Think of it, Coralline,” Pavonis persisted. “Instead of wasting time in indecision, you could be fast asleep at this moment, cocooned comfortably in a bed.”
A blanket covering her up to her chin, a bed beneath her back, her tail resting—Coralline could not resist the vision. “You’re right, Pavonis,” she said, tucking the rod of her luciferin lantern in her satchel.
She deposited Altair in a spot he chose in the shadows of Bristled Bed and Breakfast. He camouflaged himself immediately, as though to hide from the world that he was in the vicinity of such a place. She deposited Nacre on the exterior wall of the hotel, upon Nacre’s order of such. “I’ll entertain myself by eavesdropping through open window shutters,” the snail said cheerfully.
“Keep your shutters open, Coralline,” Pavonis said. “I’ll drop by before you sleep.”
Coralline nodded. From his tone, she knew there was something he wished to say but could not say in front of the others. Trying to suppress her sense of foreboding, she took a deep breath and forced herself across the threshold of Bristled Bed and Breakfast with Izar. A dagger continued to glint in the hand of the merman just outside the door.
Fissures marked the walls of the lobby like acne, and the whole place looked like it might collapse into a pile of rubble at any moment, but Izar felt relieved that he and Coralline were finally inside Bristled Bed and Breakfast. No one had asked him for his opinion outside, so he had not bothered to offer it, but it was his opinion that Coralline took too long to make simple decisions and that everything affected her too deeply—Tang Tarpon’s death, the feelings of each of her ridiculous pets, the appearance of this motel-like place. She was like a sponge—absorbing everything around her and letting it steep through her skin.
The two of them approached the concierge, a pudgy, slack-faced merman with pores on his nose that made Izar think of sprinkles of black pepper. A square stitched onto his breast pocket stated his name as Bream. A placard on his desk announced: “If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the lobby.”
“Did you send us a scroll to make a reservation?” Bream asked placidly, his arms lifting and landing softly on his desk.
“No,” Coralline answered.
Izar could not help but scoff. He thought of the many reservations he’d made at the restaurant Yacht through an act as simple as picking up the telephone. But merpeople were primitive, living without long-distance communications such as phones and cables, without electricity—with nothing but running water. Even their clothes were old-fashioned, the corsets and waistcoats. Izar had traveled a few hundred feet below sea level but felt as though he’d traveled a hundred years back in time.
“Here’s the key to your room,” Bream said, dangling a single key before their faces. Long and weighty, it made Izar think of a relic from the sixteenth century. “Your room number is—”
“Separate rooms,” Coralline pronounced.
“You could have said,” Bream muttered in an injured voice.
“Rooms next to each other,” Izar said, remembering his promise to Coralline outside, not that it had seemed to matter much to her.
As Bream poked about a drawer for another key, Izar felt a slight current at his back. He was now attuned to currents, he realized—a current was like a breeze, except that a short-lived current was usually created by movement rather than the elements.
He turned around. Two mermen came to hover behind him and Coralline, the same two who’d been lingering outside the door. Their orange tails made Izar think of a cantaloupe and a carrot. Despite the discrepancy in their shapes, he could tell at a glance they were brothers: An identical circle of baldness brewed at the center of their skulls, and their complexions looked like pallid lumps of powder.
Though Izar stared at them now, they did not seem to notice him. Their eyes were traveling up and down Coralline’s iridescent-green bodice and bronze scales, as she leaned over the counter. “Let’s get a room next to hers,” the fat brother said to the thin one.
“Your room numbers are forty-one and forty-two,” Bream said, dangling one key before Izar and the other before Coralline.
Izar grabbed his key, then asked, “Is there anything to eat around here?”
Bream opened a drawer conspirationally. “I can offer you a snack of devil’s tongue from my personal stash,” he said in a low voice.
Izar did not know what to make of the offer.
“Devil’s tongue is my favorite snack!” Coralline said, her eyes sparkling.
Bream handed them each a set of thin red strips, knotted also with a red strip. It looked like a packet of tongues—it was a sort of red algae, Izar supposed. Coralline snatched her packet from Bream’s hand, extracted a tongue, and began to munch on it enthusiastically. Izar tried a tongue more gingerly. The bite was rubbery, with the taste and texture of jerky—he liked it and took another bite.
“Three carapace each, please,” Bream requested.
Recalling Coralline’s counting of his carapace earlier, Izar placed two shells on the counter, one of them small and round—she’d called it a moon snail shell—and the other ridged and pointed, shaped like a miniature ice-cream cone—she’d called it a wentletrap. Coralline dipped her hand into an outer pocket of her satchel, extracted the same two shells as him, and placed them on the counter. After lunch, Izar had noticed that she’d given her cerith, worth twenty carapace, to the yellow-tailed waitress Morena, and had requested smaller denominations. Morena had given her a fistful of moon snails and wentletraps. Coralline had placed most of them in her golden carapace pouch and had inserted a couple into an outer pocket of her satchel for easy access.