Following Bream’s directions, Izar and Coralline entered a shadowed, bumpy corridor to the side of the lobby. Room numbers started at one and continued onward, with ten rooms to a corridor. After they’d turned their fourth corner, Coralline slipped her key into the keyhole of a door marked forty-two, said good night to Izar, and closed the door abruptly. Izar fumbled with his key at length—he was used to flashing a card for entry, not wielding a museum-variety object.
There was a current at his back again. He turned around. It was the same two mermen from the lobby, the carrot and the cantaloupe. They inserted their key into the keyhole for room forty-three, next to Coralline’s, and looked at her door with longing. The fat merman licked his lips.
Izar squared his shoulders and clenched his fists. He considered confronting them, but then thought: What would he confront them about, precisely? And why should he confront them about anything? Coralline meant nothing to him. She was simply a pathway to the elixir, to his becoming a human again.
The brothers entered their room and shut their door. Izar managed to pry his own door open, and swam in.
It was a small, cave-like space with a slanting floor, equipped with three items of furniture: a topsy-turvy desk with cracked pillars; a narrow bed somewhere between a twin- and a full-size; and a dented dresser, upon which he immediately tossed his satchel. His nose wrinkled—the room had a musty odor. In water, smell was just as pronounced as on land, but the specific source of the odor was harder to pinpoint—smell was similar to sound underwater, in that sense. But other than its smell, Izar didn’t particularly mind the shabbiness of his room—he’d grown up in a storage closet, after all. He swam to the three little round, submarine-like windows and pulled their shutters over them.
Breathing a sigh of relief at being alone at last, he unzipped his satchel and pulled out the gray tin he’d found on his desk at Ocean Dominion. He unrolled the scroll inside the tin, turned it over, and ran his thumb over the logo Tang Tarpon had indicated in its top-left corner: P&P, referring to a stationery shop in Velvet Horn. Who knew where within Meristem that settlement might be, but, if time and circumstances permitted, he would like to go there, Izar decided. It might give him context on how the elixir note and half-shell had ended up in his possession, and, more importantly, how he’d transformed into a merman.
Eager to sleep soon, he turned his attention up to the half-dozen luciferin orbs meandering over the ceiling. Pulses of light within the glassy baubles cast a white-blue glow over the room. Luciferin orbs were always there, in all indoor spaces, journeying slowly over the ceiling, Coralline had told him at the restaurant Taeiniata. The orbs sought the ceiling automatically because, bubbling with nothing but bacteria, they were practically weightless and thus had a tendency to travel up. The orbs were not noticeable during the daytime because their bacteria glowed only in the dark.
The principle of the orbs was not different than that of his Castor’s dragon arm—both depended on oxygen. In the case of the orbs, the spark of light was obtained from a trick of biology: the reaction of oxygen and luciferin, a naturally occurring compound. In Castor’s case, the spark of fire was achieved through a trick of chemistry: the meeting of oxygen and combustion chemicals.
But how to dim these luciferin orbs at night? Izar wondered with irritation.
Flicking his tailfin, he ascended toward the orbs, but he moved so fast that he bumped his head against the ceiling. Movement indoors was different than outdoors, he’d just learned the hard way. Indoors, merpeople seemed to move slowly, vertically, the tailfin flicking gently to prevent collisions. Outdoors, merpeople swam horizontally, the tailfin flapping hard right and left to generate speed.
Izar grabbed a luciferin orb in his hands. Countless tiny pores smattered its surface to permit the flow of oxygen, just as the skin of Castor’s dragon arm was fitted with a distillation chamber to permit oxygen. Izar ran his hands over the orb; his fingers discovered a tiny switch and rotated it. The pores closed, and the light within the orbs dimmed, then eventually died, as the quantity of oxygen dwindled. Izar rotated the switches of two other orbs. He decided to leave the three other orbs in the room aglow, so that some light would remain. He did not trust the darkness of the water.
He collapsed on the bed but winced—the mattress was more of a plank than anything else, just a couple of inches thick. The blanket, meanwhile, was heavy—so that it wouldn’t float away, he supposed.
In an effort to become more comfortable, he tried to unclasp the baby’s-ear shells buttoning his waistcoat. The tight fit of a waistcoat made sense while swimming—so the fabric wouldn’t fly up due to water resistance—but it was constraining when lying down. His fingers fumbled with the shells, but they were too tiny and cumbersome to maneuver through buttonholes. Cursing, he conceded to sleeping in his waistcoat.
Chewing on his strips of devil’s tongue, he then aired his frustrations to himself.
He hated wasted time; every day was supposed to prove its use in the form of a tangible, precise accomplishment. But the feeling he’d had all day had been of wandering about with an animal circus. He still knew no specifics of the elixir; the conversation with homeless-looking Tang had only made him skeptical. Tang’s murder had also confirmed his suspicions about merpeople—given their bloodlust and eagerness to kill, it was no surprise they had murdered his parents.
How differently the day would have passed had he been on land. At Ocean Dominion, each hour of his day fell immediately upon the next, like a domino. And this day would have been more fast-paced than most, for it would have been his first as co-president. He’d never taken a single sick day from Ocean Dominion, let alone a day of vacation, and now, on his first day as co-president, he was missing. It was shameful. Saiph and Antares must be worried sick about him. What would they think if they saw him like this?
His gaze shifted to the scratched, full-length mirror on the wall. He’d swept past it intentionally when he’d entered the room. He hadn’t encountered any mirrors over the course of the day, and it had been for the better, for he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of looking at his reflection. But now, he crept out of bed and sidled toward the mirror.
His reflection was that of a stranger. A scaly tail started at his hips, narrowed where his ankles had been, then flared out, turning transparent at the corners. Gill slits formed diagonal cuts on both sides of his neck, opening and closing in parallel.
In the restaurant Taeiniata with Coralline, he had lulled himself into thinking he was safe, that he’d left his enemies behind on land, but he saw now that his enemies were not the primary danger he faced; his body was—the possibility that he might be like this for the rest of his life. He punched the mirror with his platinum-chipped fist.
The luciferin orbs glowed too mildly for Coralline’s tastes—their bacteria had probably not been recently replenished. Most merpeople slept in the dark, or nearly dark, but she liked her luciferin orbs bright all night long—they were the galaxies she admired as she drifted off to sleep. She’d loved watching them ever since she was a mergirl, but she hadn’t understood why until she’d read The Universe Demystified. “The stars tell us that no matter what happens to us,” Venant Veritate had written, “no matter whether we live or die, the universe will continue to exist.” Coralline found there to be something steadying and humbling in that fact.